By “devout Catholic” I assume she believed in Catholic doctrine, and I assume Catholic doctrine says that if you’re not Catholic you are going to hell.
If the above are true, then, basically, your mom believed your dad was going to hell. If one believes in that doctrine, I guess they can hand-wave it away and not think about it, but the fact is that under that doctrine your loved one is going to hell. People can and do get along in situations like these (like your parents obviously did), but, if I think many people would find it a bit weird to love, make love to and grow old with someone they believe is going to hell. I also think many people would find it a bit weird to love, make love to and grow old with someone who believes they are going to hell. YMMV
[If I’m misrepresenting Catholic doctrine about people of other faiths going to hell, let me know]
I understand this. There are people who do it for health reasons, there are people who are doing it for environmental reasons, there are people who do it for ethical reasons that are not directly related to “Don’t cause suffering to sentient beings”, and there are people who do it for ethical reasons directly related to “Don’t cause suffering to sentient beings.”
It is those latter ones I am referring to. Sorry if my statements are a bit ambiguous about that, but it’s hard to state that in every sentence. I did explain though in a couple of posts which vegetarians I am referring to.
I have never attempted to make douchey meat eaters more sympathetic. As I have stated repeatedly, meat eaters who attack vegetarians about their food choices are assholes.
Nevertheless, you don’t have to be narcissistic and insecure to assume someone thinks badly of you even if they say nothing (BTW, this is a general statement, and not necessarily restricted to meat eaters and vegetarians)
My mother apparently thought she could find a little wiggle room in there.
Now, how the hell would you know which kind of vegetarian I was if I didn’t say anything to you except “I’m a vegetarian”? This is why I said that you were making assumptions… because you were, in order for your scenario to work, wherein a person might feel justified being directly or implicitly accused by someone else’s ethics. First, you have to know what those ethics are, unless you are just knee-jerking (plenty of that going on here).
Yes, you do, because if the person has said nothing, you have no idea what their reasons are. You are assuming the worst and making it personal without any evidence.
Not that my opinion matters, but speaking as someone who currently has a still steaming pile of chicken bones in a bowl beside his monitor, anyone who is arguing that **Diogenes **wasn’t a condescending asshole, or that vegetarians are more haughty than omnivores (either here or in the wider world, but especially the former) on the whole is either incredibly stupid, completely oblivious, or just outright disingenuous.
Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, except under special circumstances. So basically, you have to be within the church, via baptism, to be saved. For someone who willfully and openly rejects Jesus (like my father), there would be no salvation. However, like I said, my mother was a bit more of a pluralist than all that. Thus proving my point, that you shouldn’t feel some direct or implicit accusation or judgment from someone without knowing what they really think or feel, unless you’re looking to be offended.
Hmmm, now I was never taught that Hell was for non-Catholics, so much. Just that Catholicism was the best, most assured way to be saved. But only God knew, so it wasn’t up to humans to judge.
This has settled down into a fairly civil debate about vegetarianism and paternalism. Someone suggested that I move it to Great Debates. I’m going to give it a shot. If the GD moderators want to send it back to the Pit, that’s fine.
Way back on the second page, before this turned into a combination of brawl and half-assed debate on ethics, Washoe cited The China Study, which is probably the biggest single piece of “scientific” evidence for vegetarianism. The problem is that it’s not a very good source.
Anthropological research indicates that a hunter-gatherer diet, which is the way humans ate until very recently in our development, was high in animal protein whenever possible. They also ate a large amount and variety of plant foods, but animal foods were a mainstay of the diet. It is well established that hunter-gatherers do not exhibit most of the diseases that concern modern societies. They didn’t even get cavities most of the time.
We’re omnivores. We may be able to adapt to a largely vegetarian diet, but it’s not what we’re “meant” to eat. In addition, a vegan diet is close to impossible to maintain without access to a large variety of foods that are not indigenous to any one part of the world, which means they need to be shipped, and in many cases these food products have to be processed to make them edible. Without the modern industrial food complex, you couldn’t be a vegan. There’s irony for you. There is, to date, very little evidence that modern vegetarian diets do actually have any health benefits over a balanced omnivore diet which includes an appropriate amount of plant foods.
Since there’s no conclusive objective evidence for vegetarianism, it’s basically a personal choice. FWIW, I don’t even think about vegetarianism unless I get lectured about it (which has happened more than once), have to host someone who doesn’t eat meat, or see claims for the superiority of a vegetarian diet when it’s not actually true. You can eat what you want as long as it doesn’t have much of an impact on my life. I’m not about to lecture anyone about what they eat if they extend me the same courtesy.
I never said I felt oppressed by anyone, but, just so you know, observant Jews do not believe that Jewish law applies to gentiles. It’s not unethical for gentiles not to keep kosher because God does not have the same covenant with them. So your analogy is crap.
If you’re Jewish then why don’t you know that the Jewish covenant only applies to Jews?
