Hail Seitan!
There Are Seven Fundamental Tenets:
I - One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
II - The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
III - One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
IV - The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
V - Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
VI - People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any
harm that might have been caused.
VII - Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Since in the modern age we can obtain all of the nutrition we need from a well-planned plant-based diet, by buying & consuming animal products, we participate in unnecessary cruelty to sentient beings
I can make an argument that being non-vegan in the modern age is violating all seven of these tenets
Tenet I : It’s neither reasonable, nor compassionate or empathetic, to needlessly exploit & take the life of a creature when we have moral agency & alternatives, unlike other animals.
Tenet II : It’s true that it’s legal to exploit & unalive animals today, but it was also legal to own slaves in the past. Just because we’re legally allowed to do something doesn’t mean we should.
Tenet III : One’s body being inviolable and subject to their own will alone should extend to all sentient beings. If it doesn’t, Name The Trait in a way that doesn’t lead to contradiction or absurdity
That is - Name The Trait different between humans and other animals that makes it okay to do things to other animals that we wouldn’t be okay with being done to humans.
I.e. justify the speciesist discrimination and double standard and differential treatment.
Tenet IV : We should be free to tell people they’re hypocrites for loving dogs & eating cows, or even for participating in the exploitative pet industry instead of adopting/rescuing companion animals.
Even if this is offensive to people. It’s freedom of speech and necessary for the activism and the struggle for justice that should prevail above laws and institutions (Tenet II).
To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of other sentient beings, is to forgo your own right to be respected like you would be if you first gave respect to other individuals (animals).
Tenet V : Insisting we need to eat meat or animal products to be healthy despite that disagreeing with scientific consensus, is distorting scientific facts to fit your beliefs,
& not conforming beliefs to your best scientific understanding of the world.
It’s denying reality,
burying your head in the sand to avoid confronting the truth,
& living in ignorance & delusion & the willfull, unnecessary destruction & oppression of others, self, & planet.
Tenet VI : Assuming that we are already perfect & couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong or unjust, despite every historical society participating in normalized injustice, is not recognizing humans
are fallible.
And, when confronted with your mistake, in the form of what your kind have raised you to traditionally participate in regarding unnecessary systemic exploitation & violence to sentient beings,
if your response is to deflect, close your ears, & refuse to take personal responsibility or change any behavior, is to not do one’s best to rectify it & resolve any harm that might have been caused.
then that is to not right the wrong and fundamentally unjust relationship between humans and other animals and resolve it into one of harmonious and respectful coexistence.
Rather than one of needless exploitation, domination, violence, cruelty, and oppression.
Finally, Tenet VII : To claim that because these tenets do not specifically mention an obligation to not exploit & harm non-human animals unnecessarily & to be vegan, that means it isn’t entailed by
the values underlying them, is to not let every tenet serve as guiding principles designed to inspire nobility in action & thought & not allow the spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice to prevail
over the written or spoken word.
Firstly, I am concerned here with the ethics of animal exploitation, not the environment - I care about the environment too, and we can even make the argument that making environmentally sustainable/low impact choices as much as we can is aligned with the tenets of TST as well, by proxy of their impact on humans and other animals, or by extending concern to plants and the environment itself. But that wasn’t the point of my post, or of sending that paper and article from OurWorldInData - which is well-sourced and based on countless different studies. It’s simply to debunk the claim that we are harming more plants or more of the environment by being vegan. It’s clear based on the laws of thermodynamics and our entire scientific understanding of how biology and agriculture work, in addition to specific evidence regarding plant & crop use & deforestation & climate change etc in animal agriculture, that significantly more plants are harmed by a life based on animal exploitation than a life based on using plants directly.
Even if the mass animal breeding/exploitation/subjugation/killing of animals was environmentally sustainable, it would violate the ethical principles of The Satanic Temple as well as those entailed by the values underlying human rights - as animal rights/sentient rights are a logical extension of human rights principles. If human slavery was better for the environment, and abolishing it was somehow worse, it still would be morally obligatory to not knowingly & unnecessarily participate in human slavery while it was legal. The same can be argued for animal exploitation today, though we do know it’s significantly better for the environment, climate & overall planet - regardless of nitpicking one particular study, the biggest of its kind, there are countless others echoing the same findings.
Joseph Poore’s quote was with The Guardian in 2018 who he spoke to regarding the paper. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth#%3A~%3Atext=“A+vegan+diet+is+probably%2CUK%2C+who+led+the+research.
Again, this is the biggest study that’s ever been done on the environmental impact of food systems, it’s a peer reviewed study and it’s been accepted by the larger scientific community, and what it says aligns with the broader scientific consensus of many other studies. Even the United Nations and IPCC have agreed we need to shift to plant based diets to avoid the worst effects of climate change and ecological collapse - I know, authorities can be wrong, but the data doesn’t lie.
