VEGETARIANS ONLY: Religion and vegetarianism?!
VEGETARIANS ONLY: Religion and vegetarianism?
I'm just curious about what religion my fellow vegetarians are. So what's you're religion? Does it have any influence over your vegetarianism? Or vice-versa? Also, what kind of vegetarian are you? I'm curious if certain religions are more likely to have more percentages of a certain type of vegetarian than another (for example, ovo-lacto vegetarian, ovo vegetarian, lacto vegetarian, pseudo-vegetarian (eats chicken, fish, etc., but not beef and pork), part-time vegetarian, vegan, etc.
I'll start:
My religion is Deism. My religion plays a huge part on my ethics and morality, and my vegetarianism comes from my ethics and moraltiy. So my religion has an indierct relationship to my vegetarianism. I'm lacto-ovo vegetarian, because with eggs and milk, animals are not killed like they are for meat.
Answers:
Atheist
I'm not sure there's any connection between my vegetarianism and my atheism.
I'm an atheist, well, for the obvious reasons. I don't believe in any god/goddess/higher power etc etc. I have read and learnt quite a lot about many religions, and remain unconvinced by any of them. I believe in nature, the beauty of this planet, and that every living thing deserves to live out its natural life without human interference.
Humans seem to believe that their ability to affect the environment and surroundings and lives of other species, is what makes the human race superior. It is precisely the fact that it chooses to act on that ability that to me suggests that the human race is inferior.
My vegetarianism simply stems from the fact that I absolutely do not believe that I have the right to cause the death of any other living thing (and before the "So isn't a plant a living thing?" brigade start chirping - you all know that this means with a heartbeat/face etc).
No animal evolved or exists so that I can chew my way through its dead carcass, swallow its blood and end its life prematurely.
The day a chicken or a cow or anything else is able to say to me "No really, I wish to be strung upside down from a wire, have a bolt put in my brain that doesn't quite kill me, then have my throat slit and slowly bleed to death" then fine, I will make the decision on whether or not to take it up on its offer. Until then, I choose to live my life causing as little suffering, upset and distress as possible.
I don't do this for any reward, financial or otherwise. I certainly don't do it so I can enter a fictitious afterlife, or come back with my karma intact. I do it so I can sleep at night.
I am atheist
I am vegetarian because I love and care about animals, as well as my own body
I am a lacto-ovo vegetarian (going on 2yrs now). I do not subscribe to any religion. I believe in a higher power (God, I guess), and I try to be a "good person"... but I'm not a strongly religious person.
I'm a Catholic Vegan.
I went vegetarian around 14 years ago when I learned that if America alone cut its meat consumption in half we could end world hunger. As a good Catholic wanting to feed the hungry how could I not go veg.
I've never been much of a meat eater and always been a big animal lover. The transition was very easy.
Last year I attended a "Farm Animal Forum." I thought I was pretty savy about what we were doing to the animals. The evils involved. I was ignorant beyond my wildest dreams.
Two of the speakers were Catholics. A Catholic Vegan who works for Vegan Outreach of PETA and a Catholic Vegetarian who works for Farm Sanctuary. One of the speakers was Howard Lyman. I don't know his religion, or if he has one at all.
I was devistated. If any lacto-ovo veggies heard these people speak, they'd give up the milk and eggs immediately. A life of extreme torture is no better than being raised just to be killed.
I went vegan for Lent right after the forum. It was easier than I thought.
Since that time, I've learned that you can't fight for peace and justice and consume animals or animal products. You can't fight for animal rights and consume animals or animal products . You can't rescue animals and consume animals or animal products. You can't fight for ecology and consume animals or animal products. You can't be "pro-life" and consume animals or animal products.
Factory farming in all it's forms is conducive to racism, sexism, world hunger, world poverty, the culture of death, etc... It's staggering. Each person, on average, eats about 111 pounds of meat a year. But we consume 580 pounds of dairy (including eggs) each year.
sorry. I'll climb off my soap box now.
Catholic semi-vegetarian...won't eat chicken, beef, or pork, but will eat fish when I must...eggs in prepared food but not what I make (I cook most of my own meals).
hmmm...Catholicism doesn't really play into me being veg...makes Lenten fridays interesting, though!
