[GlobalMan]

(05-13-2016 01:34 PM)No Habit Wrote:  

Quote:

We've domesticated these animals over hundreds of generations and we eat them. What's wrong with that?

So are you asking: We are giving life and we are taking life, what is wrong with that?

I'll ask that.

I anticipate an answer based on a thin and misplaced moralism that doesn't apply.

(05-11-2016 04:25 AM)No Habit Wrote:  

Also, why stop at not killing animals? Don't kill any life at all if you don't have to, including plants and trees, perhaps even bacteria. Take it as far as possible.

This degrades any argument for true morality.

This mentality reminds me of the one TLOZ addressed in his post on nihilism

Quote:

The progressive ideology in its current form has its roots in the loss of traditional religious faith among intelligent men at the turn of the last century, and the universal adoption by them of a metaphysics of nihilism

...

It is not true, however, to say that progressives have replaced religion with the "worship of man" -- far from it. The progressive obsession with "equality" and with the protection of "the weak" and various "victim groups" stems from the feeling that in a world known to be "meaningless" all the way down the line, the pain and suffering experienced by the weak is adding insult to injury -- and that makes it the one thing that cannot be tolerated. Therefore, there is a sacred status accorded to groups in proportion to how far they are removed and shielded from the knowledge of "meaninglessness": thus the obsession with more primitive and "other" cultures that have not yet attained this terrible knowledge; the sacralization of women, children and animals, that are seen as always molested and tortured; and the most logical conclusion of all, the worship of Gaia and the "environment", of things that are entirely inanimate. And therefore too, the special hatred reserved for the white man as the creature that has become aware of "meaninglessness" yet continues to forge ahead with its unseemly and obscene "greed" and hunger for "growth", always adding insult to injury with its relentless forward drive even when it has been "understood" that it can have no possible point -- that all we can do in a "meaningless" world is to protect the "weak" from "torture" and give them the "justice" that is to be our sole consolation.

....

While the kind of traditionalist religiosity that you advocate stands in superficial contradiction to some of the literal tenets of progressivist ideology, it is in fact animated by the same shared conviction of "meaninglessness" and is just a differently processed reaction to it. It attempts to simply deny the deeply felt certainty of "meaninglessness" by affecting a return to a state that preceded it; yet this is belied by the same emotional undertone of fear and panic and the same conviction of inexorable decline that is shared by nilihist ideologies of all stripes. It is telling that both progressive environmentalists and would-be traditionalists are so drawn to the metaphor of a "virus", of a "disease" that has taken hold of mankind and that is already in "terminal" stages and cannot be cured unless the most radical measures are taken -- and maybe even then. For progressive environmentalists, the "disease" is the human being itself and what it has done to the "planet"