Furthermore....

People become vegetarians and vegans because they feel bad for the animals. "These animals have hearts and brains and they have feelings too." Sure they may have feelings but guess what. Most animals eat other animals

Yeah...you dont see wolves running around saying "I'm gonna become a vegetarian and not eat this rabbit because it has feelings too"

Obviously these animals dont feel bad about eating meat, so why should we?

Question

People are so concerned with eating meat because the animals were once alive....but weren't the plants that people eat once alive too?

Natural and Unnatural

The article we had to read about the words 'natural' and 'unnatural' talks about whether things that are marked as 'natural' are actually better for you than the things which arent marked as natural.

An example I thought of to exhibit this is grape juice. You see the commercials for Welsch's grape juice all the time and they always have a young child telling you that Welsch's is "all-natural". In this case. "all-natural" means that Welsch's doesnt add tons of sugar to their juice, their product is actually made from grapes. So that leads me to believe that some things that are marked as natural really are better for you.

When it comes to the question of whether or not it is natural to wear clothes, the article was right to say yes and no. It isnt natural in the sense that all of us are born naked, and that clothing is something that we add to ourselves every day. Wearing clothes is natural in the sense that all of us do it and that it is illegal to go out not wearing clothes. Dressing ourselves is natural to our society because we all grew up doing that. But it probably wasnt natural to the first society of people who populated the planet

I was thinking about the Paul McCartney quote that Katie brought up about how if slaughterhouses had glass walls that more people would choose not to eat meat. And that makes me wonder if the people that work inside these places have been affected by what they see. Because this is something that they have to see everyday for hours at a time. We've all seen movies about animals being slaughtered and that does change some peoples views but not many. I think seeing it in real life would convert many more people to vegetarianism, myself included.

I have included some pictures I found about what goes on inside the slaughterhouses...I'm warning you that they are very graphic so dont look at them if you cant handle stuff like that.
http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/images/ChickensShackledlg.jpg

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/56288814.jpg%3Fv%3D1%26c%3DViewImages%26k%3D2%26d%3D17A4AD9FDB9CF193CC300C081D9F4700B25EF2F761116F4A9DDA87A37572E0BCA55A1E4F32AD3138&imgrefurl=http://www.viewimages.com/Search.aspx%3Fmid%3D56288814%26epmid%3D1%26partner%3DGoogle&h=396&w=594&sz=54&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=27rpnLaPFLyRBM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=135&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dslaughterhouses%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4GGIH_enUS223US223%26sa%3DN

I dont really have much else to say on the matter, I am still in favor of meat-eating...but I do agree that what these animals go through isnt very nice.

...this might offend some people

The topic of our Q & A this week was about the subject of meat-eating. Honestly, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating animals, and while I can understand the viewpoint of vegetarians and vegans, I really don't believe that not eating meat is going to help anything. Sure, it may be considered "wrong" that animals are slaughtered for us to eat, but are any less animals gonna be slaughtered because some people choose not to eat them? Probably not. Furthermore, it's not like we kill every single species of animal, we kill the ones that are beneficial to us. Vegetarians, and especially vegans, miss out on many of the nutrients the rest of us get from animals, and they have to take pills to make up for it. Whether or not meat-eating is 'morally right' is a completely personal opinion based on your own chosen morals, but honestly, I don't see how vegetarians and vegans can see it as morally wrong considering the fact that most of these people ate meat for a minimum of ten years of their life. I honestly think vegetarians are crazy and vegans are even crazier (sorry megan!) if they really think that giving up meat is going to change anything besides the level of their nutrition.

In class the other day someone, I'm sorry I cant remember who, asked the question, " Is religion just rationalizing so that we dont have to deal with the bad in life?" and the example they used is that when someone dies, people always say things like, "Oh, well God took her" or "Shes up in Heaven now". And I guess, when looked at that way, it does seem that we use God and Heaven as a way to make things seem better than they really are.

It's the same concept as how people believe that everything happens for a reason. You only say that when something bad happens in hopes that something good will come out of it. It doesnt seem as bad when you tell yourself that God made it happen or that theres a good reason why it happened.

And maybe that is all religion is....its just something that makes you feel better when you have problems. Whether youre blaming your problems on religion "God did this", or youre looking to this higher power to solve your problems for you.

I'm not good at the whole title thing...

So today I was reading the whole atheism/agnosticism thing and I decided to ask some of my friends what their opinions were on which is better, and one of my friends told me that Agnostics are "baby Atheists". This was kinda amusing to me because I always thought they were two different things. But the way that she explained it to me was "Agnostics are Atheists who don't have the balls to actually stand up for anything"...and I kinda thought that was stupid. I think the difference between the two has nothing to do with balls, I think its just that Agnostics are more hopeful people; they dont know if God really exists, but theyre not gonna completely say he doesnt...because no one really knows, and theyre willing to accept that. They dont feel like they have to have complete knowledge one way or the other. They accept that they dont know everything. And I think that takes more balls then just saying something definitely doesnt exist without having proof of it.

Untitled

"Implicit in the cognitive norms of empirical evidence and observation is the assumption of fallibility, the idea that we may not be getting the world quite right, that we might someday have a more accurate view of reality based on more reliable and comprehensive observations and evidence. "

This quote was taken from our most recent reading, and something about it bothers me. I dont see how fallibility can be considered an assumption, because history has already proved that its true. It says that 'we might someday have a more accurate view of reality...", but we already know this to be true because todays world has a better view of reality and of what the world is like than the people from 400 years ago did.

Of course, as the years go on, science will improve and we will be able to have 'more reliable and comprehensive observations and evidence".

So I think 'assumption' is the wrong word to use here. It's not an assumption if we already know that it is gonna happen.