https://ibb.co/mL2wZqG

Hail Seitan!

There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:

I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.

II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.

III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.

IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.

V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.

VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any

harm that might have been caused.

VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings

I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets

Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.

Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.

Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity

That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.

I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.

Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.

Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).

To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).

Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,

& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.

It’s denying reality,

burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,

& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.

Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans

are fallible.

And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,

if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.

then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.

Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.

Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by

the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail

over the written or spoken word.

  • supersalad@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    So, do you think that if we care about plants, we should harm significantly more plants (upwards of 10x as much directly harvested to produce products of animal exploitation, & much more indirectly in land-clearing & maintenance & environmental/climate devastation of animal agriculture), than if we just used them directly?

    That said, I would prioritize animals over plants (not that we actually need to, since helping/respecting one helps/respects the other, so the point is moot), because I value sentience/subjective experience, and I do think plants most likely aren’t sentient (though I didn’t say this before now, just that there’s no reason to believe they are and every reason/much more reason to know most animals are sentient) because that’s the general scientific consensus, and because there isn’t any meaningful evidence that they are or could be sentient. I don’t believe in things without evidence, so I don’t believe in plant sentience just like I don’t believe in a higher power, or invisible fairies that I can’t prove don’t exist, or Russel’s teapot (look it up). “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. That isn’t to say it’s false, but with the current information, the belief hasn’t been justified, so I will remain agnostic on any kind of firm belief with regards to plant sentience unless something upends our understanding of biology - which is possible, but again, being vegan would still be the best thing we can do, short of future food systems that could be entirely 3D printed/lab grown/etc. And right now, we know animals are sentient. The same credence doesn’t exist for plants.

    You didn’t respond to any of my arguments, and are now just making ad hominems. Ok, I enjoy eating delicious & healthy plant-based foods, which I know are also far more sustainable, efficient, & ethical, including being lower-impact on plants themselves and animals/sentient beings. So what? This isn’t about me. It’s about the arguments against animal exploitation. You don’t need to have my username to be vegan. I don’t think you’re engaging seriously.

    Are you really acting in the spirit of reason, scientific understanding, empathy and compassion to dismiss the avoidable suffering & misinfortune of non-human sentient animals at human hands by attempting to frame the ethical choice as hypocritical simply because it can’t be perfect despite being significantly better than the alternative?

    • [deleted] in lemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      6 months ago

      I am not taking you seriously because initially I thought you were a troll. You are clearly putting in enough effort that you are actually a vegan crusader trying to gain sympathy from a random group by completely misconstruing the tenets to mean what you want them to mean.

      I will continue to not take you seriously, because you have a comical online based understanding of veganism that is indistinguishable from trolling.

      Vegan is a great thing to strive for, sure. But it approaches some things as harm reduction and others as absolutes, and that is where it falls apart as a rigid ideology because it isn’t actually internally consistent overall even if the goals are noble in intent.

