Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
If we do accept the action as permissible even if you can’t explain how it’s justified, then we could use that same rationale to accept any other forms of unreasoned discrimination. “This race is different from this one, and I can’t tell you why it’s okay to kill one race for profit/pleasure and not the other, but it is”. If opposing that kind of argument or action is a fallacy, so be it. That would mean opposing/rejecting any kind of discriminatory actions in this manner was somehow fallacious (and the discrimination itself somehow wasn’t fallacious). But that isn’t the case.
treating people like animals is exactly why the Holocaust was wrong.
get help
No, the reason why the Holocaust was wrong was because it treated individuals (sentient beings) like they didn’t matter, discriminated them based on arbitary traits/criteria, segregated, imprisoned, oppressed, enslaved, tortured and systematically exterminated them, and attempted to erase their very existence, culture and identity. The reason why the Holocaust was wrong is obviously not “because humans are superior to other animals and the humans were treated the way other animals should be”. That’s an incredibly speciesist and unfortunate reading of the tragedy which doesn’t learn any lessons from it.
The reason why treating humans the way that non-human animals were being and have historically been and still are treated by humans, was and is wrong, is simply because the way that non-human animals have been treated by humans is wrong and is clearly bad and cruel and harmful and inconsiderate toward them. If those oppressed and victimized humans were treated the way that non-human animals are, then you’ve just admitted that non-human animals are typically oppressed and victimized in the same way as those humans. It’s just that it’s such a culturally ingrained, accepted, traditional, long-running and perpetual practice that most humans are removed from the process of and disconnected from and/or sesensitized to the violence and cruelty it involves, that we tend to accept the way non-human animals are treated by humans as an inherent nature of their existence, rather than a choice we are making to inflict on them every day that we could change if we wanted to, and right the relationship between humans and other animals into one of respect and coexistence rather than one-sided domination and exploitation.
And it really should be stressed that Hitler did base the treatment of humans on how non-human animals were already being treated in the assembly line slaughterhouses in the United States - it’s very well documented if you research about it. And tons of Holocaust survivors - many of whom are now vegan or vegetarian - have spoken about the connection between the events and how eerily similar they are. The Nazis even used the same infrastructure that was being used to kill non-human animals at the time. They used cattle cars to transport them, the concentration camps were eerily similar to CAFOs, and he used gas chambers to kill them. Yes, they used Zyklon B instead of CO2 for the gas chambers, while the majority of farmed pigs are killed with CO2 (though sometimes the Nazis did use CO2 as well), but CO2 gassing by all accounts causes even more extreme and prolonged suffering than Zyklon B. So if we did the same actions that we enact on a mass scale to non-human animals today but to humans instead, it would instantly be considered as bad as many historical tragedies.
When we have a group of beings treated as badly by humans as non-human animals are, it’s always going to inevitably be used as inspiration, training and condition for treating humans badly too.
Saying “get help” over and over is an ad hominem attack and an attempt to gaslight me by strawmanning and denying and opposing everything I say, even when it’s factually proven. (Though this is also partly a moral view, in this case).
this is not something I said, or anyone else in this thread, but you put it in quotes.
please stop lying