I have been noting this more recently and it seems to be a trend, at least with people I converse with on the regular. The really religious types aren’t animal people or downright dont like them. The more chill or agnostic types seem to be more apt to love animals.
I could go on my theory of this but I’m interested to see if anyone thinks this is a trend.
Not my experience. I used to work with animals, and many of my clients, or people I did animal rescue work with, were religious. The animal rescue work, specifically, seemed to attract people who were extremely religious.
I think you found a weird outlier and your data set is small. Like, most of the world is religious in some way shape or form, your sample size is too small to make any realistic judgement call
I don’t say this out of malice, but please, please, avoid using “religion” (and indirectly “belief in deities and other supernatural entities”) as a synonym for abrahamic religions because this ends up attacking countless religions and belief systems worldwide, some of which even lack a male capital-G God and/or are Goddess-centric.
The latter case is my case, I’m primarily a worshipper of Goddess Lilith, and I’ve been literally worshiping owls, especially because I believe owls are Her familiars, even Her zoomorphic manifestation (see Burney Relief) sometimes… not to mention how owls are majestic and amazing on their own, as beautifully cute yet fiercely powerful raptors possessing the most silent flight observable among avians… I mean, just look at any Bubo (my favorites, not necessarily in order of preference, are B. virginianus, B. ascalaphus, B. scandiacus, B. bubo, B. magellanicus and B. cinerascens), Megascops/Otus (M. kennicotti and O. bakkamoena) and Athene (especially A. noctua, A. lilith (yes, there’s literally an owl species named after Lilith, native to Middle East), A. brama and A. cunicularia) for long enough and you’ll hopefully understand how goddessome they are!
(And the fact that “I know my favorite Strigidae” by their taxonomic binomials may also tell ya something about how deep I got inside this
rabbitburrowing owl’s hole of Science’s ornithology primarily motivated by non-scientific reasons (and also by my neurodivergence’s “hyperfixation” and “special interests” traits)).There are also other religions and belief systems that are very animal-friendly (especially friendly to wildlife), including but not limited to Wicca, Druidism, Buddhism (“a monk must watch their steps lest they harm ants”) and (as far as I know) Hinduism/Shaktism (cows as sacred symbols of motherhood and abundance).
If its religious, it’s wrong. I don’t care if its an abrahamic religion, Islam, Hindi or whatever religion, it’s all imaginary and never for the betterment of the people, it’s always about control
it’s always about control
“Always about control”? Whom and how exactly am I trying to “control” through my practice of an extremely solitary, idiosyncratic practice, whose convoluted syncretism (borrowing concepts across Sumerian, Egyptian, Thelema, Wicca, Gnosticism, Luciferianism, Goetia, Quimbanda and many other religions) alienates me from practically all religions from which my syncretism derives because I don’t exclusively follow any of those?
It’s all imaginary
Yes, I know!, and? So many things are imaginary around you right now, too. For example, as you’re reading this text, you’re seeing before you a mesh made of millions of trios of red, green and blue tiny dots shining in a very specific intensity so to interact your (respectively) L, M and S cones all over your retina, fooling your occipital lobe to interpret a large portion of the visible spectrum, then your Inferior temporal gyrus interprets symbols (letters from the English alphabet your graphics card is rendering a large raster bitmap based on this text’s UTF-8 byte-stream), as well as pictographs (Lemmy mascot from both the community’s avatar as well as from your lemmy.ca instance with the shape and colors of the Canadian flag; the maple leaf from the Canadian flag therein; all those colors and shapes from the Anubis “making sure you’re not a bot” anime girl shown every time you access the lemmy.ca instance to interact with the Fediverse) out of the bigger picture once projected onto your retina. The orange color you’re seeing outlining the Lemmy mascot icon from this community, it isn’t orange because there’s no orange dot on digital displays. You can neither touch nor interact with Anubis anime girl, she’s not even closely real. You can neither touch nor interact with the Maple leaf symbol like you could with an actual physical Maple leaf.
So, are you sure you’re gonna play the “deities are imaginary” atheist card with me, a religious, pagan person whose ground is heavily covered in nihilism (as in, nothing fucking exists, not even myself, as everything is a gigantic ocean of baryons and leptons from which the illusion of order, together with this Pale Blue Dot and all the self-rearranging carbon-based structures therein, have been emerged out of cosmic chaos)? At least I’m using the belief on my “imaginary” owl-goddess (because, yes, I can only imagine Her, as my retina never exactly saw Her) to seek and learn actual, scientific (ornithological) knowledge, instead of denying Science like Abrahamic religions often do.
I don’t disagree with what you said, but Islam is an Abrahamic religion.
They all (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) worship a deity based on the Canaanite god of war and weather.
I was taught as a young conservative xtian that only humans have souls and that animals were put here for our use and amusement. I was taught that animal pain could not be real because they don’t have a soul. They are effectively just toys or food for humans, according to conservative christians.
Conservatism is a fkn disease that needs to be eradicated.
Oh I’d say this is definitely just anecdotal to you personally. Lots of animal shelters are owned, operated and funded by religious organizations.
Yeah, but how do they treat them? Is it just a new way for them to make money?
Are you under the impression animal shelters are churning out big bucks?
Anything connected with churches can make good money from donations and shady financials.
While true, lets not be those jerks who associate literally every bad thing to ever happen with churches. Believe it or not there are churches with good people feeding the homeless etc. It’s probably .000000001%, but they’re out there (and it sure as hell ain’t megachurches or any church that preaches maga)
As a vegan, the most annoying people are religious people (specially abrahamic believers) and their unbreakable logic: ‘If God didn’t want us to eat meat, why did he give them to us’ Imo that reflects their attitude towards animals: they don’t see them as a living beings, but rather as things to be used.
I think it’s more to do with religious people coming from rural backgrounds.
Eating meat was a celebratory thing when I was still living in rural Turkey, so at first vegetarianism seemed like “a spoiled western thing”
In my mind it was grouped next to those ragebait videos of 14 year olds yelling at their mom for getting the wrong iphone model.
Animal cruelty argument didn’t work great either because, “I only eat halal certified anyway.”
Content warning : Religion. Don't tap if you don't want to learn what "halal food" is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_dietary_lawsNote: It sounds decent, especially for early 7th century Arabia standards, but no multi-billion industry is following regulations that make them less profit to 100%.
What DID convince me near instantly was someone showing how the meat industry is all exploitative and corrupt.
They waste workers, water, and animal lives on purpose because it’s more profitable than proper logistics. Fucking cruel looking into it, crazy they aren’t being universally boycotted already.
In good faith I am asking why vegans don’t consider vegetables to be living things.
They are living, not sentient tho.
you can’t prove they are not sentient
Or that animals are
Do you have a pet or have ever been close to an animal? If so you’d know.
Here an example of some cows if you can see that and say animals are not sentient than I have nothing else to say to say to you as it would just be a waste of time.
You’re right, I confused sentience for sapience, my bad! Of course that means plants are absolutely sentient, as we know for sure they can feel and hear. So we’re back to the beginning question, why does veganism care about the sentience of Animalia but not the sentience of Plantae or Fungi?
Of course. The Bible taught people that this planet is ours, and that animals are under us.
Ehh not quite. That’s Dominion. The other interpretation Stewardship, is that Earth is God’s dominion not ours and we are caretakers, not its owners.
