Ancient Religions vs. The Future of Veganism

you guys may not have noticed that in my
communication to vegan Ava I commented to her that she she boasts of spending thirty five hours she boasts of spending many many hours making her her YouTube videos I said well really I record my videos in like ten minutes during my lunch break at school today I've got ten minutes and this is actually my lunch break at school Maude vegan just put up a video discussing the question of whether or not vegetarianism and veganism are supported by the Christian Bible in any way it's a question that's been asked and answered many many times Christians Jews Muslims I have actually a couple develop Muslims within my patreon channel Muslims who are very interested in trying to promote veganism within the Muslim dominated world you guys may or may not have heard that I was formerly a scholar of Buddhism and of the sort of most austere most orthodox form of Buddhism Theravada Buddhism and the most clearly textual based aspect of that tradition so the aspect of Buddhist tradition that really cares about the Buddhist Bible the ancient written Canon that defines what Buddhism was supposed to be or that used to define it in the ancient world it's these kinds of questions what vegetarianism and veganism are not new to me in short if you actually do a survey of the world's major philosophical traditions the strongest tradition for vegetarianism of some kind is not Christianity it's not Buddhism and it's not Hinduism either you'll actually find it in ancient Greece and Rome in ancient Greece and Rome you find some philosophers this is pre-christian pagan ancient Greece and Rome you find some philosophers arguing for vegetarianism on genuinely ethical grounds and you find others arguing for it on supernatural grounds superstitious grounds let's say and then you find some that are kind of offering a hybrid of the two although it was a minority tradition in Athens and Rome we very clearly see that the full range of issues was debated and considered philosophically in that Millia the basis for vegetarianism and veganism in Buddhism is in a word air SATs and most people try to cover this up by misinterpreting the intention of the author and looking at the original text I say this because Christians and Jews have been doing the same thing especially lately in trying to canonize a totally modern set of ideas about animal rights ecology ethics vegetarianism veganism so you know the Buddhist Canon is full of animals similes metaphors you know a passage that describes a group of elephants is almost never interested in the elephants themselves elephants get talked about as a parable for something else but I mean elephants monkeys peacocks every conceivable animal from ancient India has stories told about it in the Buddhist Canon but the idea even of vegetarianism or veganism or of not exploiting animals is simply not a priority for the authors of that Canon doesn't mean there's absolutely zero about it I can provide you below this video with a link to an article I wrote about that but it is the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty to look at a parable about an elephant and try to pretend that this is an argument for the importance of treating elephants with decency or not eating meat or what-have-you no you know the author or the poet a lot of it is poetry and Buddhism the poet is using the image of an elephant to clarify something else now it's a great shame that people are taught to repeat this stupid notion this inane notion that we can never know the intent of the author you know this is people just repeat this nonsensically you know if you're looking at private correspondence between two lovers full of some kind of secret code and you know allusions to secret events and their personalized okay maybe that's an important point that we can't know that he attended maybe at this fine level but whether I've been reading political documents like commands given by Mao Zedong or commands given by Richard Nixon you know official political statements or when I've been studying official religious statements you know from the ancient Buddhist Canon or what-have-you I have never once been in a situation of sincerely and genuinely seeing that this this issue of not being able to know the intention of the author was a problem never once on the contrary what I have seen in both instances both in politics and religion are modern interpreters using this as an excuse to obfuscate the text to baffle and distract modern people like you and I from what's really going on what really matters in the text so for example there is a passage in the Pali Canon that makes use of a very evocative poetic image of looking at the edge of a sharp knife in the original language in Pali it is quite a well written quite a nice piece of text it's quite a nice work of art what I'm gonna say but it draws your change the fact that when you look at a sharp knife and when you look at a dull knife you cannot truly see its edge you can't tell by looking at it which knife is sharp and which knife is dull and the point is you learn which knife is truly the sharpest by cutting you know the point of the text the intention of the author is totally clear it's talking with the fact that you could have a bunch of Buddhist monks we're all wearing the same uniform bunch of guys with shaved heads wearing robes you can't tell who's a good monk and who's a bad monk just by looking at them who has really accomplished the discipline who's truly a disciplined monk or who's truly uh and then lightened monk whatever you want to say but this case it actually it's explicitly about discipline not not wisdom or something so recall but you see who's really disciplined in practice like the knife cutting with a knife cutting with a knife shows you how sharp it really is and maybe comparing it to another okay I have seen that passage