(solemn flute music)
- How can we expect ourselves to have
lives of joy and freedom and spiritual clarity
when we are sowing the seeds
of the opposite of that?
- It's almost like some mad scientist
like Satan himself designed these systems
that are being used now to raise animals.
It is absolute insanity.
- I don't get how you can love everything Jesus says
and then participate in
a mechanized system of mass slaughter
that involves pain beyond your wildest imagination.
- Even keeping quiet and silent
about the violence, you are part of that violence.
- There's another passage in the Quran that says that
because of the wrongs of humanity,
there has been much corruption
seen in the oceans and on land.
- So for a few moments in which we're
enjoying what is really just a palette preference
we're taking what is most essential to animals,
their very lives and that's the opposite
of compassion, it seems to me.
- We are ashamed of our ancestors who owned slaves.
We are ashamed of our ancestors
who believed in segregation
so too, our grandchildren will be ashamed
of what we allowed to happen on our watch.
Each of us has to ask ourselves a spiritual question,
what side do I want to tell my grandchildren I was on?
Was I on the side of mercy and compassion,
or was I on the blind side that helped
to perpetuate suffering?
♪ This little light of mine ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ This little light of mine ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ This little light of mine ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine. ♪
- This one is for you.
♪ Let it shine let it shine let it shine ♪
- [Thomas] This is my daughter Melody.
She's the reason I'm making this documentary.
It's for her and it's for all the children
who will inherit whatever world we choose to leave them.
(OM-ing)
- We've got a potato.
- Thank you for this food
and let it nourish our bodies and our spirits.
Let it keep us healthy and happy
and full of life and love and compassion
for all of creation.
- And be vegan.
- Be vegan and be a champion for the people
and be a champion for the planet
and be a champion for the animals
and be a champion for ourselves.
- And for all of these things we say
thank you and so it is.
- And be champion for the animals, so it is.
- [Thomas] I haven't always been a vegan.
I was born in a small town in South Georgia
during the late 60s
and I was raised a southern Baptist
and I grew up eating the a southern version
of the standard American diet.
Comprised mainly of meat, dairy, and eggs,
mixed in with huge helpings of fast
and processed foods.
And like so many other kids eating the SAD diet,
I suffered the sad consequences
which ranged from mild asthma to
severe allergies to tons of ear infections,
sties, viruses and zits and too many more ailments
that were considered normal to list.
(ragtime music)
Okay...um...I'm making this video
for, you know, my family back home and uh...
Um...I'm making this...okay,
I'm making this video...I'm looking at the mic...okay.
It wasn't until my mid 30s living in New York City
and attending a Unity Church that I became a vegan.
It was studying the teachings of Jesus
about kindness and compassion
and starting a daily meditation practice
that really led me to a non violent diet
even though no one at Unity or anywhere else
had ever even suggested I be vegetarian
and I had never even heard the word 'vegan'
much less knew any. Though it wasn't long
before I started noticing that during Sunday brunch,
the same ministers and chaplains who were teaching me about
kindness and compassion for all were for some reason
not including the innocent animals on their plates.
But who was I to judge the choices of another?
So I decided to live and let live
and try to be a good example.
(baby gurgling)
And that worked for almost a decade
until after my daughter was born and suddenly
I found myself with skin in the game
and a reason to care about what happens in the future.
(baby cooing)
Really, is that so?
And then I saw the documentary Cowspiracy
where I learned that not only does animal agriculture create
over half the greenhouse gases on the planet
but it's also the number one user and polluter of water
and the major cause of deforestation.
Not to mention that the grains we use
to feed billions of animals that we breed
just for slaughter could much more effectively
be fed to humans and could help
save the nearly nine million people
who die from hunger each year.
I felt I had to do something
but I didn't know what, so I did what I often
do when I don't know what to do.
I prayed and I meditated about it
and during that meditation this question
popped into my mind.
How is it possible that a compassionate,
spiritual or religious person
could support an industry that is responsible
for the unnecessary suffering of billions of people
trillions of land and sea animals
and the devastation of the very planet we live on?
That question would end up taking me on a journey
throughout the United States and around the globe
to explore the teachings of kindness
and compassion that form the basis of all the world's
main religions and the not so main ones as well
and try to understand how so many people of faith
are doing unto others that which
they would never wish done unto themselves.
(ragtime music)
The journey started when I traveled back to New York City
to speak to Victoria Moran who I'd met
once years earlier when she spoke
at the Unity church I attended
while living in that beautiful city
that never sleeps.
- I personally don't understand
why some of the people that I admire the most,
people whose words and whose writings
I completely revere, are eating our fellow creatures.
- [Thomas] Victoria Moran is a much sought after speaker,
best selling author,
and host of the Main Street Vegan Podcast.
She's been an animal rights activist and vegan
for over 30 years.
- A great deal of spirituality is about belief.
That's why we call it faith.
I'm a person of faith. I'm a Christian,
a yogic Christian and yet I understand
that there are people who have other
spiritual beliefs and other spiritual views.
So what can bring all spiritual people
together as a whole believing community?
To me that is compassion.
Because compassion is at the center
of the message of Jesus,
it's compassion that got the Jews
out of bondage and to the promised land.
We have all the eastern religions that are
Ahimsa based, non violence based.
So can we all agree that however
we see God, however we see the road
to salvation, being compassionate to one another
and expanding that compassion out to all that has life
is the true essence of spirituality?
What else could it possibly be?
- I think all of the world's religions,
if you distill them, the wisdom down to one sentence
it'd be something like this:
whatever you most want for yourself,
give that to others. That's a basic understanding
to give to others what you would like.
Another way of saying it is whatever you sow, you will reap.
It's also the same thing,
whatever we put out, it'll come back.
- [Thomas] Victoria put me in contact with Dr. Will Tuttle
who's a musician, an international speaker
and the best selling author
of the World Peace Diet.
I sat down with Dr. Tuttle in Ocala
where he and his spouse Madeline
were currently living in the solar powered
RV that they use while traveling around the country,
speaking about animal rights and performing music.
- From the time we were born,
we were forced to participate in mealtime rituals
by our parents and teachers and
everyone in our community
that essentially numb us and disconnect us
so that when we get older,
we take out our wallets and we vote for it
and we don't just vote for it, we then eat it.
So we actually bring it into our body,
we give it to our children.
This is not only toxic from the point of view
of the level of physical heath but
it's toxic from the point of view of our spiritual health,
from the point of view of our cultural health,
from the point of view of our ethical health.
We don't actually hold the knife ourselves,
we don't actually hold the electroshock prod
ourselves, we don't actually hold the
raping sperm gun ourselves and fire it,
but we pay someone else to do that
and so we pay other people to do things
that bring out the worst in them
and yet all we see is something
wrapped in plastic and styrofoam,
very often served with a smile
and so there's this deep disconnection
in our society and I think it's that
deep disconnection that is the greatest
obstacle to authentic spiritual awakening.
The authentic inner spiritual teaching
of all the great religious wisdom traditions
are pointing in the same direction.
Kindness and compassion for all living beings
is the path of awakening for all of us.
(light rock music)
- [Thomas] My next stop was Encinitas, California,
where I would sit down and visit
with Bob Isaacson, Buddhist, dharma teacher
and co-founder and president of Dharma Voices for Animals.
- The teachings of the Buddha regarding compassion
and non harming towards animals,
is not being followed by many many Buddhist practitioners,
teachers, and Buddhist centers.
