VEGANGELICA

Oh, phantom, you are right: there is a difference between not wanting to hear about health risks associated with various diets, and listening but not caring. I don't know how many people don't want to admit the harm caused by red meats and processed meats, and how many like you acknowledge it but accept the risks/don't care.

Hmm, your situation is interesting and I appreciate your honesty about it. I enjoy living, too, and I know that when it ends it ends (and since I'm an atheist I really think it ends)...but because I love living so much I'm trying to extend my life longer (and decrease the chance of painful death by cancer) by avoiding "sacrilege in the temple" (the body).

About the Holocaust and Animal Agriculture:

I see the Holocaust and animal agriculture as having similarities as well as major differences. I know a lot about the Holocaust, having read books by survivors and also historical books describing how centuries of prejudice against and victimization of Jewish people led eventually to many Germans believing Jewish people were a subhuman genetic "race" who needed to be exterminated for the betterment of humanity as a whole.

In both the Holocaust and animal agriculture, the dominant power (the dominant humans) view a group of living beings as an underclass whose death will serve the dominant group.

The goal in the Holocaust was the intentional killing/torture of Jewish people (and other groups considered "undesirable") to benefit those in power, since the Germans in power held the deluded belief that Jewish people were the cause of social problems and as "subhumans" threatened the genetic purity of the fake racial "Aryan" group.

The goal in animal agriculture is to care for young animals in a way that causes many (but not all) to survive long enough to be killed to be eaten...and the fact that some are intentionally killed early on, or die in transport, is accepted because it reduces the costs, benefitting those in power.

Nazis felt Jewish people's experience of life had no value. The Nazis felt killing Jewish people was a noble cause (a Godly cause). Animal livestock producers similarly feel that the experiences of cows, pigs, and other sentient "subhuman" beings have little value, and so feel no pang of guilt when ending these animals' experience of life. I think many in animal agriculture seem to feel they are following God's commandments by raising animals to eat them.

However, phantom, the brutality against humans in the Holocaust was much, much, much greater than brutality against most livestock animals...except that many livestock animals' needs and suffering are ignored during their lives and when slaughtered, and sometimes they are intentionally tortured and demeaned...beaten, bludgeoned, raped, confined until they go crazy, deprived of light and food (egg-laying hens), and allowed to suffer cancers and sores untreated, since as long as the animals make it to slaughter-weight without dying, the goal of the producers has been met: making money.

Holocaust survivors recall seeing plump, fattened, healthy pigs coming off the livestock cars exactly like the cars in which they, the humans, were themselves penned, starving, diseased, with no room to lie down and no food or water for days. People in animal agriculture generally try to keep most of their animals healthy enough to make a profit. The Nazis intentionally tried to deprive and degrade their victims to cause them to die. There was no effort to keep Jewish people alive; the whole goal was to kill them off from the face of the earth forever.

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