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

Reductionist Science and Religion / 161
basic disconnection between the divine and all of us reinforces the illusion
of separateness that is also propagated by reductionist science.
It is fascinating and instructive that while conventional science and
religion fight endlessly with each other—bickering brothers sharing a
common reductionist mythology—holistic science finds inspiring and
helpful guidance and confirmation from progressive and non-Western
religious traditions like liberation theology and many indigenous traditions,
as well as Eastern traditions such as Taoism, Mahayana
Buddhism, Sikhism, and Vedanta. These religious traditions tend to
have evolved in cultures and subcultures in which animals were not systematically
reduced to commodities.
The reductionist delusion of essential separateness is so ritualized in
our daily meals that it inevitably thrusts itself into our religious lives.
We are often told as children that we’ll be excluded from heaven unless
we subscribe to a set of exclusivist beliefs! Mainstream religious teachings
typically tell us we are special if we agree to an exclusivist creed.
They rarely question our violent food choices but rather encourage them
by declaring that animals have no souls and that God gave us animals
to eat—and they sponsor barbecues, pig roasts, fish fries, and turkey
dinners in communities across America. It wasn’t so long ago, when the
fourth-century emperor Constantine made Christianity the Roman state
religion, that its earlier vegetarian emphasis was completely repressed
and actually became a heresy, with Constantine reportedly ordering his
men to pour molten lead down the throats of any Christians who
refused to eat animal flesh. 11 The original Christian teachings of mercy
had to be repressed and twisted in order to be accepted by the dominant
herding culture, and the enlightened teaching that He who lives by the
sword must die by the sword became a bitter irony.
By interpreting the transcendent divine as masculine, conventional
religion deifies the masculine the same way science does, and suppresses
the feminine, which nurtures and connects. Even today, when there is
virtually no theologian who would dare argue that the infinite Spirit
that is referred to by the word God could be said to be more male than
female, we still teach our children, as we were taught, that He is the
Lord. In the old herding cultures, it was males who warred, herded, and