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

162 / the world peace diet
raped, and it is basically the same today. By emphasizing the masculine
nature of God, the herding cultures legitimized their ethos of domination,
cruelty, and killing. In fact, as J. R. Hyland points out, the main
form of worship in the old herding cultures was the sacrificial killing of
animals to please the deity. 12 Underlying all this was the fundamental
notion that “the Lord is my shepherd”—a terrifying idea when we contemplate
the realities of the herding culture that propagated these teachings.
The herder enslaved, castrated, and killed his sheep, goats, and cattle
without mercy, and these creatures were, as they are today, powerless
in his almighty hands.
The anxious preoccupation with being “saved” perhaps derives
directly from this. Our ongoing failure to save the animals at our mercy
may compel us into nervous concern about our own “salvation.”
Salvation from what, exactly? From the consequences of our actions,
perhaps? Or more traditionally, from being damned to the fires of hell?
Whence comes the power of this image? Could it be related to the
untold centuries of herders gazing through flames into the charring bodies
of animals they’ve condemned and killed as sacrificial offerings, and
which they themselves will eat?
The Myth of Evil
The basic view promoted by conventional Western religion is of an
unending battle between good and evil, with God as a male skydwelling
deity on one side and Satan as a shadowy, malicious, bestial
presence on the other. This devil is ironically represented as having the
horns and hooves of a goat or cow—the very victims we relentlessly
confine and attack for food! This evil or devil is certainly, on one level
at least, the projection of our own shadow—the guilt, shame, and unexpressed
grief we bear for the massive ongoing cruelty we engage in as
eaters of animals in the herding culture’s households. We repress our
awareness of our cruelty and consequently find ourselves plagued by a
dark and sinister presence. This is unavoidable, because the evil we see
is our own denied and unadmitted cruelty, from which we can never distance
ourselves. It emerges as devils, enemies, wars, and weapons of
mass destruction. We are told we have to side with our shepherd king,