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

214 / the world peace diet
mal’s body is cut, there is blood; if your body is cut, there is blood.
So all these similarities are there. Now why do you deny this one similarity,
the presence of the soul? That is not logical. You have studied
logic? In logic there is something called analogy. Analogy means
drawing a conclusion by finding many points of similarity. If there
are so many points of similarity between human beings and animals,
why deny one similarity? That is not logic. That is not science. 16
And Schopenhauer, in criticizing how some Christians treat animals,
wrote, “Shame on such a morality that fails to recognize the eternal
essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with
inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun.” 17
Whether or not we believe that animals have souls, the knowledge
that they can suffer as we do compels religious persons to refrain from
causing them to suffer. As guardians and vehicles of our spiritual
impulses and teachings, our religious institutions have a profound obligation
to speak on behalf of all beings who are voiceless and vulnerable,
and to the degree they fail in this obligation, they betray their mission
and become enablers of terror and oppression. Failing to act to protect
life is itself an action, a turning away. By looking the other way and
ignoring the plight of defenseless animals, religious institutions have
supported our culture’s inhumane agenda of reducing animals to
objects. Willfully neglecting to defend innocent lives from cruelty is
immoral action, and by its failures religion has forfeited its mandate and
dissipated its credibility as an authentic moral or spiritual authority.
Religion’s turning away has allowed the atrocities to continue and
legitimized the turning away of the general population. This turning
away is the paradigmatic learning that our culture specializes in, particularly
with regard to the plight of the animals we eat and use; it is the
everyday teaching of not seeing, not caring, disconnecting, and ignoring.
This learning to look the other way brings spiritual death in everyone
who practices it. In encouraging it, religious institutions show how far
they have strayed from the passionate mercy and all-seeing kindness
taught and lived by those whose spiritual evolution and illumination
inspired the institutions themselves. Spiritual teachings of our intercon-