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Did I say that eating meat is a sin? If that's what you thought I said, then you're mistaken.

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quote: (barkid)
I just can't imagine that god would deny me philly cheese steak sandwiches and steak chalupas... Am I really living in Sin by eating animals?

Well, to give $ to an industry that treats animals in a way that God would never endorse (www.meetyourmeat.com www.factoryfarming.com) is at the very least, wrong. Whether it's a sin equal to say, stealing or adultery, I don't really know. You may have to decide that for yourself.

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Truly, if God had wanted to, He could have made the plants spring up more quickly

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Mark 7:15 (NASB)

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Thing is lab rats are lab rats , you set them free , they cant survive .

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this just reminds me using animals in circuses is totally unfair atleast lab testing is one thing but using animals for our entertainment and cramming them in really unkept houses is even worse...i think they should ban animals in the circus but that wud be an altogther different debate.....

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if you look at the context in which Gen. 9.3 was written, it was immediately after the great flood when there were no crops to eat

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Jesus did not sacrifice because He did not sin, not the other way around.

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Genesis 9:3

Romans 14, especially vv. 1-4

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But didn't God give humanity permission to use animals for food?

In Genesis we are told that, "God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall fall upon all wild animals on earth, on all birds of heaven, on everything that moves upon the ground and all fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Every creature that lives and moves shall be food for you; I give you them all, as once I gave you all green plants'" (Genesis 9:1-3; the last sentence alludes to Genesis 1:29, which we quoted above, and shows conclusively that this verse had, in fact, mandated a vegan diet).

The first question we have to ask about this passage is, is it credible that God really gave permission for humans to eat meat? Did the loving, compassionate God of Judaism and Christianity really endorse the idea that "the fear and dread of you shall fall upon" all nonhuman animals? Or is it more likely that this passage is the result of a misreading of God's will by men who were sincere but still human and subject to error, still susceptible, as are all of us, even the most pious, to be misled by our own appetites and the customs which surround and shape us? As we remarked earlier, not even the authors of the Bible were immune to their own human nature. This is a question that everyone must answer on the basis of his or her own conscience. For myself, I know that the God whom I find revealed in the Jewish and Christian scriptures would never grant those created in God's own image and given charge of the care of creation permission to fill sentient beings with "fear and dread" for the sake of our own pleasures and conveniences.

But suppose your answer to this question is different than mine? What if, after examining your conscience, you still believe that God did give us permission to eat meat? What then?

The first thing that strikes us about this passage is that it is not a commandment; it is not even a recommendation; it is no more than what we called it: permission. Eating animal products is not presented here as a religious requirement or virtuous act; it is simply -- for the first time since creation -- allowed. Many scholars, both Christian and Jewish, see in this permission a reluctant, even sorrowful, recognition by God that humanity was still too mired in ignorance and selfishness to live up to the ideal of the peaceable kingdom that had existed in Eden and is foretold to come again by the prophets. They would make a distinction between what God wants us to do and what, recognizing our unique blend of weakness and stubbornness, God has allowed us to do. In the words of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, "By definition, God is the Compassionate One . . . Only after the flood, when God saw that man's instinct was deeply imbedded with a desire to kill, did He allow man to spill the blood of an animal and eat its flesh . . . It's a concession, not the ideal." And shouldn't it be the goal of every Jew and every Christian to rise to the ideal rather than sink to the concession?
In case someone objects that God would not make concessions of this sort to humanity, the Bible cites other instances of God doing precisely that. After the Exodus, when the people of Israel wanted a king to rule over them in place of the judges who had led them until then, God tried to talk them out of it, but they persisted until finally God grudgingly relented (I Samuel 8:5-22). And in the New Testament, Jesus describes divorce as just such a divine concession to the hardness of the human heart (Mark 10:4-5).

