The Lion shall eat straw like the Ox

Ok, so I am an angry pseudo-hippy (I say pseudo because I love owning stuff). It is sadly a label I embrace and more often than not play up to. I work for a VERY green company (and my stupid coffee shop job), I am a recycling Nazi, I am liberal to the point of apathy, I am a vegetarian and I have been known to wear tie-dye. So I feel it is time for me to add my opinions on the matter to the million other voices out there.

I'm not going to lie I often think if we could all live with the animals without eating them life would be alot simpler.  However, deep down I know this is fundamentally wrong from an evolutionary standpoint. Humans are supposed to eat meat, we evolved to eat meat. Our appendix is useless and will explode given half a chance. So in living in this idyllic world we would be denying our true nature - that is to hunt and to kill. I think the whole process of eating meat has been greatly sanitised.  Its chopped, gutted, skinned and shrink wrapped. Admittedly it is damn convinient but I think it devalues the animal and meat as a whole has become such a commodity its almost meaningless.

My example to underpin the point is as follows. My friend saw some livestock being transported. They were all cramped into the lorry and looking out at the passing cars. He promptly exclaimed to his mother that the whole thing was so upsetting he was to become vegetarian upon returning home.  His mother made some placatory noises and they drove home. Upon arriving home he takes a snack from the fridge. Sausages. Now my friend in question is not an idiot, he knows full well where meat comes from. Yet the whole meat industry, to my mind, breeds this sort of non-thinking. I'm not berating my friend or condemning his actions - fundamentally its his choice. It just made me sigh.

Anyway, back to my idyllic scenario with people frolicking with cows.  Might I direct your attention to Isaiah 11, also known as the Peaceable Kingdom.  Its understood as a passage dealing with the end times, the coming of the Messiah will turn the world on its head where the carnivores and herbivores live in harmony and poisonous snakes won't harm children.  After doing some environmental ethics/green theology modules I am quite fond of the idea of a primordial vegetarianism and in the end times we will return to this blissful state.

So, understanding The Fall as an actual event where sin/evil enter the world.  Taking sin/evil to be interpreted as suffering and for the longest time was understood only as human suffering.  However as time went on it grew ever more apparent to understand the suffering of the whole of Creation (proper noun here to denote importance).  Folk cleverer than I came up with the idea of a primordial vegetarianism to be part of our pre-Fall state. In this state Creation was vegetarian - that is to understand it in the loosest sense that no flesh was consumed based on the Genesis account (1:30).
 
Now I KNOW humans along with a plethora of creatures have evolved to eat and hunt lesser creatures. I am in no way a Darwin denier nor a Biblial literalist. I know from an evolutionary standpoint I am an anomaly being a vegetarian, yet I cannot reconcile my love of the flesh (I used to be a hideous carnivore in my youth) with thought of such beautiful creatures being destroyed for my benefit. It would also be horrific to deny predators the thrill of the chase and taste of meat in pursuit of a worldwide vegetarianism. Millions of years of evolution has honed these animals into such effective hunters and made them beautiful with it.

I think Heaven (if a place should exist) is a peaceful place. Like the pre-Fall state where prey animals live in harmony, free from the fear of flitting shadows whereas predators can experience the thrill of the chase for eternity without ever hurting their fellow creatures.  Their prey would be spectres of what exists on Earth devoid of feeling or sentience. All animals (humans included) can be true to their nature and not to the detriment of any other creature.

This is a very brief summary of the whole topic. It would take more than a blog post to do this subject any justice.  But I felt the compulsion to get it off my chest.

So my fellow green theology loving, tie-dye wearing vegetarians the Eschaton will usher in a new era of guilt free food and peaceful living, without any part of Creation denying their true selves.