Bookman

She had to leaf.

SallySmith

She corn stand to hear you sprout this nonsense any longer.

Queen of Swords

She was soundly beeten in the debate.

Megatron

*Now interrupting the puns to bring this public service announcement from Zero Angel!*

Beef! It's what's for dinner!

*You may now return to your regularly scheduled vegetable puns.*

Queen of Swords

That was barley relevant, ZA.

Megatron

Soy what if it's barley relevant. I had bean quiet for too long. Making up for some lost thyme, ya know?

Koyaanisqatsi

Punishment aside:

For this to be productive, you have to let us know what your thoughts are, not simply that you have them.

I believe all matter to be conscious. There is therefore no moral difference to me between eating meat or eating plants or breathing oxygen or being bombarded by radiation or any aspect of three dimensional energymatter conversion.

I find eating meat to be morally equivalent to eating plants and I derive that morality from my lack of homocentric piousness.

You asked, I answered.

There's that irrelevant, self-importance again. Do you wish to challenge my beliefs? Then please do so.

No more so than showing that cows do, yet you had no problem asserting this to be true based upon sentience. Apply the exact same method to all matter and you've derived the logical conclusion I came to when I was five.

All matter is conscious; i.e., all matter is "self aware." To claim that only we are or only cows are or only creatures with brains are or that anyone of us has the ability to declare what is or is not consciousness in order to rationalize our moral piousness is to engage in sanctimonious hypocritical moralizing, hence my comments.

Note that these are literal, demonstrable and derivative and therefore not invective.

You asked for what our beliefs were and upon what they were based and I told you. You pretended that you could read my mind and that I was just being argumentative because it didn't fit in with your moralizing attitude.

Tough shit.

I do believe all matter is conscious and by that I mean self-aware from the smallest to the largest. To me, that is the only logical explanation for all forms of consciousness and the very basis for Jung's theory of the collective unconscious; a theory I happen to wholeheartedly agree with.

For me, therefore, there is absolutely no qualitative moral difference between eating meat or plants or any other form of matterenergy you wish to posit, since on its most fundamental levels, it is all the exact same thing.

You (and Punkerslut) are the ones who are basing all of your argument on suffering as the moral linchpin to your convictions; that the unnecessary (in your opinion) suffering allegedly inflicted upon animals is morally reprehensible to you and that such unnecessary suffering should be the moral barometer for everyone to uniformly agree and cease and desist.

In other words, you are attempting to force your morality onto our morality, nothing more, nothing less.

While I agree that unnecessary suffering is not preferable, I do not know how you could possibly define such a thing, other than through personal, homocentric empathy and/or sympathy triggers. You see cows being killed by blunt force trauma guns and chickens kept in tiny pens with no room to move for their entire short lives only to then be hung upside down and their throats cut while still alive and, I would suggest, you project yourself into their situations through empathy/sympathy and conclude that you would not want to be treated in this manner, so therefore neither should we treat them in this manner.

From this you derive your personal moral stance and then preach it here.

I, on the other hand, look to what we do to our livestock and compare it to what goes on in the wild and through empathy/sympathy project myself into that scenario and conclude that "nature" (where trillions upon trillions of living, self-aware creatures are eaten alive or worse on a second to second basis; a process that has been in place for millions of years) to be far more horrific qualitatively than Gomer with a blunt force trauma gun.

Is there cruelty to animals? Yes, us included. Is it morally reprehensible? Not to me. Is it qualitatively different to murder plants and eat their flesh? No, not to me, it is not.

But you're not interested in my moral stance on this issue at all. You don't want to think that plants are just as capable of consciousness as you claim cows are, because you are a hypocrite who wishes to morally preach. This is not fingerpointing or invective; this is demonstrably true based on just about every post you've made.

To morally proclaim that we shouldn't kill and consume animals because they suffer and are conscious (something you can't epistemologically demonstrate, by the way, only assert), but that it is perfectly morally acceptable to kill and consume vegetables because they don't suffer and are not conscious, yet have no possible means to prove such a homocentric, arrogant statement is to commit the exact same "moral crime" you are accusing meat-eaters of doing.

It is, IMO, repulsive. You, however, apparently have simply convinced yourself that plants just don't have consciousness and don't feel pain and are not self-aware. You have no evidence to support this childish assumption other than what Punkerslut tried to get away with, which is, "Come on! That's absurd! No one has been able to find the seat of plant-consciousness the way we pretend we have in ourselves and cows, so plants don't have them, period."

Argumentum absurdum is a fallacy, not a legitimate, valid argument, by the way, so stop it. To just childishly declare, "It's absurd to argue that plants are alive the way we are alive" is IDENTICAL to a pigassed, ignorant red neck saying, "It's absurd to argue that cows are alive the way we are alive."

Stop being hypocritical and pretending that you have some sort of moral superiority (and/or that you can read other people's minds) and then we can have discourse.

(edited for dyslexia - Koy)

[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi ]</p>

SallySmith

While I have been trying (rather unsuccessfully I might add) to think of sentences with vegetables in them I've also been emailing a scientist I know. (I thought I should go right to the source, since I certainly am no scientist.) Here is what he had to say:

"It's hard for me to answer because 'consciousness' is a rather poorly defined beastie. Given the appropriate definition of consciousness, it is a fact that plants aren't conscious. Given the sort of ill-defined, touchy feely one that most people have in mind, we can never be certain that plants aren't "conscious." For that matter, we can't prove that other people are conscious by this definition either. I will say, though, that the definition of consciousness used by scientists who study it is narrowly enough defined that you can say it is a fact that plants don't possess it. I doubt that this helps any, though, because it is far too easy to just equivocate the various definitions of consciousness to weasle your way out of any conclusions."

Koyaanisqatsi

Would you mind providing that definition?

Arguments from authority, likewise, serve little to no purpose here.

[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi ]</p>

SallySmith

I'm butting in to say two things.
1) In terms of projecting how we would feel in similar circumstances, I would like to say that animals in these circumstances (not the cow being killed quickly but the chickens in this example)exhibit neurotic behavior that indicates they are not in a healthy environment. So I don't think you have to project to determine that they are suffering.
2) As for the horrors of the wild, I might agree with you if our factory-farmed animals had proper living conditions and a quick death. This is oftentimes not the case, though. So I don't know that nature is more horrific than Gomer. Unless Gomer is an organic farmer who expertly wields that blunt force trauma gun.