Signatories of the Durban Addendum including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ela Gandhi (the granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi), Bishop Geoff Davies, Sheikh Saleem Banda, Cardinal Napier, Rabbi Hillel Avidan. photo courtesy of Sailesh Rao
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.“ Nelson Mandela.
Have you noticed how just one man used the internet and social media to hijack the peace, divide people across religious lines and cause conflagrations in the Muslim world? People are dying as a result and the majority seems powerless to stop such incidents from flaring again.
Have you also noticed how almost everyone in a public space seem to be busy swiping their fingers over their smartphones and are oblivious to their neighbors around them? Most people are disconnected to each other and to creation due to our increased digital connectivity and as an individual, I’ve felt powerless to do anything about it. Unfortunately, the more disconnected we are, the easier it becomes for an amateur video maker to divide us up and disturb the peace.
When my colleagues and I were working on the hardware infrastructure of the internet at the Ethernet standards committee in the nineties, we were mainly motivated by altruistic notions of how increased connectivity could lead to a better world. But that same increased connectivity that gave us the Tahrir square movement also gave us the Benghazi killings and the smartphone zombies. Tahrir square was an example of digital connectivity in social networks leading to concerted physical action in the real world, creating a virtuous feedback loop that snowballed into a movement. In February, I had lunch with Geoff Thompson, the head of the Ethernet standards committee during my times there and I asked him what we should do about this conundrum. His sage advice was that we have to figure out how we can truly achieve what we really set out to do – increased connectivity among people – by understanding how to trigger more uniting events such as Tahrir square, but in more diverse pursuits besides the toppling of dictators.
Last Monday, His Holiness the Dalai Lama told his 4 million Facebook friends,
“All the world’s major religions with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.”
He used the analogy of tea and water, with water being a secular ethic, say compassion, while tea is a religion that espouses it. He said,
“But however the tea is prepared, the primary ingredient is always water. While we can live without tea, we can’t live without water. Likewise, we are born free of religion, but we are not born free of the need for compassion.”
His words must have been music to the ears of my atheist and agnostic friends, many of whom abandoned their religions of birth after becoming disenchanted with some of the ingredients in the tea they were taught to brew. Our youth, in particular, have become especially disenchanted with organized religion as they are savvy enough to see through the questionable ingredients in the brew.
Now imagine that a significant secular ethic, such as compassion, can be used to unite atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and adherents of all the religions of the world in a major common cause of pressing concern, such as the healing of the planet’s ecosystems and climate. This unity can be strengthened in a virtuous feedback loop, Tahrir square style, if it included concerted action, such as the adoption of veganism. When people the world over are doing things together concertedly, unitedly and not merely talking about unity, it would make it very difficult for a crank to sow dissension with just an online video.
While compassion is a qualitative emotion or feeling, a state of being, veganism is a concrete action step that exemplifies that quality, a state of doing. Consistent with the environment in their formative era, some religions drew the line at pork, some drew the line at meat, and some drew the line at mixing milk and meat, but it is time to take a concerted step further, to modernize our tea recipes based on the world we find ourselves in today. When half the world’s forests have been destroyed and three-quarters of its ocean fisheries have been overfished and destroyed, mainly to accommodate our eating habits, with half that destruction occurring in the last 50 years alone in an exponentially growing feeding frenzy, it is high time that we take such a step together. Besides, veganism draws a line where no religion has done before, thereby making this act of renunciation meaningful for all the major religions of the world.
The stage for such unified action was set during the UN Climate Change conference, COP-17, in Durban, South Africa, last year, when 40 interfaith leaders and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, signed an Interfaith Declaration on Climate Change and presented it to Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the climate change body. Along with the declaration, the leaders signed a two sentence addendum, specifying concrete action. This Durban addendum reads as follows:
“While climate change is a symptom, the fever that our earth has contracted, the underlying disease is the disconnection from creation that plagues human societies throughout the earth. We, the undersigned, pledge to heal this disconnection by promoting and exemplifying compassion for all creation in all our actions.”
Despite his wonderful words on compassion, his web site states that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is not vegan. He has said in the past that he eats meat for medical reasons and I wish that he wouldn’t entrust his precious health to nutritional quacks. But wouldn’t it be amazing if the Dalai Lama follows up his words with this concrete action and urges his Facebook friends to go Vegan as well? With signatories of the Durban Addendum such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ela Gandhi (the granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi), Bishop Geoff Davies, Sheikh Saleem Banda, Cardinal Napier, Rabbi Hillel Avidan and others setting examples alongside, the world can truly begin to see the unity and healing that we desperately need.
I could not agree more! For years I have been disgusted by the religions who preach love and compassion but count only human beings in their moral code. I grew up Catholic and spent years writing to bishops and Catholic journals and talking to priests about how the Church refused to condemn even the most egregious forms of animal abuse, such as bullfighting. Their were two main responses: One response is that the abuse of animals involves cultural traditions that can not be eliminated because people would not give them up (so, would the Church allow infanticide if a culture practiced it?!) The other response was that only human beings have souls and reason and therefore only human beings are given moral consideration. This presents, I think, a huge problem of theodicy (the branch of theology that concerns how the goodness of God can be justified in the face of all the suffering in the world). Surely the greatest sufferers are animals. A merciful and just God, I thought, would not create animals to suffer on this earth and then not have souls to receive justice and joy in the world to come. A just God would not allow people who tormented animals to go without divine punishment. So I have developed by own spiritual tradition that is based on veganism and work for the rest of Creation. I have hoped that other people would recognize that the traditional religions have much lacking in their dogmas and moral codes that allow violence and promote intolerance toward all of creation–animals and people.
Thank you for the feedback. However, I’m aware of many Christian leaders who are seriously considering these questions especially in light of the environmental catastrophes that anthropocentric religious views have wrought. I had several conversations with Bishop Geoff Davies in Durban, South Africa and I’m confident that change is coming.
http://gentleworld.org/speciesism-and-veganism-transcending-politics-and-religion/
“What is religion? Compassion for all things, which have life.”—Hinduism
“Non-injury to living beings is the highest religion.”—Jainism
“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to beasts as well as man it is all a sham.”—Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty