In my experience religion is one of the hardest excuses to argue against because people believe they have been told by a God that they are allowed to eat animals. This unfortunately means it can be incredibly hard to convince someone who is religious because in their eyes they are merely following what they believe they are allowed to do. When we discuss veganism with someone who is religious I think we have to be cautious to keep the argument focussed and not make it about the religion itself but how the person’s religion doesn’t justify them killing animals.
First and foremost, in no religious doctrine does a God say that we have to eat animals, he says we can if we need to but not that we have to. This means that religion still doesn’t provide a necessity for us to exploit animals and as such it still remains unnecessary and therefore impossible to morally justify.
A question I like to ask people who mention religion is, “if we don’t have to kill God’s creatures do you not think a kind, compassionate, benevolent God would rather that we didn’t?”.
I will often say, “when Jesus was alive there was not the abundance of foods that we have now and it is plausible that Jesus would have had to eat animals to survive. However, we have progressed so much as a society that there is no longer a necessity, so do you not think that in the eyes of an all loving God, he would prefer it if we didn’t kill his creatures if we don’t have to to survive?”.
Part of my frustration with religion is that, unlike the consumption of animal products, it is a personal choice and as such when people use a belief to condemn an animal to a life of suffering and pain it does not come close to making that action moral.
Using a religious belief to justify killing animals is exactly the same as using a religious belief to oppress homosexuals or women. In fact, if the logic “my religion says I can eat animals” makes eating animals moral, then by default the argument “my religion says it’s okay to treat homosexuals or women as less than me” must also make oppressing homosexuals and women moral.
I also don’t think God would be happy with what we are doing to his creatures and the planet that he made for us. Could you imagine if you had a piece of wood and you thought “you know what, I’m going to make my friend a lovely table out of this, they would really like that.” For the sake of argument let’s pretend that you spent 6 days making it for your friend and on the 6th day you looked at all you had made and it was perfect.
So you give your friend the table and they claim to be so appreciative, they say “thank you so much, you have given me this table and I will forever be grateful to you”, but then right in front of your eyes they take a sledgehammer and start destroying it. Would you be happy about that? Because this is what we are doing to God with the earth.
We claim to be incredibly grateful for the planet and all of the life that he has created, yet we are destroying everything he made for us right in front of him. He created non-human animals and we say thank you to him everyday by driving them to extinction and killing them by the trillions. We have even genetically modified his creatures, in essence playing God ourselves, because the creatures he created for us weren’t suitable for what we wanted from them. Furthermore, we go against God’s wishes by taking the milk from mothers that he designed specifically for their children.
In what reality would a God be happy that we forcibly impregnate his creatures and take their babies away from them just so that we can take something that he didn’t design for us in the first place? In what reality do we think that a God would be happy about us murdering his creatures when it serves absolutely no necessity? How can a God be pleased with us destroying the beautiful rainforests that he spent time creating just so we can produce more cattle that we then needlessly slaughter?
Why would a God create such an intricate marine eco-system, where each species of fish is as important as any other, but then be happy to watch us destroy it right in front of him? In 50 years we have decimated shark, dolphin and whale populations and in the past 40 years we have wiped out 50% of all wildlife on this planet.
Now one of the main issues with using religion as a justification for anything really, is that religious texts are often very ambiguous and of course open to interpretation, this is partly the reason why some Christians believe it is a sin to be gay, whereas others don’t. This same ambiguity can also be seen when turning to the Bible for moral guidance on whether or not we should eat animal products.
One of the main passages that people use from the Bible to justify eating animals is “every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green planet.” - but this is often taken out of context as the passages goes on to read “only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood”.
Furthermore, in Genesis the Bible states: "And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”.
Amos 6:4-7 states: “Woe to those who stretch themselves upon their couches and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall. They shall be the first to be exiled.”.
Furthermore, Ecclesiastes 3:19 states: “For what happens to people also happens to animals—a single event happens to them: just as someone dies, so does the other. In fact, they all breathe the same way, so that a human being has no superiority over an animal.”.
There are a multitude of passages from the Bible and indeed in the teachings of all the mainstream religions that further reinforce the idea that no religion mandates the consumption or exploitation of animals.
Sometimes one of the simplest questions to ask someone who is using religion as an argument is to ask, “do slaughterhouses look like the work of Jesus or the Devil?”.
Hell is described as a place of eternal suffering, torment and pain and yet all you have to do is watch slaughterhouse footage to see that they too are places of eternal suffering, torment and pain. For the animals, a slaughterhouse is hell and no benevolent God or prophet could ever condone what happens inside them.
A question that I often ask to Christians is, “if Jesus and the Devil were locked in a room with a baby lamb, which one would kill the lamb?”.