Why I am not a vegan

[Monica]

No, you have no desire to understand my points,

You are wrong.

because you are still framing my thoughts with your own interpretations that have nothing to do with my actual thoughts.

Does anyone see the irony here?

You are crusading.

I am working to free the oppressed, to answer the call of those who are crying out for help. Were it not for activists, we'd still have legal human slavery here in the US.

I don't kill animals, so I cannot answer your question.

Anyone who eats meat is killing animals indirectly. Demand feeds industry.

The one time I saw a cop shoot a deer whom was injured on the road I burst in to tears and a rage at the injustice, so I can only imagine the difficulty I would have killing an animal myself.

So you pay someone to do it for you.

What is the significance on an energetic level? It is a transition. The karma must be dealt with by the killer, and the trauma must be dealt with by the entity whom was killed. Were I to kill the animal, thus it would be my responsibility to assume the karma for the killing. I would then have to find forgiveness within myself for myself and gratitude towards the animal.

In a court of law, the person who pays the assassin is just as guilty as the assassin.

The veggies you eat are also the body of a sentient being,

This has been addressed previously. Apparently you either missed the earlier posts or chose not to read them...?

so your whole approach through emotional aggrandizement in an attempt to dramatize the horrific nature of death and killing is little more than a projection of your own fears/discomforts.

Nope. Wrong again.

(Funny how you are doing the very thing you accused me of doing...do you not see that?)

If you had actually considered and looked at what I was trying to express, it is the effects of the killing on the planetary mind that I seek to alleviate through my methods. You only saw the eating, but that was not the core of my explanation nor is it the focus of the technique.

I read all of it and understood it. I think that would be wonderful, except for 1 tiny little detail: It seems incongruous to pay someone to kill animals for you so that you can 'enjoy the taste of meat' and then try to heal and transmute the animal's trauma.

There is a story of a monk whom is traveling on a ship. The monk hears that there is a man on board who intends to kill all the passengers and take over the ship and that he is indeed capable of doing this. The Buddhist monk is then faced with the challenge of what to do with the man as the man is a skilled warrior and so will likely not be easily captured or subdued, but the vows the monk have taken include no killing. The monk eventually decides that in order to save the lives of the rest of the passengers it is better to approach the man and in the resulting scuffle the monk ends up killing the man.

Filled with remorse when the ship finally docks the monk seeks out the Buddha to try and seek forgiveness. He finds the Buddha in his retreat and approaches and explains his immense guilt over having taken a life and his regret over it.

The Buddha looks at him and then tells him that what he did was entirely out of love, not only for the many passengers whom he saved but also for the man, whom he saved from incurring the karma of killing all of those people so even though he took the man's life, it was actually more beneficial for that man to start a new incarnation.

Thus, I don't think killing is always, ever an STS action. What if your family was being threatened by someone and it comes down to kill or be killed, would you defend your family? Would you kill the person who is threatening you even if that isn't what you want to do if it means saving the lives of other innocents?

I am making this point completely out of the context of animals and meat-eating, I am not talking about that kind of killing, I am just addressing your thought that killing is always rooted in STS intentions.

When I said killing was STS, I was referring to initiated violence, not a response to violence. In the context of this discussion specifically, I was referring to unnecessary killing.

In the Acceptance and Will thread, it was I who was arguing the very same point that you just made: that there are times when violence is acceptable, such as in the story of the monk, or in any situation of imminent threat. Direct self-defense is the stopping of a violent act, and is entirely different from initiating a violent act upon a victim. Even if the situation requires violence to stop the violence, the intent is still to protect the victim; therefore it's completely different from the aggressor whose intent is to dominate/control/violate/harm the victim.

The aforementioned thread explores this in great depth.

The killing of animals for meat is inherently STS because it's entirely UNnecessary. Being aware that meat is unnecessary, and still choosing to support the atrocities anyway by buying meat, is an STS act.

Oh, also, I would like to ask you Monica, what do you think of wild game hunting?

It is an obscenity. The hunter seeks a trophy, and brags about his 'sportsmanship' when in fact he used modern technology to defeat a beautiful creature. There is nothing sportsman about it. It is the same as any unnecessary taking of life, and worse, because it is consciously about the ego.

This is not to be confused with Native peoples who had to hunt to survive.

We don't.