Time To Speak Out
A few anthropologists stumbled across a tribe in the
Amazon where 90% of the people were taught from birth to get around by
crawling, even beyond the normal moving around on all fours experienced
by all small children.
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Roughly 10% of the population, however, moved beyond
the crawling stage and walked upright. Their fellow tribespeople often
asked them if they practiced bipedalism--rather than quadrupedalism--out
of some strange religious impulse, or because of some health fad. The bipedalists
responded that humans are DESIGNED to walk on 2 limbs, not 4.
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But some of the elders in the tribe pointed to holy
traditions which lent support to crawling--a divine dispensation as it
were--despite the fact that the earliest traditions held that the tribe's
first parents, indeed, walked around on two limbs. "The gods allow us to
move around on four limbs. After all, we are not perfect," protested the
high priests.
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The political leaders of the tribe also saw the recent
increase in bipedalism as a radical movement associated with diabolical
religions imported by strange tribes from faraway lands: a development
which might destabilize the ways of the tribe. The tribal witch doctor
was instructed to paint the increasingly popular bipedalist movement as
a fad which could have dire consequences on the morals of the young.
.
But the two-fers--as the bipedalists were called--pointed
out that they experienced less neck and back pain, along with a host of
other ills accepted by the tribe as a normal consequence of getting around
on all fours.
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And so on and so on when we substitute the arguments
for vegetarianism with the arguments for bipedalism.
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Moral of this story:
We are bipeds and vegetarians by design. If the majority
of people in some societies have acquired and retained unnatural habits
for whatever reasons, that does not diminish the fact that eating flesh
and crawling around on all fours is unnatural, if not perverse.
.
Eating meat (flesh, actually, as meat is the solid
food eaten by a species), therefore, should not necessarily be seen as
a thing of the past, but rather as something that people have done and
still do and are likely to continue doing despite the fact that we are
all designed--and therefore rooted historically--in vegetarianism. Vegetarianism
should not be seen as an option any more than crawling around should be
seen as an option.
.
There are no substitutes for the real thing. There
are only unnatural, unhealthy perversions of what was meant to be.
.
Maybe we shouldn't be so nice to the powers that hold
the sword over the "food" animals, the environment, human health, the economy,
social morality, etc. Eating flesh is perverse--not an option--PERIOD!
Why should we play chess with the masters? It's their board, their pieces,
and their rules.
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We can never win the game if we play it on their terms.
I say trash the board and call a spade a spade.
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MEAT IS MURDER! ABORTION IS MURDER! WAR IS MURDER!
ENVIRONMENTAL RAPE IS MURDER! POLITICAL, RELIGIOUS, AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
THAT SUPPORT ANY OR ALL OF THE ABOVE ARE MURDERERS!
Ted PanDeva Zagar
Disclaimer: The above is not necessarily the philosophy
of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, but the opinion
of Ted PanDeva Zagar from whom this was received through the Vegetarian
Resource Centre on their mailing list.
