Religious People Who Killed The Animal-Apathy Virus In Their Heads

A heartwarming account of a number of Christians who stopped killing animals for their gastro-intestinal pleasures and turned vegetarian/vegan:

My journey was defined by this sense I have of the interconnectedness of all things, and of not wanting to be part of what I saw as an inherently cruel system. The growing awareness of how a diet that relies on large amounts of meat, particularly beef and dairy, is damaging the planet has made us all wake up. It’s a shame that the suffering of animals was not enough to make us change our ways.

My faith, and my sense of call to ordination, has always been intertwined with my connection with animals. Theologically, I don’t argue that Jesus was a vegetarian — he ate fish and the Passover lamb — but, back then, they were living hand to mouth; there were not the industrial processes of today, which are so damaging.

God’s original plan was that we were plant-eaters; we were only given permission to eat animals after the Fall. But my main reasoning is that we worship a God of compassion: the Bible says “Blessed are the merciful,” and I don’t see anything compassionate or merciful about the current meat and dairy processing industries. I also refer to Job 39: there seems to be such a pride and tenderness in God’s creation of animals in this passage.

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Moreover, the overall impression I get from the Bible is that God loves the world, and wishes to save the whole world, not just the humans in it. Suffice to say that the Bible has more to say in favour of slavery than meat eating, and, one day, Christians will be as ashamed of the latter as they are now of the former.

Knowing the degree to which animals experience fear and pain, and can see it coming — and, if they survive long enough, can remember it — I couldn’t face a God of love (or myself) if I was part of the cause of that suffering, by consuming any animal products. Genesis was written thousands of years before global warming and the difficulty of feeding an ever-growing population, and yet the diet it sets out is a necessary part of the solution to these problems.

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I do talk about my vegetarianism personally, however. If we are looking at Genesis in a Bible study, or the sayings of Jesus, I will talk about animal suffering and make the case. But I don’t see it as part of the proclamation of the gospel, and I wouldn’t preach it in a formal sense. Maybe there is an inconsistency there. Maybe it is time for those of us who are vegetarians, who have a faith, to amplify that a bit.