Do you agree with Richard Dawkins?

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, the source is called AG 101, you need nutrients to grow vegetables. Or is this a point of contention between us that must be substantiated? Do you think they grow on happy thoughts and wishful thinking?

Here, this should lay out the requirements nicely.

http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/id/id36/id36.pdf

Now, where are we sourcing our nutrients from? Speaking of "sources", you keep asking for sources but the only "source" you've been forthcoming with, in support of -your- argument, is your definition of a term with very little in the way of elaboration. Maybe I was wrong when I assumed you were looking for a serious conversation?

[Scabby Joe]

I think that it does not follow that being an atheist means that you should be a vegetarian. Of course not. Atheism is just a lack of belief in something. It maybe atheism attracts those who don't want to live by any ethical or moral code; maybe that's what they didn't like about religion.

However, for those thinkers out there atheism does at least raise some issues to consider.

First, we were not created in the image of God. We are not special, just another animal. We do not necessarily need to hold onto the Christian idea of dominion.

Second, atheists reject God given moral law. Morals or ethics may be subjective or objective but some atheists may want to to ethical/moral even without the threat of eternal hell. So, can we agree on the following:

Causing unnecessary pain and suffering is unethical.

For those that can, and do eat factory farmed meat, how is it ethical.

If we cannot agree that causing unnecessary pain and suffering are wrong then this raises lots of other issues, not least the slightly empty criticisim of religion poisoning everthing. Surely even religious ethics are better than no ethics?

Dawkins, an apparent believer in objective morality, and ardent Darwinian thinker sees the implications for atheists. Seems not many here do.

I am both an atheist and a vegetarian. My considerations for each are strictly seperate.

I am not atheist because i am a vegetarian nor am i a vegetarian because i am an atheist.

I think Dawkins is saying its a kind of prejudice to elevate the suffering of humans over the suffering and rights of animals due purely to the fact that we are humans. Its like favoring your own race or gender and discriminating against them based on a similar prejudice. People used to, and still do, think that those were very real and rational lines drawn between treatment of others. I think that the line we have drawn between ourselves and other animals is just as spurious.

Agreed 100%

[The Grand Nudger]

And yet you are willing to differentiate between creatures nevertheless when it comes to suffering, are you not? Friendly definitions to create a friendly arena in which you jump from "factory farming is bad mmkay" to "eating meat is bad mmkay". I remain unconvinced.

-Can we get a source for this-...lol. This one-way convo bullshit is getting old....

[Scabby Joe]

Well, what is your justification for it being okay to eat plants but not animals? Could it not be said that you are discriminating against them because they are not animals like you?

The basis by now must be clear in that plants do not feel pain or suffer and therefore my ethics do not require me to think they have an interest to be considered.

[The Grand Nudger]

But your ethics would require you to consider the animals harmed by their means of production, would it not? Or do you think ag happens in a vacuum? Am I speaking to someone familiar with ag, or just their own arguments? FFS.... I've been asking this question since the word go.

[Scabby Joe]

The question is, on what basis would you think it moral to inflcit unnecessary pain and suffering on another animal for the trivial reason of liking the taste of meat?

On the basis of the pain and suffering of another animal, provided it is the right animal, is even more trivial to what I value than the taste of meat.

---

This is getting silly and away from the point.

It is exactly on the point because the purpose of morality informs what can and can not be deemed immoral.

if the purpose of morality is to smooth transactions within human society and thus improve the fitness of society by eliminating unproductive friction. Morality ought not to have anything to say about killing an animal for its meat if its suffering does not cause unproductive friction in human society.

On the other hand, if the purpose of morality is to impose one's own capriciosu squeamishness upon others, then one may deem anything immoral that isn't doesn't suite one's own taske.

By your reasoning then, any amolunt of pain and suffering inflicted on any other species is of no moral or ethical concern. WOW

[The Grand Nudger]

One way convos ftl........should I stop following this thread?

[Scabby Joe]

Sure, the source is called AG 101, you need nutrients to grow vegetables. Or is this a point of contention between us that must be substantiated? Do you think they grow on happy thoughts and wishful thinking?

Here, this should lay out the requirements nicely.

http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/pubs/id/id36/id36.pdf

Now, where are we sourcing our nutrients from? Speaking of "sources", you keep asking for sources but the only "source" you've been forthcoming with, in support of -your- argument, is your definition of a term with very little in the way of elaboration. Maybe I was wrong when I assumed you were looking for a serious conversation?

