In regards to eating meat

[Monica]

Great post, Pablisimo! I too have tried various approaches, over the past 30 years, and I too strive for a balance between being true to my convictions and respecting where people are at. My own experience has been that people generally aren't interested in getting educated about the suffering of animals. At least, I haven't had any success with that, even doing it the way you describe. They just plain don't care. The most I can usually hope for is that they might be interested in how cutting back on meat can improve their health. Even that, they usually don't care about, until they get sick and are desperate. Then, they are receptive.

PETA is very unpopular, but, like it or not, their approach does work. Any advertising pro can attest to the effectiveness of shocking people to get their attention. It's the 'getting attention' that has to happen, before they are receptive to raising their awareness. Getting cancer is an effective attention-getter. More vegetarians changed their diet because of health challenges, than because of someone telling them about animal suffering.

I'm sorry to sound cynical, but I have concluded that most people just really and truly don't care. They might be really good people, and care about many other things, but their caring and compassion just don't extend to farm animals. Dogs and cats maybe, but not farm animals.

I can only speculate that it's because they're hardwired to believe that farm animals are for food, and dogs and cats are for pets. That's what they've been taught, and it's so deeply ingrained that it takes great effort to modify that program. Sort of like the "Bible is the word of God" program. It took me years to deprogram that one, so I understand that the "animals are for us to eat" program is at least as hardwired, maybe more so.

Then, on top of that, the 2 programs are inextricably linked. Because, in 1 program (Bible) 'God' said to "take dominion over the Earth" so that's 1 program reinforcing the other. A double whammy.

Then there is the "Jesus ate fish so God must want us to eat meat" thing. A triple whammy!

I wasn't immune to this programming. What got me to go veg was The Essene Gospel of Peace, attributed to Jesus. At that time, I was still quite Christian. I had already read Survival into the 21st Century 6 months prior, so he idea had been planted in my mind, but that book wasn't sufficient to get me to change. And, I had already quit eating junk food and red meat, a year before that! And I'd had a few conversations with vegetarians who spoke of animal suffering. (Though this was before youtube slaughterhouse videos.)

I even had memories of my dad making me help him butcher chickens as a child. I was a vegetarian until age 11 or so, not sure why. I just would not eat any meat. (But, to be fair, I didn't eat veggies either.)

But none of that was enough to get me to go veg as an adult. It took Jesus telling me to not eat animals, that got me to quit eating animals. So strong was the Bible programming.

Never mind that countless spiritual leaders of other cultures advocate ahimsa, non-violence. Never mind that I was already a fan of Gandhi, a famous spiritual leader and vegetarian.

It took Jesus to break thru the concrete in my mind.

This makes me wonder how much of this is because of the Christian heritage.

Which brings up a whole 'nother point, given what we know about the STS Yahweh influence of the Bible...

Hmmm....