Keeping kosher is not an ethical issue, it’s a religious one. You shouldn’t pop off at the mouth when you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
If you think I’m trolling, report me (I’m not, for the record). I don’t feel insecure about anyone else’s opinion. It’s you guys that are getting bent about mine. I used to be a vegatrian. I didn’t like it and ultimately decided it was unnatural, pretentious and futile. Sorry if that bothers you so much.
Not in my experience. I’ve never been lectured by an omnivore, not even when I was a vegetarian. I’ve been lectured endlessly by vegetarians.
I think that looking to Mercola and the Weston Price folks for a review of the China Study is in many ways like asking the Institute for Creation Science to review a historical geology textbook. Seriously, I think the best metric we have for evaluating works like The China Study or Weston Price’s book (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, right?) is to look at peer review.
A new study showed a link between vegetarian diets and reduced risk of cancer. I was also reading about a study of vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists that showed a significantly longer life span.
You’ve obviously got a bone to pick with these people. At this point meating them half way won’t work, so here it is in a nutshell: you might want to try some of these:
dig up some dirt and blackmail ‘em
Sneak up behind them and carrote them with some fiber
Have Herb and Arty choke them
Plant a small tactical ‘cuke under their car
Hack you way into their forum and pepper them with abuse
Hit them in the head with a bean ball
Pea in their bowl of granola
sow seeds of dissent by planting rumors
Just some food for thought, hay?
They think it’s kind of quirky, but not much quirkier than the other strange things we do in our daily lives. They get far more freaked out about us drinking cold water (that could give you malaria!)
They’ve met people with dietary restrictions before (religious or otherwise) and in Cameroon, at least, are generally pretty accepting of peoples’ individuality. And believe it or not, there are African vegetarians. They have the same thought processes as us, after all, and now and then someone decides that meat squicks them out or they don’t like to see animals suffer or whatever.
Anyway, it rarely comes up since the food is largely meatless. On an average day in North Cameroon you might expect to get a piece of meat the size of a couple of dice. Nobody notices or cares if you eat around it.
We vegetarians are used to hearing questions and debates and stupid questions (not all the questions are stupid but enough are) from non-vegetarians on a constant basis. Maybe they just feel like having a place where it’s not like that.
If you want to debate, he’s a nutty idea: go to a debate board.
Few people outside of concentration camps are starving in the literal sense of the word. Next to nobody dies from pure physical lack of food. But both acute and chronic malnutrition, like 20-34% of Cameroonians suffer from, makes you highly susceptible to the infectious diseases that cause so many deaths in hungry parts of the world. The problem is not that there is not enough food- you can get enough sorghum or taro to survive. It’s that eating only starches kills you slowly and terribly. It is particularly difficult for children and pregnant women, because traditionally the most nutritious food goes to working men.
I’m not going to debate how starving my friends were. But I lived in a poor neighborhood in a poor area of a poor country. They call the period just before harvest “the hungry time” and that’s when the old people and babies would start dying.
And even when I’d sit at the funerals eating millet and baobab leaves, nobody even thought to judge me as I’d pick around the tiny dried fish and bits of fat and bone.
I don’t know about other people, but what I find annoying is unnecessary insults. To me, they cheapen the effects of the real ones. Like, if you ever get really mad at me call me something mean, it won’t mean a thing to me, since I know you do it to everyone.
Also, I at first thought Diogenes might have been misinterpreted, but his responses proved me wrong. Had he immediately said that he was misinterpreted, I might have believe him. Heck, had he apologized at all I would be happy. But he’s Diogenes: he has an opinion on everything, and everyone who disagrees with him is wrong.
Heck, it makes sense why he finds most vegetarians insulting if he thinks they think the way he does. I don’t think he gets that he is a rarity.
We’re not “meant” to do anything. That smacks of biological determinism, and I’m not buying it. Whatever we find a way to do, we’re meant to do. If my health is good, my doctor has no complaints about it, and I feel good, then it’s safe to say I’m doing what I’m meant to do. That’s the great thing about having a brain capable of reasoning-- we can find ways to do things that accommodate our wishes, instead of submitting to what is “natural.” I’m sure you do a thousand things a day that you’re not “meant” to do, but you do them because you can, and you like to, and your brain and our society enable you to do them.
Yet here you are, telling us what we’re “meant” to do…
Diogenes seems very much like my mom; both of them see the world in black and white. It is either this way OR this way. It is either completely right OR completely wrong. Shades of grey really don’t enter the picture at all and it’s hard for them to understand that others see shades of grey; or if they do understand that, they think that view is wrong*.
I’ll never forget the fight I had with my mom when I was about 22 and she said that my problem is that I see everything in shades of grey, but the reality is that the world is black and white and when I grow older, I’ll see that.
This is exactly what I was taught in Sunday School as well. I don’t think Catholics have been taught “all other religions are damned, there’s no hope for them” in a long time.
