Domesticated farm animals are not natural species with independent ecological roles; they are human-engineered populations bred into dependence for human use. Ending their forced reproduction is not eradication - it is refusing to continue a harm-creating practice. — Truth Seeker

What about plants them? The plants we eat have been bred for thousands of years. We (or many urban dwellers) hardly eat any wild plants, actually.

In the end I will say this. If you have your ideology and stick to veganism, that's great, you surely have the right to do that and likely you have a healthy diet knowing the supplements you have to take. Yet if you push this, something that 1% of the population adheres to, as for everyone to adapt as a great transformation of the society and assume that everything would go just fine this bombastic plan of retirement homes for all of the Worlds livestock where in the end we waiting which will it be, Maude the cow from Thetford UK or Haru from Japan, that will be the last cow on Earth to die of old age, I beg to differ. I don't we'll reach here any agreement, because it's an utopian idea and basically as devastating as some Pol Pots idea of eradicating urban life, money and making everybody collective farmers.

* * *

Yet I think there's a possible future that might at first seem as answer to your hopes, but actually it isn't. And that's meat processed artificially in a lab.

Now, if that lab meat starts to be dirt cheap, you will know that the no hamburgers at McDonalds and others will come from a living cow...ever. If the production lab meat is one tenth of what a traditional livestock meat, then many people will prefer then the cheaper one. And knowing how corrupt the US food regulation is, health hazards will surely be downplayed. Yet this is the only way that traditional livestock will wither away partly, because of decreased demand, and hence it will become in the long run more costly or simply become the delicatessen of those that can spend it.

Just as with wild plants and plants produced in greenhouses, there's the flavor problem. That there's many for example mushrooms that we simply cannot grow ourselves shows just how limited our understanding of the biosphere is. Something that you cannot know being yourself as vegan, but there's a radical change in taste and in the healthiness when animals are fed with the monotone food of soy and grain or if they eat the variable diet in the wild of many different plants. In fact someone that hasn't any time eaten wild game, the taste will feel likely too strong. You might notice it in the difference in taste of wild berries in the forest near you and berries that you can buy at the Supermarket grown from Egypt/California/somewhere that are larger but less tasty.

Yet unfortunately if that lab meat will be so cheap and easy, perhaps advancing to make even the muscles of sirloin and tenderloin that we know, there is no reason why we wouldn't also get lab plants too. Likely these will be even worse tasting than our greenhouse based plants, but if a bag of artificially manufactured potatoes cost 5 dollars and potatoes grown in soil outside on a farm cost 10 dollars, then which one people will little money to spend will take?

Esse, thank you for your thoughtful reply. I think you’re blurring distinctions that actually matter.

First, on religion as a monolith:
I agree that religions are internally diverse. Contemplative traditions, process theology, and liberal theology often do engage rigorously with criticism. But that concession cuts both ways. Those traditions tend to depart precisely from the authority-based, dogma-first structure that defines religion as socially practiced. When a religious framework becomes genuinely evidence-responsive, revisable, and non-authoritarian, it increasingly resembles philosophy or spirituality rather than religion in the institutional sense. My critique is aimed at religion as a normative system with protected doctrines, not at every individual thinker who happens to use religious language.

Second, on ethics and consequentialism:
I am not assuming consequentialism is the correct framework. In fact, my own position is closer to a pluralist view that includes care ethics, constraints, and virtues. The issue is not “consequences vs authority” in a narrow utilitarian sense. It’s whether ethical claims are answerable to the lived welfare of sentient beings or insulated by appeal to divine command, revelation, or sacred status. Deontology and virtue ethics can be fully secular and fully accountable to human (and non-human) flourishing. Divine-command versions cannot - because they terminate justification at “God wills it.”

Third, on secular worldviews and foundational assumptions:
You’re right that no framework is assumption-free. But not all assumptions are epistemically equal. There’s a difference between provisional commitments that remain open to revision (e.g. realism about suffering, intersubjective values, empirical facts), and religious beliefs that are exempt from falsification by design.

Calling both “mythological insulation” flattens an important distinction. Secular frameworks typically expect internal critique and external challenge. Religious systems often treat such challenge as moral or spiritual failure.

Finally, on meaning:
I’m not claiming meaning requires zero foundational commitments. I’m claiming it does not require supernatural authority or revealed metaphysics. Meaning can be grounded in relationships, care, creativity, solidarity, and reduction of suffering without positing entities or commands that override moral reasoning when they conflict with compassion.

So, yes, religion can contain sophisticated moral reflection. But when it does, it succeeds despite its appeal to authority, not because of it. And when religious claims collide with the well-being of sentient beings, I see no reason they should receive special immunity from scrutiny.

That, to me, is the crux.

I think your reply mixes several different issues together, and that’s where the disagreement actually sits.

First: plants vs animals
Yes, plants we eat are also bred by humans. But that is not a parallel case in the morally relevant sense. The ethical concern I’m raising is about sentient beings with subjective experience - beings that can feel pain, fear, deprivation, and frustration of interests. Breeding plants does not create lives capable of suffering. Breeding animals does. That difference isn’t rhetorical; it’s foundational. If we erase that distinction, then all ethics collapses into mere preference. A cow is a sentient being - a plant is not.

