"The strongest argument that meat is not essential food is the fact that the Creator of this Universe did not include meat in the original diet for Adam and Eve. He gave them fruits, nuts and vegetables. Non-vegetarians easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes." From chapter entitled "Do We Need Flesh Food?" in a totally scientifically accurate textbook published in India. (via Ben Goldacre)

  • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

    ‘That cow had it coming’, I lied, forgetting my promise not to lie. ‘Goddammit, why do you always bring up cattle rustlin every time I bring a steak home?’, ‘You know how I git when you do!’ …

    Or maybe not?

    • Antinous / Moderator

      I have a copy of the Bhagavad Gita which has an odd little pictorial section of what you will be in your next life depending on what you do in this life.  One row shows a man barbecuing a steak in the first box and the man reincarnated as a tiger in the second box.  Who wouldn’t run out and buy a grill and twenty pounds of cow meat after seeing that?

  • xzzy

    Cursing and lying just makes my steak taste better.

    • welcomeabored

      It’s like buttah on a Ritz cracker.

      • EH

        Everything tastes better with Blue Bonnet on it.

  • Guido

    Whoa, can you imagine how bad it’d had been if Hitler ate meat instead of being a vegetarian?

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

      If Hitler called himself a vegetarian, then he apparently considered pork a vegetable, because he ate it all the time.  Which I guess explains everything.

      • wysinwyg
        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

          Keep reading down to the bottom.  I’ve seen numerous references describing him as a “vegetarian” who “occasionally” ate ham or sausage.  Which apparently qualified him as a vegetarian in the 1930s, but not so much today…

          • wysinwyg

            I see one person quoted as theorizing that Hitler ate sausage.  There’s really no support for your position on the wikipedia page, hence the request for better sources. “Numerous references” doesn’t do it for me. Specify those references.

          • TheMudshark

            Well, if you go into a tavern in the Austrian countryside even today and ask for a vegetarian meal, you may in all seriousness be offered any number of dishes with meat in them as long as it´s not a huge amount of meat. So I can imagine where Hitler got that notion from.

          • BillStewart2012

            The general commentary about it is that Hitler wasn’t a vegetarian for ethical or ascetic reasons, he was a usually-vegetarian because he had digestive troubles and meat gave him gas.  So if he occasionally ate some meat, it didn’t bother him ethically.

            (I’m an actual vegetarian, and I’ve found that if you’re travelling in Germany and skip the ubiquitous pork and beef, and do a fair amount of sightseeing, you can lose weight on your trip in spite of all the beer and cheese and desserts and conference-hotel meals.)

      • Guido

        AFAIK as I know, he was a vegetarian, but of course, I might be wrong. It will be great to learn more and improve my knowledge, so please, let me know your sources.

        Thanks a lot!

      • niktemadur

        Pig knuckles, to be specific.

    • Substance McGravitas

      Thank you.  I saw this item and I developed a Hitler itch that just had to be scratched.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      Maybe he was so cranky because he just really needed a big, fat sausage.

  • millie fink

    Well, I have indeed met a lot of meat-eaters who tell bad words.

  • daveedi

    But didn’t Eve “cheat, tell lies and forget promises” over the whole apple incident?

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=749833892 Florian Braun

      Strictly speaking we have no idea if it was an apple, just some sort of fruit.

      • Tribune

        “just some sort of fruit.”  like a cow?

        • EH

          The fruit of the prairie!

        • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=749833892 Florian Braun

          well played

        • TheMadLibrarian

          Road Apples.

      • Paul Renault

         Strictly speaking, we have no idea if anything described in that book ever happened.

        • http://twitter.com/trempls tré

           Strictly speaking, we have no idea.

  • hyljelyhje

    If I remember the story of Cain and Abel correctly; God himself preferred meat over vegetables. That would actually explain the bloodbath known as old testament.

    • retepslluerb

      Well, that’s after the fall from grace.  However, the argument, that Adam and Eve were vegetarian cannot be applied, as *all* animals were vegetarians before the fruit incident.

      • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

        So to me this indicates that the fangs on a lion once seen lounging with lambs and Adam and Eve, doubtlessly after a filling three bean salad, were direct evidence of God’s prescient knowledge of the impending fall from grace?

        But golly, God, your wrath now seems… so contrived.

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop

          Yeah, the physiology of various carnivores and parasites, especially those whose reproductive cycles require them to kill something in horrible ways do show a certain degree of foresight.  I always imagined the parasitic wasps sitting around impatiently thinking, “Hurry up and fall already.  My life-span isn’t that long and I need to reproduce.”
          I do find it funny that the same creationists who insist that organisms fit their ecological niches too perfectly to be anything other than deliberate design also apparently deny they were designed to eat meat at all.

        • TheOven

          Pretty sure it’s a metaphor, not an actual place of event.

          • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

            So God’s wrath is a metaphor for how Adam feels when wimmins get all uppity with his Apples.Gotitthx

          • IronEdithKidd

            Humor:  u haz none.

          • TheOven

            Mornings: I haz too much.

        • wreckrob8

          If the meat eaters didn’t eat their fair share of vegetarians there wouldn’t be enough veggies to go around and we’d all starve.

