Childhood indoctrination

[littleendian]

.....

Nur mal so aus privatem Interesse. Was waren deine Beweggründe, die dich zum Veganismus führten?

In meinem Fall war es eine Frau.

The question is about my personal motivation for veganism. As I've said here before, one of the few things I love more in my "mental realm" than reason is compassion, it sounds like terrible hippy bullshit but it's true, I want to fill my heart with compassion. I feel terrible when I see the images of what people do to animals, and as a mildly Buddhist guy I feel these terrible things will eventually come back to me (Karma) if I support them. I grew up with animals around and I've always perceived them as individuals with their very own interests and likes and dislikes, it just pains me to see them suffer. These cows have as much character and friendship and pain and joy in their dumb little lives as our pets do, and we let hate and terror rain down on them. It's not worthy for the human race, we are better than this.

As my favourite western philosopher said:
"We don't only owe the animals compassion, we also owe them justice."

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Morality is subjective. Any given moral of any given person is derived from what that person thinks is ideal/important, and everyone has a different idea of what is ideal/important.

Yes, intuitively morals are what we feel is right. However in history people have often felt something is right that is in reality terribly unjust (slavery, fascism, genocide) and they would've realized this if they had thought things through rather than just follow others. This is the highest ideal of post-religious society, namely to use ones own reason and not rely on others for thinking. But we don't, we just accept what everyone else accepts, and we commit atrocities in many cases for no better justification than our enjoyment of meat or fur.

Death is such a cruel punishment that in Europe it is not even dealt out to the greatest child molester or murderer, but still we deal it out in the billions every year for no good reason at all.