Second: “eradication” vs ending a practice
Ending the forced reproduction of domesticated animals is not analogous to Pol Pot or social engineering catastrophes. That comparison is doing emotional work, not ethical work. No one is proposing killing existing animals. The proposal is to stop deliberately creating sentient beings for the purpose of exploiting and killing them. If a harmful practice ends and the population that depends on that practice naturally declines, that is not eradication - it is moral discontinuation.

Third: the “retirement home” caricature
No serious vegan ethicist thinks every cow, chicken, or sheep must be maintained indefinitely. That framing assumes a binary: either exploit them and murder them or preserve them forever. That’s a false dilemma. Animals in sanctuaries will naturally die when their lifespan has come to an end. Transitional care for existing animals followed by non-reproduction is ethically coherent and practically manageable over time, especially compared to the ongoing global cost of industrial animal agriculture.

Fourth: lab-grown meat
Here we largely agree on the trajectory, but not the interpretation. Cultivated meat is not a refutation of vegan ethics - it is evidence that society is already trying to escape the moral and environmental costs of animal farming without confronting them explicitly. If meat can be produced without breeding, confining, and killing sentient beings, then the ethical objection to meat-as-such largely dissolves. What remains is a question of resource use, health, and access - not animal harm.

And yes, corporations will downplay risks. That’s a regulatory problem which can be solved. It's not a moral defense of animal exploitation.

Fifth: taste, wildness, and “biospheric loss”
You’re absolutely right that industrialization flattens flavor, diversity, and ecological richness. But that critique cuts against animal agriculture, not in its favor. Monocropped soy and grain feeding billions of confined animals is one of the most ecologically impoverishing systems humans have ever created. Wild game tastes different precisely because it is not produced by that system - but scaling “wildness” to billions of humans is a physical impossibility, not a moral option.

Finally: poverty and cheap artificial food
You’re naming a real concern: cost pressures will push people toward cheaper, more artificial foods - plant or animal. But again, that’s not an argument for continuing a practice that systematically inflicts suffering. It’s an argument for better food systems, better regulation, and justice-focused transitions, not for maintaining harm because alternatives are imperfect. I recommend that we implement a Universal Basic Income and Facilities (e.g. free accommodation, healthcare, education, etc.) for all humans. This will end poverty globally.

This isn’t utopianism. It’s harm minimization under constraints. We already accept that we should stop doing things once we realize they cause massive, avoidable harm, even if the transition is messy. Ending slavery didn’t require a perfect alternative economy first. Ending child labor didn’t wait for ideal conditions. Ending animal exploitation doesn’t either.

We may not reach agreement - that’s fine. But dismissing the position as “utopian” sidesteps the central question rather than answering it:
If we can meet human needs without systematically harming sentient beings, why should harm remain the default? That’s the question I’m putting on the table.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but I feel like there are a few things that you're still not properly reckoning with.

First, I feel that you haven't come to terms with the fact that all institutions, both secular and religious, develop orthodoxies, protect core doctrines, and treat certain challenges as illegitimate. Universities have foundational commitments they don't put up for debate and scientific institutions operate within paradigms that resist revision until crisis forces its hand (per Kuhn). Secular political movements and societies have sacred values that function identically to religious dogma in terms of how heresy is treated (I.e. as moral failure). This is a rather obvious sociological/historical point that I think you'll find difficult to dispute.

Furthermore, I think you're under-appreciating the degree to which religious institutions evolve and revise their fundamental commitments over time. Even the Catholic Church, which is often held up as a paragon of rigid adherence to doctrine, has changed so much that it's ultra-conservative members feel that it has all but abandoned some of its fundamental commitments. You might argue that this evolution often results in the splintering of the community, but this is true of all institutions, not just religious. Inevitably there will always be some who are unwilling to compromise and move in a new direction. Again, this is not unique to religious communities.

Second, I'm guessing that if push-came-to-shove many of your own foundational commitments would prove themselves to be less open to revision and falsification than you pretend them to be. Consider your commitment to "openness to revision" itself - are you open to revising this principle? What kind of evidence could someone offer to change your mind on this point? What about the claim that all ethics should be "answerable to the lived welfare of sentient beings", or that "reduction of suffering" is a foundational good? These are not empirical claims that are subject to falsification. Furthermore, I highly suspect that if you were to found an institution rooted in these values that you'd not have much tolerance for those who substantially question or deviate from them. Most probably you would eject such people from the group rather quickly, or leave to start another group.

Overall it seems that you are just turning a blind-eye to the fact that much of what you criticize within religion is not, in fact, unique to religion but seems to be inherent to the human condition.

By the way, what happened to your OP? Why doesn't it show up on the forum's main page?

Animals in sanctuaries will naturally die when their lifespan has come to an end. — Truth Seeker

No, they will reproduce. You have to intervene for them to do what is the most natural thing for living things doing.

Cultivated meat is not a refutation of vegan ethics - it is evidence that society is already trying to escape the moral and environmental costs of animal farming without confronting them explicitly. — Truth Seeker

Hypocrite bullshit: Commercial enterprises aren't interested in moral ethics about eating meat, they are doing this for profit. But feel free to go with the advertising.