The Buddha said to his followers
if there is no eater of meat,
there will be no destroyer of life.
Whatever the karmic effect is to the person
eating the animal, the person who has to slaughter
the animal, the person who has
to raise that animal for slaughter
is incurring extremely unwholesome karma.
Oftentimes people who cannot
find other jobs, people who are exploited
terribly in slaughterhouses and factory farming
why should these people incur negative karma,
killing animals and raising animals for slaughter
when all we have to do is eat a plant based diet?
- Compassion is such an important
key part of all traditions, but really
looking at what that meant and how
it extends to all living beings is a really
important piece. So I have to say
these two lovely guys they don't get along very well.
- They need a little more compassion.
- Yes, yes.
- [Thomas] I'd left Bob and I traveled north
to the hills of Topanga where I met Lisa Levinson,
the sustainable activism campaign director
for In Defense of Animals
and the founder of Vegan Spirituality.
- I can recall being in a spiritual circle
and raising the energy and doing
some wonderful rituals
and then directly after that we went
to have lunch and the lunch was a barbecue
and I just felt that energy drop
all the way down to the ground and below
because it was just stunning
to me that no one there thought
wow these animals that they're eating
have anything to do with spirituality.
I had had similar experiences
in other spiritual groups
and my friend Sandy had the same experience
and we were both so surprised
that people who consider themselves spiritual
and loving animals would eat animals.
- [Thomas] From Lisa's I headed down to L.A.
to attend my first ever Animal Rights conference.
It was much bigger than I expected
and suddenly I felt a little less lonely as a vegan.
- So the Good Food Institute is focused
on making alternatives to animal products
as delicious, as convenient, and as inexpensive as possible.
(applause)
So if we had been having this conversation
150 years ago, people of faith
would be saying slavery is in the Bible,
women are not chosen by Jesus
to be his disciples and we need to apply
that sort of central organizing principle
to politics. There certainly are many
times in the Bible, slaves obey your masters,
wives obey your husbands, so these concepts
up until 150 years ago
were used to justify things that
pretty much no Christians are going
to continue to attempt to reconcile with their faith.
- What is the core of Christianity?
It's love.
Is what we are doing to other creatures love?
And for what purpose?
Humans have no need to exploit other animals.
Certainly don't need to eat them.
There's simply no way to be part
of any world religion and not
care about the suffering and the premature
deaths of other animals.
As a moral philosopher I can say that
ethics teaches that any time there
is suffering, it is morally considerable
and religions agree with that.
So there's simply no way to be indifferent.
- I have asked hundreds of people this simple question.
The question I ask is
would you ever deliberately hurt
an innocent animal unnecessarily?
And so far 100% of the people I've asked
have said, absolutely not!
We would never do that,
so which means that compassion is at the core of our being.
You know that's who we really are.
This is the reason why collectively,
compassion is going to win.
- [Thomas] Sailesh Rao is the founder
and executive director of Climate Healers,
a nonprofit organization whose goal
is to reforest over one sixth
of the ice free land area of the earth.
He is the author of Carbon Dharma and
Carbon Yoga and a co producer for the documentaries
Cowspiracy, What the Health,
and the Human Experiment as well
as the one you're watching now.
- In the Laudato Si that came out last year
Pope Francis said, it is contrary
to human dignity to cause animals
to suffer or die needlessly and then
he visited the U.S. and in New York City
he had a veal and lobster dinner.
So that's when I realized how much
suffering that these religious leaders
are going through,
because when what we say and what we do
are not in alignment, we suffer.
We suffer tremendously.
- Well concern for animals has long been a part
of Unitarianism and Universalism,
Jeremy Bentham was a Unitarian legal scholar
who in the 1860s said that
the morally relevant question about
animals was not whether they could
reason or whether they could talk
but whether they could suffer?
And it's so clear now with
today's science as it was clear
then to anyone with common sense
that animals do suffer greatly,
especially those in our food system
as it's been practiced in the last 50 years.
- I was raised vegetarian and went vegan
after I learned about what happens to
dairy cows and egg laying hens
in factory farming and farming at large
so I'm really grateful that I made that decision
now it's also consistent with my Zoroastrian
teachings in that Zoroastrianism teaches
good thoughts, good words, and good deeds,
telling the truth, taking care of the environment,
showing kindness to animals, who are at our mercy
and of course taking care of our body temples as well.
- The concern, a concern is with a capital C,
this is an issue that the spirit has laid upon
the heart of a particular friend
or party of friends. That it...
They feel they're called to speak up about it,
to do something.
To speak truth to power and
this is one of the reasons why friends have offered
leadership in regard to human slavery,
equality of women, prison reform
and things of this sort, so we who
are Quakers who are concerned about
the animals, consider this as a concern
that God has laid upon us.
And if people feel uncomfortable with it
to just relax and try to consider perhaps
this is a legitimate concern,
perhaps the spirit may be speaking
to you through our words.
Just be open to it if you can.
- I have looked at a lot of different religions
over the years and my book, Peace to All Beings
goes into that quite a bit
about looking for the core truth
in each religion and it turns out
as everybody pretty much knows that
love is the core truth of every religion
and then people come along
and try to organize it
and try to put rules on it and twist it around
so it fits a certain mindset
and in many cases the patriarchal
mindset of domination which started
with animal agriculture has affected, infected
a lot of religions.
(laughter)
Sign me up.
- [Thomas] It was during the AR conference
that we had our first meeting
of the Interfaith Vegan Coalition.
Judy Carman, Lisa Levinson, and myself
had started the coalition to provide
faith specific resources and tools
for spiritual and religious individuals
and institutions to help them
widen their circle of compassion
to include all of creation.
(Native American flute music)
- You know I think a lot of people
are under the impression that
all Native American people
ate all meat all the time
and the fact is they actually ate very little meat
depending on the region that they were in.
- [Thomas] After the conference I drove
up the coast to Petaluma, a small city
north of San Francisco.
There I spoke to Linda G. Fisher,
an artist, inter-species communicator
and Native American tribal member
of the Ojibwe nation.
- I had someone say to me
oh gee you know you're vegan, you've
been vegan for so many years,
it must be quite a sacrifice.
And I kind of smiled and said,
it's no sacrifice at all
once you know that animals
feel, think, and love, and hurt
and cry and embrace their babies,
you know that it's not a sacrifice at all.
And so I explained that to her.
I said what would be a sacrifice was
if someone forced me to eat meat
to save somebody else - that would be quite a sacrifice.
I think if some of our great chiefs
were alive today they would be horrified
and they would be incredibly heartbroken
because they themselves would never do
what we're doing today.
If they didn't have to hunt,
if they didn't have to kill, I don't believe
there's any way they would've ever done that.
(flute music)
- [Thomas] I wasn't back from California
very long before Melody and I
loaded up our trusty hybrid, Sophia
and left on a road trip down into Florida.
Our first stop was Ocala, where Melody's grandpa Mike
joined us for a potluck at Kindred Spirits
Farm Animal Sanctuary.
- Mike actually was bought as a gag gift
for somebody's wedding
and then after the wedding they just
tied him up outside the church and left.
- [Thomas] The next day, our friend Logan
the director of Kindred Spirits gave
us a private tour of the sanctuary
and introduced us to several of her furry friends.
- Do you want to say hi to her?
You can, she's very nice.
She has a big nose and it's soft.
You can pet her if you want, she's very nice.
