Pledge to Be Vegan for Lent! "As we do to the least, so we do to Him." Help make this world a kinder place for all God's creatures by pledging to be vegan for Lent. This time of year, many men and women of God will choose to abstain from various foods or practices in observance of Lent, and I am giving up animal products by going vegan. There's never been a better time to cut the meat and other animal-derived products out of your diet. With the huge selection of delicious vegan meats and alternatives to dairy foods and eggs that are available, it's never been easier to go vegan! To take action on this issue, click on the link below: https://secure.peta.org/site/Advocacy?s_oo=_l878arEcQk8B0DtcJJR5w..&id=2847 You have just taken the first step toward a healthier and more compassionate life. Being vegan has never been easier, and we're here to help! For delicious recipes and nutritional information, visit our "Vegetarian Starter Kit" online. A vegan diet is truly a lifesaver: Vegans and vegetarians are less likely to suffer from heart disease, obesity, and several types of cancer, according to the American Dietetic Association. Plus, vegan foods are delicious! The following are our "Top Five Tips for Making the Switch": 1. Make vegan versions of your favorite meals. "Veg up" your favorite recipes simply by replacing the meat with other foods. For example, replace the beef in burritos with beans, guacamole, and grilled veggies, or try vegan beef crumbles from Morningstar Farms or Boca. Make spaghetti with marinara sauce and add roasted vegetables as well as vegan meatballs or sausage (try Nate's brand or GimmeLean). 2. Explore delicious vegan recipes. You'll be amazed by the variety of tasty vegan options, from classic American dishes to Italian and Creole. People tell us all the time that being vegan exposed them to an array of flavors and foods they never knew existed. 3. Try tasty faux meats and dairy alternatives. Sample the ever-growing lineup of mock meats - including vegan burgers, hot dogs, turkey deli slices, riblets, and chicken patties - and the vast array of tasty alternatives to dairy products, like vegan cream cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. Some of the most popular brands include Boca, Gardenburger, Morningstar Farms, and Silk. 4. Sample microwaveable meals and convenience foods. Always on the run? Check out the variety of vegan microwavable meals in your local grocery store's freezer aisle, like Amy's Black Bean Enchilada With Spanish Rice, Fantastic Foods' Vegetarian 3-Bean Chili, and Yves' Thai Lemongrass Veggie Chick'n. There are many quick and easy vegan snacks, including basics like fresh fruit and PB&J and unique options like Tofurky Jerky and Silk Live! soy-yogurt smoothies. 5. Find vegan-friendly restaurants in your area. Whatever your budget and wherever you live, you can enjoygreat vegan meals. Many national chains, like Johnny Rockets, sell tasty veggie burgers and other animal-friendly options. Thank you again for taking the Pledge to Be Vegan for Lent, but there's no reason that your vegan diet has to last only 40 days. During and after the Lenten season, please visit VegCooking.com and GoVeg.com to find all the resources that you'll need to stick with your cruelty-free diet. Best of luck! Sincerely, Jenny Lou Browning Vegan Special Projects Coordinator

Pledge to Be Vegan for Lent! "As we do to the least, so we do to Him." Help make this world a kinder place for all God's creatures by pledging to be vegan for Lent.

 

 

This time of year, many men and women of God will choose to abstain from various foods or practices in observance of Lent, and I am giving up animal products by going vegan.

There's never been a better time to cut the meat and other animal-derived products out of your diet.

With the huge selection of delicious vegan meats and alternatives to dairy foods and eggs that are available, it's never been easier to go vegan!
To take action on this issue, click on the link below:
https://secure.peta.org/site/Advocacy?s_oo=_l878arEcQk8B0DtcJJR5w..&id=2847

You have just taken the first step toward a healthier and more compassionate life. Being vegan has never been easier, and we're here to help! For delicious recipes and nutritional information, visit our "Vegetarian Starter Kit" online.
A vegan diet is truly a lifesaver: Vegans and vegetarians are less likely to suffer from heart disease, obesity, and several types of cancer, according to the American Dietetic Association. Plus, vegan foods are delicious!
The following are our "Top Five Tips for Making the Switch":
1. Make vegan versions of your favorite meals. "Veg up" your favorite recipes simply by replacing the meat with other foods. For example, replace the beef in burritos with beans, guacamole, and grilled veggies, or try vegan beef crumbles from Morningstar Farms or Boca. Make spaghetti with marinara sauce and add roasted vegetables as well as vegan meatballs or sausage (try Nate's brand or GimmeLean).
2. Explore delicious vegan recipes.
You'll be amazed by the variety of tasty vegan options, from classic American dishes to Italian and Creole. People tell us all the time that being vegan exposed them to an array of flavors and foods they never knew existed.
3. Try tasty faux meats and dairy alternatives.
Sample the ever-growing lineup of mock meats - including vegan burgers, hot dogs, turkey deli slices, riblets, and chicken patties - and the vast array of tasty alternatives to dairy products, like vegan cream cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. Some of the most popular brands include Boca, Gardenburger, Morningstar Farms, and Silk.
4. Sample microwaveable meals and convenience foods.
Always on the run? Check out the variety of vegan microwavable meals in your local grocery store's freezer aisle, like Amy's Black Bean Enchilada With Spanish Rice, Fantastic Foods' Vegetarian 3-Bean Chili, and Yves' Thai Lemongrass Veggie Chick'n. There are many quick and easy vegan snacks, including basics like fresh fruit and PB&J and unique options like Tofurky Jerky and Silk Live! soy-yogurt smoothies.
5. Find vegan-friendly restaurants in your area.
Whatever your budget and wherever you live, you can enjoygreat vegan meals. Many national chains, like Johnny Rockets, sell tasty veggie burgers and other animal-friendly options.
Thank you again for taking the Pledge to Be Vegan for Lent, but there's no reason that your vegan diet has to last only 40 days. During and after the Lenten season, please visit VegCooking.com and GoVeg.com to find all the resources that you'll need to stick with your cruelty-free diet.
Best of luck!
Sincerely,
Jenny Lou Browning
Vegan Special Projects Coordinator