Monocropped soy and grain feeding billions of confined animals is one of the most ecologically impoverishing systems humans have ever created. Wild game tastes different precisely because it is not produced by that system - but scaling “wildness” to billions of humans is a physical impossibility, not a moral option. — Truth Seeker

I agree. Yet the simple fact is that we don't know all the things what provide the different taste and the healthiness of "wild" food. And that makes myself critical of just how "healthy" artificial food will be.

Again you are totally forgetting what drives our societies and economies: the market mechanism. Yes, you could just eat everything wild, plants and game, and live in a city. Your food budget just would be enormous, likely multiple times of an ordinary family.

It’s an argument for better food systems, better regulation, and justice-focused transitions, not for maintaining harm because alternatives are imperfect. — Truth Seeker

And I think those are quite important issues, just as is not to be cruel towards animals and part of the biosphere. Just smart animals, but that's it.

I recommend that we implement a Universal Basic Income and Facilities (e.g. free accommodation, healthcare, education, etc.) for all humans. This will end poverty globally. — Truth Seeker

Again here you go with your incredible hubris. Just who do you think will do this? Just how? Belief in a World government solving everything is extremely naive. The World doesn't work this way. Far better is to think about improvements that actually could be implemented and would get closer to the ideals.

We may not reach agreement - that’s fine. But dismissing the position as “utopian” sidesteps the central question rather than answering it:
If we can meet human needs without systematically harming sentient beings, why should harm remain the default? That’s the question I’m putting on the table. — Truth Seeker

In life living entities eating other living entities is totally normal and in my view, we are animals.

For you, there is no value in the life of a cow, because you have decided it's existence isn't worth wile, because it suffers. Well, even wildlife suffer, and do have usually a short and nasty life of hunger and disease. But that's OK for you. That's your basic problem and we won't reach an agreement.

But coming back to the actual subject of this thread, your world view is far more religious than scientific, even if you deny it.

Esse, this is a stronger pushback, and it deserves a stronger reply. I’m going to grant what’s true in it, then draw the distinction I think you’re still blurring.

1) Yes, humans build orthodoxies everywhere. No, that does not make all orthodoxies epistemically or morally equivalent.

You’re right about the sociology: institutions fossilize. Universities have gatekeeping norms; scientific communities have incentives and status hierarchies; political movements develop taboo and heresy; “sacred values” show up in secular life, too. That’s not just plausible - it’s obvious.

But that point, by itself, doesn’t do the work you want it to do. It risks a category flattening:

* “Humans defend group identity” (true)
does not entail
* “Therefore, religious dogma is not distinctively problematic” (not established).

The relevant distinction isn’t “does an institution have orthodoxy?” but what kind of claims form the orthodoxy, and how the orthodoxy is justified and policed.

A scientific paradigm is not immune by design: it’s provisional, prediction-linked, and it faces a built-in external tribunal (reproducible reality) even when humans drag their feet. Kuhn was describing inertia and social dynamics, not endorsing “anything goes.” A paradigm can be sticky without being sacralized. When it finally breaks, it breaks because it stops working.

Religious dogma, in its classic forms, often has a different structure: it is anchored to revelation, sacred texts, sanctified authority, and salvation stakes. That creates a distinctive insulation mechanism:

* disagreement becomes not merely “mistaken,” but sinful, spiritually dangerous, or disloyal;
* core claims are not merely defended, but made holy;
* revision is reframed as “deeper interpretation,” while the protected status remains.

You can find secular analogues, yes. But the existence of analogues doesn’t erase distinctive mechanisms and stakes. It’s like saying, “People can be violent for many reasons, therefore, ideological violence isn’t a distinct pattern.” It’s still a distinct pattern.

So: I grant your sociological point. I deny your implied conclusion that this dissolves the special problem of religious insulation.

2) “Religions evolve too.” Yes. But the key question is how and at what cost.

You’re also right that religious institutions evolve - sometimes dramatically. Even the Catholic Church changes; internal conservatives sometimes feel betrayed; schisms happen; moral progress gets incorporated. I don’t deny any of that.

But again: what follows?

Religions often change because of external moral and epistemic pressure - social movements, scientific knowledge, human-rights norms, historical trauma, political necessity - not because revelation suddenly became evidence-sensitive.

And crucially, in many cases the mechanism looks like this:

1. Society’s moral circle expands.
2. Religious institutions resist.
3. Resistance becomes untenable.
4. Doctrine is reinterpreted to catch up.
5. The tradition claims continuity.

That’s not “religion is incapable of progress.” It’s “religion is not a reliable engine of progress,” because the moral compass is frequently outsourced to the wider culture. Sometimes religion is in front; sometimes behind; but when it’s behind, the sacralization of commitments raises the price of correction.

If your system makes error-correction structurally harder, “it sometimes changes anyway” doesn’t vindicate it. It shows human beings can drag even rigid systems toward decency.

3) The “gotcha” about my foundational commitments misses what I actually claimed.

You ask: am I open to revising “openness to revision”? What evidence could change my mind about suffering being bad, or welfare mattering?

Two points.

(a) Not everything is empirical, but not everything is dogma either.

I never claimed every foundational commitment is empirically falsifiable. That would be naïve. Some commitments are normative (value-claims), and they aren’t “falsified” by data the way a measurement is.

