The World Peace Diet : Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony by Tuttle Will

Author:Tuttle, Will [Tuttle, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 326479
Publisher: Lantern Books
Published: 2015-10-10T19:42:06+00:00

Religious Reductionism

Conventional Western religion, like Western science, evolved within the same milieu of reducing and commodifying large animals and tends to be similarly reductionist in its essential orientation. The infinite divine mystery is typically reduced to a judgmental and often anthropomorphized authority figure; humans are reduced to self-centered, discrete temporal entities who may be chosen or saved or condemned to eternities of hell or heaven based on one fleeting lifetime; and animals, trees, ecosystems, and all of nature are reduced to being mere disposable props in this drama. Like science, the religious establishment has tended to reinforce the domination of animals, women, and nature, and to further the interests of the ruling elite. Like science, it tends toward being hierarchical, patriarchal, and exclusivist, and like science, it tells us to rely not on our own inner wisdom, but on its outside authority. Like reductionist science, which insists on the objectivist split between self and world, conventional Western religion insists on the primary dualism of Creator and creation, God and the world. This belief in a basic disconnection between the divine and all of us reinforces the illusion of separateness that is also propagated by reductionist science.

It is fascinating and instructive that while conventional science and religion fight endlessly with each other—bickering brothers sharing a common reductionist mythology—holistic science finds inspiring and helpful guidance and confirmation from progressive and non-Western religious traditions like liberation theology and many indigenous traditions, as well as Eastern traditions such as Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism, Sikhism, and Vedanta. These religious traditions tend to have evolved in cultures and subcultures in which animals were not systematically reduced to commodities.

The reductionist delusion of essential separateness is so ritualized in our daily meals that it inevitably thrusts itself into our religious lives. We are often told as children that we'll be excluded from heaven unless we subscribe to a set of exclusivist beliefs! Mainstream religious teachings typically tell us we are special if we agree to an exclusivist creed. They rarely question our violent food choices but rather encourage them by declaring that animals have no souls and that God gave us animals to eat—and they sponsor barbecues, pig roasts, fish fries, and turkey dinners in communities across America. It wasn't so long ago, when the fourth-century emperor Constantine made Christianity the Roman state religion, that its earlier vegetarian emphasis was completely repressed and actually became a heresy, with Constantine reportedly ordering his men to pour molten lead down the throats of any Christians who refused to eat animal flesh.11 The original Christian teachings of mercy had to be repressed and twisted in order to be accepted by the dominant herding culture, and the enlightened teaching that He who lives by the sword must die by the sword became a bitter irony.

By interpreting the transcendent divine as masculine, conventional religion deifies the masculine the same way science does, and suppresses the feminine, which nurtures and connects. Even today, when there is virtually no theologian who would dare argue that the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.