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century Michael B. Eisen, Patrick O. Brown https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pclm.0000010 https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/02/new-model-explores-link-animal-agriculture-climate-change https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pclm.0000010 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22905381/meat-dairy-eggs-climate-change-emissions-rewilding
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/5/1/kgae024/7942019
“Without changing human diets, it’s impossible to halt global warming” “Researchers have shown that even when accounting for future improvements in agriculture and reductions in food waste, shifting the diets of consumers toward plant-based foods remains essential for meeting climate targets.” - Richard Waite & Daniel Vennard, World Resources Institute
Study finds that all dietary patterns cause more GHG emissions than the 1.5 degrees global warming limit allows. Only the vegan diet was in line with the 2 degrees threshold, while all other dietary patterns trespassed the threshold partly to entirely. See “How Compatible Are Western European Dietary Patterns to Climate Targets? Accounting for Uncertainty of Life Cycle Assessments by Applying a Probabilistic Approach” - MDPI, by Johanna Ruett, Lena Hennes, Jens Teubler and Boris Braun. Institute of Geography, University of Cologne, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. Sustainability journal, 2022. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/21/14449 “All dietary pattern carbon footprints overshoot the 1.5 degrees threshold. The vegan, vegetarian, and diet with low animal-based food intake were predominantly below the 2 degrees threshold. Omnivorous diets with more animal-based product content trespassed them. Reducing animal-based foods is a powerful strategy to decrease emissions. However, further mitigation strategies are required to achieve climate goals.”
Vegetarian and especially vegan diets have consistently been shown to cause the least climate impact in the Nordic modelling studies (25,29,33,54,60) (Table 1). https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Yearly-per-capita-carbon-footprint-associated-with-each-diet-scenario_fig2_334861515
In the sensitivity analysis, the environmental footprint of vegan diets is between 5% (CH4) and 38% (water use) of the footprint of high meat-eaters. For low meat-eaters, the impact is between 37% (land use) and 67% (water use) of high meat-eaters. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w#%3A~%3Atext=In+the+sensitivity+analysis%2C+the,)%20of%20high%20meat%2Deaters.
Scientific facts over beliefs? Or beliefs over scientific facts? Which is it going to be?
i don’t think this is true. can you support it?
Firstly, surely you agree being compassionate to all creatures (animals) is entailed, since that is literally the first tenet, right?
Secondly, outside of the context of TST, I contend that non-human animal rights/sentient rights are entailed as a consequence of belief in human rights, for a number of reasons: because humans are animals, so if we are believing in human rights we are already believing in a form of animal rights or animal rights for one species of animal, and often humans also believe in an at least stronger form of rights & higher standards of respect for companion animals like dogs & cats than other non-human animals, which again demonstrates that they believe in animal rights for some species, including not just humans but even some non-human animals; because human animals (one species of animal) and non-human animals (all of the species of animals excluding humans), as groups, both include sentient beings/individuals, and almost all non-human animals are confirmed by our best available scientific understanding of the world to be sentient and to think, feel and experience many of the same things we do in response to the same actions; and because there’s no logically consistent way of justifying withholding from/denying rights to (especially negative rights to not be unnecessarily, opportunistically harmed, exploited & killed by human moral agents with alternatives) non-human animals/sentient beings, in a way that actually attempts to explain the reasoning between the differential treatment/speciesist discrimination, without also denying them from certain cases of humans (& dogs & cats) or leading to absurdity. And a variety of other reasons.
One very compelling argument for non-human animal rights being logically entailed from most humans’ views on human rights is the Name the Trait argument by AskYourself which is an evolution of the age-old argument from marginal cases in animal rights theory. It challenges the person who believes in withholding those rights from non-human animals, or finding it ok to do things to them that would violate those hypothetical moral or legal rights, while not holding the same view for humans and believing it to be morally impermissible to withhold from or violate those rights when it comes to humans (or, sometimes even dogs & cats, who if you don’t find it ok to exploit & kill for unnecessary products, would mean you would face even more of a challenge justifying doing or being okay with doing those actions to other animals), to name the trait either present or lacking in non-human animals that justifies doing to them what you wouldn’t think is justified to do to humans. You can also extend this style of argumentation to asking someone to justify the discrimination & differential standards of respect between dogs & other non-human animals, and even apply it to forms of discrimination between humans as well (agree with me or not, I also advocate for LGBT rights & women’s rights, and I’ve found the Name the Trait argument very effective in those contexts and other human rights discussions by equalizing situations and individuals and challenging the logical consistency (or inconsistency) of different arguments used to justify forms of discrimination).
if we are believing in human rights we are already believing in a form of animal rights or animal rights for one species of animal…
i know this is a hot take, but i don’t, personally believe in any rights at all. so this falls flat for me, though i suppose some might find it compelling.
but for those who do, i would ask if “right” is the correct term for the motivation to treat animals well. i’d say it’s more about doing the right thing, not respecting a right.
so? sentience isn’t the basis of the axiom of being compassionate to creatures.
again, i don’t really believe in rights, so this is shaky, at best. but to try to deal with the claims about the distinction between people and animals, i’d admit its speciesist, but go further and say that speciesism in necessary for correct action. you shouldn’t treat lions like cows, or dogs like fish. and you shouldn’t treat animals like humans.
there is no reason to limit it to animals. where can you find any justification for that?