- There you go.
Her nose is almost as big as your hand.
That's how she says hi, when she opens
her mouth and she says (pants)
that's how a pig says hi, it's nice to meet you.
So Felicia and Gomer are from a factory farm
in Iowa that flooded back in 2008 and so
the farmers, they evacuated but they
left all their pigs locked up in buildings
so a couple of the pigs were able to
escape and swim to freedom and Felicia and Gomer
and their friend Calypso who's since passed
were part of a group that was rescued by Farm Sanctuary
and then they were placed here
with us a couple years ago.
They both kind of retired to Florida.
They both have pretty severe arthritis
which is pretty common in factory farm pigs
because we bred them to only live about
six months before they're used for food
so they're really not bred to live a long time
and they're bred to get as big as they can
as quick as they can which means that
it puts a lot of pressure on their leg joints.
So these two are both about nine now,
so arthritis is fairly common at that age.
Their friendships are just
really deep with each other,
like these guys came out of the factory
together and they've been together ever since.
It's just I think really important
to them to have that kind of connection with each other.
Especially the guys from factories
'cause they kind of start life without
it like they can't touch their moms which is really
important and the only real physical
contact they have with anybody
is a negative. So I think
when they come in a sanctuary it's really
nice for them just to be able to have
time with each other and quality relationships
with each other.
And they grow to like us too, like these two
really like everybody, they love to meet new friends
all the time 'cause now they know it's safe
and nobody's gonna hurt them.
- [Thomas] From Ocala we traveled down to Tampa
where we visited with our friends and I had a
chance to meet and speak with Bawa Jain,
Secretary General of the World Council of Religious Leaders.
A body that brings together the world's preeminent
religious leaders and see if these people can
work together on the issues that impact us most.
Whether that be the environmental challenges,
the issues of poverty, health,
conflict, they’re just harnessing
the power of religion of the global good
of all, not just some.
I come from a tradition, a way of life
called the Jains, it's one of the oldest
way of life in the world.
Live and let live that's what we try and follow.
Why are Jains vegetarian? Let's just understand that.
When you talk about non violence,
in thought action and deed,
how can you be a practitioner of Ahimsa non violence
if you're going to consume any living beings?
My guru came from the tradition where
the Jain monks wear face masks.
They also carry a little broom made out of cloth
that before they sit anywhere they can
brush off any form of life so they
do not commit any form of violence and kill them.
Similarly the mask on the face is also
that even the micro organisms in the atmosphere
should not be killed.
Now it is proven beyond doubt
that if you want to get rid of the greenhouse gases,
get rid of the slaughterhouses.
It's a ticking bomb.
It's a ticking bomb! Do we want
that for our children and our children's children?
How will they judge us at that time?
What karma are we sowing that knowingly
we are not taking any action?
When we know something and we don't
do anything, that also is creating karma
which is negative for us.
- Hey Melody you know where we're going?
- To the Cookie Contest.
- That's right, to the vegan cookie contest.
There's gonna be like what,
1,200 cookies to be eaten tonight
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Susan Hargreaves, of Animal Hero Kids
invited several local Fort Lauderdale bakeries
to offer up their best vegan cookies
and then everyone there got to eat one of each cookie
and vote for their favorite.
Melody and I thought all the ones we tasted
were yummy but didn't have enough room
in our bellies to try them all.
- In the early 80s, 1980,
I learned how most animals are treated
by visiting stock yards and slaughter houses
and for 34 years now, I have been
teaching kids about being kind to all animals.
AnimalHeroKids.org is my baby
because I know from visiting the schools
that the children are naturally compassionate.
They want to help animals. They want
to make sure no one gets harmed.
They're genuine and sincere
and their clear voices hearten me.
- Can you tell me any reason why
you don't want a pet monkey?
Yes I can tell you lots of reasons, they smear their poop,
they urine wash, they masturbate in public,
they will bite your children
and they have big teeth.
I had said that to one woman
she said, "Oh, that sounds like my husband!”
- [Thomas] Our next adventure would take us
to Jungle Friends Primate Sanctuary in Gainesville, Florida
where Kari and her dedicated team
of compassionate caregivers
provide a healthy, happy life to
over 300 primates who are ex pets,
or retired from lab experiments
and others who have suffered exploitation,
abuse, and neglect.
- I talked to a researcher actually
where I said whatever happened with your project?
Did you figure out, and I won't
go into exactly what they were trying
to figure out? And he said, they're never
going to figure it out because
even if they did and they could,
they won't have their jobs and their grant money will end.
So it's just going to always be something
that they're going to be trying to figure out.
They're meant to be in the wild
I mean there's no way you can make it right
with them living like this.
I mean this is wrong I wish none of these guys
had to live like this.
- In cages, you want all of them to be free of course.
- I want them to be free, I don't want them
in your living room, I don't want them at the lab,
I don't want them at the zoo and I don't
even want them here but there's no where for them to go
- [Thomas] It was at Jungle Friends
that I reconnected with Maya Barak
a holistic veterinarian from Tel Aviv, Israel
who I had met at the Animal Rights Conference in L.A.
Maya joined Melody and me
for a two week road trip that would take us
through 13 states on our quest of compassion.
Our journey started with a visit to
Rooterville Animal Sanctuary where Maya would
introduce us to her friend, Elaine West, the founder
of Rooterville and a devout Christian.
- You change your diet and you change your life
that's what I love to tell people
because it's true and it's not just your health,
it's physically, emotionally, spiritually,
in every way this will change your life
and it's gonna open you and soften your heart
and we're not supposed to have hard hearts.
Adam was a gardener. God put us in a garden,
that's our first clue.
You know our body is a temple of the Lord,
the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Bible tells us,
and we treat our bodies like dumpsters, right.
You don't put trash in a temple.
I know a lot of people my age in their 50s
are facing this where they go to the doctor
and all they get are more pills
and told this is the way that you're
gonna live for the rest of your life
and you're gonna just have to manage these diseases.
Well when we choose God's way our body can heal itself
and to me this was amazing.
My arthritis, after three months,
I woke up one morning and I had no more pain
and that was a miracle for me.
And I had lived with an inhaler
and on all kinds of medication
because my allergies were so bad.
I had pneumonia twice. They told me
if I had pneumonia again, I could possibly die.
They told me that I would have
to live with that inhaler and my condition
would only get worse and worse.
You know the doctors are quick
to give you more medication.
They're not very quick to give you any hope.
When you share this information
with Christians, it's almost
like - I don't know - like a wall goes up.
That they would rather believe
the world’s system that is pills
and procedures and...you know...medications
and problems your whole life,
they would rather choose that than God's way.
Plants heal our body.
We're digging our graves with our forks
and it's really sad when you see people
that have things like diabetes and heart disease
and cancer even and they're praying for a miracle
while continuing to eat
the western diet, the world's diet. They continue
to put that in their body which is causing the problem.
They don't see that they're killing themselves.
- Genesis 1:29 is part of the first conversation
between God and human beings
recorded in the Bible
and God tells Adam and Eve
you are to eat the plants and the seed bearing fruit, period.
And immediately after that, God says
and it was very good, and it's the first time
in the creation story that God
describes creation as very good.
[speaks Hebrew]
Up until that point God just says
it's good, it's good, it's good
but when we get the instructions
to eat a plant based diet,
now creation is very good.
