I'm curious about your continued use of the term "vegan" rather than "vegetarian". I don't see anything contradictory between caring for animal friends and drinking their milk or eating their unfertilised eggs.
I think one reason he wouldn’t consider vegetarianism the ideal is that, under normal circumstances, producing animal products like dairy and eggs involves the systematic mistreatment, torture, and killing of animals. For instance, to produce milk, calves are usually separated from their mothers, kept in inhumane conditions, and often slaughtered or sent into other cruel industries. In the case of egg production, millions of male chicks are typically killed just a few hours after hatching, often in macerators or through other horrific methods.
But... that's the same "normal" conditions that are grossly exploiting the world to produce corn oil. The way food is currently produced in this fallen world is horrifying in most cases no matter whether vegan, dairy or meat. We're talking about in the ideal world that will come about when Jesus returns and renews the heaves and earth, and dairy seems quite plausible to me in that case. I agree the Bible doesn't explicitly say either way, but the Biblical arguments given in the post seem *inherently* to prohibit meat but only to prohibit *certain current sinful ways* of producing dairy.
It seems I misunderstood what you were arguing for. I thought you were defending vegetarianism in the current world. I agree that in the new earth, we could consume dairy and milk. I’d even go further and say we might consume other animal products too, as long as it didn’t involve death or suffering. I have to admit, this is pure speculation.
What does seem clear to me is that, at present, a vegan diet is by far the least harmful option, by orders of magnitude, compared to omnivorous or vegetarian diets.
While I largely agree, I think this analysis is confused. Jesus fed meat to people in miraculous events where saying, e.g. meat was needed to avoid lean times *cannot possibly apply*. It was a miraculous moment of plenty! If Jesus wanted abundant vegan options at the feeding of the 5000, that would have been precisely as a available and miraculous, and yet was not chosen. Indeed, four of His apostles are fishermen and they're never admonished to treat fish better, despite Jesus on multiple occasions giving Peter fishing advice! (Luke 5:4-7 and John 21:4-6)
In parallel, if ritually killing animals was bad, God simply would not have *commanded* it. Moses *allowed* people divorce because of the hardness of their hearts, but no one was ever commanded to divorce.
There's also something I ought to say about how not-only-Catholics believe we are commanded to eat human flesh (notably, His), but as I am not Catholic I will simply note Jesus did command it, whatever that might have meant.
Josh, thank you so much! To answer your rebuttal - just because it is commanded does not mean its not bad. God sometimes works within fallen structures and fallen people. For instance, in Deuteronomy 20:16–18, God orders a genocide of multiple groups of people. That doesn't mean that genocide is good, it just means God is working within fallen civilizations to deliver the best outcome. In the same way, ritually killing animals was not 'good' but rather something that was done for a season to deal with man's ingrained habit.
Right, so that's a fair example of my concern. I didn't say it was good, I said if it was bad it wouldn't be commanded. Plausibly it was neutral, plausibly the goodness of badness was particular to the details of the ritual sacrifice. Perhaps it was even particular to specific usages of the ritual, and sacrificing an animal with no underlying sin issue was itself a sin! But we should be careful in our reasoning here, otherwise our chance of coming to the right conclusion is completely random.
Much, if not most, of the immense violence committed by humankind is against animals — largely for food but also trophy hunting and (perceived) medicinal uses — their blood literally shed and bodies eaten, or wasted, in mind-boggling quantity by us predator and omnivore human species.
It even leaves me [as a big fan of Christ's unmistakable message and miracles] wondering whether the metaphorical forbidden fruit of Eden eaten by Adam and Eve was actually God’s four-legged creation. I'm not vegetarian, but I can still see that really angering the Almighty — a lot more than the couple’s eating non-sentient, non-living, non-bloodied fruit.
And maybe animal slaughtering and eating is as bad for one's spirit as it can be for one's body, not to mention the natural environment (e.g. large-scale beef-cattle farming requiring massive deforestation).
Meantime, as strange as it sounds, when I eat meat (however relatively little) I distract my thoughts from what I’m actually eating — once bloody animal flesh — which is one small step below cannibalism.
I'm intrigued by this argument, and I do find modern factory farming concerning to say the least.
But the author seems to reach a little too far, and he fails to address what I consider the single most relevant passage in Genesis 9.
God specifically told Noah that he is now allowed to eat everything, not just plants. The only restriction is not to eat meat that still has blood in it.
That can't just be a concession to the existing culture, because the clear implication is that Noah and his family had not been eating meat, and there were no other people left on Earth. So what was it?
I really appreciate your hard work and your biblical and ethical defense of our duties to animals. We’ve had enough of animal exploitation and torture at human hands. I hope Christians can unite against what is probably one of the worst things we’ve done in history.
