Eating animal is wrong - be vegetarian is right:

[JP Cusick]

The constantly misrepresented Bible text is that humans have dominion over animals and thereby dominion means we can kill and eat animals as we wish, and that is not what the scripture declares, see here below:

Genesis 1:
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
-----------

So from this we can see that directly in the next verse after saying that humanity had "dominion" over the animals - then it tells us to only eat fruits and grains.

As such dominion over the animals never meant to kill or to eat the animals.

When Jesus was asked about divorce He said = "... but from the beginning it was not so." Matthew 19:8, because it matters as to what was in the beginning, and in the beginning people were not to eat animals.

Later after people became sinful (full of sin), after Noah's ark, then people ate animals and people demanded meat to eat, so God compromised by letting sinners eat the animals but God told them how to clean and cook the meat - which was an improvement for ignorant barbaric humanity, but this was not the original plan.

As such if any person wants to really get closer to God then they need to stop living off of the violence and butchery of animal sacrifices.

[JP Cusick]

Eating animal is wrong - be vegetarian is right:

I expected this to be a discussion, but now I guess that the truth is far too obvious and indisputable and most people are just too cruel and barbaric to even consider showing consideration to the animals they eat.

In the Bible concerning the animal sacrifices then it quotes God as saying = Hosea 6:6 For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

God told people to sacrifice the animals as a sin offering and the purpose was so that people would find some mercy for the animal that dies as that was the point, but ignorant blood thirsty humans would never find mercy, and so they just killed more animals as if God wanted the cruelty instead of their self feeding on it.

The same butchery of animals going on today is still giving the same old blood sacrifice for our sins as done in the past.

The old animal sacrifices could indeed have taken away the sins - if only the people would see and embrace the mercy which they never did.

Hebrews 10:2 " For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. " KJV

If the person(s) had learned mercy then the sacrifices would have stopped - but no.

[Divine Insight]

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

So why then did this God "design" animals that are clearly equipped to prey on other animals and eat meat?

This ancient folklore simply doesn't match up to reality.

In fact, I have often said that if all animals were naturally vegetarians and humans where the only animals on earth that actually eat meat and prey on other animals I might be far more inclined to believe in a "God" that created a vegetarian world.

But such is not the case. Animals were eating animals long before humans ever showed up on the planet. So we can't even pretend that animals became degraded later due to human's supposed "fall from grace".

These ancient tales simply don't much up with reality.

[JP Cusick]

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

So why then did this God "design" animals that are clearly equipped to prey on other animals and eat meat?

This ancient folklore simply doesn't match up to reality.

In fact, I have often said that if all animals were naturally vegetarians and humans where the only animals on earth that actually eat meat and prey on other animals I might be far more inclined to believe in a "God" that created a vegetarian world.

But such is not the case. Animals were eating animals long before humans ever showed up on the planet. So we can't even pretend that animals became degraded later due to human's supposed "fall from grace".

These ancient tales simply don't much up with reality.

That is a great point and I do not have any conclusive answer for it.

I too understood that animal violence to other animals is some how connected to evil and sin entering the world, but that does not add up with the facts.

It is noteworthy that the brutal dinosaurs were wiped out in one stroke which implies that God destroyed that old world ~ and life (evolution) began anew.

Human beings are not the only ones who are said to "fall from grace".

I am not so foolish as to take the Genesis creation story as too literal, and it seems odd for ancient people to then write down in their holy book that humans were not to eat animals, so there is a paradox and a mystery.

There are other facts as like eating animals is cruel and barbaric, that human teeth and stomach are not carnivorous, and that we humans can stop living like wild beast.

I know that people like to claim that humans are "omnivore" but that too does not add up, because humans must first clean the meat and cook it and tenderize the meat, or else our teeth break, and the stomach will puck out raw meats, and people will choke on fur or feathers, so a raw omnivore is not accurate.

For myself I often view animals eating other animals to be a motivator for me to not be like that example, and I have often viewed animal life as being examples of what not to do.

So again = I do not have any conclusive answer for it.

[Divine Insight]

It is noteworthy that the brutal dinosaurs were wiped out in one stroke which implies that God destroyed that old world ~ and life (evolution) began anew.

