On the one hand, God prescribes a vegetarian diet in the Garden of Eden and the apocalyptic visions of Isaiah and John imply the restoration of a vegetarian diet. However, it is also clear that God permits, Jesus partakes in, and Paul sanctions the eating of flesh.
Many biblical scholars believe that Jesus was a vegetarian. Jesus' message is one of love and compassion, and there is nothing loving or compassionate about factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals live miserable lives and die violent, bloody deaths.
In this passage, God prescribes a plant-based diet not just for humans, but for all land-based non-human animals. Christian vegetarians and vegans point out that it was this creation—where all creatures ate plants—that God then declared "very good" in verse 31.
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. ' And it was so. In these verses, God institutes a plant-based diet for both humans and non-human animals alike.
There is no direct statement on the subject by Jesus in the New Testament. The story of Jesus feeding fish to people would support the view that Jesus may have been a pescatarian. Paul seems to have been more open to meat eating, but even Paul was open to vegetarianism.
They ate from the trees in the garden and didn't need to labor for food. While they had dominion over the animals, they didn't need for animals for clothing, labor or food and did not yet have a desire to eat meat, though it seems meat eating was permissible.
Let's look directly at Genesis 9:3, the verse that Jews have cited countless times over the millennia to justify the eating of meat. Yes, Genesis 9:3 does quote God as saying, “Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat.”
Jainism. Jainism is a nontheistic religion based in India that embodies the ahimsa principles of non-violence, so some strict Jains follow a vegetarian or vegan diet.
Plant-based eating is deeply rooted in three of the prominent religions practiced in India – Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. All these religions believe in the concept of Ahimsa, which means kindness and non-violence towards all living things.
Although many humans choose to eat both plants and meat, earning us the dubious title of “omnivore,” we're anatomically herbivorous. The good news is that if you want to eat like our ancestors, you still can: Nuts, vegetables, fruit, and legumes are the basis of a healthy vegan lifestyle.
On the one hand, God prescribes a vegetarian diet in the Garden of Eden and the apocalyptic visions of Isaiah and John imply the restoration of a vegetarian diet. However, it is also clear that God permits, Jesus partakes in, and Paul sanctions the eating of flesh.
There are four reasons that overlap with the reasons anyone else might give: concern for the environment, concern for animals, concern for human welfare, and the desire to adopt a more healthy diet. In addition, Christians might be inspired by long religious traditions of fasting from meat and other animal products.
What did Jesus eat on a typical day? The short answer: a lot of bread. Bread was a staple in the typical daily diet in the first-century Greco-Roman world, supplemented with limited amounts of local fruits and vegetables, oil, and salt. Bread in first-century Galilee would have been made with wheat or barley flour.
A long passage in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra shows the Buddha speaking out very forcefully against meat consumption and unequivocally in favor of vegetarianism, since the eating of the flesh of fellow sentient beings is said by him to be incompatible with the compassion that a Bodhisattva should strive to cultivate.
It is also true that there are some Hindu deities who are offered meat. Most famously, goats are regularly offered to the Hindu goddess Kali. Meat offerings are also not uncommon in Nepal, a majority Hindu nation. But the vast majority of food offerings to Hindu deities today are vegetarian in nature.
One of the earliest followers of what we now consider a vegan diet was Arab philosopher and poet Al-Maʿarri who abstained from animal products for his health and beliefs on the transmigration of souls and animal welfare.
Most Christians in the Western Hemisphere eat meat. Though a small vegetarian/vegan minority exists, for the most part Christianity in North and South America is a meat-eating religion.
This summer also saw the publication of Kosher Modern, a cookbook designed to make the stringent dietary rules of observant Jews – no pork, no shellfish, no mixing of milk and meat – an opportunity rather than a constraint.
The year prior, an online poll of 1,700 people interested in vegetarianism found that 49 percent of the Christians who responded were vegetarian or vegan compared to 61 percent of the atheists and 60 percent of the Buddhists.
One of the teachings prohibits taking the life of any person or animal. Many Buddhists interpret this to mean that you should not consume animals, as doing so would require killing. Buddhists with this interpretation usually follow a lacto-vegetarian diet.
Today, it's generally the case that vegetarianism is considered a personal choice in Theravada and Tibetan Buddhism: most eat meat, and others are vegetarian, pescatarian, or vegan. Vegetarianism is more common in Mahayana schools, and particularly in the Chinese, Koreaean, and Vietnamese traditions, and in the West.
The only dietary restrictions specified for Christians in the New Testament are to "abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meat of strangled animals" (Acts 15:29), teachings that the early Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen, preached for believers to follow.
According to the spiritual texts of two of the world's major religions, God did not put animals on Earth for human consumption, but to live in harmony with us as we are both a part of nature.
Prohibited foods that may not be consumed in any form include all animals—and the products of animals—that do not chew the cud and do not have cloven hoofs (e.g., pigs and horses); fish without fins and scales; the blood of any animal; shellfish (e.g., clams, oysters, shrimp, crabs) and all other living creatures that ...
No; our guts aren't long enough, and our teeth don't quite fit the bill. We are, it seems, omnivores; our bodies can handle both meat and plant matter pretty well. It's not quite that simple, though. Just looking at an animal's teeth and gut is no surefire way to distinguish its diet.