Converting into a Vegetarian for Love is the First Negative Reason for being a Vegetarian!

Sanjeev posted this in Reasons for being a Vegetarian on February 23rd, 2009

Though I became a vegetarian to start with because I fell in love with a vegetarian woman (I am a Vegetarian by Choice), I think it is a negative reason to become a vegetarian because:

 

  1. It does not pass the test of Universal Truth:
  2. It can be used to argue a case both for and against the cause of vegetarianism

 It does not pass the test of Universal Truth:

 

I think that turning into a vegetarian because you happen to be in love (with a vegetarian) does not pass the test of Universal truth. If the answer to the question – Should you always do what the person you love does? – is an irrevocable, unambiguous and always YES, then it can be termed as a universal truth. I am sure that no one believes this. People with different interests meet and fall in love and continue to follow their different hobbies while living happily with each other. People of divergent faiths live together as lovers, life partners and do not adopt each others religion because they do not feel the necessity to do that. I even know of people who follow different diet plans (one spouse being a vegetarian and the other who would eat anything that walks with its back to the sky).

 

It can be used to argue a case both for and against the cause of vegetarianism

 

  1. It is not a reason that one can give to others to convert to a vegetarian diet. What if the person you want to convert falls in love with a non-vegetarian? Theirs will be a union made in heaven since both love the same kind of kind – animal variety. And in the process you would have lost the chance of converting even one of them into your own kind, that is, a vegetarian.
  2. It is not a reason which can be marketed to convert all the non vegetarians in the world to become vegetarians. The non-veggies will start a counter movement to try to convert vegetarians into non-vegetarians if they were to fall in love with one of their kind. After all if love can make a non-vegetarian into a vegetarian, then by the same token it should be possible to make a vegetarian into a non-vegetarian. It will depend on who is hit harder. Like in my case, I was hit by the cupid harder than my better half and so I capitulated. Of course having said this let me also acknowledge that it is a lot tougher to convert a vegetarian into a meat eater than to do the reverse. Why? I think we will take that up in some other post, some other time!
  3. In these times when a relationship does not last long and divorce rates are high, what will happen if your subsequent partner was a non-vegetarian? Will you then reconvert? And how many times will you do that? Are you going to change you diet preferences to suit the partner that you are currently in relationship with?

 

Thus it is obvious that being hit by the cupid is not a reason to become a vegetarian. One can become a vegetarian because of this, but it is not a reason that can be applied in general or marketed well to build a movement. It is also not a sustainable reason. That is why I call it a negative reason. In fact had I not become a vegetarian because of my wife, I might not even have thought of it as a reason worth even mentioning!

 

In my next post we will get more serious and I will take up the second negative reason to become vegetarian– Health.

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What Are NOT My Reasons for Being a Vegetarian?

Sanjeev posted this in Negative Reasons to be a Vegetarian on February 21st, 2009

This website is about being a Vegetarian by Choice. I have also stated in my earlier posts that I am a Vegetarian by choice. In my first post – I am a Vegetarian by Choice – I have mentioned that for the first 29 years of my life, I used to eat meat but later became a vegetarian because I met a woman I wanted to marry and she was a vegetarian. I have remained a vegetarian after that (now it is almost 16 years since my conversion to vegetarianism) and I think it is a good idea to become and remain a vegetarian for life. Before I get into those reasons, which I term as POSITIVE REASONS TO BE A VEGETARIAN, I would like to talk about what are NOT my reasons for being a vegetarian, and I term them as NEGATIVE REASONS FOR BEING A VEGETARIAN.

 

I am also going to break this article onto several posts because a single post will be too long to list what I think are the negative reasons for being a vegetarian.

 

To begin with, what is meant by Negative Reasons for being a vegetarian?

 

We human beings have something that we believe animals do not have – intellect. It is the ability to think rationally based on certain individual belief systems to arrive at a decision which is translated into action.  I am sure animals too have it but it is perhaps rudimentary and dictated by the survival instinct, that is hardwired, and hence the decisions that they would take can always be predicted and are always the same. This also means that in a given situation all members of the same species will act similarly.

 

This is not so in case of human beings. We use very complex software in our head coupled with what our heart says and arrive at decisions which can vary from one person to the other – that is under similar circumstances two people can arrive at different answer to the same problem depending on their own belief systems and experiences. The reasons for such decision can both be right or wrong when judged against the accepted universal truths or universally accepted end results.

 

For example, it is a universally accepted truth that treachery is a crime. (Why, because I am sure that there is no one is this world who would like to be betrayed). However history is replete with examples of people who betrayed their country and spied for foreign or enemy states. There can be umpteen arguments to justify or denounce the actions of the traitors. However if the arguments fail against the universally accepted truths, then it is a negative reason.

 

Therefore, when I term a reason as the Negative Reason what I mean is that the reason given is not based on a universal truth or a universally accepted end result and therefore the decision will turn out to be different depending on who takes that decision. In that respect I think that all animals act out of positive reasons (their actions are always same for a given set of circumstances) and most humans act out of negative reasons!

 

Thus Negative Reasons for being vegetarian would mean that the given reason would fail the test of universal or natural truth and therefore one will be able to argue both for and against the case with equal ease.

 

As a vegetarian one would like to see that a movement begins and grows that gives you the power of irrefutable logic to convert a meat eater into your way of thinking.  A negative reason will not give you that leverage because one can argue both for and against the proposition if you base you propaganda on a “negative reason”. And that is something you as a vegetarian would not want. So we need to find some good positive reasons basis which we can market the vegetarian way of life and get people to become vegetarians by choice.

 

Before we find what those positive reasons for vegetarianism are, we need to understand and discard the negative reasons first.

 

And what are the negative reasons for being vegetarian or what are not my reasons for being a vegetarian? They are:

 

  1. Being a vegetarian because you are in love with a vegetarian.
  2. Being a vegetarian because it is supposed to be more healthy.
  3. Being a vegetarian for religious reasons.
  4. Being a vegetarian for Moral reasons, that is, being a vegetarian because of the belief that one should not kill animals!!

Am I out of my mind? No way.

 

All the above reasons are not good reasons.

 

They are all negative and will not stand the test of time.

 

I’ll take them one by one in my coming posts.

 

So stay tuned.

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