- [Thomas] After Rooterville we drove Sophia
up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
where we spoke with Jeffery Cohen,
the executive director of Jewish Veg,
whose mission it is to help Jews to embrace
plant based diets as an expression
of the Jewish values of compassion
for animals, concern for health,
and care for the environment.
- Considering what Genesis 1:29 said,
it got me thinking what does
the rest of the Bible say, why aren't
all rabbis and clergy and ministers
vegetarian or vegan if this is what it says
in Genesis 1:29, so I started
reading, researching and to my pleasant
surprise, it's actually a pretty
consistent theme in the Bible
that plant based diet is the ideal,
that meat eating, while permitted, is usually
framed in a fairly negative
and sometimes extraordinarily
negative light and that we're supposed
to be treating animals, not just
with compassion but with exquisite sensitivity.
You know there's a whole slew of
verses in the Bible that command
that we treat animals with such sensitivity.
Collectively these are known in Hebrew,
(speaks Hebrew) which translate to
the prevention of suffering to animals.
And it says in our Talmud
which is the main rabbinic commentary on the Bible
that not only are we to prevent
animal suffering, we are to relieve the suffering
of animals whenever we have occasion to do so.
And on that basis alone,
given how animals are treated today
in modern animal agriculture, there's no way
we should be consuming animal products.
Probably the most misunderstood,
the most distorted verse in all of the Bible
is not Genesis 1:29, it's what comes right before that.
Genesis 1:26, that is the famous
dominion verse. So yes it does
say in Genesis 1:26 that human beings
were granted dominion over the animals
but two important things
to consider about that.
Number one is that's part of the exact
same conversation in which
we're instructed to eat plants exclusively.
So clearly dominion, did not give human beings
the right to kill animals for food.
Secondly, that dominion verse is part
of the exact same verse, not just
the same conversation but the same verse,
where we're told that human beings
are created (speaks Hebrew) in the image of God.
Therefore we are to exercise dominion
the way that God exercises dominion
over human beings.
And any rabbi will tell you the primary attributes
of God's dominion are mercy and compassion.
- [Thomas] From Pennsylvania
we headed northeast to Athens, New York
and visited with Frank Hoffman
who serves on the advisory board
of the Christian Vegetarian Association,
and is co founder with his wife Mary
of the Frank and Mary Hoffman
Family Foundation which is dedicated
to cruelty free living through
a vegan lifestyle.
- We became vegan for reasons of compassion.
But the side effect was that
our health improved dramatically.
We had all kinds of problems,
aches and pains and arthritis starting
and coughing and sneezing things,
the head colds, irritable bowel syndrome,
all kinds of things like that
and we found that within about three weeks
of becoming vegan our health improved.
We didn't have these same symptoms.
Both Mary and I are in our late 70s
and we haven't taken medication - I don't know -
it's gotta be at least 25 years now,
But we don't get the chronic diseases that people get.
The Bible tells us that if we're a child
of God we're to be a peace maker
and as peace makers and Paul picks up on this
and he says as peace making children of God,
we're to help free creation from its present corruption.
Well part of that corruption is the way
we live. We've heard people say
when I buy an animal product in the supermarket
I didn't hurt the animal, I'm just
buying the product that's sitting there.
And I'm saying no, you're actually contributing to it.
The first thing you can do
and the most important thing to do
in saving this world
and to living in the heavenly world
of God starts on your dinner plate.
(upbeat mariachi music)
- [Thomas] When we left Frank and Mary’s,
we drove down to New York City
where we parked Sophia and traveled by transit.
Our first stop was on the upper east side
where I had the honor and pleasure
of meeting Pramoda Chitrabhanu,
who is the director of the Jain Meditation International
Center in New York City as well
as on the board of PETA India.
She is the author of several books including
the Book of Compassion and Rainbow Food for the Vegan Palate.
- Only because of the taste buds,
only because of our own greed,
only because of our own satisfaction
of the senses! When are we going
to become sensitive?
When are we going to understand?
Because each and every living being
is given a different instrument
and it's a symphony
and we are creating music out of that instrument
and we forget that each and everyone's
life is intertwined with each other.
How can we disturb one living being?
But when we take the dairy,
the meat industry, the cows, you are
snatching away the five senses of those living beings
who can hear, who can see, who can feel,
who can taste, who can smell.
We have no right to take the life of any living being
even though they are not human beings
but they have already got five senses
and with one shot we destroy that.
Our hearts should really tremble
to do all these things and we don't
have any qualms. But the violence
is not because of the bad people,
it is because of the silence of the good people.
So be a whisper, or be a scream,
just be the voice for the voiceless being.
- [Thomas] After we left Pramoda’s,
we traveled down to Union Square
where we were approached by Mike,
a compassionate wildlife activist
who was out raising awareness about the plight
of the elephants.
- Yeah, just go for it, explain me on it right.
- So a keystone species basically is a species
of animal that has such a disproportionate
effect on the ecosystem that were
they to disappear, things would change very rapidly.
So, elephants are a keystone species,
bees are a keystone species,
even humans are, but in a bad way.
So, like if we all suddenly disappeared
everything would just start getting better.
- Everything would change for sure.
- Yeah it would change exactly.
So, elephants are a keystone species,
chickens are not, you know what I mean.
And that's not to say that they're less important
because they're still very important
and I do think that our meat industry
is really, really messed up, really, really bad
and I would love to see that change.
- [Thomas] Can I ask you this question?
- Yeah yeah.
- [Thomas] Did you know that in order
for a cow to produce milk she had to be
impregnated every year and her baby taken away
after the first day of her life
and if it's a male it usually goes to the veal industry,
if it's a female she ends up in there...
within four years of their life
they are slaughtered for meat
and usually they would live 25 years of their life.
Did you know they were taken away?
- No no, I didn't know that.
I mean again I'd have to -
it's very difficult to take the word of somebody,
not to say that I don't think you're informed but--
- But first of all do you think the cows just make milk?
- I don't know, I don't know enough about them.
That's really what I can--
- [Thomas] That's the best answer.
- Yeah I don't know.
- [Thomas] While we were in Manhattan we stopped by
to see Victoria who told us about a cow
she met many years ago
during her visit to a slaughterhouse in southern Missouri.
- I meet a lot of people who say
well I only eat humane meat, I only
eat meat from small family farms.
Well these cows came from a small family farm,
the farmer drove them in himself.
You could tell that these cows knew people
and trusted them so the first couple
just walked up the chute and onto death
but the third one was not having any of it.
She saw her friends go first,
she heard the screams and she smelled the smells
that I'd been smelling all day.
She was not about to walk up that ramp,
so she just planted herself and stood there.
And the man up at the top of the ramp,
about time to go home, he was ready to
go see his kids, he whistled to her.
He whistled to her the way he'd whistle to his dog
when he went home in 20 minutes.
And this cow seemed to trust him,
she kind of turned her head and looked at him
and it was as if she was deciding whether
or not to override all her instincts,
what she was hearing, what she was smelling
and instead do something that
we pride ourselves as humans
in being able to do, trust another person.
So with this trust, misplaced as it turned out,
she walked to the man who had whistled to her.
He got her with the captive bolt pistol,
she was hoisted up her throat was slit,
her beautiful skin was sliced off her
and into a pile to go for shoes and boots
and belts and handbags and all of a sudden
she was no longer a being,
she was in the process of becoming beef.
Now I knew that in a few days
her parts and pieces would wind up
at a supermarket in St. Louis.
