BiblicalVegan.com

A good indicator of the level of interest or activity surrounding any given endeavor is the availability of Internet domain names pertaining to the interest. Out of curiosity, I checked "biblicalvegan.com" and—surprise, surprise!—it was available. What does that tell 'ya? So I registered it and now own it. Not sure what I'll do with it down the road. At the very least, it will keep the (relatively) few others who share the Bible+vegan connection from being discouraged if/when they check to see if that domain name is available. Yes, they'll be sorry it's not available, but gratified to know that there's at least one other person out there who shares their beliefs.

The Wrong Starting Point

The young British chef, Jamie Oliver, was awarded the TED Prize this year, $100,000, to use in implementing his wish: "I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity."

It's a noble goal and he gave an emotional talk. But it had too much of the liberal, feel-good, the-government-and-schools-should-be-doing-more approach to suit me. Take the short video of him in an American grammar school classroom where the students (second graders?) couldn't identify the most common vegetables he showed them. Whose fault is that? The school's?

And I thought about my own young granddaughters who, I believe, could have identified most, if not all, of the veggies. Why? Because they learned it at home from parents who have involved them in growing food in their own backyard garden. The liberal solution for everything is for public, tax-payer funded entities to solve the most basic of life's problems—in this case, learning about healthful relationships with food. Where are the parents in this equation who are responsible for teaching children what's right and responsible? Yes, schools should do their part by serving healthy food, as should government by not subsidizing unhealthy approaches to food like our government does. But teaching about fundamental issues of life—like food—ought to begin in the home.

See what you think:

Drink Up, Dave!

David's latest purchase in pursuit of good health: a gallon of Bragg's organic unfiltered apple cider vinegar. I have an entire book dedicated to the folklore healing properties of ACV—and many folks swear by it today. If you visit earthclinic.com, almost every home remedy suggested involves doing something with ACV. (Ahem, the true initiates know it as ACV). It'll cure what ails 'ya.

Drain it, Dave!

From Dust to Dust, Quickly

I don't know how long this USAToday.com link ("Going Green Eternally") will remain active, so if you're interested, check it out soon. It's a photo slide-show of a "green" burial at a "natural" (woodland) cemetery in South Carolina. Burial is in a cardboard casket; no concrete vault; a respectful gathering of family and friends. I've been watching this trend the last several years and agree 100 percent with it. Having buried two parents, the cost of modern funerals is . . . well, there's no need for it to be as complicated or expensive as it is. The last time I checked, in North Carolina it's legal to bury someone without embalming, etc., if burial is within 24 hours of death. It's now possible to purchase simple caskets—or have wooden ones made—from outlets other than funeral homes at a fraction of the cost of the bronze behemoths sold to grieving families by funeral homes. A good book on the subject is Grave Matters—A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial by Mark Harris (Scribner, 2007).

This pictorial gives a good overview of the process. The casket is driven to the woodland site in a family van, loaded into a small wagon pulled behind a golf cart, driven to a pretty chapel in the woods, then carried to the grave. Simple and respectful—just as it should be. (Except—the lady in the pictorial isn't playing a flute. Even my granddaughters know it's a recorder. Right, girls?)

2-15-10 update: When my daughter-in-law read this post and viewed the slide show she realized this was funeral and burial of a good friend of hers, a young mom whose children are in a homeschooling play group with my granddaughters in South Carolina.

What Are Animals For?

I'm constantly on the lookout for insights leading to understanding of the purpose of animals in God's design of planet earth—something besides eating them, which is not why they were created (Genesis 1:29-30).

A January 25, 2010, Time magazine article (time.com—don't know if it was in the print version) is helpful in this regard. It profiles the new plans of organic gardening guru Eliot Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch (gardening columnist for the Washington Post), to integrate a small herd of cows and sheep into their Maine organic farmstead. Heretofore, the couple has raised only veggies and written books, sharing their knowledge. But now, for environmental reasons, they are going to incorporate the animals into their plans for sustainability. They are not vegetarians; they are incorporating animals into the life cycles of their growing operations because of what the animals add to the environment (besides eventually ending up on the table).

This is one of those situations where I'm happy to take the good with the bad. I don't support the consumption of the animals for food, but I do support the ideas Coleman will work out for what the animals add to a sustainable lifestyle: specifically, healthy reproduction of grasslands through rotational grazing, the provision of manure for composting to aid in plant production, and the sequestering of carbon in the soil instead of the air. (The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] issued a report in 2006 saying that factory farming of cattle contributes more greenhouse gas emissions [i.e., methane gas from the cows] to the atmosphere than all the transportation vehicles in the world.)