According to this interpretation, God has given humanity a high road and a low road, and the freedom to choose. And so the issue becomes, Why -- even if it may be permitted -- would a Jew or Christian who is trying to reflect God's love and compassion in his daily life want to eat meat, eggs, or dairy? The raising and slaughter of animals for food and fabric causes intense physical pain, emotional distress, and premature death to nine billion animals every year in the United States alone. This entire system of torment and death exists solely for those who consume animal products. If it were not for them, no animals would be confined on factory farms and no animals would be slaughtered. The Judeo-Christian virtues are love and compassion, nurturing those in need, and relieving those in distress. Why would any conscientious Jew or Christian -- or anyone else for that matter -- want to be responsible for so much suffering and death?

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But Saint Paul said that Christian vegetarians are "weak" Christians.

In Romans 14:2, in the course of discussing Christians who are "weak in faith," Paul says, "One person eats everything, while another, being weak, eats only vegetables." This is a curious sentence. Why would Saint Paul say that eating only vegetables is a sign of weakness? Obviously his intended audience (the Christian community in the city of Rome) would know -- since he sees no need to explain himself -- but we are left in the dark. Fortunately, Paul gives us the key in I Corinthians 8, where he talks about eating meat that has been dedicated to idols, and says that this may be a "pitfall" for people whose consciences are "weak." He means that if someone believes that by eating the meat he is worshiping the Greco-Roman god to whom it has been dedicated, then that person has committed the sin of idolatry. However, people whose faith in God is "strong" enough that they are absolutely certain that the pagan gods do not exist are not guilty of idolatry because you cannot worship something that you know is fictitious.

In AD 51, the Roman Emperor Claudius issued an edict banning Jews from the city of Rome. Jews continued to live in Rome, but they had much the same status as undocumented aliens in the United States. They had to stay "underground" and avoid coming to the attention of the authorities. In Rome, as in most cities in the Roman Empire, the production and sale of meat was a monopoly of various pagan temples. The only available meat that had not been dedicated to idols would be from kosher butcher shops. But being in the city illegally, Jews could not operate butcher shops in Rome for fear of coming to the attention of the authorities. (The pagan butchers would be only too happy to turn them in.) Therefore, Roman Christians who could not eat the meat without believing that they were worshiping the deity to whom it had been dedicated "ate only vegetables" to avoid the sin of idolatry. In short, Paul was not talking about what we today would call "ethical vegetarianism," but a situation peculiar to his time and place.

OK, but Paul still believed that eating meat was acceptable for a Christian.

Yes, he did. Paul was born in Tarsus, a Greek city on the southern coast of modern Turkey. Although a pious and practicing Jew (he once referred to himself as "a Pharisee of the Pharisees"), he was as much at home with Greek culture as Jewish and sprinkled his letters with Greek proverbs and quotations from Greek writers. One of the attitudes that Paul absorbed from his Greek education was Aristotle's notion of a hierarchy of beings, ranked according to intelligence, in which the lower exist to serve the higher and humans have no moral responsibilities to animals. In I Corinthians 9:9, Paul quotes the verse from Deuteronomy which we discussed above, "Do not muzzle an ox while he treads out grain." "Does God care about oxen?" Paul asks. "Or does he speak entirely on our behalf. It was certainly written on our behalf." He then goes on to interpret this commandment as an allegory meaning that preachers may be paid for their services.33 But as we have seen, according to the Bible, God does care about oxen, and about all of the beings whom God created. Paul has abandoned the traditional Biblical view of animals to advocate the perspective of Greek philosophy. This is why he finds no ethical objection to eating meat.

Among the other attitudes that Paul absorbed from the culture around him are that women should serve men and never speak in church (Ephesians 5:22-24, I Corinthians 14:34-35), slaves should always obey their owners (Titus 2:9 and the entire epistle to Philemon), and the notion that all governments exist by the will of God, and that to oppose any government, however cruel and tyrannical, is to oppose God (Romans 13:1-4). Fortunately, Christians today are nearly unanimous in rejecting these claims as guides to conduct in today's world. It is time for us to recognize that Paul's claims about animals are part of the same cultural fabric and to reject them in the same fashion. They cannot be reconciled with the most fundamental of all Biblical principles: loving God (and therefore loving God's creation) and loving your neighbor as yourself.

