Interesting how we focus on the small and not the big

Hi all.  Time for another nugget of thought.

Of late I have been reading a lot concerning the vaccination debate.  To vaccinate or not to vaccinate.  I will state to begin with I am pro vaccination (very strongly) so if you read this thinking I will support what I find to be ridiculous reasons for not vaccinating your children you will be mistaken.

But this is not a rant either about the narrow views of those anti vaccination.  I believe this is as a good an example as I can find about modern life as any.

First lets look at some of the arguments I have found against vaccinating your children.  The couple of reasons that make me chuckle most are 1. Vaccinations give your kid autism and 2. Vaccinations are full of toxic chemicals and 3. Vaccinations are mind control serums that the government uses to control the population.  I bet most readers will have a giggle at these when they read them put so plainly.

Let's look at the autism reason first.  Autism is a genetic condition.  So it means you are born with genes that code for autism.  Please show me conclusive scientific proof (not some hillbilly's whack job manifesto) that science is at the point where we can alter the genes of a living organism as complex as a human.  We humans are still stumbling at altering the genes of more simple creatures like plants, bacteria and so on and they have to be altered when they are still embryos.  That is when they are still merely a single cell.  Viruses for instance do have the capacity to insert their RNA (not DNA) into cells to hijack the cell's ability to reproduce but they do not have the capacity to alter DNA.

And honestly if we were at the point where we could manipulate the genes of a human don't you think they would be using it to do something constructive ... like cure the many genetic diseases out there that are a result of the DNA not being correct when the child was conceived?  Not burdening the medical systems of the world by creating children who need thousands and thousands (probably millions) of dollars of additional care over their life times?

Anyway the study that found this link has been discredited and is now a laughing stock of the scientific community.

Now lets look at the mind control aspect (I will come back to the toxic chemicals in a sec).  If you have been vaccinated think about this - did you choose what to wear this morning?  Did you choose who to vote for last election?  Did you choose your own breakfast cereal?  Did you choose what TV you are going to buy?  Did you choose where you wanted to live?  Point made ... moving onto something that doesn't sound like something an idiot spat out when they were drunk.

And now the real point I want to make.  The point about toxic chemicals.

According to the World Health Organization almost every vaccination they list is less than 10 mL, in fact of that number most are under 5 mL.  A couple are more with the largest one being about 30mL.  Some are single doses and but most require about 3 or 4 doses.  Barely anything.  I have seen arguments against vaccination because chemicals like formaldehyde are used to preserve the vaccination and that parents don't want to introduce harmful chemicals into their child's body.

This is the real point of my argument here.  This tiny amount of chemical pales in comparison to the toxic chemicals that enter into a child's body from other sources.  Formaldehyde for instance is used in a variety of things.  It is used to make clothing in a store feel soft and to be wrinkle free.  Hence why it is recommended that all new clothing is washed before wearing it.  What about the cigarette you are smoking?  Formaldehyde is in that too ... among other toxic things.  In fact it is found in many adhesives, solvents and bonding agents found in your home.  Your house probably contains more formaldehyde right now than all the vaccinations over the course of a child's life put together.

Then again this is not the only dangerous chemical in a child's life.  Let's look at MSG for instance.  A chemical found in about 80% of processed food.  How many parents out there give their children let's say chicken nuggets.  My husband loves them, eats them like they are going out of fashion.  They contain about 50% chicken (read the ingredients list ... its not as much chicken as you think).  Makes you wonder what the other 50% of ingredients are doesn't it?  Chances are they contain MSG (MSG has a variety of names so its not likely listed as MSG).  MSG makes food taste so much better.  And it makes you want more.  So you buy more.  And therefore eat more.  The only one I see benefiting in this instance is the company that made the chicken nuggets.

In a lab if you have a bunch of mice, they don't get fat on their own.  So how to they make the mice fat to study obesity?  They give them MSG laden food.  Let's do a visual demonstration:

Not very pretty.  And you never thought that commercial companies would harm you precious child.

But I feed my child organic food you yell.  Well lets look at another aspect of modern life.  Car exhaust fumes.  If you live in the city then your surrounded by this.  So is your child.  Our friend Formaldehyde comes up again here as one of the components of car exhaust fumes.  So is sulphur dioxide, a rather strong and potent acid.  Especially when mixed with water.  Then there is components like nitrogen dioxide (kids often use this to get high as it deprives the brain of oxygen), carbon monoxide (once again deprives the brain of oxygen) and benzene, which is a known cancer causing agent.

So while there are parents who jump up on their soap boxes and scream about anti vaccination, I have to find flaws in their logic.  Vaccinations have removed horrible diseases like polio from the western world.  Let's do another visual demonstration of what the after effects of polio are:

Is this what those who are against vaccinations really want to go back too?  A world where this happens.  The power is there to prevent this.  And by not vaccinating you actually put your entire community at risk of deadly disease   Mostly because vaccination simply lowers the chances significantly of a person catching these diseases.  So your child becomes infected because you didn't vaccinate, you send said child out into the world and then what?  Your child dies along with everyone else's?  How would you feel knowing you allowed the spread of a toxic disease like polio and killed or destroyed the lives of those in your community?

