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

Some Objections Answered / 213
ing that the chicken, fish, cow, or pig they are eating was not really an
individual with a soul, but just an expression of its species’ “group
soul.” It’s ironic that while the book purports to elucidate spirituality
and raise consciousness, it may actually do the opposite, reducing its
readers’ sensibilities and blinding them to the reality of the suffering
that individual animals experience because we reduce them to objects,
mere fractions of a hypothetical “group soul.”
It harks back to the era of slavery in the United States, when religious
leaders, Bibles in hand, used similar wording to proclaim that
black people had no individual souls, that they were more like animals
than soul-endowed white people. 15 It harks back also to Thomas
Aquinas who, a thousand years ago, proclaimed that neither animals
nor women had souls. Though blacks and women were eventually
granted souls, it appears that those in power decide who have souls, for
their own purposes.
Voltaire wisely said, “If we believe absurdities, we will commit
atrocities.” Culture is the product of conversations, and our conversations
are still dominated by the ideas and assumptions of the exploitive
herding paradigm we were all fed as children. To stop the atrocities, we
must awaken from the absurd belief that animals are insentient, trivial,
soulless property objects and challenge our religious institutions to
extend ethical protection to animals. This of course will mean challenging
the meals at the center of social and religious life and the atrocities
“hidden in plain sight” within those meals. These words by Swami
Prabhupada reveal an alternative to our culture’s dominant paradigm.
Prabhupada: Some people say, “We believe that animals have no
soul.” That is not correct. They believe animals have no soul because
they want to eat the animals, but actually animals do have a soul.
Reporter: How do you know that the animal has a soul?
Prabhupada: You can know, also. Here is the scientific proof.
The animal is eating, you are eating; the animal is sleeping, you are
sleeping; the animal is defending, you are defending; the animal is
having sex, you are having sex; the animals have children, you have
children; you have a living place, they have a living place. If the ani-