Blog - Joyful Curmudgeon - Blog
A Mary T. Hoffman Commentary from All-Creatures.org

 

"Joyful Curmudgeon" An oxymoron?
No! I see all the beauty of God's creation and I'm joyful.  At the same time, I see all the suffering and corruption going on in the world, and feel called to help expose and end it so that we may have true peace and compassion.

 

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Will Tuttle, Ph.D. - 2 Mar 2006
By Mary T. Hoffman

Last year at the North American Vegetarian Society’s annual “Summerfest” in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, we met Will Tuttle in person. Previously, we had only known him through his excellent “Food for Thought” articles published in VegNews and through our association with Prayer Circle for Animals. Not only did we get to meet him, we got to hear him play his own wonderful piano compositions on the stage of the Pasquerilla Performing Arts Center!

Now I want to tell you that his book, The World Peace Diet, Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony, is a “must read” for anyone who is searching for an honest account of what we know deep down inside is the truth. And I say this as a born again believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. Truth is universal and has no boundaries. Anyone, of any faith (or no faith), who reads this book will understand what I mean, if they have what Christians call “a teachable spirit.”

There are ever so many passages from this book that stand out, and that I’d like to quote. Here are just a very few:

This first quotation from The World Peace Diet has special meaning for me (for why, see paragraph 5 and photo of
http://all-creatures.org/heart/blog-20060217.html ):

“Of all the mammals, it is the cow whose maternal instinct has been perhaps the most obvious and celebrated: her gentle and patient eyes, her natural mothering way with her calf, licking and feeding and watching over her baby, and her loud lamenting when her calf is taken from her. She cannot fight the hands that steal her offspring away, or speak to us in human words, telling us how deeply it hurts her. But it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. For us to ignore her suffering, and the suffering of her calf – hundreds, thousands, millions of times over – is to ignore and deny our own decency.” (Page 115) [Emphasis mine]

“Compassion is ethical intelligence: it is the capacity to make connections and the consequent urge to act to relieve the suffering of others. Like cognitive intelligence, it is suppressed by the practice of eating animals. The ability to disconnect, practiced at every mealtime, is seen in perhaps more chilling guise in the modern scientist slowly freezing dogs to death to learn about human physiology, in modern soldiers looking straight into the eyes of helpless civilians and killing them, in hunters deceiving and chasing defenseless animals and killing them for sport, and in countless other legal and approved cultural activities.” (Page 11)

“It would be difficult to conceive of a more wasteful, toxic, inhumane, disease-promoting, and destructive food production system than our farmed animal industry. (Page 183)

“Our theories about animals will be seen in the future as quaint balderdash, as we now view the medieval theories of healing through bleeding and leeches and of an earth-centered solar system.” (Page 201)

In The World Peace Diet, Will Tuttle puts into words what we know to be true, whether we admit it or not. As he brings together the whole picture, I think that you will say, “Yes!” in recognition of this, as I did.

See:
http://www.all-creatures.org/book/r-worldpeacediet.html

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