But that doesn’t make them equivalent to revelation-based dogma.

There’s a difference between:

* axioms adopted because they best cohere with shared experience and reduce contradiction (e.g., “suffering counts morally”), and
* axioms adopted because an authority declares them sacred and disobedience is a moral stain (e.g., “X is wrong because God forbids it”).

Normativity isn’t the issue. The issue is whether your normative bedrock is defended by reasons accessible to other minds, or by special authority.

(b) “Open to revision” doesn’t mean “I will abandon any principle on demand.”

Fallibilism is not liquid relativism.

I’m not “pretending” to be revisable while secretly being dogmatic; I’m describing a real distinction:

* Some commitments are revisable in the sense of refinement, scope, and tradeoffs.
* Some are so central that abandoning them collapses the entire project (like “truth matters” in inquiry).

Science itself has this feature. The commitment to evidence is not “falsifiable” by evidence without self-undermining. Yet it’s not religious dogma; it’s a constitutive norm of inquiry. Similarly, “unnecessary suffering is prima facie bad” isn’t an empirical hypothesis, but it is a constitutive moral starting point for any ethics that takes other minds seriously.

If someone says “suffering is good” or “other beings don’t matter,” we can’t refute them with a lab experiment. But we can expose the implication: they’re rejecting the very basis of moral reciprocity. At that point, debate isn’t about “who has the right evidence,” but about whether they are still doing ethics at all (in the sense of offering reasons that could bind anyone beyond their tribe).

4) Would I eject dissenters from a welfare-based institution?

Probably - depending on what “dissent” means. And this is where your argument almost reaches the real point, but stops short.

Every institution has membership criteria. If you join an organization dedicated to disability rights, and you advocate excluding disabled people from public life, you’ll be shown the door. That’s not dogmatism; that’s integrity of purpose.

The deeper difference is what justifies exclusion:

* In dogmatic systems, exclusion often protects identity, authority, or sacred status.
* In welfare-based systems, exclusion protects vulnerable people from harm and preserves a mission justified in publicly shareable reasons.

Yes, both can label dissent as “moral failure.” But the content matters. “You’re morally wrong to harm people” is not the same kind of claim as “you’re morally wrong to doubt our revelation.”

If you collapse those, you end up unable to distinguish abolitionism from inquisitions except as “both are groups with strong beliefs.” That’s too thin to be useful.

5) The human condition point is true - and it supports my critique rather than cancels it.

Your last line is right: much of this is human. Humans seek certainty, belonging, status, and moral cleanliness. We build institutions that protect those needs.

That’s exactly why systems that sacralize authority are dangerous. They take normal human tribal psychology and add:

* cosmic stakes (salvation/damnation),
* sacred texts (hard-to-revise anchors),
* moralized epistemology (doubt as vice),
* and legitimized coercion (historically common).

If human beings are prone to orthodoxy, then we should prefer moral and epistemic frameworks that minimize the damage of that tendency - frameworks that build in error-correction and reduce the incentives to treat dissent as spiritual contamination.

So, I’m not denying human nature. I’m arguing we should design around it.

If we agree that institutions inevitably develop orthodoxies, then the central question becomes:

Which kinds of orthodoxies are least likely to entrench error and least likely to authorize harm when they do?

My claim is: orthodoxies grounded in authority and sacralization are systematically riskier than orthodoxies grounded in public reasons, fallibilism, and accountability to sentient welfare.

If you think that’s wrong, the strongest move isn’t “secular groups do it too.” The strongest move is to show that revelation-anchored, sacralized authority is not more prone to harmful insulation than reason-anchored, publicly contestable frameworks.

That’s the real disagreement.

By the way, what happened to your OP? Why doesn't it show up on the forum's main page? — Esse Quam Videri

I don't know. My OP is the first post on this page: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16247/comparing-religious-and-scientific-worldviews/p1

1) “Sanctuary animals will reproduce.”

You’re right about the biology: if you put intact males and females together, they can reproduce. My “naturally die” line only holds if sanctuaries are run as actual sanctuaries rather than unmanaged mixed herds.

But here’s the key point: preventing forced reproduction is not some unnatural horror. We already manage reproduction constantly - in pets, in wildlife conservation, in farming itself (artificial insemination, selective breeding, culling, etc.). The whole domesticated-animal system exists because humans intervene in reproduction more than almost any other domain of life.

A vegan transition doesn’t require “retirement homes forever” or letting populations explode. It requires ending deliberate breeding and using humane population management for the remainder:

* separating sexes (common),
* contraception,
* sterilization where appropriate (routine in animal welfare).

Call that “intervention” if you like - it’s intervention to stop making victims, not intervention to keep exploiting them.

So: yes, reproduction must be managed. That doesn’t undermine the ethical argument; it’s part of the practical plan.

2) “Cultivated meat is hypocrite bullshit because it’s profit-driven.”

This is a category mistake. Something can be morally beneficial without being motivated by moral virtue.

Most moral progress in the real world is implemented through mixed motives:

* Businesses switch because it’s cheaper or legal risk changes.
* Politicians act because voters or incentives change.
* Technologies spread because they’re convenient.

That doesn’t make the outcome “advertising.” It makes it how societies actually move.

My point wasn’t “companies are ethical.” My point was: if the market delivers a meat-like product without breeding, confinement, and slaughter, that’s a structural exit ramp from a harm-based system. We can acknowledge corporate cynicism while still valuing harm reduction.

If you want to call that “hypocrisy,” fine, but it’s still a reduction in victims.

3) “We don’t know what makes wild food healthier/taste different; artificial food might be unhealthy.”

Two separate claims here: taste and health.

Taste

Sure. Wild foods taste different because of diet diversity, exercise patterns, stress hormones, muscle structure, species differences, soil microbiomes, harvesting time, post-harvest handling, and so on. We don’t fully model all of it. Agree.

But taste is not a moral defense of harm. “I prefer the flavour” has limits as a justification when the process involves suffering.

Health

You’re right to be cautious about ultra-processed food - whether plant-based or lab-grown. But “we don’t know everything” is not an argument against changing practices; it’s an argument for proper testing, regulation, surveillance, and transparency.

Also, we’re not choosing between “wild, perfect, natural food” vs “lab goo.”

Most people already live on industrialized food systems, including industrial animal products with antibiotics, zoonotic risk, contaminants, and chronic-disease correlations. So the honest comparison is:

* current industrial animal agriculture (with known harms)
vs
* alternative systems we can test and regulate.

Being cautious about new tech is a good idea. Using uncertainty as a blanket permission slip for keeping the status quo isn’t.

4) “You forget the market mechanism.”

I’m not forgetting it. I’m explicitly relying on it where it helps (price, convenience), and calling for regulation where it fails (externalities, worker exploitation, monopoly, misleading health claims).

Markets are powerful at distributing goods, terrible at pricing suffering, ecosystems, and long-term health costs unless forced to.

So yes: people will buy what’s cheap. That’s exactly why a transition strategy should target:

* true cost accounting,
* subsidies shifting away from harm,
* safety regulation,
* making the low-harm option the easiest option.

That isn’t utopian. That’s basic policy reality.

5) “Only smart animals matter… just don’t be cruel.”

If moral status depends on being “smart,” then you’ve built an ethic that can justify harming:

* human infants,
* people with severe cognitive disabilities,
* advanced dementia patients.

You probably don’t want that implication, but it’s there.

A cleaner line is sentience, not intelligence: the capacity to suffer and to have experiences that can go better or worse. That includes cows, pigs, lambs, chickens, fish, octopuses, and many others.

And “don’t be cruel” doesn’t get you out of exploitation. You can be “not cruel” in your tone while still:

* forcibly breeding,
* confining,
* separating mother and offspring,
* killing at a fraction of the natural lifespan.

The harm is structural, not just a matter of cruelty.

6) “UBI and free services globally are hubris; who will do it?”

Global UBI and free accommodation, healthcare and education are politically hard, but I didn't recommend a World government.

But two important clarifications:

1. An idea can be ethically correct and politically difficult.
Calling it “naive” doesn’t show it’s wrong - it shows it’s hard.

2. There’s a non-utopian pathway: incremental, modular, multi-level implementation.
You don’t need a single World government to move toward the principle: “Everyone receives according to needs, and contributes according to abilities.” You can do:

* national UBI pilots → expansion,
* targeted child benefits,
* universal basic services in specific domains,
* climate/wealth levies,
* regional compacts,
* debt relief and anti-corruption enforcement,
* automatic stabilizers.

If you want “implementable improvements,” fine - that’s a tactical discussion, not a refutation of the moral aim. I’m happy to debate strategy. But calling the goal “hubris” is wrong.

7) “Eating other living entities is normal; we’re animals.”

Lots of “normal” things are not morally acceptable. Violence, rape, infanticide, and dominance hierarchies are also “natural” in many animals. Nature is not ethical. We can't look to nature for ethical lessons.

Humans have one distinguishing feature: we can choose systems. We can ask whether a practice is necessary, and whether it is defensible given the harm.

So the real question isn’t “do animals eat animals?”
It’s: Do we need to, given alternatives? If the harm is avoidable, “it’s natural” stops being a justification.

8) “You think there’s no value in a cow’s life because it suffers; wildlife suffering is OK for you.”

This is simply a misrepresentation of what I said.

I didn’t say a cow’s life has no value. I said creating cows for exploitation and slaughter is not justified when we can meet needs otherwise.

And I don’t think wild suffering is “OK” in a celebratory sense. I think it’s tragic, but there’s a moral difference between:

* harms we cause deliberately and can stop, and
* harms built into nature that we currently can’t prevent without causing worse harms.

If we reach a future where we can reduce wild-animal suffering responsibly without ecological collapse, that’s worth discussing. But using “nature is harsh” to excuse industrial harm is like saying, “People die of disease anyway, so murdering them is fine.”

9) “Your worldview is more religious than scientific.”

This is just a rhetorical label, and it doesn’t land.

Science is a method for describing reality. Veganism (or any ethic) is a moral claim informed by scientific facts such as cows, lambs, chickens and octopuses, etc. feel pain. Calling moral commitments “religious” because they’re moral is incorrect.

