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

The Nature of Intelligence / 33
food is so strong that I can often feel it as a living force. For several
years, I’ve been speaking on Sunday mornings at progressive churches
and centers, primarily Unity churches, and giving seminars on developing
intuition. I find in addressing groups of even apparently progressive
people that when I begin to raise the topic of the inherent cruelty to animals
involved in viewing them as things, and the ethical and spiritual
ramifications of our cultural practice of eating them, it seems I must
push through an invisible psychic wall that absolutely resists hearing
these ideas articulated. It seems to be the unconscious collective denial
of the group.
This is ironic, since the Unity movement’s two founders, Charles
and Myrtle Fillmore, were ethical vegetarians who decried the unnecessary
cruelty to animals involved in viewing them as commodities, and
who spoke against using leather-bound Bibles, wearing fur, vivisecting
animals, or in any way harming “our little sisters and brothers of the
animal world.” They strongly encouraged people to refrain from eating
animal foods. Charles wrote copiously on the subject, saying for example
in 1915, “Therefore, in the light of the Truth that God is love, and
that Jesus came to make his love manifest in the world, we cannot
believe it is his will for men to eat meat, or to do anything else that
would cause suffering to the innocent and helpless.” 2 In 1920, he wrote,
“We need never look for universal peace on this earth until men stop
killing animals for food.” 3 Together, Charles and Myrtle started the
Unity Vegetarian Inn outside Kansas City, writing, “The idea and object
of Unity Inn is to demonstrate that man can live, and live well, on a
meatless diet.” 4 Today, a mere seventy years later, we find animal foods
now permeating the menu, and the vegan ethic that Unity’s founders
wove into the fabric of their teaching has been repressed and virtually
forgotten.
What has happened with Unity is not an isolated case. We know
that the Buddha taught compassion for animals and a vegan ethic of
plant-based eating, and yet many people today call themselves
Buddhists and eat animal foods. A strong argument can be made that
Jesus and his original followers propagated a similar teaching of compassion
toward animals, and—according to researcher Keith Akers in The