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Vegetarianism
From ISKCON youth foundation
Submitted by Krpa Moya Gouranga Das.
Hare Krishna!
Looking at the world's history we find that many great scholars, philosophers, scientists, artists, poets, writers and religious leaders of the world were purely vegetarian. The vegetarian diet enlightened their minds and blessed them with noble qualities of
tolerance, compassion, love and non-violence.
"Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act that is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel." -Leo Tolstoy
"As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love." -Pythagoras
"Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind." -Albert Einstein
Despite impressive progress in science and technology, the world is faced with a crisis of unremitting violence in the shape of wars, terrorism, murder, vandalism, child abuse, and abortion. More than 140 wars have been fought since the United Nations was formed in 1945, and in America alone 20,000 are murdered each year. With social and political solutions conspicuously failing, perhaps it's time to analyze the problem from a different perspective: the law of karma. The callous and brutal slaughter of countless helpless animals must be considered as a powerful causative factor in this wave of violence that can't be checked.
Meat-eating played a role in many of the wars during the age of European colonial expansion. The spice trade with India and other countries of the East was an object of great contention. Europeans subsisted on a diet of meat preserved with salt. In order to
disguise and vary the monotonous and unpleasant taste of their food, they eagerly purchased vast quantities of spices. So huge were the fortunes to be made in the spice trade that governments and merchants did not hesitate to use arms to secure sources. The understanding that meat-eating leads to war has influenced many of today's most thoughtful people to become vegetarians, as it had influenced great thinkers in the past.
In this age of Kali the propensity for mercy is almost nil. Consequently there is always fighting of wars between men and nations. Men do not understand that because they unrestrictedly kill so many animals, they must also be slaughtered like animals in big wars (karma). This is very much evident in the Western countries. In the West slaughterhouses are maintained without restriction, and therefore every fifth or tenth year there is a big war in which countless people are slaughtered even more cruelly than animals. Sometimes during war, soldiers keep their enemies in concentration camps and kill them in very cruel ways. These are reactions brought about by unrestricted animal-killing in the slaughterhouses and by hunters in the forest.
His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada introduced vegetarianism in the Western world on a very large scale in the '60s and '70s, influencing the lives of millions towards purity and compassion. He gives a further explanation why it is sinful to kill animals. "All living entities have to fulfill a certain duration for being encaged in a particular type of material body. They have to finish the duration allotted in a particular body before being promoted or evolved to another body. Killing an animal or any other living being simply places an impediment in the way of his completing his term of imprisonment in a certain body. One should therefore not kill bodies for one's sense gratification, for this will implicate one in sinful activity."
(Extract from Food for Peace by Ramboru Dasi)
Hare Krishna!
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A poem by George Bernard Shaw
We are living graves of murdered beasts
Slaughtered to satisfy our appetites.
We never pause to wonder at our feasts,
If animals like men could possibly have rights.
We pray on Sunday that we may have light,
To guide our footsteps on the paths we tread.
We are sick of war, we do not want to fight,
And we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
Like Carrion Crows we live and feed on meat,
Regardless of the suffering and pain
We cause by doing so, in this we treat,
Defenceless animals for sport or gain -
How can we hope in this world to attain
The peace we say we are so anxious for,
We pray for it o'er hetacomba of slain,
To God while outraging the moral law,
Thus cruelty begets the offspring --- WAR !
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