I appeal to publicly shareable reasons about sentience and harm.
Religion often appeals to revelation and divine authority.

That distinction matters.

You seem to be saying:

* suffering is part of life,
* humans are animals,
* so exploiting and murdering animals is normal,
* and moral ambition beyond “don’t be cruel” is quasi-religious.

I’m saying:

* suffering is part of life,
* but avoidable suffering caused by our institutions is our responsibility,
* and if we can meet needs without breeding and killing sentient beings,
* then “normal” isn’t a moral defense.

My claim is: orthodoxies grounded in authority and sacralization are systematically riskier than orthodoxies grounded in public reasons, fallibilism, and accountability to sentient welfare. — Truth Seeker

You've conceded quite a bit here. Notice that your claim has shifted significantly to being one about the comparative risks of orthodoxies grounded in authority, etc. vs. those grounded in public reasons, etc., whereas your original axis cut across the religious/secular divide. It should now be fairly straight-forward for you recognize that there are plenty of secular orthodoxies that can (and do) meet the former criteria (e.g. Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), and there are plenty religious orthodoxies that can (and do) meet the latter criteria (Quakerism, Universalist Unitarianism, etc.). Now you could respond by saying that former "are actually just religions" and the latter "are not real religions", but then you're just defining religion in a way that makes your critique true by definition.

If you think that’s wrong, the strongest move isn’t “secular groups do it too.” The strongest move is to show that revelation-anchored, sacralized authority is not more prone to harmful insulation than reason-anchored, publicly contestable frameworks. — Truth Seeker

Again, this wasn't really your original claim, which you seem to have now more-or-less abandoned.

Let's go ahead and put the nail in the coffin with regard to your original claim. While it's always difficult to quantify harm, I think you'll be hard pressed to say that religious institutions have caused more harm than dysfunctional secular orthodoxies such as Stalinism, Maoism or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime.

The bottom line is that the true fault-line here is not between secular and religious orthodoxies, but between functional and dysfunctional orthodoxies, of which we have religious and secular examples of both.

Maybe you didn't add a category to the thread when you originally posted it? I'm not sure, I've never started a new thread on this site before. It is strange that it's not showing up on the forum's home page, though. At least, it isn't for me.

I don't know why this is so. Sorry.

Esse, I think you’re right that my formulation sharpened the axis, but you’re wrong that this is a retreat or a definitional trick. It’s just me being precise about what the critique actually targets.

1) I didn’t abandon the religious/secular distinction - I made it structural rather than tribal.

My original point was never “everything secular is good, everything religious is bad.” It was: religion has characteristic insulation mechanisms that tend to raise the risk of error persisting and harm being sanctified. Those mechanisms can appear in secular movements too - and when they do, I criticize them for the same reasons.

So yes: Stalinism, Maoism, and Khmer Rouge are secular orthodoxies that exhibit sacralization, authority-worship, moralized heresy, and coercive enforcement. I’m not surprised by that; I explicitly said human beings build these patterns. The conclusion isn’t “therefore religion is innocent.” It’s: religion is one historically common and socially robust vehicle for those patterns.

In other words: the target is not “religious people.” The target is sacralized authority + illegitimate-critique rules + coercive enforcement + cosmic/ideological stakes - whether the banner is God, History, Nation, Race, Party, or Leader.

2) Your Quaker / UU point actually supports my argument, not undermines it.

Quakerism and UU are good examples precisely because they reduce or refuse the classic insulation features (coercive dogma, infallible revelation, salvation threats). They do religion in a way that is closer to “public reasons and fallibilism.”

That’s not me redefining religion to win. It’s acknowledging that religious traditions contain multiple sub-traditions, some of which behave more like open moral communities than sacralized authority structures.

If you want to call those “still religious,” fine. My claim survives: the more a tradition relies on revelation-as-authority and sacralization-as-immunity, the more it risks harmful insulation. The more it moves toward fallibilism and publicly shareable reasons, the safer it tends to be.

That’s not a semantic trick; it’s a causal hypothesis about institutional design.

3) “You’ve conceded quite a bit” - no, I’ve clarified what “the problem” is.

You’re treating “religion” as a binary category and asking for a binary indictment (“religion causes more harm than secularism”). That’s not a good test of the argument.

A better test is: when harm is defended, what are the justificatory circuits?
Religions have historically had some very distinctive ones:

* “God commands it.”
* “Scripture is infallible.”
* “Doubt is sin.”
* “Salvation depends on obedience.”
* “Sacred order overrides human welfare.”

Secular totalitarian movements can replicate those circuits using different nouns: “History demands it,” “The Party is infallible,” “Counterrevolution is evil,” etc. When they do, I criticize them for the same reason: they make correction morally forbidden.

So again: I’m not abandoning the religious/secular divide. I’m saying the real danger is a structural package, and religion has historically been a major carrier of it - not the only one.

4) The “harm scoreboard” doesn’t settle the question you think it does.

You say it’s hard to argue religion has caused more harm than Stalinism/Maoism/Khmer Rouge. That may be true depending on metrics, time windows, and attribution. But even if I granted it, it wouldn’t “put a nail in the coffin” because the argument was never “religion is uniquely harmful” or “religion is the biggest harm-doer.”

