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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (106445)	6/24/2005 2:34:57 AM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

You seem to be off on some rant that started because you misinterpreted what I was saying. I didn't say anything judgmental about capitalism at all. I was just giving a brief history of vegetarianism, and historically it is true that artists and spiritual people tended to be vegetarian. Nor did I say capitalists couldn't be vegetarian! Modern vegetarians tend to be well educated and affluent, and certainly most of those people would be capitalists. History of Vegetarianism At various times throughout the history of humankind, people have registered their opposition to the cruel way in which animals are oppressed, and many have turned to a vegetarian way of life. For both ethical and economic reasons, countless millions of people throughout the world live on a vegetarian diet. A number of religions and beliefs have lent support to vegetarianism. Brahminism, Buddhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism all advocated an abstention from flesh foods. More recently, the Seventh Day Adventists and The Order of the Cross have advocated a vegetarian diet and many Hindus and some Roman Catholic groups adhere to a vegetarian diet. Early ideas Some early writers express their opposition to meat eating in no uncertain terms. Plutarch stated: "I am astonished to think what appetite first induced man to taste of a dead carcass or what motive could suggest the notion of nourishing himself with the flesh of animals which he saw, just before, bleating, bellowing, walking, and looking about them." Ovid, in the fifteenth book of his "Metamorphoses", puts into the mouth of Medea a forcible disquisition upon the Golden Age: "Blest is the produce of the trees and in the herbs which the earth brings forth, and the human mouth was not polluted with blood." Seneca, the greatest of the Stoics wrote: "To abstain from the flesh of animals is to foster and to encourage innocence." In a later statement he claimed: "I resolved to abstain from flesh meat, and at the end of a year the habit of abstinence was not only easy but delightful." Pythagoras enjoined the abstention from the flesh of animals and his followers formed a vegetarian community. Other famous early vegetarians were Diogenes, Plato, Plotinus and Socrates. Vegetarianism was not uncommon among early Christians, and some monastic orders follow a vegetarian diet to this day. Famous writers such as Voltaire, Paley, Pope, Shelley, Bentham and Lamartine urged the desirability of a humane diet. Alexander Pope expressed the opinion that: "Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood and abounding with the cries of expiring victims or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there." Sir Richard Phillips, who died in 1842 and was High Sheriff of the county of Middlesex, was an ardent vegetarian from the age of twelve when he visited a slaughterhouse. The philanthropist and prison reformer, John Howard, was a practising vegetarian whose influence and concern affected many aspects of life in his own time and since. He claimed that his diet gave him immunity against "gaol fever" which was prevalent in the many filthy prisons he visited. vegsoc.org