Actually in terms of numbers, the vast majority of dinosaurs were vegetarian living on plant life and grasses only. The predators who pray on the vegetarians are always a smaller group. Necessarily so. Otherwise they would quickly just eat each other up.

I know that people like to claim that humans are "omnivore" but that too does not add up, because humans must first clean the meat and cook it and tenderize the meat, or else our teeth break, and the stomach will puck out raw meats, and people will choke on fur or feathers, so a raw omnivore is not accurate.

Humans are omnivores. A true vegetarian animal cannot digest meat at all. So humans have a stomach that can not only digest meat but is actually quite good at it.

It's false that humans will puke out raw meat. This may be true of many people in our modern day society. But their puking may actually be more of a psychological reaction to the thought of eating raw meat. So people actually do eat raw meat, but that can be dangerous for other health reasons as well.

As far as choking on fur or feathers, there are actually many vegetables that need to be prepared as well, and cannot be eaten whole. So I'm not so sure that's a valid argument for the difference between eating meat versus veggies. Fruits often have seeds that can easily break a tooth, or get caught in the throat. So they aren't exactly "perfectly designed" as pure food either. And of course many plants are quite poisonous as well.

In fact, consider the following scripture:

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Notice that this verse says that God has given us every herb bearing seed, and [/u]every[/u] tree. But that's clearly not true precisely because many plants are indeed highly poisonous.

So this is yet another flaw in these scriptures.

Strangely Buddhism allows for all of this because Buddhism doesn't have doctrines proclaiming that God told us what we could or couldn't eat. The God of Buddhism likes to make us I guess evidently.

Buddhism actually has logically valid excuses for all this silliness. Of course, this doesn't make Buddhism true, but at least the Buddhists were wise enough to cover all the bases. They certainly did a better job of inventing a God than the Hebrews did.

[benchwarmer]

The constantly misrepresented Bible text is that humans have dominion over animals and thereby dominion means we can kill and eat animals as we wish, and that is not what the scripture declares, see here below:

Genesis 1:
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
-----------

So from this we can see that directly in the next verse after saying that humanity had "dominion" over the animals - then it tells us to only eat fruits and grains.

As such dominion over the animals never meant to kill or to eat the animals.

Oops, someone didn't keep reading:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?s ... ersion=NIV

3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

What was that you were on about again?

[JP Cusick]

Actually in terms of numbers, the vast majority of dinosaurs were vegetarian living on plant life and grasses only. The predators who pray on the vegetarians are always a smaller group. Necessarily so. Otherwise they would quickly just eat each other up.

That makes sense that there would be more plant eaters as like there are today, but I never heard that said before.

My understanding was that most dino's were carnivores and they simply eat each other, as like any fish just eats smaller fish.

Humans are omnivores. A true vegetarian animal cannot digest meat at all. So humans have a stomach that can not only digest meat but is actually quite good at it.

That ignores other factors, as like the human intervention because humans purposely decided to eat animals when it was not natural to their diet, and ignoring evolution that over the centuries and beyond humans have adapted away from our ancestral diet.

I read some where that native American Indians have a smaller liver which is not so compatible with alcohol as where the Europeans who had adapted to alcohol over the centuries and beyond. So the evolution played a role.

And I read that humans tried mixing meat into the feed for cattle to try to make the cattle into better human food, and that created the mad-cow disease, but the humans tried is the point - just as we force meat into our children.

Alcohol is not really compatible with humans but humans force ourselves to drink the booze and we become more and more tolerant = so alcohol is not a natural diet and it is not from evolution, because alcohol is a human choice.

As such this same process is surely what happened with eating animals - that humans forced the meat down their throats and over time that human brutal exploitation simply evolved by force.

I also read stories of old Rome where the soldiers would complain about being fed meat when the Roman soldiers were farmers and they complained about not being fed vegetables which was their customary food. The only reason that is known is because old Roman records recorded the soldiers complaints.

And we also know from old Greece that they pushed athletics and sports as a way to make better soldiers for their armies, and feeding the soldiers animal meat would make the soldiers more fierce in war.

