This Atheist Is Going Vegetarian
Once upon a time, I ate meat. Even though I’m an atheist Five Guys cheeseburgers answered my prayers. Tasty Burger was my church. Kentucky Fried Chicken my Messiah.
Those days are behind me.
I have decided to be a vegetarian. It’s been something I was thinking about for a few months. And I’d like to say I made two columns and wrote out the pros and cons of never eating meat again. However, that was not the case. You see, my decision is based on my heart and not my head.
It boils down to the ethics of meat-eating. I came to realize I couldn’t be complicit with the infliction of misery on my fellow animals.
The famous evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins shaped my opinion and helped to make the move to vegetarianism.
He discussed the matter with philosopher Peter Singer and this is what Professor Dawkins had to say:
It implies that all of us who are eating meat, including me, are in a very difficult moral position. What I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm and it requires a level of… social courage, which I haven’t yet produced, to break out of that. It’s a little bit like the position which anybody, not everybody but many people, would have been in a couple of hundreds of years…