You need nutrients to grow vegetables. That's why we have developed crop rotation. To feed many of the animals you eat, we need to grow things for them to eat.

http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug...k.hrs.html
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/549

You still haven't demonstrated your claim that a vegetarian diet causes more unnecessary harm and suffering than one based on meat.

[The Grand Nudger]

Crop rotation is great, it's part of the overall package, but it doesn't meet the nutrient requirements of commercial vegetable production (except in the wildest fanatasies of the organic movement). This is why farms use crop rotation -in addition- to fertilization.

The animals we eat often eat things that we cannot (que ruminants), we often (though clearly not often enough) grow things for them to eat on land unsuitable for production of things we can eat. I've already addressed this. You continue to ignore it.

I'm waiting for you to provide me with a solution so I can be specific. If crop rotation is your solution, then I'm sorry to say, it isn't sufficient, and all environmental harmed caused by ag in the present moment applies (which includes all of the suffering you hope to prevent, and the starvation in our own species you consistently ignore). Crop rotation is often pointed to as though it were some kind of perpetual motion machine. It is not.

(your Cornell link is a great one, that's why we shouldn't feed cattle grains, they dont do well on grain to begin with, they eat grass, and that's how we should produce beef. You did notice the huge bump for pasture land right at the beginning of that paper, didn't you? If we shifted subsidies from corn to pastureland we could produce beef for the average consumer (which is why we went with grain btw) at the same cost -albeit not quite as much......maybe. People would have to eat -less beef-, not -no beef-, next?)

Honestly, you seem to think that by arguing against the worst case scenarios of production that somehow, almost as if by magic, we will be left with vegetarianism. This is not the case. We don't do things in a very intelligent manner currently, get past that, get over it, I'm not arguing for it. We're discussing what you are arguing for, we are trying to establish your argument. Your argument is not "we should engage in more ethical livestock production", or "We should be more ethically minded omnivores", is it? If we made the switch to grass fed, pasture raised beef I'd probably stop eating it, not for ethical reasons, but because I don't really like the taste. Nevertheless, it would qualify as "ethical" by your standards, would it not?

If we converted all feedlot cropland to cropland for human consumption we would still require fertility, would we not? Where would we get it, and how have you avoided any suffering in the sourcing of it, given our limited options in this regard? Feeding people on a diet of straight corn isn't going to work any better for us than it does for cattle. Is this really what you want to find yourself arguing for, subjecting human beings to a part of a process you describe as unethical when it is directed at the poor cow? Que that comment I made about shuffling the suffering around. What you have put forward thusfar is inadequate, it belies a complete lack of understanding as to why we do what we do in ag, and our alternatives. If all I knew about ag was that I didn't want to hurt animals the I could see myself adopting a similar point of view......unfortunately there is just a little bit more to it than all that.

That a completely vegetarian diet may cause more suffering (dependant upon the solution) than the one we currently enjoy is a simple matter of fertility. We would have to grow more crops than we already do (and some of us are already starving). This would require more nutrients than we currently use. We source quite a bit of this fertility from intensive livestock production, and other bits from oil. Remove intensive livestock production and we need more oil. Remove oil and we need more intensive livestock production. Is this difficult to understand? What we do here, in our country, is leverage the less-than-sentient oil more heavily than the sentient livestock. It's a compromise born of ingenuity. That being said, we give very little consideration to what suffering the oil itself causes, and seemingly, neither do you.

(crop rotation, btw, was a product of the dark ages, the original green revolution. "We" did no such thing, nor is it some high tech solution for the problems we face today. It has been known to us for literally a thousand years, and is insufficient. Hopefully you didn't think it was the cutting edge. This was actually part of the badass combo we used to bootstrap our population and diets. The other half was our own feces. They leveraged less livestock for fertility by the use of "nightsoil" than we currently do, and oil was unavailable to them as a solution. We figured out, in the interceding few hudred years, that this was not such a good idea when presented with alternatives. Even so, to this very day, there are those who would argue that we should return to this system.)

[The Grand Nudger]

You know what else is starting to get on my nerves in this discussion? That a couple of us seem so willing to assume the just because we've created a thing we call "ethics" that the cosmos are going to bend over to accommodate it. As if every ideal we can imagine must somehow be workable in the real world. Then, the sheer absurdity of the implication that someone here has found this absolute ideal in the first place, that the rest of us are just a bunch of immoral/unethical bastards. I don't even know how to begin to approach this.....