Sorry, but when I hear "religion," I think "superstition." Having said that, I'll address your question by first defining "religion" as I suspect you mean it: Spirituality.
That said, my vegan lifestyle is my religion. And, like you, my "religion" (veganism) plays a huge part on my ethics and morality. I live my life helping animalkind; that means not eating, wearing, or exploiting them. It also means being active in the protection and welfare of animalkind.
You say "with eggs and milk, animals are not killed like they are for meat," but what about the exploitation and abuse behind the process of obtaining the dairy products? There are so many tasty substitutes for ice cream and eggs (used in baking, not omelets) that all one needs is a bit of creativity to make your commitment to the animals total and complete by forsaking all animal-based ingredients and products (that means shoes of man-made materials; they exist, they're nice looking, and they're cheaper than leather).
I think you can do it; I think you're a caring, mindful, compassionate soul who would make small dietary and fashion changes to accommodate the animals.
I consider myself a non-denominational pagan; my beliefs and practices are largely a mix of Wicca and neo-Druidism. (If you didn't understand that, don't worry about it.) I occasionally attend Unitarian Universalist services, as well.
My religion led me to be an environmentalist ("treehugger") and the negative environmental impacts of factory farming and over-grazing played a large role in my becoming a lacto-ovo vegetarian. So there's definitely a relationship.
And yes, I'm aware that battery farms for eggs and industrial dairy farms are as polluting as meat farms, but I didn't feel that I could go from omnivore to vegan in one fell swoop. Veganism may be in my future, but for now I'm still working on being a healthy, fit vegetarian. :)
Agnostic.
Ovo-lacoto vegetarian, off from years of being vegan.
I suppose that my lack of religion plays a role in not eating meat. We're on earth for a short time, why should some lives be cut short because of being eaten?
There's not necessarily a connection between religion and vegetarianism.
Vegetarianism is a choice, an ethical choice. Religions are ethics systems, but not the only ones. The same is true of deism - it's an ethics system.
There is no such thing as a pseudo vegetarian or part time vegetarian. Either a person is one or isn't one.
I don't really practice a religion per se. My beliefs are earth based however.
I grew up being Jewish but I'm slowly turning to agnostic. My religion had absolutly nothing to do with my decision to become a vegetarian. The type of vegetarian I am is lacto-ovo vegetarian (I think that's the one where you still consume dairy products)
And the person who said "I'm a semi vegetarian"....theres no such thing as a semi vegetarian.
I'm an atheist. I don't mind the selective killing of animals to feed and clothe people, but I personally find eating meat to be yucky. My lack of faith has nothing to do with my eating habits.
I grew up in a family of baptists
and became an atheists. After
becoming Vegan I discovered
Buddhism and found that it made
perfect sense to me. There's no
real deity only a role model and
code to follow. Also there's no
damnation for not being Buddhist
nor any promises of a blissful
afterlife. The true motivation is
the ability to stay grounded and
centered and maintain peace of
mind. "My religion is kindness".
Make good moral choices in
order to be in harmony with all,
THE DALI LAMA.
The two biggest appeals
to me were the concept of
respecting all life and the ab-sense
of a place of torment. Someone
saying worship me only or I'll send
you to hell creates the wrong
motivations for a lot of people.
I call it, "spirituality under duress".
I respect the religious choices of
all others even though only this
one works for me.
Grew up in family with generations of vegetarians - so it's natural.
The main principle of veganism is my religion,being as cruelty free as possible,to humans and animals.Like Ghandi said,be the change you wish to see in the world,and that's what I try to do.I believe in God,but don't follow a religion.I think being spiritual is more important than being religious.religion and money make normally nice people do things they wouldn't normally do,like "holy wars" sacrifices and killing eachother for one's own gain.Everyone knows the difference between what is right and what is wrong,the hard part is choosing to do the right thing.I just always try and do what feels right.