        • AlexG55

          Well, the physiology of other animals certainly changed at the Fall- snakes used to have legs…

    • Brainspore

      There’s also the bit at the end of the Great Flood where the Lord was swayed to bestow grace upon Noah & Co. because they invited Him over for barbecue. (Genesis 8:20-8:21)

  • Michael Rosefield

    I’m trying to guess as to what proportion of humans on the planet are basically fruitcakes of some kind or other. I feel the answer might be alarmingly high.

    • oasisob1

      I believe it’s slightly over 100%.

    • http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns

      I’m actually more of a crepe filled with apples.

  • chgoliz

    The scientific basis for this theory is a couple-thousand-year-old story about the Jewish/Christian god and the people he created from dirt?

    I take it you’re like me: a longtime vegetarian who thinks silly arguments for veg*ism do more harm than good.

    • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

      Maybe made some from dirt but I heard women were made from ribs, which explains my deep and lasting affinity for the fairer sex.

    • conflator

      I’m just sad I need to find a different excuse for forgetting promises and telling bad words.

    • BillStewart2012

      And most of the vegetarians in India are Hindus, who don’t actually believe Judeo-Christian origin myths because they’ve got their own.

      And while they’re at it, claiming that the Arabs were superior because they ate dates while the Brits ate meat?  The Arabs eat lamb or goat if they can get it, though they also do a lot with beans, notably falafel and hummus, as do pretty much anybody from Greece to Persia.

      • TimRowledge

        Beans are people too! I’m hooman bean!

      • ldobe

        Totally OT:
        How delicious is hummus, amirite?

        Man I’m a total white kid who grew up eating pork chops and potatoes, but I fell in love with Mediterranean food the first time I had hummus on warm pita.

  • Jaldhar

    The idea that the foods you eat affect your temperament is a basic principle of Ayurveda  the traditional system of medicine but its Interesting that an Indian Christian (David Poddar is the author) would be promoting it and mixing it with his own religions myths.

    • Jerril

      The dominant religion in a culture affects all aspects of the culture, even to the point of “contaminating” other religions active in the region. Thus syncretism and new religions.

    • http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

      Christianity has been practiced in India almost as long as it’s been practiced in Greece or Egypt or Italy. And a lot of people draw Greek concepts of the nature of God, and of substance, and so on, into Western Christianity, so why is it strange to draw Indian concepts into South Asian Christianity?

      • Jaldhar

         Oh I don’t think its strange overall , just interesting that it would be this particular concept.  The oldest established Christian community in India is the Syrian Orthodox of Kerala, an area where most of the Hindus aren’t vegetarian either.  Most of the recent converts elsewhere are also not from vegetarian backgrounds.

  • Velocirapt42

    PETA is writing text books now?

  • http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino

    Wait, which god is this? Not the same one who poo-pooed Cain’s vegan spread in favour of Abel’s delicious BBQ?

  • stasike

    What the textbook claims is true: Non-vegetarians *DO* easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes.They just forgot to mention that: Vegetarians easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes TOO. ;-)

    • http://whimsicalacious.tumblr.com/ Patrick McGorrill

      It’s just that living a life filled with falsehood and violence is more difficult for vegetarians.
      Because their diet is lacking in key nutrients, vegetarians have trouble with many cool and fun activities. But that doesn’t mean they have to live without!

      • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

        With quality of reasoning like that, you could have a lucrative career writing Indian textbooks!

  • PathogenAntifreeze

    I like that this is “the strongest argument.”

  • PathogenAntifreeze

    The strongest argument against the existence of unicorns is that they are known to misbehave, and therefore would have missed the boat when Noah was wrangling pairs of every animal for the Ark.

    The strongest argument for why women should always be laughing while eating a salad is that salads, being a leafy vegetable, are related to shrubberies, and this one time, a shrubbery was telling people stuff in the Bible.  While on fire, I think.  And therefore, salads must tell really good jokes, hence all the pictures of women laughing.

    I should try to get that last one peer reviewed…  I’m gonna be the next celebrity scientist.

  • Anel Viz

    Personally, I find it very reassuring to know that vegetarians never ever cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes.

  • http://www.facebook.com/larratt Shannon Larratt

    Seems pretty much in line with the outlandish statements that are made in diet books, alternative medicine, and so on… the fact that we notice it here simply shows our cultural biases. I have no doubt that if the statement was swapped, ie. “vegetarians lie and commit sex crimes due to a deficiency in essential amino acid yumyum”, meat eaters would totally buy it and repeat it at length.

  • niktemadur

    Whoever said that all assholes are meat-eaters has obviously never been to Whole Foods.
    Wait!  Whoever said that all assholes are meat-eaters, is obviously an asshole that hangs out at Whole Foods!

    EDIT: I like going to Whole Foods, but I’ve bumped into some truly uninformed, holier-than-thou attitudes there.
    Now something sublime: If you live in San Diego, do yourself a favor and go to the Hillcrest Whole Foods, there’s an African woman who tends the salad bar and sings to herself all the time, it is like balm for the soul, absolutely beautiful.

  • travtastic

    Oh, darn. This can be a great point to use against everyone who doesn’t eat animals, since they’re a giant hivemind. Go at it, gentlemen and ladies.

  • http://microblog.ourcoffs.org.au/mjd mjd

    Can I be the first to suggest the title “Beefer Madness”?