misinterpreted in the most nebulous and bizarre ways by modern readers by people you know alive today who try to turn it into some kind of metaphorical metaphysical statement about the nature of transcendental meditation try to make it into something it isn't and it's just a hundred percent intellectually dishonest and to hide behind the notion that you can't know the intention the author is just a lie and of course I've seen that with people making excuses for communism who look at a piece of text from Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin and who pretend oh well you know we're never gonna know what this really meant I mean sometimes you're talking about a piece of paper that says you know yes kill all these people yes you know this is the policy is to liquidate or eliminate these people and no I mean it's not this is not a poetic image this is not private correspondence talking about something confusing these are not the issues now it is no surprise that lifted up by the wings of faith and self-righteousness so many people would like to reinterpret Christianity and reinterpret Judaism have already mentioned Buddhism as being fundamentally Pro vegetarian actually the strongest case the the the gap that's easiest to close that mention this many times much channel the huge advantage here really goes to the Hindus Hindus and Giants in theory could get their act together and become vegan although historically they're not really vegan but they could they could make that step very easily so look you know in a word yes I think these approaches are even if they're well-intentioned but they've also so far been failures and I think what we really have to worry about as vegans is what happens if one of these is successful like this may sound bizarre but what if there's a schism within the Catholic Church in Ireland and 10% of all the Catholic churches in Ireland declare themselves members of the new reformed Catholic Church that among other things is vegan like this is how they change Catholicism now many of you will laugh or just it just seems so bizarre it seems super but that would be success okay success is not a handful of idiots on the internet giving each other the thumbs up in facebook repeating their ludicrous reinterpretations of the Bible as if the Bible were sincerely concerned with animal ethics animal rights veganism ecology etc those ideas are not in the Bible and you can forcibly misinterpret those texts as if those authors were really sincerely concerned with that because of course the image of an ox in the field is there there are all kinds of images involving animals but I mean it's an incredibly low priority incredibly low interest for the authors compared to all the other themes that are dealt with such as the importance of you know the the Jewish people conquering their neighbors I mean a very large percentage the Old Testament is concerned with the the Jewish people conquering their neighbors and then forcing them to attend the Feast of the tabernacle these are aspects of the ancient religion that have dropped out of modern usage when was the last time you got invited to the Feast of the tabernacle I asked you um a lot of weird stuff in in the Old Testament nobody want nobody's really comfortable talking about anymore look as easy as it is to poke fun at these efforts I think the bigger question we have to ask is what condition will secular veganism be in if or when one of these groups exceeds already the supreme master Ching hai group has been massively successful so the Church of supreme master Ching hai is a new religion that owns the world's largest chain of vegan restaurants and those restaurants are staffed primarily by volunteers because those volunteers are told to have the magical belief in karmic rewards for their working at the restaurant so they're going to be reincarnated at a better level of heaven she teaches about plural heavens you can level up by volunteering to work for free at her restaurants if you don't have enough money they can pay you but then you get less karma and believe me the math is precise she tells you exactly how many karma points you get for each deed it's a but you can google this supreme master Ching hai and many of you have eaten in those restaurants without being aware that it is operated by a new religious group in this way but look they've had tremendous success despite several strategic disadvantages compared to say the Catholic Church in Ireland if the Catholic Church in Ireland actually had that schism that would be a huge change in the world if there were a reformed group within Hinduism or Buddhism which are much more likely than Catholicism do it that really came out and said okay we're a Reformation within this religion and among other things we're gonna get rid of the ambiguity we're gonna say look doesn't matter what the ancient texts say here's our modern dictum is that veganism is the solution for right now what happens then hahaha you might have pie in the sky you might you might have high hopes for this but for me actually I see it as a challenge that currently we're very ill-prepared to deal with currently the state of secular veganism veganism as a political movement veganism simply as a non-religious animal rights ecology ethic ethics based movement is so weak that actually that probably be a challenge we could not cope with so my hope is that before any major religious group starts co-opting veganism in a powerful way because already happen in a small scale with supreme master Ching hai really has believe me go to Taiwan you'll see the power and influence that that religion has tremendous before that happens I hope the rest of us get our act together so we are neither co-opted by nor discredited by some new religious movement or some cult that could very easily have a higher level of organization and a higher level of credence than we ourselves now have