This is an example of how narrow minded we humans can get.  We focus so much on the one little thing where in fact our whole modern world is toxic and poisonous to us.  We have the capacity to remove these horrible diseases from the world so no child or adult has to suffer them.  No one has to be deformed.  No family destroyed.  Yet we let irrational fears stop us.

So focused are these people on preventing one little thing in the environment that they fail to see the bigger picture.  The huge SUV they drive like a trophy is probably undoing all the good those tiny little vaccinations provide when their child later dies of cancer from breathing its fumes.  Or when their child suffers complications of obesity from eating MSG laden food.

There is a bigger picture here.  So take off those blinders and think a little bit more than about yourself.  If you already have ... well done.  My hat off to you.

Sources
http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/1/07-045096-table-T2.html
http://www.bestwaytoloseweight4u.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/monosodium-glutamate-side-effects-300x225.jpg
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/car-exhaust-chemicals.html
http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/14639/1/Dangers-of-Exhaust-Fumes.html
http://childimmunizationusa.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/african-children-with-polio.jpg
http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/indoorair/voc/formaldehyde.htm

Do you need to be religious to have morals?

I saw this and thought this would be a great point to discuss.  Albert Einstein after all is considered one of the greatest minds of the last hundred years or so.  Probably of all time.  But regardless of who said it, this is a statement I find powerful and worthy of deeper thought.

It is said that you need religion to have a moral code.  Most religious types will likely come up with something along the lines of "how do you know what is right if you don't have religion?" when this very prospect is put to them.  Religion does offer us a structured moral code.  There is a set code of conduct that we can refer to in a religious text that if we get into a sticky situation morally.  Subject to some interpretation of course.

But I will ask this.  What if under these moral codes it says "kill all who do not believe in your religion".  Most main stream religions actually have something to this effect in their religious texts.  A large number of people now days will say "oh but we don't follow that part" yet it is in there, part of the moral code of conduct that has influenced history time and again.  How many died in the Christian Crusades?  How many die now in the War on the West staged by fundamentalist Islamics?  Two examples of when this moral code is taken literally.

I am atheist.  I believe in a higher power but I don't subscribe to any religion.  I would favour Wicca if I had to pick a religion because the Wiccan Rede is the closest to my own moral code.  The final line of the Wiccan Rede is "An ye harm none, do what ye will".  If we all lived by this one line then I think this world would be an infinitely better place.  And you don't need to be religious or a Wiccan to live by this simple ethos.

And then we come to the real point of this post.  Do you need to be religious to have a positive moral code?

I would say those of us who do not have religion in our lives have a stronger moral code.  We do not draw lines in the sand over trivial things like belief or sexuality or gender and so on.  This is because we do not have a theology that tells us we are going to hell if we embrace someone who is a homosexual or give rights to women or have friends with a variety of beliefs.

Yet there is also one point that is more critical here.  Our moral code is by choice.  It is not forced on us.  It is not fear based.  There is no one telling us we will burn forever in hell if we do not follow the moral codes written in a book.  There is no priest to absolve our so called sins.  There is no one offering the reward of heaven.  We are on our own to forge our own code of morality.  We are free to question morality with no repercussion and explore it to establish our own system by which to live by.

Because someone with no religion has to forge their own moral code then they give their charity willingly and for different reward.  They have to give it unselfishly.  How can you give charity in a selfish way if you have no greater power tapping on your shoulder and saying "Your not joining my club if you don't help you fellow man".

I volunteer with a no kill animal charity.  I help them not from the selfish desire to insure my afterlife is free of fire, but because I find it abhorrent that we live in a society where a cat or a dog can lose its life for as pathetic a reason as it hasn't found a home in its allotted time.  I, like many others, want to live in a world where cats and dogs are not treated as disposable objects but treated as living creatures that share our planet.  My reward is from helping animals to find loving forever homes and knowing that I have helped to get some of these animals out of horrible situations.  My reward is not based in a need for karma or a ticket to heaven.

I simply help because I love animals and there are two things in this world I cannot tolerate.  The first is those who would harm a child.  The second is those who would harm an animal.  Both are often incapable of fighting back and therefore are at the whim of the adult who has the power.  That power could come from the adult being physically larger than them.  It could be they hold the gun.  Or the adult is the ones placing the animal or child in a cage so they cannot escape as they are tortured to death.  Do not confuse this with the debate over eating meat.  Animals that die for meat in modern countries often have wonderful lives and are killed quickly.  They serve a purpose and are not killed because a human got bored and needed entertainment.

I do not need to be religious to find these things criminal.  I do not need religion to find motivation to want to change the world for the better.  I have a desire to change the world for the better, not for my own reward.  My desire is to change the world for the better so that the innocent in this world do not suffer.  Which ultimately is the difference.

