First and foremost, in no religious doctrine does a God say that we have to eat animals, he says we can if we need to but not that we have to. This means that religion still doesn’t provide a necessity for us to exploit animals and as such it still remains unnecessary and therefore impossible to morally justify.

Using a religious belief to justify killing animals is exactly the same as using a religious belief to oppress homosexuals or women. In fact, if the logic “my religion says I can eat animals” makes eating animals moral, then by default the argument “my religion says it’s okay to treat homosexuals or women as less than me” must also make oppressing homosexuals and women moral. →

Let’s imagine that you give your friend the table and they claim to be so appreciative, they say “thank you so much, you have given me this table and I will forever be grateful to you”, but then right in front of your eyes they take a sledgehammer and start destroying it. Would you be happy about that?

This is what we are doing to God with the earth. He created non-human animals and we say thank you to him everyday by driving them to extinction and killing them by the trillions. We have even genetically modified his creatures, in essence playing God ourselves, because the creatures he created for us weren’t suitable for what we wanted from them. In what reality would a God be happy that we forcibly impregnate his creatures and take their babies away from them just so that we can take something that he didn’t design for us in the first place? How can a God be pleased with us destroying rainforests that he spent time creating just so we can produce more cattle to needlessly slaughter? →

There are a multitude of passages from the Bible and indeed in the teachings of all the mainstream religions that further reinforce the idea that no religion mandates the consumption or exploitation of animals.

Hell is described as a place of eternal suffering, torment and pain and yet all you have to do is watch slaughterhouse footage to see that they too are places of eternal suffering, torment and pain. For the animals, a slaughterhouse is hell and no benevolent God or prophet could ever condone what happens inside them.

Do slaughterhouses look like the work of Jesus or the Devil? →