Two problems with the harm scoreboard approach:

1. Scale and state power matter massively.
Modern totalitarian secular ideologies had access to 20th-century industrial states, mass surveillance, modern weapons, and centralized control. That supercharges harm. It doesn’t show the ideology is uniquely worse in essence; it shows that ideology + industrial state power is lethal.

2. Religion’s harms are often diffuse and long-duration, not always captured in body counts:

* legitimizing hierarchy (subservient women in Islam and Christianity, caste in Hinduism, etc.),
* blocking medical care (Jehova's Witnesses refuse blood transfusion) or education (Taliban in Afghanistan stopped the higher education of girls),
* sanctifying violence or exclusion (Crusades and Jihads),
* normalizing guilt, fear, and obedience,
* resisting reforms for centuries.

You can argue about magnitudes, but “body count” is not the only axis of moral damage. (And even on body count, across centuries and empires, religion’s ledger is not obviously light - though quantification is messy.) European Christians conquered, killed, forcibly converted, and enslaved millions of people worldwide across centuries - calculating the exact number of victims is impossible - estimates range from 101 to 259 million victims worldwide, depending on the sources being used.

Please see: https://www.evilbible.com and https://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/categories.html if you have the time to explore both websites in detail. If you don't have that much time, here are some of the reasons the Biblical God, if he/she/it/they exist(s), has done/is doing/will do more evil than good.

God didn't keep his words to Adam and Eve

In Genesis 2:16 and 17 the Bible (New International Version) says:
And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die."

If after eating the forbidden fruits, Adam and Eve died just as God had said, then that would have been just and consistent with God's Words. However, after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruits, instead of just Adam and Eve just dying:
1. God evicted them from Eden.
2. God punished Eve and all her daughters (an estimated 54 billion and counting) with painful childbirths.
3. God evicted all the other species from Eden, too, and makes herbivores, parasites, carnivores and omnivores instead of making all the species non-consumers.
4. God punished humans with having to toil to survive.
5. God commanded humans to reproduce which leads to more suffering and death. Ruling over other creatures causes suffering and death to those creatures, too. "God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."" - Genesis 1:28, The Bible (NIV)

These acts are cruel and unjust and totally inconsistent with what God had said to Adam and Eve which was they would just die if they ate the forbidden fruits. God didn't keep his words to Adam and Eve.

If God had made Adam, Eve, the angels, all the other species all-knowing and all-powerful, then they would all be making perfect choices. It is 100% God's fault that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. If they were all-knowing and all-powerful, they would not have the desire to gain knowledge, as they would already have known everything there is to know.

I didn't ask to come into existence. No living thing does. I would have preferred it if I had never existed. If God is real and actually did the things the Bible claims, then these cruel, unjust and inconsistent actions make the Biblical God evil.

Global genocide - The Global Flood

Genesis 6:13, 7:21-23 (ESV)

“And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’ … And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.”
Summary: God kills virtually every living creature on Earth, sparing only Noah's family and the selected animals in Noah's Ark.

Genocide of Sodom and Gomorrah

Genesis 19:24-25 (ESV)

“Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground.”
Summary: Two entire cities are burned alive - men, women, and children - for collective sin.

The Ten Plagues of Egypt (mass suffering and death)

Exodus 12:29-30 (ESV)

“At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. And Pharaoh rose up in the night … and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.”
Summary: Every Egyptian firstborn - including infants, sentient animals and prisoners - is killed by God.

Genocides ordered in Canaan

Deuteronomy 20:16-17 (ESV)

“But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded.”
Summary: Explicit divine command to exterminate entire populations.

1 Samuel 15:2-3 (ESV)

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel … Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
Summary: A total genocide command including infants and animals.

Slavery sanctioned and regulated, instead of banned

Leviticus 25:44-46 (ESV)

“As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. … You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers … you shall not rule one over another ruthlessly.”
Summary: Permanent enslavement of foreigners is explicitly permitted.

Human child sacrifice ordered (later revoked)

Genesis 22:2, 12 (ESV)

“He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering…’”
“He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy…’”
Summary: God tests Abraham by commanding the killing of his child - a psychological act of cruelty, even if halted. Why would an all-knowing and all-powerful being need to test anyone? It makes no sense.

Mass slaughter of boys, men and non-virgin women and sexual slavery of virgin girls

Numbers 31:17-18 (ESV)

“Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.”
Summary: Command to kill boys and non-virgin women; keep virgin girls as sex slaves.

Sevenfold punishment and cannibalism (threat)

Leviticus 26:27-29 (ESV)

“But if in spite of this you will not listen to me, but walk contrary to me, then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.”
Summary: God threatens to make His people resort to cannibalism as punishment.

Eternal torment in Hell

Matthew 25:46 (ESV)

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Revelation 14:10-11 (ESV)

“He also will drink the wine of God’s wrath … and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.”

Mark 9:43-48 (ESV)

“It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire … where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.”
Summary: Eternal conscious torment for unbelievers - infinite punishment for finite crimes.

Matthew 25:41 (ESV)

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’”

Revelation 20:10 (ESV)

“...and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”

Luke 13:27-28 (ESV)

“But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out.”