They would be on a styrofoam tray
and cellophane wrapping
and they would be purchased by good people.
They'd be purchased by people who love their children
and give to charity and go to church.
Well they didn't know her.
I did, for just a few minutes
at the very end of her life,
but because I knew her, it's my obligation
to share her story.
- In the Muslim faith we have this really beautiful
saying from the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings
be upon him, in which he says
that none of you truly have attained to faith
until you love for one another
what you love for your own self.
Which is very similar to the golden rule
that was preached by all of the great prophets and sages.
You know I think as time has gone on
the spiritual and ethical tradition
has been able to widen that to not only
humanity but to a lot of the creation of God
both in terms of the environment as well
as the animals and just every living being.
- [Thomas] From Manhattan, we drove
to Princeton, New Jersey to speak with Imam Sohaib Sultan
Princeton University's first Muslim chaplain
and author of the Koran for Dummies,
and the Qur'an and the Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
- We are living in a time in which
there is a great exploitation of the environment
and of animals and the way that we
see the farming practices evolve
to fit the consumer societies and the materialistic
societies has formed has greatly
harmed the environment and has
greatly affected animals
at a level unprecedented in our history as human beings.
One should really consider the mass production
of food and the unethical means by which
that food is produced in our modern age
and we should really consider whether
we want to be part of that evil practice or whether
we want to be part of the solution,
to restore the balance to the environment
to restore the balance to the ecosystem
and to restore the balance to the human beings,
because when the human begins are exploiting
the environment, the environment is going
to turn its wrath against the human beings.
And we're constantly seeing that
from the lack of access to water
to air pollution to scarcity of food,
all of this is being caused by
our mistreatment of God's earth.
You know there's a really important passage
in the Koran that says that oh humanity
your actions are certainly bound
to rebound against your own selves.
So there's this idea that whatever we do
we're going to see its consequences
both the good and the beautiful,
and the ugly and the wrong.
And it's also important as Muslims
to understand that this idea
of karma or this idea of our actions
rebound against our own selves is not only
limited to this life but there's also an
afterlife reality to it.
The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him,
he said that on the day of resurrection
when people have to answer for their deeds
before God, one will even have to answer
for the innocent sparrow that they killed.
- What is the difference between pity and compassion?
So pity is, you know, I see the cow,
they just ran it through a factory farm,
it lived this awful life, they slaughtered
it in this awful way and I'm like, “Poor cow, that's bad
they're torturing all these cows.
This is terrible. Wow, I'm hungry.
Where's the closest McDonald’s, you know?
No link whatsoever, versus compassion
which is you know they're suffering in this industry,
they're suffering in the way that
we treat animals, they're suffering
in eating suffering from the way
that this animal was killed.
I don't want to contribute to the suffering. I quit.
I'm not gonna contribute to your suffering.
- [Thomas] It was in Tacoma Park, Maryland where we met
Nazirahk Amen, a naturopathic doctor,
a practitioner of Chinese medicine
and an organic farmer who's been vegan
for over 25 years.
- In the beginning I worked actually
as an EMT. I was an intermediate level medic
and you know working in the medical system
while studying to become a doctor at that time
and just seeing the contradictions.
It's not focused on prevention,
it's really focused on these sort of
quick fix pharmaceutical interventions
and you know as a provider, you know,
when someone's having an asthma attack
and you go in and you give them drugs
and you know you see that asthma attack break
and those people can breathe again,
that's beautiful you know but
in another four weeks, six weeks, three months
and you get the same call,
you know, it sort of takes some of the glamor out
and you walk into these people's homes
and you see they're having this asthma attack
or this sickle cell crisis or whatever other
disease and here, you know, right
next to the bed, they just got through
eating a three pack for a dollar
glow in the dark set of cookies
with a big glass of cow’s milk
and you're asking yourself the question, you know,
do you think that any of what you just ate
has anything to do with
how you're feeling right now?
We don't really get to ask that question.
You know, I mean, I felt better immediately
from going vegan, but in a couple years
after I went vegan I was probably the strongest
I've ever been in my life and
you know I maintain that on a day to day basis.
So, you know, anyway, I'm 95 years old and (laughter).
- I had this one case I remember this woman very well.
I said to her, I said your problem
is not that you have spastic colon.
I said you're eating foods that are gonna
make you sick because they contain lactose
and to my surprise, she said
“Oh I know that,” and I said, “Well,
if you know that these foods are gonna
make you sick, why are you continuing to eat them?
She said, “Because the government says I have to.
The U.S. dietary guidelines say that I have
to include dairy foods in my diet
in order to be healthy.” And I, of course,
explained to her that, no, you don’t,
that you don't need dairy foods for any reason,
that they're, as I said to her,
“Cows don't drink milk but there's
plenty of calcium in their milk
and it's because they get it from
the green plants that they eat
and that if you eat green leafy vegetables,
you'll get plenty of calcium in your diet.”
But it really upset me that people were being
made ill by listening to recommendations
from the government that were
not based on science but rather
were based on marketing.
- [Thomas] We left Nazirahk's farm
and crossed over into Virginia
where we had a conversation with Dr. Milton Mills, who
practices urgent care medicine in the Washington D.C. area
and is on the National Advisory Board
of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
He is a practicing Seventh Day Adventist
which is one of the very rare Protestant
denominations that recommends
a vegetarian diet to its members.
- God designed us and he gave us an owners manual
and it's called the Bible and in the Bible
he tells us what we should be eating.
He tells us what he designed us to eat
and if we care about ourselves and
if we care about what God wants then
we will follow his instructions for a healthy life.
And when I see people who call themselves Christians
eating fried chicken and pork chops
and all this stuff that they know
are unhealthy and that's
going to destroy their health
simply because it tastes good
then I have to ask, “Do you love
the pleasure of eating this unhealthy food
more than you love God? Because
if you really love God, then you
would do what he asked us to do
and that is eat a plant based diet.”
And when you realize the type
of misery and pain and suffering that's
inflicted on other animals
in order to raise them by the billions
just so they can be killed and dismembered
so people can eat them, it's impossible
for I think a feeling person
to justify that, particularly someone
who says that they believe in a loving God.
It's one thing if it's a matter
of life, death and necessity but
in modern life, it's not.
- [Thomas] The next day we had to say a sad goodbye to Maya
who was off to a holistic veterinarian conference
before she headed back to Israel.
And then Melody and I and Sophia
made our way back to the sacred woods of North Florida.
- Abra cadabra.
- The environmental crisis is not a crisis
of the bees and the birds
or the trees and the toads, it's a crisis of
how we live as spiritual beings in a physical reality.
Therefore in order to address this crisis we're
going to need to address the spiritual roots.
- [Thomas] Just a few days after Melody's
fourth birthday, I found myself
on an airplane headed to Marrakesh, Morocco
to join our producer Sailesh who'd invited
me to attend the 22nd United Nations
Climate Change Conference - COP22,
where people from all over the world
come together to work on finding solutions
to the climate crisis that is
threatening the future of life on our planet.
- What are some of those spiritual roots?
This includes the desire for instant
self gratification, consumerism.
We are facing a climate crisis, a planetary emergency
which is really messaging to us
that the human way of living is out of balance.
By the end of this 21st century, human beings
are likely to extinct five million
of the ten million species on this planet.
And so, according to the Jewish tradition,
it is forbidden to extinct a species.
We have a mandate to be stewards, to care
for the creation that God
has entrusted to us, to be righteous,
to be mindful and that comes
down to the smallest level of human consumption.
