I have been noting this more recently and it seems to be a trend, at least with people I converse with on the regular. The really religious types aren’t animal people or downright dont like them. The more chill or agnostic types seem to be more apt to love animals.
I could go on my theory of this but I’m interested to see if anyone thinks this is a trend.
Not my experience. I used to work with animals, and many of my clients, or people I did animal rescue work with, were religious. The animal rescue work, specifically, seemed to attract people who were extremely religious.
You know how the after church crowd is the meanest to service workers? They’re famous for it. This is like that.
I think you found a weird outlier and your data set is small. Like, most of the world is religious in some way shape or form, your sample size is too small to make any realistic judgement call
Thats why I asked here
Touche’.
Probably, they’re both independently correlated with right-wing politics.
Assuming you live in the West. In India it’d be another matter.
As a vegan, the most annoying people are religious people (specially abrahamic believers) and their unbreakable logic: ‘If God didn’t want us to eat meat, why did he give them to us’ Imo that reflects their attitude towards animals: they don’t see them as a living beings, but rather as things to be used.
I think it’s more to do with religious people coming from rural backgrounds.
Eating meat was a celebratory thing when I was still living in rural Turkey, so at first vegetarianism seemed like “a spoiled western thing”
In my mind it was grouped next to those ragebait videos of 14 year olds yelling at their mom for getting the wrong iphone model.
Animal cruelty argument didn’t work great either because, “I only eat halal certified anyway.”
Content warning : Religion. Don't tap if you don't want to learn what "halal food" is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_dietary_lawsNote: It sounds decent, especially for early 7th century Arabia standards, but no multi-billion industry is following regulations that make them less profit to 100%.
What DID convince me near instantly was someone showing how the meat industry is all exploitative and corrupt.
They waste workers, water, and animal lives on purpose because it’s more profitable than proper logistics. Fucking cruel looking into it, crazy they aren’t being universally boycotted already.
In good faith I am asking why vegans don’t consider vegetables to be living things.
They are living organism, but don’t have a nervous system or barain like animals have and there is no evidence they have a conciosness like animals have.
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They are living, not sentient tho.
you can’t prove they are not sentient
Neither can you prove they are, while you can easily prove that animals are.
I’m not the one making an unprovable claim
Or that animals are
Do you have a pet or have ever been close to an animal? If so you’d know.
Here an example of some cows if you can see that and say animals are not sentient than I have nothing else to say to say to you as it would just be a waste of time.
You’re right, I confused sentience for sapience, my bad! Of course that means plants are absolutely sentient, as we know for sure they can feel and hear. So we’re back to the beginning question, why does veganism care about the sentience of Animalia but not the sentience of Plantae or Fungi?
According to one religious person I’ve talked to, animals don’t have “souls” so they’re not worth anything. I argued there’s no difference, many animals have emotions and awareness, just like us. His reply was they we are smarter than animals.
I asked what about dumb people then, because there’s considerable overlap between the dumbest people and the smartest animals. Like at what “IQ” do you obtain a soul? That’s about when he tried changing the subject.
You spoke to a Dominionist. The other end of that spectrum are Stewards, Dominionists believe the Earth is ours to do with as we please. Stewards believe the Earth belongs to “God” and our duty is to be caretakers. I am heavily in the Steward camp
One Christian will use either argument depending on which serves them better at the time.
To steelman his argument, maybe he was saying god gave people souls because we are smarter?
I was taught as a young conservative xtian that only humans have souls and that animals were put here for our use and amusement. I was taught that animal pain could not be real because they don’t have a soul. They are effectively just toys or food for humans, according to conservative christians.
Conservatism is a fkn disease that needs to be eradicated.
My VERY religious stepdaughter somehow sends out a ‘bite me now’ signal to cats.
She was also just going to essentially dump her cat on the street when she left the country a couple years.
So yeah, she sucks.
EDIT: to clarify, I took in that cat who is a bit of a butthead, but doesn’t deserve to die for it.
It depends on what religion you look at you have religions with literal sacred animals, religions where all life is sacred, religions where the prophet didn’t like dogs so dogs are explicitly shunned, religions where just cloven hooves animals are forbidden etc. it’s kind of all over the place, my church is dog friendly and I’ve brought him with me before.
I do think there is a subset of Christianity that believes that 1) animals exist to serve man 2) animals don’t have souls so that would mean animal welfare isn’t really a priority. It’s also important to maintain that animals don’t have souls explicitly to justify caring less about them, if they had eternal souls it would be a lot harder to feel ok exploiting them.
So yes, I do think some religions do have an undercurrent of denying animal welfare for the benefit of animal exploitation because they believe that is the god given purpose of animals, to be exploited by man.
But “Sacred animals” AFAIK doesn’t mean all animals, but very specific one. Like you shouldn’t eat cows, but eating pigs is fine. So it isn’t against religious people general morales to avoid killing animals.
But maybe you know of a religion where all animals are sacred.
Of course. The Bible taught people that this planet is ours, and that animals are under us.
Ehh not quite. That’s Dominion. The other interpretation Stewardship, is that Earth is God’s dominion not ours and we are caretakers, not its owners.
Yeah actually. I think I’ve observed this as well. It’s not surprising, religions are super anthropocentric. Humans are god’s chosen creatures etc. So much for love
Depends if you’re a cow or a chicken
they are also likely to neglect them, and see them as commodities, as the current thing to have, once the honeymoon phase wears off they neglect them, anecdotes of course. consider how religious people dont really adopt people for the right reasons and railing on abortion rights.
Speaking from experience, whether you are religious or not, being kind to animals are a separate thing. What I can say though, devout Muslims that I knew are either animal lovers, or animal avoiders because they are scared by furry things.
But being cruel to animals? I’m quite sure thats against our teaching though. Although we do slaughter animals for food, for example.
I know a fair number of religious people, They don’t seem to be any more or less cruel than non-religious people.
