Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
I also never said plants weren’t including in all “living things”. Not all living things are necessarily sentient. Animals are. We don’t know that plants are. And a lot more plants are harmed by being carnist than being vegan, in addition to confirmed sentient animals being exploited, killed & having their interests violated - opportunistically & unnecessarily.
Veganism is inherently about sentience - it’s concerned with non-human animals by proxy of their sentience. If we discovered other sentient entities, such as sentient AI, the values underlying veganism/animal rights would be extended to include them in the circle of moral concern as well, and we would avoid harming them as much as we could, and not deliberately/opportunistically & unnecessarily exploit & victimize them either - and if there is an option by which we can reduce harm to them even lacking evidence of sentience, as long as it didn’t sacrifice beings we know to be sentient (humans and non-human animals), we should choose that too, to err on the side of the precautionary principle, which many vegans and sentientists employ. We’re already doing that by consuming plants directly instead of growing, harvesting, clearing & destroying much more plants, land & environment for animal agriculture. Sentientism is essentially a future-proofed definition of veganism that gets down to the underlying axioms of why sentience/subjective experience matters.
Veganism ( https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism ):
“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”
is more or less equivalent to Sentientism ( https://sentientism.info/ ) :
“Evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings”.
Which sounds a lot like the first Tenet of The Satanic Temple to me.
I believe atheist YouTuber GeneticallyModifiedSkeptic identifies as a sentientist, but is what other people would call vegan: https://youtu.be/oQ1TJ7oUMHg
https://sentientism.info/what-is-sentientism/an-overview
"When it comes to working out what to believe and how confidently to believe, Sentientism suggests we should use evidence and reasoning. That naturalistic approach is an alternative to holding faith-based, arbitrary or unchangeable, dogmatic beliefs.
As we think about “who matters?” Sentientism suggests we should have moral consideration and compassion for every sentient being – any being capable of experiencing, particularly experiencing suffering or flourishing. Roughly speaking, that means human and non-human animals, but other types of artificial or alien being might conceivably one day be sentient too. Having moral consideration for someone at the very least means we wouldn’t needlessly exploit, harm or kill them."