To be human

Not much has hap­pened on this blog recent­ly, because I have been tired a lot. Last week it turned out that I have a vit­a­min B12 defi­cien­cy, which may explain the tired­ness. I had this defi­cien­cy before and have been tak­ing vit­a­min B12 sup­ple­ments since then, but appar­ent­ly I didn’t take enough. My ener­gy lev­els …

Farm animals in the Global Goals

The Glob­al Goals were launched in Sep­tem­ber last year. These suc­ces­sors of the Mil­len­ni­um Devel­op­ment Goals try to give a com­plete pic­ture of how we can improve our world. The goals are based on exten­sive con­sul­ta­tion of stake­hold­ers. The most impor­tant out­come is the real­iza­tion that pover­ty reduc­tion and a sus­tain­able soci­ety are two sides …

Christians and animals

Any­one who takes up the task of explain­ing the ethics behind veg­an­ism, draws their main argu­ments from the book Ani­mal Lib­er­a­tion by Peter Singer. Time to read this clas­sic from 1975 for myself. Singer is a util­i­tar­i­an, which means his ulti­mate goal is to min­i­mize the amount of suf­fer­ing in the world. Oth­er moral sign­posts, …

The wolf and the lamb

I was intro­duced to the prin­ci­ple of non-vio­­lence by the books of Gand­hi and Tol­stoy. These authors made it clear that liv­ing non-vio­­len­t­­ly meant that they did not eat meat. After I had been veg­e­tar­i­an for a few years, I began to feel like a hyp­ocrite because I still ate the prod­ucts of the ani­mals …

Precious life

There are many rea­sons to not eat meat, all of which are valid in them­selves: The impact on the envi­ron­ment, a fair dis­tri­b­u­tion of food, your own health… But today I want to look at the moral prin­ci­ple: Is it bad to kill and eat an ani­mal? This will inevitably bring up some ele­ments from …