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Please feel free to ask me anything you choose and I will do my best to answer. I understand how you must feel being religious and feeling like the core of your religion is compassion. I personally don't understand how anyone can defend cruelty of any kind. The problem is that there is a great deal of cruelty and killing in the bible. I don't need to point it out, you know the bible better than I do I'm sure. I've heard just about anything justified by taking one passage or another from the bible. It's a bit of an inkblot. I think that is why I like Buddhism so much. It's absolutely clear that ahisma, non-cruelty and compassion are the core of the religion. Over the thousands of years of the history of buddhism no one has or could justify a war, murder or cruelty and find anything in the teachings to back it up - at least that I could find. I do understand the core of compassion in Christ's message but it makes me a bit sick to see what's been done in his name. It's a bit insane to murder someone because they murder someone else but that seems to be widely accepted by many Christians with capital punishment and even killing abortion doctors and anyone else in the building when the bomb goes off. In NYC I happened to live next to an abortion clinic. Getting home each day was a trial. There were a couple of times I couldn't get home at all because of a bomb. Then again, when Moses came off the mountain he did throw down the ten commandments and order the execuation of thousands of people in a rage. What I mean by that is if I want to murder and do atrocities I can find examples in the bible to back me up in it. When people say that the bible is the actual word of God and everything has to be obeyed to the letter, what exact letter are they referring to????? So when people tell me that the only way to eat is live food because that is exactly what God ordered in the beginning, I can quote a lot of places where God was into us eating other stuff. When you say that God made us with the anatomy to eat the way that it says to in Genesis, it makes scientific, logical and personal sense as well and as a metaphor is a deep teaching - then I can get behind it. If someone says - well that 's what it says in the bible and therefore it's what we have to do, then I say - I beg to differ.
By the way, I have turned many people onto vegetarianism when they ask me why I eat that way I say simply that I love animals, they are my friends, and I don't murder and eat my friends. Just like my dog, other species have intelligence and feelings. I would never eat my dog eventhough in other cultures they eat dogs regularly.
greenbunny
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