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(Matt 9:13). In other words, those who practiced animal sacrifice were committing a sin for which they needed to repent, and part of Jesus' mission was to put a stop to sacrifices. Reinforcing this, in Matthew 12:7, Jesus says, "But if you had understood what this meant, 'I will have mercy, and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless." Had the people listened to the prophet Hosea, they would not have condemned guiltless animals to be slaughtered. Mercy, according to Jesus, does not permit the sacrificial killing of animals.

There is a famous event in the career of Jesus commonly known as the "cleansing of the Temple." It is recorded in all four gospels, but John gives the most extensive description: "In the Temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of ropes, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, 'Get all this stuff out of here! Stop making my father's house a marketplace!'" (John 2:14-16).

The money-changers were there because only Jewish coins could be used in paying for animal sacrifices, and Greek and Roman money, as well as Jewish, was in circulation in Israel. The animals were there to be sold to worshipers for use as sacrifices. Given Jesus' opposition to animal sacrifice, it seems likely that this incident was an attack on that cruel practice. If so, the cleansing of the Temple is history's first recorded civil disobedience on behalf of animals and Jesus was the first animal liberator.

It is often claimed that Jesus must have eaten lamb at the Last Supper because Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe the Last Supper as a seder and lamb is traditionally the seder's main course. But nowhere in the New Testament is it stated, or even implied, that lamb was served at the Last Supper. In fact, the gospel accounts strongly suggest that the main course of the meal was bread. The gospels portray Jesus as regularly provoking the displeasure of the religious authorities in Jerusalem by refusing to follow traditional practices. So there is no reason to assume that he would eat lamb at the seder just because that was the traditional practice. If Jesus condemned animal sacrifice as sinful, it stands to reason that he would not sacrifice a lamb for the Passover seder.

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I've been a vegetarian for 6 years, but chicken is getting really tempting.....lol.

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Oh, and what about organic meat? Is there a huge difference between organic meat and non organic meat? Just wondering....I don't know if this has been brought up before.

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It's nice to hear that you're making an effort to change what and how you eat, but unfortunately, the USDA's organic seal on meat does not guarentee that the animal was treated humanely. It only guarentees that the animal was not given hormones or drugs or excess antibiotics or etc. (by the way, genetic engineering has yet to be implemented into animal agriculture due to its cost and its immaturity as a science. The only way most animals farmed for consumption are genetically manipulated is by selectively breeding them for a specific food purpose [like how McDonalds helped to develop a breed of chicken with excess breast meat])
Unless you went to the exact farm where the meat you eat comes from, there's no way to tell whether their treatment before their eventual slaughter (and by the way, animals raised under organic condictions still go to the same slaughterhouses conventionally raised animals go to) was cruel or not.

Click here for more information on this: Free Range Eggs and Meat: Conning Consumers?

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actually I will qoute the bible at the veggies God gave man dominion over beasts and even Jesus ate lamb and other meets so did the twelve apostles in fact because the last supper was a celebration of passover the main course at the last supper was lamb

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Doesn't the Bible say that God gave humanity "dominion" over nonhuman animals?

Yes, it does (Genesis 1:28 and Psalms 8:5-8). But this does not mean that God gave us license to kill and exploit animals for our own purposes. The Hebrew verb, like the English phrase "have dominion" which is often used as the translation, simply means "have authority." Governments have dominion over their citizens and parents have dominion over their children. But we expect government officials to use their authority for the benefit of the people, and we expect parents to use theirs for the welfare of their children. There is no reason why humanity's dominion over nonhuman animals should be judged by any other standard.

