This probably isn't really the place to discuss the particulars of vegetarianism, yeah. It's not exactly a religion, though it's part of some (as per the gates mentioned above).
Still, it mostly depends on how you define harm. It's certainly
painless (for the plants -- less so for the animals that end up dead to clear farmland et al), because (any known, anyway) plants are incapable of feeling pain, just like most insects, certain sea-dwelling macro-organisms, etc., etc. Pain is a fairly well defined phenomena from a physiological perspective, last I paid attention to that sort of thing.
And it's hard to say damage is really a fair qualifier -- there's plants that have to catch fire to continue their lifecycle, and many that have being eaten (sometimes to the death, iirc) in a similar position. Plus there's plenty of cases where damage is not
harm -- see human exercise, ferex. Even straight up individual plant destruction is somewhat difficult to support as being substantially harmful -- plants that aren't kept to a stable population can and will end up driving themselves to extinction, and often times killing specific (diseased, ferex) plants is both relatively good for the plant itself (less net damage, same end results), and substantially good for every other of its kind in the vicinity.
Unthinking, short-sighted vegetarianism -- the sort that ends up driving animals and plants to extinction (aka agriculture
) -- can definitely be harmful, though. Rub to that is that that's not really saying much. Unthinking, short-sighted just-about-anything can be harmful, heh. On the other hand, you could almost certainly run a vegetarian system that's a full on net good (i.e. net reduction of harm compared to an undisturbed system, by the heuristic being used), for the people subsisting off it, for the general plant population involved, for most individual plants included, for the associated fauna biosphere, and so on, and so forth. Might even be possible to manage that with a non-vegetarian food production system, if difficult
and sub-par -- the right kind of suffering makes the meat taste better ♫---
As for the 3D printing, obviously the resources for it are going to have to come from
somewhere, and that somewhere is almost certainly going to be reached by climbing over the corpses of mass populations of animals and plants. I'd almost wager that reliable, fully effective, non-animal replacements for meat will be the last death knell for most of the animal world. When we don't even care enough to keep them around to eat, we're going to expend significantly less effort keeping many (or any) of them around :V
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Topic: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion (Read 684539 times)