Personalism

I have long thought that personalism is an ideal conceptual or philosophical 'vehicle' for expressing per-personal (and thus pro-animal) sentiments conceptually, abstractly, philosophically.  The later Peter A. Bertocci, a well-known Personalist, taught at Boston University.  He is often cited in papers about complex moral matters, particularly about sex and love, but the moral status of the person in distributed moral obligations is a concern for principled persons of all kinds, including those of us with profound respect for personhood in every species.

Peter Anthony Bertocci

May 13, 1910-October 13, 1989

Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, where he taught for thirty-one years. B.A., Boston (1931); M.A., Harvard (1932); Ph.D., Boston (1935).  Dissertation: The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Thought (published in 1938 by Boston University Press; advisor: Frederick Robert Tennant - the process metaphysician).

Other books include 
The Human Venture in Sex, Love, and Marriage (1949); 
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1951);
Free Will, Responsibility, and Grace (1957); 
Religion as Creative Insecurity (1958);
Sex, Love, and the Person (1967); 
The Person God Is (1970); and 
The Goodness of God (1981)

On This Site:a

• The Person, Obligation, and Value [1959]
  
• Susan K. Langer’s Theory of Feeling and Mind[1970]
  

Materialism: Failing before Life’s Challenges

In 1951, Bertocci wrote:

“. . . no matter how narrow the gap between the chemical and the living becomes—and discoveries about the nature of viruses and colloids do indeed narrow that gap—we must remember that the gap is a qualitative and not a spatial one.  Suppose we consider the colloids the ‘missing link’ between living and dead matter.  This may impress our minds with the wondrous continuity of degree between one order of being and another.  But let us take a closer look.  Has the gap between life and matter really been crossed, let alone explained?  Even though a colloid may reproduce as living things do, it otherwise behaves like a chemical.  But a cell acts throughout like a living being and not like a chemical.  The fact still remains that when life appeared,life appeared. . . . This collocation of events, this close interrelation of living and nonliving beings, is an opaque fact unless we postulate a purpose which uses one order as an aid to the continuance of another.  Obviously this appeal to a broader purpose will not explain how the food enters the stomach becomes part of the living blood, bone, nerve, and brain.  Any biochemist can give us the sequence, but he is as silent before this fact of transmutation as we are.  However, we’re not trying to introduce a Purposer to describe what science has not so far described; here we seek to explain the harmony between two orders of being, the harmony between two differing and interacting qualities of existence.   We are seeking a view which, far from denying established scientific facts, will allow them to fit into a broader scheme which decreases the mystery.  What mystery?  The fact that living beings should appear and be so closely interconnected with nonliving beings—especially if all there was to begin with was the nonpurposeful, nonliving, nonthinking hustle and bustle of units of energy. . . .”

“. . . Our interest here is to emphasize the greater coherence which comes into our thinking if we consider the interrelation of the physical universe and life and the developing evolution of species as the handiwork of a creative Intelligence intent on producing a world rich in life, and, in the existence of man, rich in mind and value.  The evidence so far adduced enables us to envisage a Mind which is responsible not only for the ultimate physical preparations for life but for the first appearance of life in its many forms and for the additional mutations and variations discovered by our scientists.”

Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1951, pp. 333-34, 337 (italics in the original).

Fifty years later, the atheist Antony Flew wrote:

“[We may now know] how—by evolution through natural selection—one or more very primitive kinds of organism evolved into the enormous variety of species now known either still to exist or to have existed during some period in the past.  But that is a very different thing from knowing the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life or even of any life.  For, so far as I know, no one has as yet contrived to produce any plausible conjecture as to how even the most primitive kind of organism with a disposition to reproduce and thus to expose itself to natural selection might have evolved from a mixture of the many kinds of complex molecule which are now known to be required for that construction.  [My italics; Flew has been dealing with these issues for over fifty years.]