I never said we should limit it to animals. I specifically said we can include plants and other organisms or phenomena in our moral consideration as well as animals, and the most optimal actions (veganism) would still remain the same (since that causes the least harm to all of them) and the entailed actions would be unaffected in most situations. More strawmanning. And you avoided the question. The question isn’t about whether “only” being compassionate to creatures is entailed by a human rights based reading of the tenets of TST, it’s just about whether being compassionate to all creatures is “entailed” by it period (it’s kind of a rhetorical question, because the answer must be yes if you’re actually following the tenets since it literally says it there). I have spoken in depth about the plants tho objection and explained both why it’s rational - in a consistent manner - to prioritize entities we know are sentient over entities we don’t know are sentient, but also why the best thing to do if we want to protect plants or other non-animal organisms is also to be vegan anyway, so there’s no point saying anything more about that.
this is so intellectually dishonest, we are done. stop talking to me
It’s not intellectually dishonest. I’ve literally never said that. From the beginning as soon as people made the plants objection I stated that we could include them in our moral consideration too, not harm them unnecessarily, and that being vegan was the best thing we could do for them. I also made cases for why we should prioritize beings we know are sentient (aka most animals) over organisms we don’t know are sentient (aka non-animal organisms, including plants). That doesn’t mean not considering the organisms that haven’t been proven to be sentient. Just like someone who valued humans over other animals but was still vegan because they thought other animals still mattered, and mattered more than many humans’ arbitrary habits that they have replacements for, isn’t necessarily saying we should limit moral consideration to humans just because they would prioritize humans over other animals in a situation where their fundamental interests conflicted or you could only save one of them. It’s simply bad faith strawmanning to claim that’s their view when it isn’t. And it’s the same as what you’re doing.
For the last time:
Animals being confirmed sentient and holding higher moral priority in my eyes doesn’t mean limiting it to them or excluding plants from consideration.
More plants (and animals) are spared by being vegan and it’s far better for crop & land efficiency, & for the environment & Earth’s ecosystems as a whole, meaning better for all life on the planet - sentient or not.
stop lying. get help
NTT is a line of argument that falls afowl of the line-drawing fallacy (also called the spectrum fallacy). just because there is no single differentiating factor, or a specific collection of factors which, when considered are sufficient to distinguish one end of a spectrum from another does not entail that there is no difference between one end of the spectrum and the other. humans are different from pigs.
Yourofsky (like the guy or not but don’t ad-hominem him, address the argument not the arguer) explains it better than me through a lens of intersectionalism https://youtu.be/GH2p3TOUtR8 and btw in theories like vegetarian/vegan ecofeminism - a branch of intersectionalism, which itself stems from feminist theory - the kyriarchy, as described as “a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission” has frequently been talked about as including speciesism as one of its many forms.
if you find the yourofsky speech you linked to be compelling, even an answer to the question i asked, we should end this. i don’t think you’re qualified to engage in the critical thinking necessary to sucessfully shoehorn your ideology into satanism.
all these rely on poore-nemecek 2018. it’s all bad science.
That’s simply false. So much for valuing scientific facts and not distorting them to suit your beliefs. I referenced multiple different studies, and also the Poore-Nemecek study is widely accepted by the larger scientific community and its general findings do align with the broader scientific consensus of other studies, even if there were hypothetically some slight mistakes or inaccuracies, which you neglected to elaborate on. You’re the one cherrypicking here by hyperfocusing on supposed methodological flaws with one study while ignoring the larger body of evidence.
poore-nemecek 2018 is a meta-analysis of LCA studies. such an analysis falls a foul of good practice because LCA studies cannot be combined, due to having disparate methodologies. The studies cited by poore-nemecek 2018 even state this explicitly.
That’s not accurate — Poore & Nemecek didn’t just lump LCAs together. They harmonized 570 studies into a standardized framework precisely to account for methodological differences. That’s why the paper is so highly cited and why its dataset is still being used by other scientists and even the IPCC. And crucially, its conclusions are backed up by dozens of other independent studies and meta-analyses, so dismissing it as ‘bad science’ is simply not credible.