How do religious people justify raising and slaughtering animals for food?

[Edwardo Piet]

In that case, I can only speak for my own faith and say that we do not consider it sinful to eat meat. So, justification isn't necessary.

Well, you've kind of justified it by saying it isn't sinful. That's your justification. As for me, I justify it on basis of being hungry and liking the taste. If that's not good enough for veggie types, tough.

I had an online friend on Facebook who I spoke to for years about all sorts of things and we got along really well but when I told her that I ate meat but the rest of my family was vegan she said "So you care about your stomach more than innocent animals?" and blocked me forever.

I won't disclose who it was but it was someone who used to post on AF.

I thought that was utterly absurd and one of the biggest overreactions from someone I've ever had to contend with. And it's not as if I'd been lying all the time and said I was a vegetarian or vegan. I've never suggested that I didn't eat meat . . . so her reaction was utterly bizarre. Does she just assume everyone is vegan by default, even though most people aren't, and only when they explicitly say they aren't does she ragequit a friendship? And she's no idiot either.

Anyways, it was weird.

[The Industrial Atheist]

Alexmahone has a point. If this world was designed by anyone who has even a grain of compassion then there really is no reason not to avoid this predator-prey madness that stains our world with so much blood. The populations of various species could be controlled by tinkering with fertility rates rather than disease and predation. Life could have been based on photosynthesis and chemosynthesis and there would be no continual slaughter happening every day, let alone the pollution, food shortage and diseases that come from growing livestock.

You make a deeper point. Why couldn't we be designed so that we don't even WANT to eat meat or so that it's not even something we would think of? Adam and Eve ate the apple and yadda yadda yadda. Why punish animals for what humans allegedly did? Not to mention punishing all humans for what 2 of them did. Don't get me started on that.

Also, why does(did?) god like animals killed and burned in his name? You would think an all powerful being would find better things than that to be impressed by.

[Catholic_Lady]

Well, you've kind of justified it by saying it isn't sinful. That's your justification. As for me, I justify it on basis of being hungry and liking the taste. If that's not good enough for veggie types, tough.

I had an online friend on Facebook who I spoke to for years about all sorts of things and we got along really well but when I told her that I ate meat but the rest of my family was vegan she said "So you care about your stomach more than innocent animals?" and blocked me forever.

I won't disclose who it was but it was someone who used to post on AF.

I thought that was utterly absurd and one of the biggest overreactions from someone I've ever had to contend with. And it's not as if I'd been lying all the time and said I was a vegetarian or vegan. I've never suggested that I didn't eat meat . . . so her reaction was utterly bizarre. Does she just assume everyone is vegan by default, even though most people aren't, and only when they explicitly say they aren't does she ragequit a friendship? And she's no idiot either.

Anyways, it was weird.

Wow... so much for tolerance of different view points...

[The Grand Nudger]

You make a deeper point. Why couldn't we be designed so that we don't even WANT to eat meat or so that it's not even something we would think of? Adam and Eve ate the apple and yadda yadda yadda. Why punish animals for what humans allegedly did? Not to mention punishing all humans for what 2 of them did. Don't get me started on that.

Also, why does(did?) god like animals killed and burned in his name? You would think an all powerful being would find better things than that to be impressed by.

All explicable and thoroughly answerable outside of the fiction of a god.  They only seem batshit when one tries to make them explicable within the fiction of a god.

[Angrboda]

Also, why does(did?) god like animals killed and burned in his name? You would think an all powerful being would find better things than that to be impressed by.

It's a form of sympathetic magic. In those times, blood was synonymous with life, the essence of a living being. By ritually sacrificing and burning the flesh, you thereby transfer the power of the animals blood, its life force, to the deity to whom it is sacrificed. It's like giving the equivalent of gold in terms of what an entity that is spirit would desire.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_magic

[The Grand Nudger]

There's even a globally common hierarchy of sacrificial value.  Plants, barring specifically denoted sacred ones..ofc, had relatively less life than animals.  Easy to make the connection.  They just sit around most of the time, doing a whole lot of nothing.  Animals, again barring specifically denoted sacred ones, less than human beings.

Over and above all of this, there was greater sacrificial value to any of the above when it was dear to us, commensurate with the level of affection and pain that would be experienced by it's loss - the very nature of sacrifice....

-ergo.

Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

Like the dragons in the garden, when god was small and the earth was young and the first people walked....he was content with sheep and goats from herdsmen.  By the time of Isaac he is fully grown, and so too is his appetite.

Feed him here at the alter, and you will feed him there on his throne. Perhaps he may not feel so hungry later in the night, while you're sleeping.

[Shell B]

I think morality extends out to having a certain level of respect for the animals, and even plants, too.

Even I wouldn't take it that far. Plants are not sentient i.e. they cannot feel.

No, but they have immeasurable benefit. Some respect is warranted.

[Angrboda]

There's even a globally common hierarchy of sacrificial value.  Plants, barring specifically denoted sacred ones..ofc, had relatively less life than animals.  Easy to make the connection.  They just sit around most of the time, doing a whole lot of nothing.  Animals, again barring specifically denoted sacred ones, less than human beings.

Over and above all of this, there was greater sacrificial value to any of the above when it was dear to us, commensurate with the level of affection and pain that would be experienced by it's loss - the very nature of sacrifice....

-ergo.

Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

Like the dragons in the garden, when god was small and the earth was young and the first people walked....he was content with sheep and goats from herdsmen.  By the time of Isaac he is fully grown, and so too is his appetite.

Feed him here at the alter, and you will feed him there on his throne.  Perhaps he may not feel so hungry later in the night, while you're sleeping.

I always get a kick out of how the penance for having your period was that you sacrifice two pigeons to God. Maybe that was God's way of managing the burgeoning pigeon population......

[The Grand Nudger]

I always get a kick out of how the penance for having your period was that you sacrifice two pigeons to God.  Maybe that was God's way of managing the burgeoning pigeon population......

Or maybe the blood had made him mildly peckish?  King of the Lamiae, we already established in another thread that he has an aversion to sunlight.

In seriousness, though, OT God trips all over it's own dick with disjunct myths cobbled together, as any large work of it's kind would...the varying origins of the stories having been lost even to the narrators. That god cursed women to menstruate in the first place - that this -was- their penance and sacrificial redemption for having made themselves unclean- was likely not a story known to the originating culture from which that little gem was sourced. The first five don't seem to share a common pedigree, and even internally some portions of a single book in the first five present themselves as disparate composite constructions.

The "priestly material", so far as we can tell..was a social contract and compromise between different societal trends and expectations which would be converged into a loosely unified whole after a great deal of cultural contamination. This is why so much of leviticus comes out of left field.

[WinterHold]

In the wild; they -the animals- eat us immediately, in the most terrible way possible.
They literally chop us to pieces.

But they don't hunt us for fun. We should repay them the same treatment.
They don't lock us as pets. We should pay them the same treatment and never enslave them if it was ever going to harm them.
The don't eat a "Double human with cheese". i.e they never overeat us. We shouldn't get fat on their flesh also.

Other than that; plants are also alive. So vegetarians aren't that cool if you think about it