“Conway sees here a threefold challenge to the materialist, of which I consider two of the elements to be much more formidable than the third.  The first of these two is to produce a materialistic explanation for ‘the very first emergence of living matter from non-living matter. In being alive, living matter possesses ateleological organization that is wholly absent from everything that preceded it.’  The second challenge . . . is to produce an equally materialist explanation for the emergence, from the very earliest life-forms which were incapable of reproducing themselves, of life-forms which a capacity for reproducing them-selves.”

Review of David Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, Philosophy, January 2001, p. 161.

Posted October 13, 2007

"Immoral doctrines" or "Immoral Persons" vis à vis Speciesism

Some believers in human exceptionalism base the concept in the Abrahamic religions, such as the verse in Genesis 1:26 "Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” " Animal rights advocates argue that dominion refers to stewardship and does not denote any right to mistreat other animals, which is consistent with the Bible. Buddhism, despite its reputation for respect for animals, explicitly accords humans a higher status in the progression of reincarnation. Animals may be reincarnated as humans, but only humans can reach enlightenment. Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes that early hunter-gatherer societies such as the Innu and many animist religions lacked a concept of humanity and placed non-human animals and plants on an equal footing with humans.

Religious and anti-religious anti-speciesists may not be able to get along socially or politically because, as a practical matter, many people may be unable to accept the values that a specific religion promotes (e.g., Islamic attitudes towards women) and will therefore not join that religion. Advocating for religious reasons that animals be accorded social and political rights may seem to require a practical secular justification either because (a) rights can only be established legally by a broad social consensus and social pluralism presents many contrasting religious and nonreligious belief patterns, and (b) arguing from a conceptual foundation that is not broadly accepted may in practice disconfirm what intuitive agreement might already exist on behalf of the personhood and moral status of animals. They may also be unable to accept the fact that those who do not affirm the rights of animals will go to hell or be damned, especially if said nonbelieving specieists are close to the person.
More recently, charges of speciesism against religions, both East and West, have posed a curiously re-discovered intellectually challenge: does one reject speciesist religions or merely the speciesist interpretations by speciesist affiliates who do not fully comprehend the breadth and depth of religious teachings? In other words, are religious teachings that describe the moral fallibility of human life more true because speciesism, a newly-recognized sin, is evident even among religious affiliates?
 
http://maynardclark.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F1B64BFA99EC136!3682.entry

Hoffmanism

Hoffmanism is a philosophy propounded by Christian vegetarian minister, Rev. Frank L. Hoffman of Athens, New York.

The three points of Hoffmanism

Hoffmanism teaches 3 points:

1.     
1 - God loves all persons unconditionally.

2.      2 - We should realize this unconditional love and love every other person unconditionally.

3.      3 - All persons should be vegan (that is, to neither eat animal products, nor consume, wear, or endorse the production of anything that involves the suffering or involuntary use of another person, particularly nonhumans, who cannot voice their unwillingness to participate in uses that compromise their freedom and/or well-being).

The 4^th point of Hoffmanism seems to be, according to his followers’ interpretations, that it matters not whether we know anything, think anything, or do anything of significant personal or historical effort because God doesn’t really care what we do.

While this sounds at some points like hyper-Calvinism, Hoffman was ordained a Methodist minister, through reared Jewish.

Frank Hoffman’s Venues

After seminary, Frank Hoffman served without compensation in the Federal Church of Athens NY for about a decade.  Early in the 20th century, he started a web-site-based e-mail list called variously Veg-Christian or VC or VCList at http://www.All-Creaturers.org

Based upon his web traffic, one might be tempted to think that he boasts millions of followers (millions of unique site visitors, and the number of daily visitors seems to be increasing progressively.  With a US population of about 306 million, he could claim several percent of the entire US population with his minimalist ‘Christian vegetarian theology’.

Criticisms of Claims about Hoffmanism

(1) Critics of these presumptive claims of millions of Hoffmanites could easily point to the many pro-animal, animal rights, and vegan websites sub-hosted at www.All-Creatures.org.  However, Frank Hoffman himself does no claim any followers at all, no members, no explicit doctrine(s), and no behavioral requirements (including intellectual expectations).

(2) Other critics note that assumptions of ‘site visitors’ and occasional e-mail posters (that they’re on the right page (with the minimalist teachings) bears no resemblance to any kind of historical understanding called Christianity by any stable regularly-gathering faith community claiming to be Christian.  However, network associations with minimalist ‘consensus statements’ could, while not claiming to be ‘a church’ (as Hoffman at times claims – ‘an online church’, have some value.

(3) Further criticism is that some of Hoffman’s followers are merely emotionally needy vegetarians, but messages of love have long attracted folks with a particular spiritual need to be reassured that a culture of noninjury is socially, historically, and morally desirable.   Further, ad hominem criticisms do not address the legitimacy of a teaching.

What might emerge from Hoffman’s influence is very unclear.