Everything that we consume, we need to think,
“Am I elevating this object in the highest way?
Am I using it in holiness? Am I reusing it?
Do I actually need this?
If we do that, then we're living at a higher
vibrational frequency. We're living in resonance
with the divine. We're living in resonance
with the planet that God has given us.
- We know that of all the energy
that human beings are putting into the climate
system via the greenhouse gases,
93% of that is ending up in the ocean.
This has led to an increased acidification
of the ocean. The acidity
makes it very difficult for shelled
animals to continue to fabricate
their shells and so we're beginning
to see threats to coral reefs.
We're beginning to see threats to
shelled animals, in general.
And the most important ones are the little
coccolithophores, part of the plankton
population and if their shells
are compromised, they can't live
and the danger will be that...these are the guys,
the plankton are the ones that are actually
manufacturing the oxygen in the atmosphere
that we breathe a few weeks after it leaves the ocean.
So ocean acidification is a
global issue that affects absolutely everybody
and all of the living things in the ocean.
It's my belief that societies in which
people care for each other
are societies that will also take
care of the environment and so there's
a relationship between our human compassion
and our compassion for nature
and now both are needed to assure
the survival of our civilization.
- I would say that compassion is central
to our religious tradition within Islam
and as a Muslim trying to be faithful
to its teachings, I have to strive to become
more compassionate in my life.
As an example, every chapter of the holy Koran's
114 chapters begins with (speaks Arabic)
which means in the name of God,
most compassionate, most merciful.
A small chick fell out of its nest
in the tree onto the ground
and one of the Prophet's companions
was playing with it in quite a ruthless manner, a ruthless way.
When the Prophet came upon him,
he became very stern and angry
and he said, “What are you doing?”
He said, “Amusing myself.” He said,
“How can you amuse yourself
with the child of someone else that's
not your child? Return the child to its mother.”
And what's very interesting is
in the Arabic language they have
two words, the word normally used
for baby chick is one word.
The word that is used for child
which is exclusively used in the human sense
which means (speaks Arabic)
is the term that he used for this chick.
So, in other words, its relation to its mother
is the same as the relationship
of a human mother to her own child.
- Last year in the run up to the Paris
climate talks, a number of religious
organizations issued statements on climate change
and so our organization issued
the Hindu Declaration on Climate Change for 2016
and that was signed by over 60 Hindu leaders
and organizations from across the world.
And within that, we put forward
the case for why Hindus should be concerned
about climate change and what Hindus
should and could be doing to address climate change.
And within that, one of the key things
we spoke about was diet
and to live a lifestyle which minimizes harm
on the environment, on animals, and on other people.
And so within that, the advocation
of a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle
was something that we strongly said
that Hindus, actually not just Hindus,
all concerned people of the world
should take very seriously.
If we want to create a world which is full of compassion
which is full of love, which is full of peace,
then we have to imbibe that and live that
within our own hearts and minds.
- Because we have a system, a socioeconomic system
that's growth oriented and that's based
on consumption as an organizing value,
and competition as an organizing principle.
And because it's growth oriented,
we have been growing our population
and our livestock, continuously.
See, if you look at what has happened
to the biomass distribution of the planet,
our weight is now double the weight
of all the wildlife from ten thousand years ago,
and our livestock is two and a half
times our weight and what is worse
is that our livestock eat
five times as much food as we do
because they are mostly young animals
and they're eating a lot in order to grow.
So, it's as if you have a bunch of weight lifters
who are lifting five times their weight
and they discover that they are on quicksand
and they're sinking.
So what is the first thing they should do
with the weight they're lifting?
Should we not drop those weights
or should we continue to hold on to them?
That's the situation we are in at the moment.
But we are in a society where we are taught
to look outside for happiness. We are taught, you know,
that's where it is, and the entire socioeconomic system
depends on us believing this.
That the happiness is outside us.
So we really are at a position where
we have to change our socioeconomic system.
We have to change it so that
we are looking for happiness inside,
all of us, so that we are reducing
our demands on the earth and therefore
allowing the earth to come back,
you know, to regenerate again.
Veganism is a way of living where
we seek to never deliberately hurt
an innocent animal unnecessarily.
No longer is it necessary to eat animal foods.
So knowing that, we can now get in alignment
with who we really are, because all of us
want to be compassionate to all life
because that's who we are.
So the most important step that an individual
can do today to address environmental destruction
is to adopt a plant based diet
which is as local as possible,
which is as organic as possible.
So it's Local Organic Vegan Eating - that’s L.O.V.E.
- [Thomas] The day before I left Morocco,
I joined thousands of environmental
activists from all over the world
as we took to the streets of Marrakesh
in a march for climate justice,
hoping one day that these marches
will include justice for animals as well.
- I am a ladybug from the forest.
Do you like to ask some questions?
- How does India have the largest export
of leather products in the world
and can still be a cow friendly country?
- [Thomas] On the second day of 2017
I once again found myself flying over the ocean.
Holger Eick, one of our producers who lives in Hong Kong,
had invited me to join him in India
where we would explore
the teachings of compassion in some of
the world's most ancient spiritual traditions.
We would start our journey in the city of Mumbai
where we spoke to Nithya Shanti who lived six years
as a Buddhist monk and now travels internationally,
sharing practical wisdom teachings
for happiness and enlightenment.
- I used to think for a long time
I need to be like the Buddha,
I'm not enough like the Buddha
I need to be more like the Buddha.
Then one day, it settled on me
that I'm not the Buddha. I'm not the Buddha.
Even if I tried my very best,
I'll be a second rate Buddha.
But my eyes shone when I realized
even if the Buddha tries his best
he'll be a second rate Nithya Shanti.
In the Buddhist tradition, the word
for compassion is Karuna. And Karuna
is known as one of the noblest states
we can experience as a human being.
One of the most noble qualities...
It's called actually a boundless state.
When your mind is in unbalanced
all you are concerned about is about me and my little world
and at most the people around me.
But as your mind gets more and more balanced
you realize - all beings we're in the same boat,
we all seek to be free from suffering.
And so the response of
a balanced mind to suffering
is compassion, is a desire
to alleviate that suffering in whatever
way they possibly can and that's compassion.
- Vedanta is Indian philosophy which
originated in the Vedas but
it is simply knowledge of yourself.
Vedanta says there are three distinct
types of thoughts in a human being.
The highest is sattva which is called pure thoughts
and unselfish thoughts, compassionate thoughts,
loving thoughts, thoughts that contemplate
on the higher, the transcendental.
A person who is in sattva, pure thought
will not do anything that harms others
and to eat the flesh of another creature
because you find it tasty or even
if you think it's nutritious
is abhorrent to a person with pure thoughts.
Vedanta says at all times in your life
you must have an attitude of not wanting
to injure, hurt, or be nasty
to anyone in thought, word, or deed.
- [Thomas] While in Mumbai,
we had the wonderful opportunity to visit a
beautiful, world renowned Jain temple,
where we had the pleasure of speaking
with Urvi Shah, a devout Jain
who gave us a tour of the temple.
- Often I ask my patient, do you take milk
and they say oh no no, I hardly take milk,
I don't take milk, and then
we sit down and start writing down
chai, yes, curd, yes, maybe ice cream yes,
maybe paneer yes, maybe ghee yes,
and it can be literally like half a liter
of milk every day, so you do consume milk.
