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Never said that. Sheesh "squared".... I simply said that you can't assume that death by predator is in any way mortifyingly monstrous.
This is what I was responding to:
Quote:
Originally Posted by rifleman
And yet she, not being a lion or leopard or sabre-toothed tiger, or gazelle or lamb, cannot possibly know if the death of a prey species is in any way agonizing, cruel, horrendous or monsterous.
Your other points are insightful. Thanks RM. I'll check the diet link as I am interested.
BTW - I have seen your credentials and agree at the magnificence and wonder of it all. One thing for sure, as you are fond of pointing out, love it or hate it - it works.
I was watching a nature program on the "Discover Channel" about lions. It was mostly about how they hunt.
Watching them stalk and bring down their prey (in this case a young gazelle), and then watching them all tear into it and eat it alive, blood covering their fur and dripping from their mouths, literally almost made me gag.
Of course, as a vegetarian, I've always been repulsed by the idea of eating animal flesh, but I wonder how Christians, who attribute all life as being created by God, reconcile the fact that their God created a system whereby some animals have to kill and consume other animals in order to survive?
Carnivorism is a horrendous, monstrous way to survive, and as I watched the lions claw the baby gazelle, and listened to its terrified cries, knowing it must have felt horrible pain before it died, the only thing I could think of was, "How could anybody believe that anything would willfully design this system?"
Any thoughts?
Ermm....we humans are created to be omnivorous...God has given us this great gift of being able to eat both vegetables and meat. Why deny the pleasure?
There are animals who are sole carnivorous...lions etc.. Give them veggies and these carnivores cannot survive. Same for the sole herbivorous creatures...no meat for them.
But we humans, we get to enjoy both. Isnt that great. There are some who want to turn into vegetrians...Fine but that is not what is intented by our Creator. How do we know that our Creator intended for us to enjoy both potatoes and meat? By our dentalworks! We have both incisors and molars right? Incisors to cut meat and molars to ground the food. If GOD had not intended us to eat meat why would we even have incisor teeth in the first place?
As for the way the food chain evolves, this is only a natural part of life. Brutal? Maybe but this is how it is. This is our world. A temporary world/abode. A world full of challenges as already stated in the various religious scriputures. We are not intended to reside here permanently so our way of thinking, living should reflect that. We are just travellers in this world, stepping to rest a while under its shade before moving on to our real final destination - paradise ( or hell)
I guess someone got hungry enough to have a Combo Meal at the Fast Burger place and decided it was pretty darn good so hence forth "God" says its okay to eat it.
Well, now that you ask.....several differing varieties have psycotrophic abilities that, in my youth mind you, I enjoyed at various times and events. Without plant life, I doubt substance ethanol would have come into existence, and I would not have been able to so successfully destroy so many of my brain cells, by-in-large, enjoying the exercise, granted nausea was not one of my favorite parts, except when in conjunction with Peyote, nausea in technicolor. And, one other little question....How did people learn to hold their breath without marijuana? A real poser, that one. Also, I have felt, for some time, that the best pizza is made with psylicybin rubinski mushrooms. Of course, I actually did quit using these fine herbs over 20 years ago, but, it was fun while it lasted !
Ahh yes, the late great psilly-sigh-bin mushrooms. Watched some youngsters (relative to me anyways) at an Outdoors Ed course I was teaching gnosh down some 'shrooms they THOUGHT were psilocybins. Proof that it pays to know thine mushrooms:
They got VERY ill, and we had to rush them out of our wilderness campsite and to a local hospital who fortunately had experience with this very mistake. They lived, but did, in fact, suffer some long term liver enzyme changes. Not good!
Darned God for making those vegan mushrooms so toxic, but so simialr-looking to the real psilocybins!
I DO get the OP; but it's hard to imagine a world with....
1) no death, just births (crowded!)
2) our necessary energy needs absorbed from, say, the sun though our skins, or via ocean wave energy or whatever. I mean, we can't just eat the plants; that would kill the co-existing and plant-eating animal wildlife quick-like, as I pointed out.
3) sufficient lack of organism diversity that we could and would intelligently understand each other to the point of us all "just getting along" to quote Rodney King.
Rather, the very diversity we see, and the vast array of animal and plant types (even to the point of carnivorous plants: Venus Flytrap with flys dying a horible enzymatic death in the greedy tentacles of that "monsterously horrible" evil plant...) points, to my mind, to the obvious:
We evolved absent any Godly interference or design beyond, just possibly, His initiation of the Grand Experiment via a dosing of the original oceans with some DNA or it's earlier ancestor, RNA.
But the rest is too obviously the result of Evolution's vast efficiency, filling every conceivable niche (and some that are even inconceivable), up to and including the OP's cruel world. Even niches that we may never see; animals or plants we may never know. Why would a designer God do that, I'm wondering.
The vegan-theist alternate, a homogenous, loving, "huggy-snuggums" world without any death, is unimaginable (and illogical to boot), and would be boring in the extreme anyhow.
I'm as atheist as they come and don't harm living, breathing creatures if I can help it.
There's a great chant from one of the buddhist sutras: Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
I figure you can't save and kill at the same time.
Because we're so removed from our prey, people don't realize the torture that goes into providing meat to the masses. They just go to a grocery and pick up a package.
She was referring to the world God created, before the fall of man. It was perfect.
Really? SO, who let that nasty talking snake(the devil) into the "perfect" world?
It obviously wasn't very perfect or well designed if it could get screwed up so easily.
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It's Just Not Logical, God!
