Religion

Many of the oldest religions start from not killing

By WhyStopHarmingAnimals.com

Many of the oldest religious traditions start from a world without killing, or from a rule against it[2][5][6][7][9][19]. Genesis opens with humans and animals eating plants[2]. Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism put non-harm at the center of their ethics[5][6][7], centuries before anyone thought of a hamburger. Zoroastrian cosmology begins and ends without meat[9], and later writers remember Zoroaster and many of his priests as meatless[11][12][14]. A Cherokee account of the origin of disease begins with humans, plants and animals living together in peace[19]. Where killing animals for food does appear in these stories, it arrives later, as a step away from how things began[2][9][19].

Genesis and Isaiah

In the first chapter of Genesis, God creates humankind in his image (Genesis 1:26–27)[1][2] and then assigns food[2]. Genesis 1:29–30 reads: "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food[2]. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food[2]." Humans get seeds and fruit[2]; every animal gets green plants[2]. Nobody in this world is given another creature to eat[2], and the first humans, Adam and Eve, eat plants[2].

Meat is not granted as food until after the flood[2], in a world the story has described as filled with violence. In Genesis 9:3 God tells Noah: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything[2]." The permission is real, and it reads as a concession to a changed world[2]. TheTorah.com, a site of Jewish biblical scholarship, sets out the same reading: Genesis 1 describes a herbivorous creation, meat enters only after the flood, and Talmudic and modern interpreters treat vegetarianism as the original plan[3].

Isaiah looks forward to a world like the first one[4]. Isaiah 11:6–9 describes a restored creation in which "the wolf shall live with the lamb"[4], the lion eats straw[4], a child plays at the den[4], and "they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain[4]." The holy mountain is a place where nothing is killed[4].

Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism

In the traditions that grew up in ancient India, non-harm is less a story about the past than a rule for the present. The word is ahimsa: non-violence toward all beings[5]. Post-Vedic Hindu texts raise it to a central virtue and favor vegetarian offerings over animal sacrifice, and Hindu ethical teaching moved toward vegetarian practice[5]. Jainism, a śramaṇa tradition that arose alongside early Buddhism and is among the oldest living religions, makes non-violence toward all living creatures its core practice[6], according to the Harvard Pluralism Project. The Jain vegetarian diet follows directly from that rule, which makes not killing the first thing Jain ethics asks of a meal[6].

The first Buddhist precept is to refrain from taking life[7]. Mahayana scriptures, including the Laṅkāvatāra and Mahāparinirvāṇa sutras, go further and denounce eating meat as the extinction of compassion[7], and East Asian monastic Buddhism built vegetarian kitchens on that teaching[7]. Practice varies[7]. As The Conversation lays out, Theravada Buddhists differ on whether and when they eat meat, though across the traditions the ethic still centers on not taking life[7]. A 2014 review by Leitzmann in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society concludes that Hinduism and Buddhism have recommended a vegetarian way of life since their conception, and that the earliest human food cultures were plant-based[8].

The meatless founders of Zoroastrianism

Zoroastrian cosmology tells a parallel story. As Britannica summarizes it, the first human couple fed on water, then plants, then milk, and only then meat[9]. In the final millennia the sequence runs in reverse[9], and meat is the first thing given up[9]. The perfect world, at both its beginning and its end, has no need for a knife[9].

Ancient writers describe the founder the same way. Pliny the Elder reports that Zoroaster lived for years in the wilderness on cheese[11]. Diogenes Laertius says the Magi, the Zoroastrian priests, dressed in white, slept on the ground and ate vegetables, cheese and coarse bread[12]. Porphyry, citing Eubulus, says the first and most learned class of Magi neither killed nor ate anything living[13]. Colin Spencer, in his history of vegetarianism The Heretic's Feast, writes that Zoroaster was a vegetarian who also disavowed animal sacrifice[14]. These are Greek and Roman observers of a foreign religion, and that should be kept in mind, but the tradition also speaks for itself. In the ninth century the High Priest Ādurpād ī Ēmēdān, in Denkard Book VI, told Zoroastrians: be plant-eaters, so that you may live long; keep away from the body of farm animals; Ohrmazd created plants in great number for helping animals and people[15]. Mazdakism, a Zoroastrian sect, later made vegetarianism an explicit rule[15]. Not every later Zoroastrian followed this, but the founder[11][14], many of his priests[12] and the stories of the world's beginning and end[9] all point the same way.

The family at the head of the early church

Early Christianity has its own meatless figures. Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius in his Church History (2.23), says that James the Just, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, was holy from the womb, drank no wine and ate no flesh[16].

Some historians go further. James Tabor, a historian of Christian origins, follows Keith Akers in arguing that Jesus himself ate no meat or fish[17]. John the Baptist and James are both remembered as meatless, and in this reading the few gospel stories involving fish fail tests of authenticity[17]. Akers reconstructs the Jewish-Christian movement known as the Ebionites as vegetarian, nonviolent and opposed to temple animal sacrifice, and reads the cleansing of the temple as an act against the meat market at the center of worship[18]. This is a minority view among New Testament scholars, though it is made by serious ones[17]. What is not disputed is how James is remembered.

A Cherokee beginning

The same shape appears on another continent. James Mooney recorded the Cherokee account of how disease and medicine began[19]. In the beginning humans, plants and animals lived together in equality and mutual helpfulness, without killing[19]. When humans grew aggressive and started eating the animals, the animals invented diseases to keep them in check[19]. The plants stayed friendly and offered themselves as medicine[19]. The Cherokee hunted, and the story is not a dietary rule. But as in Eden, the world is whole until people begin to kill animals, and the trouble starts there[2][19].

A Hebrew creation account, a Persian cosmology and a Cherokee origin story share no common source, yet they place the killing of animals in the same spot: after the beginning, as a loss[2][9][19]. The traditions of India made the same judgment into a daily rule[5][6][7]. Across all of them, the world as it should be is one where nobody has to die to feed someone else.