My greatest argument against negatively labeling anyone, even though the bias for our own instinctively takes over, is as follows:
Do we protect those who are weaker or not as intelligent as us?
For example we protect our young, we protect those with abilities that require help from us in order to make it. But here is my question... what happened to plants and animals? If we consider ourselves more intelligent than animals, wouldn’t that mean we would protect them? Instead we reason, “We’re more intelligent, they can’t process pain like us, let’s eat them and use them for clothing!” Or how about the forests we destroy to build our homes and fuel our own survival?
God says it’s okay. Alright so that’s it? The greatest authority says something and we just do it, without even questioning it internally because we are afraid of... what? Pain, punishment, not receiving the benefits that come with agreeing with top authority? Plants are living things because they grow. Animals are living creatures that wail in agony at receiving pain. Do you realize our bias as human individuals that only see through what benefits our survival and that of our species? If plants and animals could communicate in words as we do we would be called “evil” by them.
I hate when mankind causes pain to its own kind. We put people in jail for that. But we never stop to think that’s who we all are by how we treat other living creatures because we deem OUR survival more important. The bias for our own survival made us invent OUR own definitions of good and evil to the convenience of the survival of OUR own species. Think about that. Digest that. It will make you think twice before you negatively label another. At least you will be able to note the tendencies, that we ourselves have in us, that are apathetic to the suffering of other living creatures we don’t think twice about for the sake of our longevity.
It is so thought provoking to analyze this, and humbling as well because we realize we aren’t as “good” as we were all taught to be. I place my survival and the survival of my own kind before plants and animals, I do. I just notice my own bias in that, that could also be noted as selfishness or egocentric, but really makes me think about how we treat nature and this world for our sake. Just a thought. I eat plants and sometimes animals myself. Interesting to think about though, what if we were to place ourselves in their position?