If you have just consumed one slice of cheese
you have already consumed 16 ounces of milk.
The Indian subcontinent in Asia
is very obsessed with dairy products
because it's so deeply ingrained
that they think it's vegetarian.
Milk production is very high,
it's highest in the world. In fact,
India is one of the largest exporters of beef
in the world, thanks to the dairy industry,
because after repeated artificial insemination,
three or four times, about six or seven
year of age, now cow is spent.
She's of no use. Also, the young calf,
you know, the baby male cow is allowed
to just die and so the veal is produced
because there's no use of male cow
anywhere in any industry.
From the times of Lord Krishna,
we consume so much dairy, it's there
in our temples as prasad.
It's there at any good occasion,
marriage, everything's made from dairy.
Ghee, particularly, is used a lot
so it just doesn't go out of the psyche
of the Indian mind. So, I had to write a book
on dairy alternatives
and show them the way that you can make
butter milk, you can make yogurt
you can make ice creams, you can make
all the Indian sweets same way, exactly
same, tasting even much better and healthier.
- One of the first patients I remember
was a man who had diabetes but that's
not why he came to me. He had diabetes
and he was being given medicines
and the blood sugar wouldn't come under control
but he came to me because he had
the complications of diabetes,
he was losing his eyesight.
And when I suggested to him
to stop all the dairy, within two weeks
his blood sugar came down
and his eyesight came back.
It was just so amazing and then over
a period of time he went on a
whole plant based diet and improved even further.
So, this was one of my early cases which
brought to my mind how much changing
our diet really helps because our body
always works to heal.
I actually realized that medicines
come in the way of healing.
In fact medicines never cure, but the body heals.
I also run a 21 day residential program
where we have people coming in
with all kinds of diseases
and we do all the lab reports at the beginning
and as they get better, we take off
medications and they're given buffet meals.
We have cooking classes every day, we have yoga,
meditation, and within 21 days,
most of them get off at least 70% of the medication.
Many of them are off all their medications
and they have more energy than
they ever had before and we do
lab reports all over at the end
so that they can actually see the difference
between the two reports and even I'm amazed.
Not only they are amazed but I'm amazed
every time, how fast the body can actually
heal if we take away all the things that make it sick.
- [Thomas] Holger and I left Mumbai and flew
over to Udaipur where we met up with Sailesh
and I ran into Dharmada, a friend I had made
during the Animal Rights conference in L.A.
She introduced us to her friend, Ashutosh,
and together we all traveled out to Animal Aid Rescue
where we met the founder, Jim Meyers,
who along with his wife, daughter,
and 50 full time staff members and volunteers
from around the world, have rescued
over 65,000 injured and ill street animals
including dogs, cows, camels, and donkeys,
just to name a few, since they opened their gates in 2003.
- In the state of Rajasthan, it is not legal
to euthanize a cow.
Any of the other animals you see here,
the monkey, the blind dogs, the
handicapped dogs, all can be euthanized
but the cow is given this special protection.
A dairy in the city,
somebody, that cow, there, this one, that one
stopped giving milk and at night,
it was pushed out into the street.
And cruelly, the same one that you say,
is so holy, we aren't even going to euthanize them,
we're so enraptured with their
spirit to keep it alive, every single
cow represents an abandonment that it was
not profitable to feed that cow anymore, to do anymore
with it so you've removed it and you've broken a law.
This animal at night
would be eaten out by dogs and pigs
alive in the street,
with no medicine to alleviate pain, no one
to shelter its eyes in a 49 degree Celsius day,
to move the flies away and here it was
the only way I could get, not happy,
because it's nothing to be happy about,
but I could get satisfied
that some justice was being done
so that this cow which this dear lady
is helping us with, this cow
is going to die in a few days. It's not gonna be,
it's legs aren't gonna get stronger
and get better and return to the city,
find its long lost brothers and sisters.
The least favorite question a serious
politician in India wants to hear
is, “What happens to the male cows?”
And so that story has to be suppressed
if you're gonna keep up all the sensitivity.
So, no one shows the links.
- [Thomas] After visiting the royal palace
and two Hindu temples, the Jagdish and the
Karni Mata, I had to say goodbye to Holger
as he flew home to Hong Kong
and I journeyed forward to New Delhi
where I would have the unique opportunity
to speak to two Digambara Jain sadhus,
sky clad Jain saints who have freed
themselves of all attachments and worldly possessions,
including clothing, money and even dishes and silverware.
The Jain religion is said to be around 5,000 years old
and it has a rich history of non violence and vegetarianism.
It has libraries filled with their collective
knowledge and wisdom, yet there was really
only one question I wanted to ask
these holy saints of Ahimsa.
- (foreign language speaking)
As much as I loved and felt at home in India,
two weeks was as long as I could keep
myself away from Melody and our sanctuary in the woods.
- When you were a kid did you get really dirty
and your mom get mad?
- I did get really dirty but you know
I had a pretty cool mom. I don't think
she got mad about it.
- How old are you now?
- I will be 50 in a few weeks.
- Aaahhh, I forgot.
- One of the great Hasidic rabbis, Rabbi Nachman, taught
that the day you were born
was the day that God decided the world
could not exist without you,
and that is true for every being,
that every being that has breath
God has said the world cannot
exist without them. And to honor
God is to honor the holy breath
of every being and to see
that the world needs each of us.
- [Thomas] I was very excited to have
the honor and delight of sitting down
with Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz
while he was attending a rabbinical conference
in Atlanta, Georgia.
Rabbi Yanklowitz is a social justice activist,
a sought after educational
and motivational speaker and the author
of seven books on Jewish spirituality and ethics.
He is the founder of the Shamayim V'Aretz Institute,
a graduate of both Harvard and Columbia
and the only person I've personally met
who's donated one of his kidneys to a stranger.
- The book of Psalms teaches
that the world is built through kindness.
We bring heaven down to earth by perpetuating kindness.
In every interaction, in every act
of food consumption, in every choice we make,
we have the opportunity to elevate
the sparks of holiness in whatever we encounter.
We have the opportunity to objectify
and abuse or we have the opportunity
to see the holiness in everything.
When my children were born
and I held them for the first time,
the level of love I felt was so infinite!
This is how God experiences all of God's creatures.
Each creature is held with infinite love
and to take the Godly perspective
of the universe is to treat every being with love,
to treat every being as an end in themselves.
All of our religions teach this,
in their purest form.
So the most central question we can
ask ourselves every day is
how can I increase compassion in the world today,
through my every choice?
- I long ago started just saying
I'm a follower of Jesus Christ
because even if you are not a Christian
coming into that conversation
you know enough about Jesus to think that you're gonna
generally agree with most stuff
Jesus says. I mean turning the other cheek
and forgiveness and goodness.
I mean most people agree that Jesus
was teaching the right values
even if they're not Christians. And it's because
I love Jesus so much that I'm a vegan.
I'm not a vegan who also coincidentally
is a Christian. I am, full on,
a vegan because I love Jesus Christ.
- [Thomas] Although I'd already shot several hundred hours
of footage and I was a quarter way
through the rough cut, I couldn't pass up
the amazing opportunity to travel back
to Manhattan and speak to Suzy Welch,
who is a business journalist, bestselling
author and a regular contributor on the Today Show.
She's a devout, evangelical Christian
and an Animal Rights activist,
who currently sits on the advisory board
of the Good Food Institute.
- Jesus' earliest followers, many of them
were vegan because they got it.
