The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Reductionist Science and Religion / 153
atized knowledge, and the latter of our yearning to reconnect with the
spiritual source of our life and live in harmony with each other and with
the larger order. Both science and religion are massive institutions, each
employing millions of people and spending billions of dollars on projects
that are all, in theory, intended to bring increased health, ease, security,
understanding, meaning and happiness to our lives.
While few would argue that science and religion have not brought
benefits to us, many would argue that they have strongly contributed to
war, destruction, and misery as well—that they have exacerbated problems
as well as solved them. Why is this? More specifically, why haven’t
the thousands seeking to improve and heal the world through scientific
or spiritual development addressed the obviously violent and predatory
mentality required by our food choices? Besides our universal resistance
to admitting complicity in the cruelty of our meals, there is another factor
operating: the reductionism promoted by many Western scientific and
religious institutions that works to keep crucial connections invisible.
The revolution in human consciousness that apparently first began
about ten thousand years ago in Iraq with the domestication and herding
of large animals for food was a revolution of reductionism. Its distinguishing
feature was the inner and outer act of reducing: reducing
powerful wild animals to confinement and routinized slaughter, and
reducing human respect for animals and nature in the process. Our forebears
became predators of reduced prey—herded animals who were
commodified and guarded and then stabbed and decapitated. They
themselves became reduced and desensitized predators disposed to generating
similarly reductionist scientific and religious institutions to validate
their attitudes and behaviors.
Besides producing reductive scientific and religious systems, the old
herding cultures produced reductive and predatory economic systems
that increasingly viewed humans as economic units and led gradually to
gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth. By the historic era three
thousand years ago, we see in our most ancient writings such as Homer,
the Old Testament, and Sumerian cuneiform writings a well-established
economic system dominated by rich cattle-owning kings battling over
lands for their livestock, with the masses of people reduced to mere