Matthew 13:49-50 (ESV)

“So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Divine deception and hardening of hearts

Exodus 9:12 (ESV)

“But the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them, as the LORD had spoken to Moses.”
Summary: God prevents Pharaoh from repenting, then punishes him for it.

2 Thessalonians 2:11 (ESV)

“Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false.”
Summary: God intentionally deceives some people.

Killing for minor offenses

Numbers 15:32-36 (ESV)

“While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day… And the LORD said to Moses, ‘The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.’”

2 Kings 2:23-24 (ESV)

“He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.”
Summary: Death penalty for collecting firewood on the wrong day, and 42 small boys murdered by bears because they made fun of a prophet's baldness.

Collective punishment across generations

Exodus 20:5 (ESV)

“For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.”
Summary: Descendants are punished for ancestors’ actions - contrary to the Bible’s own later law: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” - Ezekiel 18:20 (ESV).

Predestination

Ephesians 1:4-5 (ESV)

“Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,”

John 6:44 (ESV)

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”
Summary: God predestined who would be saved and who would be damned forever. It is absurd and utterly cruel and unjust.

Conclusion

These verses show that the Biblical God, by the Bible’s own words, kills entire populations, including children and animals, endorses slavery, inflicts suffering, threatens eternal torture in hell, hardens hearts or deceives minds, and predestinates who would be saved and who would be damned, removing moral responsibility.

When the acts attributed to God are judged by the same moral standards the Bible applies to humans - such as “You shall not kill,” “Love your neighbour,” and “Love your enemies” - they fit the description of moral evil far more often than benevolence. The Biblical God is a hypocrite who has killed and has failed to love his neighbours and enemies.

That’s why I conclude that, if the Biblical God exists and the Biblical text is true, His recorded actions are predominantly evil rather than good.

There are also extra-Biblical reasons. At least 99.9% of all the species that have existed so far on Earth are already extinct. Every year, non-vegans cause suffering and death to 80 billion sentient land organisms (e.g. cattle, chickens, pigs, lambs, goats, ducks, turkeys, etc.) and 1 to 3 trillion sentient aquatic organisms (e.g. fish, lobsters, octopuses, crabs, etc.). Life is full of suffering, injustice, and death. An allegedly all-knowing and all-powerful being, such as the Biblical God, could have prevented all suffering, injustice, and death, but failed to do so. He could have made all organisms made of energy that don't need to consume anything to live forever, but he didn't do that. So, all suffering, injustice, and death are 100% his fault. If he had not created anything, no one would have the burden of existence or the risk of making mistakes. If he had made everyone he has allegedly made, all-knowing and all-powerful, then everyone would always make perfect choices, and no one would have made any mistakes due to ignorance, incompetence or trickery.

I am an agnostic regarding the existence of God(s) because it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God(s). However, I am convinced that the Biblical God is imaginary and evil. He is imaginary because there is no evidence for the claims made in the Bible. He is evil because of his many evil words and actions in the Bible.

5) “Functional vs dysfunctional orthodoxies” - agreed. Now we can actually get somewhere.

Yes: the real fault-line is between orthodoxies with good error-correction and humane constraints and orthodoxies that sacralize authority and suppress correction.

Where I think you still haven’t fully engaged is this:

* Religions that center revelation and sacralized authority are structurally prone to treating certain questions as illegitimate in a way that is harder to unwind.
* Religions that reduce those features become more functional.
* Secular movements that adopt those features become more dysfunctional.

So the conclusion is not “religion bad, secular good.”
It’s: design matters - and sacralization is a known design risk.

6) The one question that decides the debate

If you want to falsify my thesis, you need to show one of these:

* that revelation-anchored sacralization is not a risk factor for harmful insulation, or
* that publicly contestable, fallibilist norms are no better at correcting error once power is involved.

If you can show that, I’ll revise my view.

But if we agree that “functional” systems are those with robust error-correction and humane constraints, then we’re basically agreeing with my core point: the more you sanctify authority, the more you gamble with human fallibility.

That’s not an attack on spirituality. It’s an engineering warning about institutions made of primates.

So the conclusion is not “religion bad, secular good.” — Truth Seeker

I'm skeptical. After all, your thread is entitled "Comparing Religious and Scientific Worldviews". You literally spend the entirety of the OP showing how religions contradict each other and how secularism offers a way out. In contrast, you spent no time at all reviewing the ways in which secular ideologies contradict each other. In your reply to you even have a section entitled "Why not religion?" in which you list out the characteristics that are supposedly unique to all religions that make them unsuitable for adoption as worldviews, again, without any analysis of how similar dynamics play out in secular ideologies. I'm sorry, but despite what you now claim, it's very hard to take you seriously when you say that you never intended for the conclusion to be "religion bad, secular good."

That said, if you claim this was not your intention, then so be it. Thanks for the lively discussion.

I have compared many religious and secular ways of living, and I prefer my Agnostic Compassionist Vegan lifestyle to all the other religious and secular lifestyles. You didn't resolve the issues I raised in my previous post. Nor did you falsify my theses by showing one of these:

* that revelation-anchored sacralization is not a risk factor for harmful insulation, or
* that publicly contestable, fallibilist norms are no better at correcting error once power is involved. Thank you for your participation. I hope you will address all the issues I raised.