      • supersalad@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago
        1. You’re correct that I’m not trolling & I do believe in animal rights principles as a logical extension of human rights principles. However, I’m not trying to gain “sympathy”. I’m trying to convince people to start respecting animals, and one way to do that is to show how their own values logically lead to animal rights being obligatory to respect - and veganism and animal rights are essentially the same thing if you aren’t aware - loosely the moral philosophy and social justice stance/movement that advocates for/believes that non-human animals deserve rights by virtue of their sentience, especially negative rights to not be exploited or harmed by humans without need. Animal welfarism is not the same thing as animal rights/animal abolitionism/animal liberationism, and uses the same model as pro-human slavery welfarism which was opposed to anti-slavery abolitionism. It’s humanewashing that seeks to uphold exploitative industries or practices under the guise of reforms or of painting certain forms of it as less severe than other forms, without recognising the institutions as fundamentally unjust & unreformable/that they can never truly be ethical since they always violate the interests of sentient beings without consent & unnecessarily & opportunistically.
        2. If you believe that the Tenets do not entail veganism/animal rights, then please provide an argument for why instead of derailing into whataboutisms about plants, which is a bad faith (& illogical & factually incorrect) argument and fails to interact with my proposition at all. I outlined my reasons why each of the tenets collectively entail veganism/animal rights, especially the very first one. In order to justify the differential treatment of non-human animals as an application of this philosophy, or why, for example, being compassionate to all creatures in accordance with reason, doesn’t entail NOT unnecessarily causing harm, suffering, exploitation, domination, subjugation, commodification, objectification, oppression, captivity, confinement, mutilation, deprivement of wellbeing/freedom/autonomy/relationships, violation of interests, and the termination of one’s life & experience & existence & ability to continue experiencing the world & experiencing wellbeing, cutting their lives short at a fraction of their lifespan, etc. when we don’t need to and we have alternatives that can meet all our needs & even our selfish desires which are never as important to us as the interests to not have those actions done to them are to the non-human animals (negative interests - which warrant negative rights) - then u are going to have to either name the trait difference between humans and non human animals that justifies doing to them what u presumably don’t hold to be justified to do to humans (or possibly even dogs or cats), or provide some other reasoning or justification for how it can possibly be in alignment of the tenet or ethos of being compassionate to all creatures in accordance with reason, to do all these harmful, horrific, violent, brutal things to harmless, gentle, vulnerable sentient creatures (who we should be treating like children in need of protection, not objects for us to devalue and gain something from by instrumentalizing, harming & killing) without necessity & despite alternatives.
        3. I don’t think I’m misconstruing the tenets. They’re pretty clear in what they’re saying. I already acknowledged that the tenets don’t outright make the connection between the values they’re espousing/the directions & principles they’re outlining, and veganism/animal rights. I’m also aware the majority of TST people aren’t vegan & don’t actively agree with or acknowledge animal rights principles as being obligatory or logically entailed by their values, just like most of human society aren’t & don’t (so this isn’t anything unique to TST), and do actively engage & participate in (& often promote & defend) animal exploitation/harm/killing unnecessarily (even if indirectly through purchase/consumption & engagement in economic systems & industries predicated on those actions). I know this because there’s a page made by TST where it lists the differences between TST and LaVeyan Satanism and seemingly tries to (jokingly, I think) highlight ways in which TST is better, and one of them is that they serve cheese or something (unserious, I’m sure). Of course they could include vegan cheese in their definition of cheese, or its plant based nature could even be implied in some contexts of someone simply saying “cheese” in combination with other information known about them (which you could argue the tenets are) - but they most likely didn’t mean that. The reality is that most people are unaware of the cruelty in the dairy industry [to get an idea, see Dairy Is Scary video (warning:graphic) https://youtu.be/UcN7SGGoCNI or the Disneyfied animated (but still heartbreaking) depiction Milk : A Short Film From A Mother’s Perspective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZsm2_TdFa0 , Dominion (2018 documentary) https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko , Milk: Make Up Your Own Mind documentary by Joey Carbstrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=d5wabeFG9pM&t=0s , Earthlings , etc - and Milked , Cowspiracy etc for more on the environmental side] so it’s understandable that they wouldn’t specifically state that avoiding supporting the extremely cruel & exploitative & destructive dairy industry - or veganism/animal rights in general - would be morally entailed by the Tenets, and even have shown indication that they probably are unknowingly rejecting the idea that vegan/animal rights principles would be entailed/obligatory for a consistent rendering/following/implementation of the Tenets by making that cheese comment - and somewhat unblameably given the amount of misinformation in the world and the lack of public awareness about the impact and nature of these industries. But if we look at Tenet VII, it does advocate for using our ability to reason & empathize above the written or spoken word, which we could infer includes reacting to new information as we learn it, such as the cruelty to nonhuman animals (& harm to humans in various ways as well - including exploited & traumatized slaughterhouse workers), environmental & societal harm/destruction, and even health impact of animal products & animal agriculture/animal exploitation industries, and to adapt to it by demonstrating empathy and practical decision making and make the ethical & logical choice to avoid supporting & participating in these unjust & harmful industries & systems given we don’t need to.
        4. When you say I have a “comical online based understanding of veganism”, I’m not sure what you mean, given that I’m vegan and you don’t seem to be based on your comments - you seem to have reactionary views against the idea of veganism. That said, what’s your understanding or definition of veganism? I’d be interested to know. Especially since the definition I’m using more or less aligns with the current version of the Vegan Society’s definition (whose founder Donald Watson coined the word “vegan” in 1944 marking the establishment of the group) which I referenced earlier (in addition to the definition of Sentientism, which implies the same actions but just describes it in terms of sentience and opens itself up more specifically to other hypothetical sentient entities), or the earlier Vegan Society definition from 1951 when Leslie Cross properly defined it:

        http://www.candidhominid.com/p/veganism-defined.html?m=1

        Recently the Vegan Society adopted revised and extended rules which among other things clarify the goal towards which the movement aspires.

        The Society’s object and meaning of the word “veganism”, have until now been matters of inference and personal predilection, are now defined as follows:

        “The object of the Society shall be to end the exploitation of animals by man”; and “The word veganism shall mean the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals.”

        The Society pledges itself “in pursuance of its object” to "seek to end the use of animals by man for food, commodities, work, hunting, vivisection and all other uses involving exploitation of animal life by man.”

        This essentially aligns with the general understandings/definitions/descriptions of animal rights theory, abolitionism, animal liberationism, etc. Which you can read about on Wikipedia for example.

        That said, I am a descriptivist (or rather something like “progressive prescriptivist”/descriptivist, not sure if there’s a precise term for my view), rather than a “traditionalist” prescriptivist. That is, I’m fine with the word vegan being redefined, re-used, re-interpreted in principle, however I also do have certain preferences and beliefs about what definition for the word would be most appropriate or beneficial or serve the most utility, and I lean towards any of the Vegan Society’s definitions from 1951 to present, excluding the definitions before 1951 which had failed to include the full scope of animal exploitation and focused only on food (which is part of why to this day some people still think veganism is a diet). So I don’t really agree with the assessment that I have a “comical understanding” of the word, or that it’s necessarily even possible since to a degree all definitions are valid, at least in theory/in a vacuum & removed from other considerations. Regardless if you disagree with the definition(s) and understanding(s) of veganism that I used/presented, we can at least understand that I’m describing a concept which I am defining the way I have & labeling as veganism, even if we need to use a substitute word to be on the same page, or call it “my definition of veganism” or whatever. I’m saying my definition/understanding of veganism, the one I’m talking about, is entailed by TST tenets. 5. This is sort of too vague an objection to even respond to. I appreciate you said that veganism(/animal rights, as I define it), is a great thing.