(August 25, 2010 at 8:05 pm)lrh9 Wrote: This is the extension of atheism and vegetarianism thread. Someone said that since some organisms feel pain it is wrong to kill and eat them.
It's as simple as that.
Then I definately agree with you.
Granted I do personally believe that forcing things to suffer pain is wrong (I still don't know how I feel about boiling live lobsters - despite my LOVE of lobster), but like hell if I'm not going to eat things that can feel pain. Some of my favorite things to eat can feel pain!
As one guy on futurama said, we'd probably eat people too if they didn't taste lousy. (Though in futurama they do drink soylent cola, so I suppose humans are better in soylent and/or cola form.)
Though I suppose the serious point of mine here is that neurons firing pain signals into the brain or not from the preparation to being eaten does in no way I can see have an intrinsic moral value to it that isn't also assoicated with eating living things in general.
I mean, why discriminate between a broccoli and a cow? They're both precious living things with just as much right to live as one another, why should I discriminate between one or another?
It's this line of thinking that some things, because they are alive and want to live, intrinsicly makes it more moral to make sure they live a full productive life, but another grand, long lived living thing - such as poison ivy or cabbage, are living things also. Why should we discriminate and prey on them in lieu of cows, pigs, and chicken?
If living things are precious and should not be killed, then all murder is wrong - be it mosquito, human, or the human enslavement tree. On that morality we should eat nothing except sunlight and 100% pure water that has been treated to carefully remove all single-celled organisms from being digested or we should eat nothing at all.
It's ridiculous.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