In other words, these are significant contributions the animals make to a sustainable environment without being eaten. Most people think of this in reverse: We raise the animals for meat and oh, by the way, they have these other benefits. But it's the "other benefits" that are part of the animals' life when they do what they naturally do. They provide these benefits by simply existing, not because they are being raised to be consumed.

It's easy to imagine how, in a perfect world, large and small grazing animals could play a significant role during their lifespan in promoting the ecology and sustainability of the planet—without having to be eaten. This article provides a good overview of those benefits.

[The picture above is used without permission from the time.com article. See link above.]

New Foods on a Plate Near You

Researchers in India have developed a strain of rice that doesn't have to be cooked; can be eaten after being soaked for 45 minutes:

And other researchers have created a soy product with the texture and mouth-feel of chicken: "looks like chicken, feels like chicken, tastes like chicken." (I don't understand this need for vegetarians to continue to pretend they're eating meat. Isn't that like Bill Clinton saying he didn't inhale?)

The Company Capitalists Keep—and Other Thoughts

I've spent too much time researching this not to share it, in spite of the time it has required of me, and may of you. It started out as something over which I laughed out loud when I read it—a quote from C. S. Lewis. But then it turned much more serious as words from Lewis are wont to do.

First, what made me laugh: Lewis wrote these words (I came to find out) in 1947; I don't know enough of his political leanings at the time to know why he included capitalists in this quote. But it made me laugh out loud—the inclusion of capitalists in a group of "others" we might find unsavory. The quote as I originally read it: ("vivisection" is the practice of conducing experiments on live animals for purposes of medical or scientific research)

Vivisection can only be defended by showing it to be right that one species should suffer in order that another species be happier . . . . If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.

Okay—that's funny in this day of debate on the merits of capitalism and the mess that has arisen in our economy (allegedly) due to its free exercise. Looking at our economy today it would not seem unfair to group capitalists with "imbeciles, criminals, [and] enemies."

That was not, of course, Lewis' point. He was talking about the slippery slope that exists between harming defenseless non-human animals and doing the same to defenseless humans. A point well-made and embraced by all concerned for animal welfare, human and non-human.

In the source I was reading, the quote was (apparently) mis-attributed to Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain, in which he devotes a chapter to "Animal Pain" (chpt. 9). But in looking for the quote in my copy of this book, to fill in the ellipsis in the quote, I couldn't find it. Searching the contents of The Problem of Pain at both Amazon and Google Books didn't reveal the quote in this book. But I found the quote attributed to The Problem of Pain scattered all over the Internet. Apparently, a good example of bad attribution gone viral.

I wasn't surprised when I found the full quote, and accurate attribution, in an article by (The Rev. Dr.) Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of the Oxford [University] Centre for Animal Ethics: "A Christian Assessment of Animal Experimentation" posted on the website of All-Creatures.org. (Linzey has written more than a dozen books on animal rights and welfare from a Christian point of view, but his work has gained little attention on this side of the pond. This article is adapted and expanded from his 1987 book, Christianity and the Rights of Animals.)

I was happy to find Lewis' full quote in Linzey's article, but it was the larger context that was more disturbing. Typical of Oxford-level scholarship, Linzey provided documentation of what was happening just before Lewis wrote his words in 1947—the Holocaust had just introduced to the world the reality of human vivisection, the Nazi (among others—see below) practice of experimenting on human subjects. Lewis was concerned that lumping man and animals into an evolutionary grab-bag of creatures, all of which were totally equal in biology and value, would result in what was already commonplace on animals becoming commonplace on man. Indeed, it had become commonplace during the war. Lewis was being careful to keep the distinction between image-bearing man and non-image-bearing animals.

Here is Lewis' full quote from Linzey's article:

Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing up our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reason. Indeed, experiments on men have already begun. We hear all that Nazi scientists have done to them. We all suspect that our own scientists may begin to do so, in secret, at any moment.

Linzey then cites an example of how human experimentation was going on among the Nazis:

On 15 May 1941, Dr Sigmund Rasher, who was the Nazi Medical Officer of the Luftwaffe, wrote to Himmler concerning his experiments on the psychological and physiological troubles involved in high-altitude flights:

I have noticed with regret that no experiments on human material has yet been introduced here, because the tests are very dangerous and no volunteers have offered their services. For this reason I ask in all seriousness: Is there any possibility of obtaining from you two or three professional criminals to be placed at our disposal? These tests, in the course of which the ‘guinea pigs’ may die, would be carried out under supervision. They are absolutely indispensable to research into high-altitude flying and cannot be carried out, as has been so far attempted, on monkeys, whose reactions are completely different.

