Time To Speak Out


A few anthropologists stumbled across a tribe in the Amazon where 90% of the people were taught from birth to get around by crawling, even beyond the normal moving around on all fours experienced by all small children.
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Roughly 10% of the population, however, moved beyond the crawling stage and walked upright. Their fellow tribespeople often asked them if they practiced bipedalism--rather than quadrupedalism--out of some strange religious impulse, or because of some health fad. The bipedalists responded that humans are DESIGNED to walk on 2 limbs, not 4.
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But some of the elders in the tribe pointed to holy traditions which lent support to crawling--a divine dispensation as it were--despite the fact that the earliest traditions held that the tribe's first parents, indeed, walked around on two limbs. "The gods allow us to move around on four limbs. After all, we are not perfect," protested the high priests.
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The political leaders of the tribe also saw the recent increase in bipedalism as a radical movement associated with diabolical religions imported by strange tribes from faraway lands: a development which might destabilize the ways of the tribe. The tribal witch doctor was instructed to paint the increasingly popular bipedalist movement as a fad which could have dire consequences on the morals of the young.
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But the two-fers--as the bipedalists were called--pointed out that they experienced less neck and back pain, along with a host of other ills accepted by the tribe as a normal consequence of getting around on all fours.
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And so on and so on when we substitute the arguments for vegetarianism with the arguments for bipedalism.
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Moral of this story:
We are bipeds and vegetarians by design. If the majority of people in some societies have acquired and retained unnatural habits for whatever reasons, that does not diminish the fact that eating flesh and crawling around on all fours is unnatural, if not perverse.
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Eating meat (flesh, actually, as meat is the solid food eaten by a species), therefore, should not necessarily be seen as a thing of the past, but rather as something that people have done and still do and are likely to continue doing despite the fact that we are all designed--and therefore rooted historically--in vegetarianism. Vegetarianism should not be seen as an option any more than crawling around should be seen as an option.
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There are no substitutes for the real thing. There are only unnatural, unhealthy perversions of what was meant to be.
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Maybe we shouldn't be so nice to the powers that hold the sword over the "food" animals, the environment, human health, the economy, social morality, etc. Eating flesh is perverse--not an option--PERIOD!  Why should we play chess with the masters? It's their board, their pieces, and their rules.
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We can never win the game if we play it on their terms. I say trash the board and call a spade a spade.
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MEAT IS MURDER! ABORTION IS MURDER! WAR IS MURDER! ENVIRONMENTAL RAPE IS MURDER! POLITICAL, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS THAT SUPPORT ANY OR ALL OF THE ABOVE ARE MURDERERS!
Ted PanDeva Zagar

Disclaimer: The above is not necessarily the philosophy of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, but the opinion of Ted PanDeva Zagar from whom this was received through the Vegetarian Resource Centre on their mailing list.