This same Hebrew verb is also used to describe the role of shepherds in caring for their flocks.15 Jesus' use of the image of "the good shepherd" (John 10:11, 14) tells us clearly that he believed God intended dominion to be exercised for the well being of the animals rather than for our own gratification. In the same spirit, the Talmud teaches that "dominion" means "guardianship" or "stewardship," referring only to the use of animals for labor, and carries with it an obligation of kindness, compassion, and generosity.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church published by Pope John Paul II recognizes that dominion is not license when it says, "Use of the mineral, vegetable, and animal resources of the universe cannot be divorced from respect for moral imperatives. Man's dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute..." (2115).

In any event, the grant of dominion in Genesis 1:28 cannot by any stretch be used to justify meat eating because beginning in the next verse, as part of the same instruction, we read, "God also said, 'I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth, and every tree bearing fruit that yields seed: they shall be your food'" (Genesis 1:29). In other words, according to the Bible, at the time of giving humanity dominion over the animals, God also instructed us to maintain not just a vegetarian, but a vegan diet.

In the final analysis, dominion equates to power. To say that our dominion over animals gives us the right to inflict suffering and death upon them for our own appetites and pleasures is to say that might makes right, which is a principle that neither Judaism nor Christianity has ever endorsed. From a Biblical perspective, it was God who invested animals as well as humans with the ability to suffer and with the love of life. Surely a just and merciful God, such as is described in the Bible, would want those entrusted with dominion to use their power to reduce rather than increase the suffering of all those whom God had created.

Perhaps at the beginning of a new millennium we should think of dominion as a delegated responsibility, a grant of trust from the creator to humanity to care for the whole of creation, including each individual endowed with the ability to suffer.

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But didn't Jesus offer sacrifices at the Temple and eat lamb at the Last Supper?

It is never suggested in the New Testament that he did either.

The gospels report numerous occasions on which Jesus went to the Temple to teach, but never mention him going to the Temple to offer a sacrifice. In fact, Matthew reports twice that Jesus flatly condemned animal sacrifice by quoting with approval Hosea 6:6, "But go and learn what this means," Jesus said, "'I will have mercy and not sacrifice'; for I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matt 9:13). In other words, those who practiced animal sacrifice were committing a sin for which they needed to repent, and part of Jesus' mission was to put a stop to sacrifices. Reinforcing this, in Matthew 12:7, Jesus says, "But if you had understood what this meant, 'I will have mercy, and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless." Had the people listened to the prophet Hosea, they would not have condemned guiltless animals to be slaughtered. Mercy, according to Jesus, does not permit the sacrificial killing of animals.

There is a famous event in the career of Jesus commonly known as the "cleansing of the Temple." It is recorded in all four gospels, but John gives the most extensive description: "In the Temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of ropes, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, 'Get all this stuff out of here! Stop making my father's house a marketplace!'" (John 2:14-16).

The money-changers were there because only Jewish coins could be used in paying for animal sacrifices, and Greek and Roman money, as well as Jewish, was in circulation in Israel. The animals were there to be sold to worshipers for use as sacrifices. Given Jesus' opposition to animal sacrifice, it seems likely that this incident was an attack on that cruel practice. If so, the cleansing of the Temple is history's first recorded civil disobedience on behalf of animals and Jesus was the first animal liberator.

It is often claimed that Jesus must have eaten lamb at the Last Supper because Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe the Last Supper as a seder and lamb is traditionally the seder's main course. But nowhere in the New Testament is it stated, or even implied, that lamb was served at the Last Supper. In fact, the gospel accounts strongly suggest that the main course of the meal was bread. The gospels portray Jesus as regularly provoking the displeasure of the religious authorities in Jerusalem by refusing to follow traditional practices. So there is no reason to assume that he would eat lamb at the seder just because that was the traditional practice. If Jesus condemned animal sacrifice as sinful, it stands to reason that he would not sacrifice a lamb for the Passover seder.

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Actually, we get our meat (and our veggies) from a farm-share program. We've been to that farm, so we know that the animals (and veggies) there are treated humanely.

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It's nice to hear that you're making an effort to change what and how you eat, but unfortunately, the USDA's organic seal on meat does not guarentee that the animal was treated humanely.