are vegetarians more ethical by not eating meat?

[Creed of Heresy]

Yes, we can choose to eat either plants or animals but plants are living organisms, too. Just cuz it can't yelp when you pluck an apple doesn't mean it's not made of organic, living materials. You start the argument that eating animals is unethical then you slide down the slippery slope to the point that you eventually reach the point where you'll have to starve to death because life comes from death via consumption.

Don't compare "killing" an apple to killing a pig, the former we can do in the comfort of our living room, the other is something so repulsive and contrary to what we feel is right, our innate ethics, that we hide the act away behind fences and walls and pay other people to do it for us and to print pretty pictures on the packaging to never remind us of what was necessary for our pitiful few minutes of taste.

Speak for yourself, I've butchered deer, pigs, cows, and dressed them as well as turkeys and pheasants, and I didn't feel any repulsion. You still haven't exemplified what the difference was for either of those things by the way, you just said "one is ok, the other is repulsive," even though there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who find the act anything but, and you never provided anything more than an appeal to emotion for justification. Weak, baseless argument, I dismiss it entirely and chalk it up to your personal feelings and nothing more.

While they live, treat them well, and when you go to kill them [because they're gonna die anyway eventually]

You are gonna die anyway, does it really follow from that that it is ethically justified to kill you now?

I can serve a purpose, I can help mold and shape this world. A chicken or a cow cannot. It's this little thing called sapience. I possess it. A cow does not. The ethical justification for eating a cow is that it is livestock, and its purpose was to be bred for food. That justification does not exist, because I am not livestock, nor was I bred for being food to another human being. So no, it would not be ethically justified, whereas eating an animal still is.

do it quickly and cleanly and don't make them suffer. There's no contradiction here unless you're just trying to split hairs, which is just petty and argumentative for the sake of being petty and argumentative.

I believe if we were talking about your life or your death you would not talk about "splitting hairs", and I'm sure you wouldn't want to be killed "quickly and clean" or otherwise, period. Why is it so hard to accept that all living beings might feel the same urge to stay alive? Any cow or pig has as much or as little right to be alive as you or I, brain size don't enter into it. The viewpoint of the homo egocentricus is a residue of Christianity and we as atheists should set out to overcome it. We took away the geocentric universe, then we took away the superiority of the white man, then that of man over woman, now we are taking away the arbitrary distinction between man and other animals. It's only logical.

I reiterate above; bovines lack the intelligence to be worth comparing to a human being, same with all livestock. It's so hard to accept because I do not have a chicken or pig brain and I'm also told by scientists that animals are little more than instinctual responses, and that we ourselves are just barely more, but more we are. We are still capable of independent action based on a high level of environmental determination. The rest of the animals in this world, save for a very scant few, are not, and those few that are have extremely limited variable interaction. You can make some vague appeals to ethics all you want, but you have nothing to base these supposed ethics on other than personal feeling and I'm sorry but I have no inclination to accept what you say as fact or valid based on nothing more than your FEEEEEELIIIIIINGS. If you're just trying to protest what I'm doing, then fine, feel free to bitch while I eat a steak, I don't care because ignoring you is very easy to do while I eat this delicious, juicy slice of heated and seared and seasoned meat. If you're trying to engage me in a debate, then do so with debatable points, and not with appeals to emotion. The only "rights" in this world are what we humans give or don't give, and I don't give animals that have been bred for slaughter the right to live for anything more than their intended purpose, and neither does the vast majority of the human race. Yes, I'm going with the ad populum argument, because in this case, where you appeal to "ethics," which themselves are established by the opinions of the population, it's wholly valid. The right imbued upon me is a right imbued through the genetic success of the rest of my race; natural selection put me in a power of control over these other races. I can outthink them, which is my strength over creatures five times my size, and it is the strength that allows me dominion. That I DON'T just mindlessly kill them all is already quite ethical. Asking me to also not consume a few that my species has long become accustomed to devouring to the point that those species have been domesticated for exactly that purpose is foolish and hollow and demanding too much.

The difference between all those other arguments is that one unfairly established strength of one over the other with no basis. There IS a basis of human strength; the fact we are the most successful of all mammals, through numbers and intelligence.

When a fucking group of cows get together and learn how to split the atom or map Higgs-Boson particles with supercolliders or fucking fly despite lacking the physical aspects necessary to do so on their own, then you can start stating that other animals are equal to humans, but until then, quit your bitching and lemme enjoy my damn turkey.