Linzey notes that Himmler acquiesced to the doctor's request, then provides further documentation as to how similar experiments were being carried out among the Japanese in their prisoner-of-war camps: (the following quote combines the words of a Japanese military man, followed by explanation by the source Linzey is quoting; the numbers refer to footnotes in Linzey's paper)

‘I sometimes felt sorry for the logs of wood. I wondered, is it right to do such things to them?’8 The speaker is Naoji Uezono, leader of the vivisection team of the 731st Japanese regiment during the Second World War. The ‘logs of wood’ (maruta) were some three thousand Chinese, Russian, Mongol and American prisoners of war. These human prisoners were subjected to ‘injection of plague, cholera, typhus and other germs, the freezing of limbs, the infecting of syphilis [and] the prolonged exposure to X-rays’.9 If people wonder why details of these experiments are not so well known as their Nazi counterparts, the answer is even more grotesque. An arrangement was made whereby the vivisection team would be granted immunity from prosecution, if the useful results of their researches were handed over to the Americans. The ‘freezing experiments were so thorough that the team leader became the world authority on the science of human adaptability to [the] environment’.10 Dr. Edwin Hill, a US Army scientist, said in 1947 that the important information ‘could not be obtained in our laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation’.11

The idea that American authorities would negotiate for the research data collected from human experimentation is repugnant to me. It's worthy that America's "scruples" prevented her from doing her own "human experimentation," but what a shame that we would gladly avail ourselves of the criminal activity of others.

What started as a humorous perspective on "the company capitalists keep" ended up in a sad place. Lumping us in with "imbeciles, criminals, and enemies" was unwittingly (or not) prescient on Lewis' part. Lord, have mercy.

Short-Circuiting the Human Body

One of the most interesting things I learned years ago in reading about plant life and the human body was the electrical nature of both. Cellular life is an electrical domain, not to mention the firing of nerve impulses that govern our very existence. Death is like being unplugged—all electrical activity in the body ceases.

But while we are alive, there are other implications that are now only beginning to be studied; harmful implications. Because we live in an "electrical soup"—the ubiquitous reality of unseen EMF (electro-magnetic frequency) radiation from the electrical devices that surround us—researches are beginning to find evidence of a negative impact on our body's electrical functions, resulting in dis-ease.

This is almost too big a subject to comprehend—what would life be like without all the devices upon which we have become so dependent and which may be harming us? For those interested in the research, Dr. Mercola has a new article that documents the dangers. (". . . he wrote as he sat before dual flat-panel monitors, washing his body with EMF radiation.")

Don't say I didn't warn me.

Hook 'em Horns, Carolina Style

When I moved to my present house in Union County 10 years ago it was to escape the Charlotte sprawl—now I'm right back in it. All the undeveloped land around my subdivision is now filled in with more houses and shopping and business areas. Two blocks down the street from where I live was an intersection with four vacant corners—beautiful woods and pastureland. Today, three of the corners are filled with commercial activity. On the fourth stands this beautiful beacon to a time now past—and I wonder how long it will last:

And the fenced pastures that go with the house are now home to a half-dozen Texas longhorn cattle. I have no idea who owns them or how they got to North Carolina, but they are a beauty to behold:

This pair seemed to go together; wherever the big one went the little one was close behind:

In this photo, note how long and thick the tail is on the adult. This gives you an idea of the horror of "tail docking" that is carried out in many commercial factory dairy farms—taking a pair of large bolt cutters and cutting the tail off dairy cows—with no anesthesia—because it's a nuisance in the milking parlor, leaving a stub of 6-8 inches long. Besides enduring the obvious pain, the cow can no longer use her long tail to swish away flies and biting insects. What an abominable practice—harming animals for the convenience of man. (In a previous post, I linked to an ABC Nightline undercover video that shows this practice.)

You can see this youngster's horns just beginning to grow:

It's easy to understand the origin of "Hook 'em, Horns!":

School Daze

My good buddy, Lile (we saw each other EVERY Sunday at church and spent 11 of 12 of our school years together), sent me this picture from her files. What a treasure! My family's home in Decatur, Alabama, was just a block from our grammar school (dear old Gordon-Bibb), so our house was a not infrequent spot for "field trips" during my five years at that school. This is our first grade class with our dignified and beloved teacher, Mrs. Poer. Lile and I have put our heads together and remembered a half-dozen or more of these 56-year-old faces. (Note the April 1955 notation on the photo's top edge.)

Sweet Lile is on the top row, upper right corner, and yours truly is on the top row, two spaces down from Lile—elbows on knees, brow furrowed, cowlick in place. That was a great house with stairs large enough to hold the whole class. Oh, for such a house today!