And this same thing is done with guard dogs today - that the dogs are fed raw meat to make the dogs more fierce and more aggressive.

The same is true for humanity, that they put violence into their mouth and greater violence comes out of the person.

So people actually do eat raw meat, but that can be dangerous for other health reasons as well.

Agreed - raw meat is dangerous to humans for lots of reasons.

People may eat a raw steak with the blood on their plate, but it is still processed meat and not quite raw.

As far as choking on fur or feathers, there are actually many vegetables that need to be prepared as well, and cannot be eaten whole. So I'm not so sure that's a valid argument for the difference between eating meat versus veggies. Fruits often have seeds that can easily break a tooth, or get caught in the throat. So they aren't exactly "perfectly designed" as pure food either. And of course many plants are quite poisonous as well.

Grains and fruit are not hard to eat and a gatherer can pick grass seed like wheat and barley and rice with ease, and tree fruit would have been the desert.

Human teeth have never been equipped to tear raw flesh from a bone.

In fact, consider the following scripture:

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

Notice that this verse says that God has given us every herb bearing seed, and [/u]every[/u] tree. But that's clearly not true precisely because many plants are indeed highly poisonous.

That is true, but my understanding is that poisonous plants taste repulsive from the first taste, and even a primitive caveman (or cave woman) could figure out that they are not to eat nasty tasting plants.

Plus the fact that the entire world changed when sin began to dominate.

We can not ignore the fact that ignorant humanity infected the entire world.

Strangely Buddhism allows for all of this because Buddhism doesn't have doctrines proclaiming that God told us what we could or couldn't eat. The God of Buddhism likes to make us I guess evidently.

Buddhism actually has logically valid excuses for all this silliness. Of course, this doesn't make Buddhism true, but at least the Buddhists were wise enough to cover all the bases. They certainly did a better job of inventing a God than the Hebrews did.

I see Buddhism to be similar to Christianity in that the human followers screwed up everything taught by their founders.

Christianity got Jesus Christ all wrong, and so too Buddhism got the Buddha all wrong.

I myself love the real teachings of Buddha, but not so much for the followers.

[JP Cusick]

Oops, someone didn't keep reading:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?s ... ersion=NIV

3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

What was that you were on about again?

I did directly include that in my very first posting (the OP) - it was said in the part that you deleted.

I said this:

" Later after people became sinful (full of sin), after Noah's ark, then people ate animals and people demanded meat to eat, so God compromised by letting sinners eat the animals but God told them how to clean and cook the meat - which was an improvement for ignorant barbaric humanity, but this was not the original plan.

As such if any person wants to really get closer to God then they need to stop living off of the violence and butchery of animal sacrifices. "

And I also said this:

As such dominion over the animals never meant to kill or to eat the animals.

" When Jesus was asked about divorce He said = "... but from the beginning it was not so." Matthew 19:8, because it matters as to what was in the beginning, and in the beginning people were not to eat animals. "

[Divine Insight]

I see Buddhism to be similar to Christianity in that the human followers screwed up everything taught by their founders.

Christianity got Jesus Christ all wrong, and so too Buddhism got the Buddha all wrong.

I myself love the real teachings of Buddha, but not so much for the followers.

The problem is that you and I never met Jesus, so we have no clue what he might have taught. Neither did he personally write anything down. So all we have are the hearsay Gospel rumors that were written about him.

Therefore, how can you say that anyone got Jesus wrong?

You see, the problem is we have Matthew claiming that Jesus himself spoke the following words:

Matthew 5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Considering the Jewish culture he lived in it only makes sense that the "jots and tittles" he was referring to was the Jewish law as written in the Torah. Therefore according to Matthew Jesus was a Literal Fundamentalist. After all, he's proclaiming that every jot and tittle shall not pass from law. That's about as literal as a person can get.

We could claim that Matthew was mistaken or outright lying about what Jesus might have said. But what would be our grounds for making such an accusation? We never met Jesus ourselves, and outside of these hearsay Gossips we really have no clue what Jesus might have said, taught, or thought.