I'm curious about your continued use of the term "vegan" rather than "vegetarian". I don't see anything contradictory between caring for animal friends and drinking their milk or eating their unfertilised eggs.
I think one reason he wouldn’t consider vegetarianism the ideal is that, under normal circumstances, producing animal products like dairy and eggs involves the systematic mistreatment, torture, and killing of animals. For instance, to produce milk, calves are usually separated from their mothers, kept in inhumane conditions, and often slaughtered or sent into other cruel industries. In the case of egg production, millions of male chicks are typically killed just a few hours after hatching, often in macerators or through other horrific methods.
But... that's the same "normal" conditions that are grossly exploiting the world to produce corn oil. The way food is currently produced in this fallen world is horrifying in most cases no matter whether vegan, dairy or meat. We're talking about in the ideal world that will come about when Jesus returns and renews the heaves and earth, and dairy seems quite plausible to me in that case. I agree the Bible doesn't explicitly say either way, but the Biblical arguments given in the post seem *inherently* to prohibit meat but only to prohibit *certain current sinful ways* of producing dairy.
It seems I misunderstood what you were arguing for. I thought you were defending vegetarianism in the current world. I agree that in the new earth, we could consume dairy and milk. I’d even go further and say we might consume other animal products too, as long as it didn’t involve death or suffering. I have to admit, this is pure speculation.
What does seem clear to me is that, at present, a vegan diet is by far the least harmful option, by orders of magnitude, compared to omnivorous or vegetarian diets.
While I largely agree, I think this analysis is confused. Jesus fed meat to people in miraculous events where saying, e.g. meat was needed to avoid lean times *cannot possibly apply*. It was a miraculous moment of plenty! If Jesus wanted abundant vegan options at the feeding of the 5000, that would have been precisely as a available and miraculous, and yet was not chosen. Indeed, four of His apostles are fishermen and they're never admonished to treat fish better, despite Jesus on multiple occasions giving Peter fishing advice! (Luke 5:4-7 and John 21:4-6)
In parallel, if ritually killing animals was bad, God simply would not have *commanded* it. Moses *allowed* people divorce because of the hardness of their hearts, but no one was ever commanded to divorce.
There's also something I ought to say about how not-only-Catholics believe we are commanded to eat human flesh (notably, His), but as I am not Catholic I will simply note Jesus did command it, whatever that might have meant.
Josh, thank you so much! To answer your rebuttal - just because it is commanded does not mean its not bad. God sometimes works within fallen structures and fallen people. For instance, in Deuteronomy 20:16–18, God orders a genocide of multiple groups of people. That doesn't mean that genocide is good, it just means God is working within fallen civilizations to deliver the best outcome. In the same way, ritually killing animals was not 'good' but rather something that was done for a season to deal with man's ingrained habit.
Right, so that's a fair example of my concern. I didn't say it was good, I said if it was bad it wouldn't be commanded. Plausibly it was neutral, plausibly the goodness of badness was particular to the details of the ritual sacrifice. Perhaps it was even particular to specific usages of the ritual, and sacrificing an animal with no underlying sin issue was itself a sin! But we should be careful in our reasoning here, otherwise our chance of coming to the right conclusion is completely random.
Much, if not most, of the immense violence committed by humankind is against animals — largely for food but also trophy hunting and (perceived) medicinal uses — their blood literally shed and bodies eaten, or wasted, in mind-boggling quantity by us predator and omnivore human species.
It even leaves me [as a big fan of Christ's unmistakable message and miracles] wondering whether the metaphorical forbidden fruit of Eden eaten by Adam and Eve was actually God’s four-legged creation. I'm not vegetarian, but I can still see that really angering the Almighty — a lot more than the couple’s eating non-sentient, non-living, non-bloodied fruit.
And maybe animal slaughtering and eating is as bad for one's spirit as it can be for one's body, not to mention the natural environment (e.g. large-scale beef-cattle farming requiring massive deforestation).
Meantime, as strange as it sounds, when I eat meat (however relatively little) I distract my thoughts from what I’m actually eating — once bloody animal flesh — which is one small step below cannibalism.
I'm intrigued by this argument, and I do find modern factory farming concerning to say the least.
But the author seems to reach a little too far, and he fails to address what I consider the single most relevant passage in Genesis 9.
God specifically told Noah that he is now allowed to eat everything, not just plants. The only restriction is not to eat meat that still has blood in it.
That can't just be a concession to the existing culture, because the clear implication is that Noah and his family had not been eating meat, and there were no other people left on Earth. So what was it?
I really appreciate your hard work and your biblical and ethical defense of our duties to animals. We’ve had enough of animal exploitation and torture at human hands. I hope Christians can unite against what is probably one of the worst things we’ve done in history.