They got that Jesus was about mercy, compassion
and love, and life.
Choose life, give life, stop killing,
show kindness to everything and so
Jesus' earliest fanatical followers were vegans.
And at one point, in Acts, Paul, frustrated with them,
says, “Stop talking about what you're eating.
You're sort of taking up all of our time
with your vegan diet
and let's pay attention to other things.
He had bigger sort of philosophical issues
that he wanted everybody paying attention to,
but we know historically
that Jesus' earliest followers,
the people sort of closest to his message,
were vegan because of him. So it's not like
I invented this, that I am just
following the tradition of Christians
all along who got that connection
but the connection's been buried. It's been buried
for a long time for cultural reasons, for cultural reasons.
But then people come back to this concept of dominion,
that's the big one for Christians.
Well God gave us dominion over all of His creation.
Well then, you have to think about
what dominion means. Well, God
has dominion over us. What does that mean,
God's dominion over us? He tells us exactly
what dominion means. People like
to debate what dominion means
but God tells us what dominion means.
It means loving, nurturing, life filled,
hope filled, compassionate, merciful,
tender, love! Okay and if that's
what dominion means and God's demonstrating
it towards us, which he is,
then it's our turn to use that
exact same exact bunch of words
in how we treat God's creation.
And, I don't know, slaughter houses
are not included in that.
And so for me, well yeah, bring up dominion,
bring it, because the Bible tells us what dominion is
and if you believe that dominion
is what God tells us it is,
then you have to stop eating animals.
- So Roman Catholics take scripture
very seriously, but we always
pair it with tradition saying that
we can't really even interpret scripture
without the tradition as well,
and the tradition on animals
all the way to the catechism of the Catholic church,
the official teaching of the Catholic Church
through the catechism, is so interesting
on animals, including an almost justice
like command saying that we owe animals kindness.
Often, in moral theology, we think
about justice as being what we owe
other people and the language of justice
is used in the catechism of the Catholic Church.
We owe animals kindness, that's unambiguous.
And so much of what we do today,
of course, is inconsistent with that
and Catholics have to ask those questions.
- [Thomas] While in New York City,
Victoria and I visited the beautiful
campus at Fordham University
which was founded by the Catholic
Diocese of New York in 1841.
There we spoke with Charles Camosy,
an Associate Professor of Theology
and Social Ethics and an author
whose books include, For Love of Animals,
and Peter Singer and Christian Ethics.
- I think so much of where injustice
comes from is our refusing to apply our principles
consistently. So we say we believe this
but then when it comes to his other thing
where it looks like we have to act
in a way contrary to the way we're currently acting
if we want to follow that principle seriously,
we kind of abandon the principle.
I use the analogy in my classes,
arguments and principles are like buses,
they're not like taxis. So if you
have a principle you have to follow it
wherever it goes or you gotta
get on a different bus. You can't
just tell your principle wherever
it's gonna end up, that's just being irrational.
So and so much injustice has come
from that kind of irrationality.
We believe in the divinity of the human person
except in slavery. We believe in non violence
except when we perpetuate war in the Crusades.
We believe in the most vulnerable,
except when it comes to how we eat.
And so in the book I'm trying to call out
all Christians to say,
if we really claim to believe these things,
we ought to change our whole lives
or let's not claim to believe these things.
Because if we just pick and choose
where we end up as a result of these principles,
we don't actually really believe the principles are true.
And to me that's just what it means
to be a Christian, it means following
Christ in every aspect of your life,
not just picking and choosing where you do that.
- Charles and Myrtle Fillmore the founders of Unity,
were staunch vegetarians all their lives,
talked about it a lot.
I think the Archives has 135 talks
from Charles Fillmore about being vegetarian.
They wrote about it in their publications,
and so having been to seminary
and knowing Unity's history,
I knew they were vegetarian.
I didn't know quite how ferociously
they were until I became vegan
and started reading more about it.
- [Thomas] So it turns out the founders of Unity,
the church I was attending
when I became vegan
were vegetarians in the late 1800s and
even included it in their statement of faith,
until it was removed in 1939.
So I joined Victoria at Unity village
in Missouri where she arranged an interview
with her friend, Reverend Ellen Debenport,
Unity's Vice President of content and media,
to ask why no one at Unity
had ever told me about this
and to discuss how Unity could be
more proactive in sharing Charles' teachings
about not eating animals.
- A lot of people find Unity
as refugees from rigid religions
and so they're hyper sensitive
to being told what to do,
or being told they're wrong or bad
and so Unity's leaders including me
are probably pretty hesitant
to talk about, there is this other
way to eat that you might find
would enhance your spiritual journey.
We may be moving in that direction.
We have more and more ministers who
are talking about it and who
think Unity really should insist on it
from World Headquarters, which
isn't going to happen any time soon,
because we don't want to tell people
what to do, but we can talk about it
and we can revive the idea that the Fillmores
preached vegetarianism and saw it as a spiritual practice.
- [PODCAST] Learn how to eat better,
get healthy and help animals. Welcome
to Main Street Vegan with your host, Victoria Moran.
- [Thomas] The Main Street Vegan podcast
on Unity radio is one of the ways
Unity has begun moving back
toward their vegetarian roots,
and after speaking with Ellen,
I look forward to seeing what other
ways they'll find to honor Charles and Myrtle's
original teachings about not eating
or wearing our fellow earthlings.
Over 74 billion farmed animals
are bred and slaughtered every year,
most of them while they're still just babies
and in the United States they eat
nearly 70% of the grain we grow
and raising them uses over 80% of our water
and almost half of our land
and it's also the number one cause
of water and air pollution as well
as deforestation, species extinction,
and ocean dead zones.
How long can we continue to try
and justify this?
All of the great spiritual traditions agree
that along with life's joys,
there will also be suffering
but so much of the suffering I see
in the world around me is unnecessary
and caused by the choices we make every day.
Those choices are having a devastating
effect on our individual
and collective karma and health
and they're threatening the future of our children.
(Native American flute music)
My prayer is that each of us
will challenge ourselves to be more kind
and compassionate with our thoughts, words and actions,
to vote wisely with our dollars
and to take better care
of all of creation including our body temples
and to take the time each day
to go within and ask some version of what
can I do to make the world better
for those yet to come
and then listen carefully for that
still quiet voice to answer.
♪ All around this great big world ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ All around this great big world ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ All around this great big world ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪
- Eating fruit is help your brain like mine.
♪ This little light of mine, ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, ♪
♪ ♪ This little light of mine, ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, ♪
♪ This little light of mine, ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪
♪ Hallelujah ♪
(upbeat jazz music)
♪ Namaste ♪
♪ I ain't gonna hide it under no bushel, no ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, ♪
♪ Ain't gonna hide it under no bushel, no ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, ♪
♪ Ain't gonna hide it under no bushel, no ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪
♪ Everywhere I go ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ To everyone I know ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ Everywhere I go ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪
(upbeat jazz music)
♪ Let it shine now ♪
♪ Everywhere you go now ♪
♪ To everyone you know ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪
♪ This little light of mine ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine, lord ♪
♪ This little light of mine ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ This little light of mine ♪
♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪
♪ Hallelujah ♪
♪ Namaste now ♪
♪ Don't forget to pray now ♪
♪ And everywhere you go ♪
♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪
Ladies and gentlemen put your hands
together for the Village Brass Band.
Good night, drive safely and God bless.