"We pray on Sundays that we may have light/To guide our footsteps on
the path we tread;/We are sick of war, we don't want to fight,/And yet
we gorge ourselves upon the dead." -George Bernard Shaw
"Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an
act which is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man
suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity,
that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by
violating his own feelings becomes cruel." "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields." -Leo Tolstoy
"I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we
should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our
bodily wants." -Gandhi
i'm christian (methodist) and my religon does not influence my vegetariansim. i know jesus ate fish....people agrue that ALL the time with me....but we have free will. right now i'm a ovo-vegetarian but i don't eat direct eggs. like, i'll eat brownies that were baked with eggs and biscutes that were cooked with eggs but i won't eat like scrambled eggs, omlets, sunny-side up, etc.
i am a lacto-vegetarian and have been since i could choose my own food. i have never been very religious- i go to a youth group every week at church but that's about it. i guess you could call me semi-agnostic. religion has never really influenced me in my vegetarianism, all though i recently found out that in the Book of Daniel in the Bible Daniel abstains from meat and alcohol and becomes very good looking. so christianity obviously supports vegetarianism, but i would still be vegetarian if it didn't. my diet IS however the biggest indicator of my moral standards, because i believe it is cruel to kill animals for food.
Vegan. Seventh Day Adventist. I could talk on this subject for days!!! Religion is a major factor for me. To summarize...
Starting in Genesis, we were created vegan. Gensis1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. After the flood, all vegetation was destroyed, so God allowed some eating of meats for survival, but he specified between clean and unclean meats to eat. See Leviticus chp 11. This is not the ideal situation in which we were created. Soon, vegetation regrew (obviously). In Daniel chp. 1 Daniel ate vegan and was proved to be 10 times wiser. Jesus also taught compassion and mercy. Today, man's greed has reached its peak so that we treat animals as commodities, regardless of how horrible, just to make money. How are we being stewards of God's creation? Were Adam and Eve naming the animals pork chops and hamburger? No, of course not. Looking to the future, Jesus is coming again soon. A new heaven and a new earth will be created. Revelation 21:1 1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. 4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. There will be no more death. So we will be vegan here. Why not prepare now? Why not eat what we were created to eat? Our maker knows what fuels us. Ok, I will stop my summary now.
I'll start with my diet, Technically I'm lacto-ovo simply because I occasionally use commercially prepared analogs (meat subs) that contain dairy/egg, other than that I'm a total vegetarian. I don't use terms like 'almost' or 'pseudo' [insert five letter V word here] because that's an insult to vegans.
My faith? I'm one of the few that still follow central European pre-christian beliefs (most who wouldn't convert got burned 1300-1500 years ago). Lacto-ovo is required for those of us that are selected to be leaders/preachers/sources/teac... (take your pick of terms- it doesn't translate well) but isn't required/needed for anyone else. I started to become veggie at 8 years old because I chose to follow this path when it was offered to me (so it obviously influenced my choice to be veggie
Does that answer help?
I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian and a Catholic. Religon isn't a big deal in my life right now, I dont go to church and stuff, but I pray and try not to lose my faith. My faith, however, is currently on the back burner. That sounds bad but: it doesn't make much sense to me right now, Catholics believe animals don't have souls, and acorrding to my grandmother "God put animals on this world for one reason and that was to serve man". I don't believe it, but if that was true I would not be religous.
I'm what people call vegan, although I dislike the word myself. I prefer to just be "human".
I'm not religious.
No, not atheist, I don’t like the implications of that word.
I think that religion is just as empty as believing in science.
Maybe I’m wrong, but Buddhism is the only large organized religion I know of that is not based upon superstitions, gods, and such but follows nature and the universe. To Buddhists, Buddha was just a person, a philosopher with wise words. Not a god. I’m not a follower of Buddha’s teaching either.
In the end, none of us knows anything.
Yet, I know enough to see that nature works all by itself without our ‘help’ or understanding and that following nature is the best path in life. I also believe that doing more good than evil (to put it in black and white terms) is the way in which everyone should live. It’s as simple as understanding the difference in helping or harming. It’s plain to see. Family, friends, and village should be the focus of our lives and the more we become disconnected from nature, the further we separate ourselves.