This is slightly off my usual beat, but I find the question interesting enough to take the time; I hope you do too.

Does God want us to be vegetarians?

I engaged in a discussion on the topic recently with Liz Oliver, my niece’s fiancee, and found it both interesting and, at least so far, without conclusion.

As you may know from reading in the past here, seeking and trying to follow God’s will is central to my ability not only to eat healthy but to live productively and serenely.

One side of the argument would say that God values mercy, love, and life, so how could it be OK to slaughter animals for our sustenance when we can sustain ourselves in other ways?

The other side would say that the slaying of some animals for the sustenance of others is rife in the food chain, and if God designed it that way for so many species, what could be wrong with our species’ doing the same?

A key point that I did not grasp, never mind appreciate, for most of my life is that humans are animals just like the rest, constituents of nature just like the rest. Yes, we have different characteristics, but so do the rest. In my opinion, this is vital information applicable over the range of human existence.

The way it may apply here is that our special characteristics include the ability to reason, of course. Could it be that placing mercy over animal protein is a choice God would like us to make?

Though of course I have no evidence, I consider it quite evident that making good choices is part of God’s will for us. He could have created an Eden in which we blithely nibble bonbons in bucolic pastures, but our existences are richer by their being more challenging than that. It is where bad things can happen to good people, as Rabbi Kushner wrote.

It is also evident, to me, that He favors some choices over others: love over hatred, sympathy over harsh judgment, etc.

But the question of killing other beings for food is, to me, more complicated. He made us carnivores. We evolved from carnivores. He sanctions carnivorism in a great many species. One could conclude that God is down with meat-eating.

Or, one could argue that he hoped we’d used our special abilities to make the choice not to destroy others’ lives for our gratification. That’s the standard on the human-to-human field, certainly. In contrast to my earlier conclusions, that answer is just not evident, yet, to me.

I have gotten this far, however: It’s all but impossible to be God-conscious and sanction the warehousing of animals, the manipulations of their bodies for commercial gain (in a podcast recently, Jonathan Safran Foer (“Eating Animals”) told me that all commercial turkeys are artificially inseminated because their breasts have been bred so large as to prevent copulation), and in general the disregard for the lives and existences of these beings so that humans can have cheap burgers and McNuggets.

Would I eat more meat if I knew the animals that supplied had lived “natural” existences, if I knew they hadn’t been tortured in my name for all of their lives? I’m still working on that. In the meantime, I'm eating less meat.