Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [72]
Investigating the Great Faith Traditions
For a long time I had the idea that the great faith traditions aren’t concerned with food or even with our relationship to animals, but as I gave it serious thought, that didn’t seem correct to me. How could any wisdom tradition that has endured for many hundreds or thousands of years not have reflected on so fundamental a question as how we relate to these fellow creatures? Animals are so totally in our power, after all, and isn’t spirituality in part a matter of how we choose to treat the powerless?
I decided to do some searching—both soul searching and researching the world’s spiritual traditions—to find out what they really suggest about the question of eating animals.
The first thing that became clear was that virtually all spiritual traditions have indeed considered the question of whether it is ethical for humans to eat animals. My initial explorations only skimmed the surface, but even so it was easy to see that spiritual leaders throughout the ages have grappled with the contradictions inherent in following and advocating a peaceful, humane existence while killing and eating animals. For Christians and Jews the dilemma is so central that it is addressed in the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, preceding even the Ten Commandments! The first thing God does after creating humans is call humanity to steward the earth and its creatures, but the second thing God does is declare, “See, I have given you every plant-yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food” (Genesis 1:29–30). A clear call for vegetarianism, it would seem.
I already knew that important contemporary religious leaders from Pope Benedict XVI to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama had condemned factory farming. What I didn’t expect was that it wasn’t just a few great lights or just a few religious traditions speaking about meat as a problem. Spiritual traditions have always wrestled with the questions raised by eating animals.
“One of the most striking things one discovers in comparative religion,” the historian of religions and Jewish studies scholar Aaron Gross, PhD, explained to me:
The potential moral danger of meat eating is a major theme across religious traditions. Eating meat is often condemned and, if not, it is surrounded by cautions and restrictions as is the case in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Mircea Eliade, arguably the most influential scholar of religion in the twentieth century, in fact argued that the ancient hunter’s sympathy for the animals he killed was one of the origins of religion itself. Religion begins in part, Eliade theorized, out of concern about the problem posed by killing in order to live.
It seems that my discomfort with the business of eating meat has ample precedent! So not surprisingly, as soon as I looked, I found numerous spiritual leaders from multiple traditions calling upon us to eat more spiritually and mindfully.
Christian Traditions
A new generation of Christian theologians has shown that the question of food, especially meat, has been one of the great religious questions in Christian history. David Grumett, PhD, and Rachel Muers, PhD, are the first scholars to systematically study the issue. “Nowadays people might think of religion as being about abstract beliefs,” explains Grumett, “but if you look back through history it’s been very much about