It has always amazed me how the same one thing can be seen by two people totally differently. Human nature is strange in that way. One man’s meat is another man’s poison, as the saying used to go, before the youth came along and decided that you can’t say “man” because women also need poison, you know.
Well, you can’t say meat because the animals have rights too and that it is their physical body, not merely meat, you savage. Where is your intelligence? Can’t you see that rights apply to all of us who feel pleasure and pain?
So as you can immediately see here, our perception of reality is quite different from another person’s. Yet we are all looking at the same reality before our eyes. And we apply our moral criteria in a subjective and whimsical way that ignores logic. Because logic is relative, isn’t it? Some may beg to differ.
In other words, we will never have a full agreement on what reality is or what constitutes a moral and ethical existence for all of us on earth. Some are more inclusive than others. You may want to include women in your discussion on humans, since it’s not just about men, and I may want to include all mammals since they all feel exactly like a human does, in my observation.
To me killing a cow is like killing a human. Both suffer in the same way, so I can’t discriminate between these creatures when it comes to who we can abuse and torture and murder and who we cannot. That’s just how I roll. Me and about a billion Hindus in India. You got a problem with that? That’s your ignorance, not mine. It’s not my fault that you can’t see logically the natural conclusion of your philosophy of life on earth.
And the same can be said about many points of view or perceptions of reality here on earth among humanity. There is no clear single perception. We are all clouded or biased by our morality, which is groomed into us in childhood by our community. So who gets to determine what is good and true or what is not? We constantly fight over it.
Well nowadays it appears as if the western world is being steered toward a more and more liberal perception of reality by the year. The east too maybe, in its own way. For example, a few centuries ago it was fine to enslave black African people because they were more primitive than the rest in science. Those who were black, from Africa, did not have the same rights as the more powerful Europeans and Arabs. The black man could be enslaved, sold, tortured, abused and killed as your property. That was morally fine.
Today we look back at those days as if we were mad, crazy, totally insane, disgusting and barbaric. Well that’s how I look at cow killing. You were only too happy to extend rights to Africans because they feel the pain of abuse like anyone else. Well what if I told you that, from my perspective of reality, the cows and all other mammals, also feel the pain, exactly like a black African, and exactly like any human being. They have the same nervous system. So how can we be fine with their abuse, torture and murder?
My perception of reality doesn’t compute the logic, or the ethics of it. And all 1 billion of us in India and around the world have a problem with it. That’s how it is when you are a peace lover. I’m just saying. It’s actually the compassionate and peaceful way to see life. So who is right and who is wrong? Strangely there is no hard and fast rule that can be decided here. Both sides of the argument think that they are correct. It’s a moral grey area. And your stance on the dark side or the light side of that grey zone depends on your subjective view of reality and on your grooming as a child.
And it’s the same for all of life. Right and wrong are subjective and the bar shifts to the left or the right over the millennia, to the light or to the dark side. We look back at our ancestors as savages and barbarians who practiced slavery and heterosexuality – the primitives. What we’re they thinking. One day we will look back at today and say the same thing. Those primitive ancestors of ours practiced mass slaughter and sodomy, the savages. Degraded themselves to the level of animals.
And it isn’t all evolution over time. Often it’s devolution over time. For example, India was vegetarian way back in its earliest history, when it was still called Bharata, before the Moghul or British invasions. Now they have lost that moral high ground due to contamination by the invading barbarians. What to do?
So life on earth appears to be a never-ending clash of cultures, of norms, of standards of morality, of truth and illusion, of right and wrong. Therefore, is there really an absolute truth, unchanging and always self-evident? Like gravity and mathematics. Well some may say yes, though as we know, even science gets outdated, found wanting and then updated all the time. What was science in the past is no longer science today. It happens all the time as we find out more information by trial and error.
One thing is true though. We all feel pleasure and pain, all warm blooded creatures. And we all frown at a life where one creature’s pleasure depends on another’s pain, where I gain pleasure from your pain. We all think that is wrong. Or do we? Maybe we should ask ourselves these hard questions. And this has nothing to do with religion or any imaginary construct. This is about life on earth and what is staring us in the face on the ground all the time. It’s about living with yourself in honesty. And giving all others the same right to life that you have, because the difference between them and you is... zero.
image: source