I’ve seen this a lot but where I’ve really started to notice it is on some of the shows put out by the Atheist Community of Austin. Most specifically, I saw a call this past week over on Truth Wanted by someone calling themselves a “sentientist” and from there, the whole thing went to hell.Now I’ll be honest right up front, the co-host, Dan Beecher was a whole lot more rational than either ObjectivelyDan or the caller, but let’s break this down a little bit.

This is purely an emotional reaction. That’s all veganism is, especially the people who like to slap “ethical” on their chest and play make believe. Like it or not, man is an animal. We evolved to eat meat. We evolved to eat virtually anything we can fit through our system, as omnivores, but meat is absolutely on the diet whether you like it or not.

Granted, we shouldn’t cause unnecessary suffering in the animals that we raise for our own consumption, but these are the same people staring at videos of kittens and going “awwww!” all the time and that’s just not rational, sorry.

I am rational. I care about rationality. I care about applying logic and reason to my daily life and I don’t give shit-one about your feelings. I just don’t.

When it comes to food animals, they exist for one and only one purpose, one that we have defined. Most of the time, we are at the top of the food chain and that comes with benefits. These animals wouldn’t exist if we didn’t breed them for our own consumption. Welcome to the real world. It’s something that a lot of people would rather not live in but too bad.

That’s not to say that we ought to delight in the pain of other creatures, but I want my hamburger and if you don’t like it, fuck you. Treat them as humanely as we can and slaughter them for our use. That’s how the real world works.

Of course, these people don’t like that and this “sentientist” doofus wasn’t making any sense. He’s drawing arbitrary lines in the sand which animals he wants to protect and which ones he doesn’t care about and even on the call, this kind of thing came up and there are no good answers coming from their side. If plants can react to negative stimulus, and we have copious examples of that in nature, why not protect plants? Why just animals? Or, for that matter, why just cute animals? Because if you notice, they’re not out there arguing that we ought to protect the parasitic tape worm, right? They don’t want to talk about that part. Life is precious until it’s inconvenient or ugly to look at.  They’re not much concerned if we wipe out things like the human bot fly (Dermatobia hominis) or one of the fly larvae that like to eat your eyes (like Baylisacaris procyonis). These are the same people who would happily step on a cockroach running across their floor or spray for mosquitos that are harassing them. Those aren’t cute. So much for “respecting life”.

Because all of this is pure emotion and zero intellect at all. That’s what I’m starting to realize underlies just about all of humanity’s problems these days. The complete over-reliance on feelings and a complete dismissal of the facts when they interfere.

Can we please knock that off?