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.
Gross view. The same was said of human slaves.
comparing slaves to animals is what slavers do. get help.
All injustice, oppression, domination, violence, hierarchy and inequality are connected. Intersectionalism 101. Whether we’re fighting against racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, speciesism, or any other oppressive or unjust system and power imbalance or injustice, we’re opposing the same kyriarchy (master-rule).
Also, the word cattle comes from chattel as in chattel slavery. The enslavement of humans was literally based on the domestication and exploitation of non-human animals. Humans (particulary white European humans) thought they could tame and sophisticate other races of humans like they had done to non-human animals that they farmed - and they employed them both to pull ploughs on farm and do agricultural work. Slavery was always tied to food and agriculture. But no one wants to think about these things or see the connections and how you’ve been tricked into repeating history.
one of these things is not like the others.
treating livestock like livestock isn’t oppression.
It’s true that humans who are intending to devalue or oppress other humans often compare them to, or model the treatment of them on, non-human animals. I’ve acknowledged this multiple times. But you need to understand that this is part of the oppressive culture and mindset of human supremacy and speciesism that we’re trying to dismantle. When we compare humans to other animals, we are trying to reclaim that comparison as something positive that allows us to see the similarities between each other rather than focusing on our differences. That reasons to care about humans extend to why we should care about other animals: they feel the same things as us, share very similar life experiences, relationships, etc. Of course we’re not trying to insult or devalue humans by comparing them to other animals, even if you have a socially programmed idea of what that comparison must inherently or always imply; offense, devaluation, demeaning language, etc. We’re trying to redefine what the human-[non-human] animal relationship can be, into something much more positive and respectful. No, I don’t support bestiality.
Furthermore, I said that what you said is the same thing that humans said about human slaves, which it more or less was. Acknowledging that fact isn’t something it’s rational to criticize or try to twist into misrepresenting me as comparing human slaves to exploited non-human animals (not that we shouldn’t make circumstantial analogies like that for the sake of compelling humans to wake up to the injustices committed on non-human animals), or even comparing humans to non-human animals, and especially to knowingly slander me as insinuating that human slaves are less valuable than other humans just because I talked about their treatment or rather the arguments used to justify it in the same context as the treatment of non-human animals and the arguments used to justify their exploitation/harm/killing/etc.
That said, there are very important and powerful comparisons to be made and several parallels you can’t ignore between the treatment of non-human animals (who many contend, are experiencing a form of slavery by humans) and the treatment of enslaved humans, as well as the overall cultural attitudes toward them and toward the people and movements seeking to oppose and abolish them.
https://www.amazon.com/Dreaded-Comparison-Human-Animal-Slavery/dp/0962449334
It’s understandable that people are so offended by this comparison at first glance because of all the deeply ingrained ideas about non-human animals being in a subservient position and how comparing how they’re treated to how human slaves were/are treated is somehow legitimizing the idea that those human slaves (or the usually racist assignment of purposes and discrimination of them) are somehow subservient by nature or something, which obviously isn’t the intention at all. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are actually people who don’t think of other animals as being offensive to be compared to or to have the treatment of humans and justification for human oppression be compared to that of non-human animal oppression. You can keep pretending to be offended or disingenuouslys strawmanning and depicting me as saying or implying something you know I’m not, but it’s clear you’re just being a troll at this point.
why would that even come up? you’re such a weirdo.