M3004
Question:
Does eating vegetable food not mean just as much destruction of life as the eating of animal food?
Answer:
It is true that vegetable products, like animal products, consist of microlife but the microlife in the plant-substance has no day-conscious ability to feel physical suffering in the way that the animal microlife does. The physical conscious life of the plant consists only of being able to vaguely sense pleasantness and unpleasantness. Pain in the plant can therefore in the worst case only be noticed or felt as a hint or vague feeling of unpleasantness. In situations where animal life would wince in excruciating pain, vegetable life would feel only a hint or vague feeling of unpleasantness, and at that only when it is a matter of roots, leaves, stalks, grains and unripe fruit. By eating the ripe fruit-flesh around the kernel in the edible fruits no killing whatsoever takes place, since the microlife here gets a normal and perfect unhindered promotion in its life-cycle by being consumed as nourishment in an organism. But as yet vegetable nourishment has to contain the above-mentioned roots, leaves, stalks and grains because ripe fruit does not create enough filling in the intestinal structure which the terrestrial human being possesses. But this structure will change with evolution to the advantage of the flesh and juices of ripe fruit which will then become the terrestrial human being's only acceptable source of nourishment.
The same source of nourishment will at that time together with refined ethical thinking and considerate and healthy care of the structure of the body create the perfect human being in God's image whose atmosphere will be devoid of the physical misery of today with its diseases and all too violent undermining and mortality of the organisms.
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The above questions and answers are taken from a fixed heading in the Danish Contact Letters from 1950-51 where Martinus answered questions from the readers. Question no. 4 was first published in Danish in Kontaktbrev no. 2, 1950. Translated by Mary McGovern, 1989. First published in the English edition of Kosmos no. 3, 1989. Translation slightly revised by Anne Pullar in Kosmos no. 3, 2020. Article ID: M3004.
© Martinus Institut 1981, www.martinus.dk
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