Love Thy Neighbor

The deeper I investigate hate, the more illogical it becomes. Why not love all things. It doesn't require much energy, once you see the logic in it.

 

Peace and love. It's simple Hate requires so much effort.

 

I respect all of life. It is now being learned that even trees have memory and soul for lack of a better word. they feel...So do blades of grass which communicate with each other....everything does....
The expression aura...picture all of life with a light around it...everything organic included....that is life energy......If we had different eyes, we could visually see it.

 

Do you think plants experience suffering when we pull them up to eat them? To me it seems unlikely, even though the life in them is the same as the life in us, they don't have a brain or central nervous system.

That may be why some spiritual paths insist that a veggie diet is the best thing if we want to evolve.

But actually you could go further and say that not only do we kill animals, but we've bred a lot of their instinctive behaviour out of them to suit our convenience. Sheep are a good example. Wild breeds of sheep are actually pretty aggressive and would not be easy for humans to manage and thus exploit. So we create something - a freak - that nature never intended. Let's not even talk about what we've done to creatures that were originally wild wolves.

There's a certain amount of pain and suffering in the natural world, but humans have magnified it by many degrees not only in the way we treat animals, but each other too.

 

Captain Obvious says:
There's a grey area between hate and love

 

I don't know where i heard plants scream, so I don't know.....but they respond. They responded to music with a science experiment I saw happen. Ones with music grew better than ones without, and they were healthier, greener....etc........and everything else was the same exact conditions. I don't know, but I imagine they feel something.
Man does not NEED meat to survivew. there are lots of other options, but man likes meat, so he has a hard time giving that up.....
Now more than ever, people are going vegetarian.....so there is a rise in consciousness for many, too.....
Some still want to remain totally barbaric, though.....


not to mention trophy hunting, and all of the rest of the unneccesary killing to me is just barbaric.....and ashamed to be part of the human race at times.....we can do better than that.

We have to eat something, so i am not going to feel guilty eating my many salads.....but then there is the argument of fruit and other things, where you do not have to kill the root to eat something.....

 

Tomatoes like heavy metal.

 

Captain Obvious says:
There are different kinds of love.

It was a general statement anyway

 

^ I think there might be a grey area between 'all things' and 'most things'. Bacteria are living things, but if you get an infection, such as I've had over the last few days, it's not that easy to feel love for that particular bug.

 

It also depends on the circumstances. Like with insects, spiders and ants etc. They're ok outside, but get removed (or killed ) inside.

 

LOL! No, I don't have much love for bacteria or viruses, either....

Love is such a loose term that does not hold much meaning anymore....so I like to use the word respect instead.....

and what is a soul?

Elephants mourn their dead, as we do, and in some cases, for even longer periods of time....Is that soul? I think it is.....

I saw a program not too long ago where the tooth fairy visited a little girl and she asked her grandmother, why the tooth fairy did not leave anything for their dog who also lost a tooth at the same time...the grandmother replied "Because they do not have a soul..."
i was so hurt by that comment and to tell a little girl that felt so wrong to me...but what can i do about that.....nothing.

 

Hunting just for 'sport' is an anachronism and one with which I have absolutely no sympathy.

I know we kill plants, but you have to balance that against the advantages the plants get for their species because we cultivate them. I wonder how much wild rice for instance there would be in the world without humans. A tiny fraction of what is there growing in as perfect conditions as we can provide for the plants, protected from pests and diseases. And the plants would die anyway in the wild, with only a small amount of the seed or grain they produce going onto grow as the next generation.

 

Removed if they come in my place. Except spiders which I just leave alone.

 

I saw some ants in the bathroom... I hope they don't have a colony somewhere close because it is annoying for us and will end very bad for them in the end.

edit: and that while I am fascinated with them and have a lot of respect for ants!

 

That can be a problem. And where there's a few ants there's always a lot more close by.

Beetles and woodlice are the main insects I get coming in. There's a colony of small black ants in my back garden and I actually enjoy watching them sometimes. I even observed the winged males flying off a couple of years ago. Fascinating creatures, even if they can pose a problem.

 

I reckon that just by holding the views and feelings about animals you've expressed you are already doing something.

 

This was what I was getting at. Of course animals eat because of natural processes. But why would God need to include that if he can do whatever he wants?

 

Maybe it's not as much a matter of why did God want a world that hurts us a lot. Perhaps if the idea that God transcends physical reality holds any merit that could also mean that God does not look at the world like us. Everything is temporarily happily. Life has ups and downs naturally.
Maybe experiencing how good good things are is inevitable without knowing how bad the bad can be. Maybe feelings (including pain), consuming other life to live yourself (wether you're a human, alligator or musquito) and a seemingly horrible thing as death are not as bad as we perceive them, unless of course we would favor not having this dualistic experience at all? Does life seems better as a plant (without a nervous system or a brain to experience emotions at all)? Is it better to not have lived and be oblivious to this reality? I'm sure to some unlucky people or animals it is... but I can't say it ruins this whole experience for others (in most cases it clearly doesn't). Not saying this from a selfish viewpoint, although I can see how it could be regarded as such.

 

I think that actually humans increase the suffering and misery that's in nature in many ways.Look at the amount of extra suffering we inflict on each other in wars for instance.
A lion eats a gazelle and we assume the gazelle feels just like we think we would under those circumstances. But actually, the gazelle probably suffers a lot less than an animal raised under factory farming conditions.Less than a child slave labourer in Pakistan.
Some people tend to magnify the pain in the world in their own minds until it eclipses all the positive things. A lot of religious ideas are about how miserable it all is and how the only hope is some kind of escape into either the extinction of individual existence in nirvana or a Christian type heaven after death(for some). Not animals as they don't have a soul according to Christianity.

I don't see your attitude as selfish at all. It's good that there are many humans who feel that life is on balance worthwhile, something to celebrate even. We should be the ones who are pressing for change. We could eliminate so much suffering in the world, even if not all of it, if only we organized things differently and the will to do so was there in a large enough number of people. Perhaps though humans will have to evolve to a higher stage before that can happen, but even now the possibility is there to make things a lot better for ourselves and other animals. Idealistic fool? Probably, but incorrigible I'm afraid.

 

I place all living things in the category of "neighbor". I see everything as an individual due respect, until they fuck it up. That's why I prefer plants and pets to people.