Its murder.

[Monica]

My point was precisely that you cannot think like that. Just like you cannot drive up a 60 degrees slope. You end up in impossible situations. That's not catalyst it is reality.

Respectfully, Ali, think like what? In the way that you thought he was thinking? If so, then the person clearly IS thinking 'like that.' Which means, one CAN 'think like that.'

Thought come in myriad forms.

Eating a vegetable is semantically practically the same as choosing to kill another life out of necessity. So it seems that you are correct. You implied earlier however that eating vegetables was somehow objectively better than eating something else since vegetables and fruits were made to be eaten by us. No they're not, fruit maybe and even then not all of the fruit, but vegetables certainly not. they're organisms who fight to survive just like we do.

Looks like a good time to link to our sister thread:

Life on Planet Earth > In regards to eating meat

...which has some excellent discussion of these issues and overlaps this one.

Another arbitrary measurement of a creatures advancedness is the amount of genes it has in it's DNA...

Admittedly arbitrary? That is a human-based criteria.

According to humans' criteria for intelligence, much less sentience, plants aren't even on the map. And yet Ra tells us that some trees have attained sufficient sentience to become 3D entities.

There is a flower in Japan that's about 10 times more complex than we are. We suppose it does not think, it has no brain. But it is a highly advanced entity none the less.

Physically advanced does not necessarily indicate sentience.

If you wiped it out and started it from fresh assuming the same path could be walked again it would take more generations to evolve than we did.

Evolve in what way? Such a reference to evolution refers to only physical evolution. That flower might be more highly evolved than we are, physically, but is it sentient?

Why do we not pick height? Weight? Speed? Because we don't have those things, as monkeys we value social aptitude and intelligence.

Well, again respectfully, those are the arguments put forth by the scientific community, who do not recognize the spiritual component. They view us as just animals with certain specializations due to evolution, and one specialization is no different from any other. Sentience is not acknowledged nor is any spiritual component at all.

I object to the notion of seeing Gaia as some sort of anthromorphized ball of clay.

Are you saying you don't consider Gaia sentient? Or do you consider Gaia sentient but way beyond humans' notions of good/evil etc.?

Most of all creatures on earth die through violence or disaster. To claim that Gaia is innocent, knows nothing about that is in my opinion naive. It discredits the thousands of generations of indiginous people that this planet has known. And is right back in the christian/muslim/jewish mindset. Where God is great and all misery comes from the devil...

We know from Ra that the higher densities have a much better understanding of catalyst and don't view it with the same good/bad simplicity as the religions do.

I don't see Gaia as 'innocent' which implies naivete but do see Gaia as maternal and yet dispassionate at the same time. Gaia has graciously provided a schoolyard for juvenile delinquents to repeat 3rd grade, and at the risk of great peril to Gaia herself.

This choice must be an act of great love on Gaia's part.

The mechanisms of the classroom are subject to the aptitude of the students.

Can a creature not be great and terrible at the same time? We are moral, I can deal with that, but why must we impose morality on everything around us? What is the problem in that? It's a fact of life that if you want to walk into the wilderness and eat what Gaia feeds you, survive truly as one of her children. You'd better come prepared. Most of us would not last 2 weeks. Gaia is brutal, no amount of love and light is going to change what she is.

Gaia is also generous and lays out bounty on her table. We just have to understand her and how to partake of that bounty.

As I am learning about wild foraging, I am looking around at the city, and am amazed at how much bounty there is, right under people's noses, and they are throwing it all away. Wild weeds 20 times more nutritious than storebought vegetables, being killed with weedkillers...nutritious acorns being crushed by cars, raked up and thrown out in the trash, denying even the squirrels their food.

On what are we basing the assumption that she truly lovingly cares about us as individuals?

We have no way of knowing whether Gaia cares about each of us as an individual, but we do have enough data to conclude that she cares about the souls who need such a school, at this point in their development, for Gaia has endured much pain due to offering herself in service to us.