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... It is a fact worth speculating upon that many groups of early Christians were both mystical and vegetarian. Had they not been ousted by the Emperor Constantine--whose imperialistic political purpose they did not serve--from the official Christianity which he (and not Jesus) established, we might today have seen half the Christian world holding a faith in mystical beliefs and eating fleshless foods...
4.5.3.3,Listen The greatest of all diet reforms is the change from meat-eating to a meatless diet...
4.5.3.5,Listen A meatless diet has practical advantages to offer nearly everyone. But to idealists who are concerned with higher purposes it has even more to offer. On the moral issue alone it tends to lessen callousness to the sufferings of others, men or animals, and to increase what Schweitzer called ”reverence for life.”
4.5.3.8Listen A meatless diet is advisable for aspirants, where circumstances permit, as the brain fed on it is less resistant to meditation.
4.5.3.9Listen The delusion that flesh food is essential to maintain strength dies hard. I do not know a stronger animal than an elephant. I have seen it in the East doing all the work that a powerful steam-crane will do in the West. Yet the elephant is a vegetarian. Moreover it outlives most other animals.
4.5.3.10Listen Pythagoras pointed out that the way a nation treated its animals, so far as they are at its mercy, is an indirect judgement of its character.
4.5.3.40Listen It is not only the unnecessary killing of tamed animals for food that shows man's thoughtless lack of mercy, but also the unnecessary hunting and killing of wild animals. They are entitled to their mountain or forest home.
4.5.3.51Listen ... It is less destructive to uproot a vegetable or pluck a fruit than to slay an animal--and there is less suffering too. This is the answer to the argument that we still destroy life when we become vegetarians.
4.5.3.64,Listen Our definition of sin needs widening. It is also sinful to break the laws of hygiene, to indulge in habits that are either poisonous or devitalizing, to eat foods obtained by slaughter.
4.5.3.70Listen Wherever and whenever meatless diet becomes the rule, and not the rarity that it is today, we may expect violence and crime to abate markedly.
4.5.3.72Listen Nobility of character will not save a man who eats meat from the dark karma which he thereby makes, although it may modify it. This bad habit puts his good health into peril.
4.5.3.78Listen The follower of a fleshless diet who throws his principles to the four winds in a trying situation lest he be thought peculiar, eccentric, different is more eager to please other men than the Overself, more interested in what their opinion is of him than in the success of his quest…
4.5.3.83,Listen If he really believes in this teaching, he will seek to bring it into every area of his life. There is no area from which it can rightly be left out, not even from that of the kind of food he eats.
4.5.3.84Listen It is proper to defend one’s life when it is menaced by aggressive men or by wild beasts, but it is against philosophic ethics to take life without a just cause, as when one kills animals for food—still more when one kills them wantonly for sport. Every higher instinct urges us to substitute compassion for cruelty in our dealings with the lower kingdom.
4.5.3.90Listen The beautiful coloured fruits which the trees and bushes offer him have been saturated with beneficent solar rays, not with innocent blood.
4.5.3.96Listen Saint Paul on vegetarianism: ”I will eat no flesh for evermore, that I make not my brother to stumble.” (1 Cor. 8:13)
4.5.3.123Listen They will one day feel mercy for the animals and desist from the custom of slaughtering, cooking, and eating them. Of course, the slaughter is done indirectly, by others acting on their behalf. But some of the guilt remains.
4.5.3.128Listen The vegetarian who refuses to turn his body into a graveyard for slaughtered animals is obeying not only a moral law but also a hygienic and an aesthetic one.
4.5.3.130Listen As his mind becomes purer and his emotions come under control, his thoughts become clearer and his instincts truer. As he learns to live more and more in harmony with his higher Self, his body’s natural intuition becomes active of itself. The result is that false desires and unnatural instincts … will become weaker and weaker and fall away entirely in time …
4.5.3.143,Listen How can the human race avoid the fate of being slaughtered in war when it itself slaughters so many innocent creatures in peace?
4.5.3.157Listen ... It would be desirable, although admittedly difficult, gradually to adopt a meatless diet as a help to secure both the individual's development and the world's peace.
4.5.3.160,Listen
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