"My God says that I'm allowed to eat animals."
Now, religion is an excuse that is commonly used to justify not going vegan.
But I think it's important to note straightaway at the beginning,
that no religious text says that we have to eat animals.
Which means that no religion says that it is a necessity for us to consume animal products.
And because it's still not a necessity, it means it still can't be justified.
Now the way that I see it, when these religious texts were written, it was an entirely different world.
We didn't have the abundance of foods that we have today,
which means that when Jesus was around or Mohammed was around,
it may well have been necessary for them to consume animal products.
But in today's society, in today's contemporary world, there is no necessity.
So it's irrelevant what happened in the time of Jesus and Mohammed to today.
Because the world has changed so much in that time.
Now, I truly believe that any compassionate and benevolent God
would rather that we didn't eat his animals, if we didn't have to.
After all, he designed them. He designed them to feel fear, to feel pain, and to suffer.
Why would any benevolent God therefore allow us -
or wish for us - to inflict pain, suffering and ultimately death onto an animal who wishes to avoid that.
Hell is a place of eternal suffering, pain, and fear.
If you look inside a slaughterhouse, you will see that they too are places of eternal pain, suffering, and fear.
And to the animals, we are the devils of this world.
We are the ones causing that pain, suffering, and fear upon them, but they've done nothing to deserve it.
They are taken to these literal hells for no necessary reason whatsoever.
And no God would look at the actions, look at the things that we do to animals,
and believe that they were acceptable.
Another big issue with the religion argument is that religion is a personal choice.
It's a belief. And when people use their beliefs to justify taking the life of an animal,
or inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering upon another living being,
that becomes incredibly disingenuous.
Now the thing is, if we morally justify taking the life of an animal
because of someone's subjective interpretation of the Bible, or a religious text, tells them that's acceptable,
then by that same logic it must also be morally justifiable to treat a woman or a gay person
as someone who should be oppressed.
Because people's subjective interpretations of religious texts allow them to come to that conclusion.
You see, if we morally justify one action, by pointing at the Bible or a religious text,
we therefore morally justify any subjective interpretation of those religious texts.
Now, let's look at this is on a larger scale: Raising and killing animals is destroying our planet.
In fact, animal agriculture is the number one cause of climate change.
It's causing huge amounts of rainforest destruction, of species extinction,
of oceanic dead zones, and almost every environmental calamity that we are currently facing
can be attributed somewhat to our consumption of animal products.
If a God had created this planet for us
to live on, to exist on, to spend our lives on, why on earth would he be happy,
that our consumption of animal products was destroying this planet he made for us?
He created this planet for us to survive and live on, and we are destroying it in front of his very eyes
just because we want to selfishly consume animal flesh and animal secretions.
No God would look at us with glee and with happiness.
He would look at us with disdain because of the arrogance of the way that we act,
and we pollute and we destroyed the world that He created for us
Think of it this way: If you created something for your friend,
let's say a table, and as soon as you gave it to them, they destroyed that table right in front of you.
How would you feel about that?
You'd be angry. You'd be upset. You'd be frustrated. Well, that's what's happening to God.
He created this planet for us. And right in front of him, we're destroying it.
We're destroying the creation he built for us.
What else could we possibly expect God to feel other than anger, frustration, and despair?
Because we're destroying the world that he created for us.
And we're destroying all the creations and all the animals, that he also created to exist with us, not for us.
We're also going against the actions of God by taking things that he didn't design for us.
Now, a cow's milk was designed for a baby calf.
God created cow's milk for a baby cow.
So when we impregnate cows and we take their babies away from them, just so we can take their milk,
We're going against God, because God never designed cow's milk for us to consume.
We've also selectively bred and genetically modified his creatures.
How offensive must that be to God, that we took the creatures that he created,
and we played God ourselves by changing them, by making them different,
by breeding them in a specific way to modify them,
so they can better suit our needs and better suit our selfish desires.
So even though there may be pastures in religious texts that say that we are allowed to eat animals if we have to,
there are also many pastures that imply that we're supposed to be vegan,
or we're not supposed to harm God's creatures.
So no, religion is not a valid excuse to not go vegan, because no compassionate,
benevolent God would look at the things that we're doing to his creations and think it was acceptable.
We don't have to eat animals to survive, and because we don't have to,
because it serves no necessity in our lifestyles,
no God would allow us to inflict such pain, such suffering, and such fear onto innocent creatures.