So to proclaim that Matthew got Christ all wrong would be baseless. That could only be a hopeful guess on our part.

Similar things can be said about Siddhartha Gautama. There can be no doubt that Buddhist disagree on what Siddhartha taught, just as Christians disagree on what Jesus taught. But once again, since we never met Siddhartha ourselves, we are not in any position to say who got him right and who got him wrong. All we can do is give our own hopeful opinions about what we "wish" he might have taught.

Also, just as Jesus was born, raised, and taught within the Abrahamic theological culture and was therefore necessarily tied into supporting those cultural ideals, Siddhartha didn't invent "Buddhism" entirely out of the blue either. He merely made Buddhism popular by voicing his own opinions on these concepts.

For example, the Buddha didn't invent the idea of pantheism, or reincarnation, or the cycle of samsara. Or even the idea that the goal of life should be to get out of samsara. To the contrary, these ideas already existed. All Siddhartha claimed was that he had become "enlightened" and was convinced that he had achieved this goal. And its anyone's guess whether there was something to it, or the man was just deluding himself.

I mean seriously. I too like a lot of the wisdom that is associated with the teachings of the Buddha, and like you, I even see similar teachings associated with Jesus when we ignore the the dogma of fundamental Judaism as claimed by Matthew 5:18.

In fact, I see so many similarities between many of the things taught by Siddhartha and Jesus that I'm convinced that Jesus was actually a mystic-minded Jew who was trying to bring the higher moral teachings of Buddhism into his home culture of Judaism (unsuccessfully I might add).

In any case, the bottom line is that both of these men were working with previous cultural beliefs, folklore, and superstitions of a spiritual afterlife or reincarnation, etc. So neither of them made this stuff up. These superstitious beliefs already existed in the cultures they grew up in.

For us to say today that people don't "get" Jesus or Buddha, is to be quite blunt about it, extremely silly, and even arrogant on our part. Clearly we never met either of these men and we have no clue what they might have been trying to teach or whether there was any truth to any of their teachings, especially when it comes to the supernatural and superstitious tales of an afterlife.

In the Jesus story the authors claim that Jesus was the virgin born Son of God. They even have God proclaiming in a loud voice from the clouds that Jesus is his Son and that we are to listen to him. Obviously, anyone who believes that would then also believe that Jesus would actually know the truth of reality, and things like a spirit world an afterlife. But clearly there's no reason to believe that any God spoke from the clouds proclaiming Jesus to be his Son. If a supernatural God could speak to us from the clouds, then why bother sending Jesus at all? Why not just tell us what he wants us to know directly? The moment we see the claim that this God spoke from the clouds proclaiming Jesus to be his Son is the moment we should sit the Bible on the shelf marked "fiction" next to Greek Mythology.

At least there is no claim that any God told anyone to listen to Siddhartha. So we can easily chalk Sid up to just being an over-zealous spiritual nut case.

As wise as his teachings may have been. Wise teachings do not imply supernatural knowledge or wisdom. To the contrary, if we are wise enough to recognize that his teachings are wise, then ultimately we are just as wise as we seem to think he was. So nothing special there. The same goes for Jesus too of course.

[JP Cusick]

Christianity got Jesus Christ all wrong, and so too Buddhism got the Buddha all wrong.

There can be no doubt that Buddhist disagree on what Siddhartha taught, just as Christians disagree on what Jesus taught.

I do not want to jump away from the thread topic, and we (you and I) already have a discussion about both Jesus and Buddha teachings in the "Sacred Scripture section" so here the discussion is about "Right and Wrong".

QUOTE this thread title = Eating animal is wrong - be vegetarian is right:

My view is that both Jesus and the Buddha were vegetarians, even full vegans, and that is one of the important principles which those two great leaders aligned.

Jesus fed the multitudes with bread and fish but it does not say that Jesus ate along with the multitudes, because God allows sinners to eat animals, and at the famous "Last Supper" Jesus stopped the Passover sacrifice of eating a lamb or sheep as Jesus changed that ritual into bread and wine, so Jesus stopped the eating of the animal.

When people put violence into their mouth and stomach - then the violence comes out of their heart and soul.