You might argue that well who cares what the motivation is as long as aid is given.  That maybe be.  But I live with passion.  I live with desire to change the world.  I do not live with fear of heaven or hell.  And I can find motivation to go that bit further from knowing that for a small handful of living creatures I really am making a difference in their lives.  Even if they cannot thank me.

The Wiccan Rede
http://wicca.com/celtic/wicca/rede.htm

Carving your own future

This time I want to discuss the weight of expectation.

Of late I have been thinking about my life.  While I love some parts of it, I have missed out on others.  I find myself struggling to define myself in this world.  So far I have only the option my ancestors had, that of being a house wife and mother.  In a modern world that wants its women to have it all - career, family, a perfect house - it can be a difficult task to reconcile your mind to this when you have only one piece.

I grew up with the weight of expectation.  I was the first person in my family - on either side - to be intelligent enough to be considered for university.  I was forever told that I would go to university and have a great career.  Now approaching thirty I am the only one of my family without a job and no prospects for any job better than a fast food restaurant.  This is despite achieving a bachelors degree.

Looking back at my life I have come to the conclusion that this weight has set myself up for failure.  It was so expected that I would follow this one path I didn't have room to grow in any other direction.  But what if this path was not the correct path for me?  What if I have now wasted close to thirty years of my life on a path that I cannot follow?  So far I have accumulated nothing more than a massive student loan that will trail me for the rest of my life.  While obtaining a degree is has opened doors that normally would have been closed, in my life it has not really given me the future I desired.

But what if I had never been pushed to go to university.  What if like my siblings, the expectation was they just get through high school.  My brother has become a builder.  He will do well in life because there is a growing demand for people with a trade.  You know like an electrician or plumber or builder.  One sister is a personal trainer.  Perhaps not the most lucrative of professions but one that will be increasingly in demand with the expanding waist lines of the population.  My other sister works for the courts after having a long career in the government sector.  And then there is me ... unemployed for the fourth time in my life.

You could argue that without my past experiences I would not have the husband I do now.  A man who is willing to let his wife stay home while he works his butt off to bring in enough money to take care of our ill advised debts.  But when you do nothing more than sit at home and spend that hard won money it slowly weighs on you heavier and heavier.

Perhaps if it had not been expected of me I would have looked outside the path of university and found something I enjoyed more.  I might have taken up a trade or I might have skipped study altogether.  Perhaps I would have ended up in the same place.  But at least I would have had the choice.  It would have been my choice.

It wasn't until I moved away from my family that I learned to hear my voice.  It has yet to set me on a path that I can be happy with but listening to that voice in my head has taught me a couple of things.  First of all student loans shouldn't be handed out to kids.  An 18 year old is not an adult capable of making good financial decisions.  If someone puts a piece of paper in front of you and says "sign here and you get $150 a week to live on" an 18 year old is probably not thinking about the long term consequences of this action.  In fact I believe that the age for obtaining credit of any kind should be at least 20.

If most 18 year olds are like I was at 18 then they will not be mature enough on many levels to understand finance.  This is something that we are not taught to understand as few of our parents understand it themselves and no schools force you to take a class on life skills like how to make good decisions around finance.  I only learned about it because I held a job where I processed massive numbers of finance contracts and having to explain them time and again gave me a detailed insight into finance.

Secondly I learned that university does not give you any fraction of a clue about what a job will be like.  If you want to an engineer they don't tell you that a lot of engineering roles will have you on call 24/7.  This means they can ring you at 3 am and you have to get up and go in and fix the problem.  This could take 24 to 48 hours.  So congrats your awake this long.  They don't tell you that you have work with managers who don't want to fix things, they just want to save money and expect you to fix it up with a roll of duct tape.

Or if you want to work with computers so that you don't have to deal with people (not all of us are social creatures).  This is fiction because now days developing IT solutions is all about working with the client to get the best result.  If you want to be a biologist then you have to accept that that this is the degree with the lowest employment rate, unless you want to teach or do genetic engineering.  The realities of a career option are often glossed over so that when you get to the end of your degree you probably don't want to work in that industry because its really not suited to what you need in a job.

Thirdly no one tells you how important maths will be.  Maths should be compulsory at all levels of schooling. Not English studies, but maths.  I thought I left maths behind in high school.  How wrong I was.  It likes to pop its little head up and say "hello.  Thought I was gone for good right?"  Maths is far easier to get your head around in high school than as an adult years later.  So any high school student should be studying a maths subject.

My point is stop expecting things of people, especially your children.  Let them find their own way.  When my children get to the end of high school I will be encouraging them to take a couple of years off to learn about themselves, explore the world and decide what they want for themselves.  My only condition I will have on them is that they hold a job and pay their own way through life.  If they want to be musicians, models, actors or actress then they fund that by working.  If they want to be doctors or engineers or vets or computer scientists, then they work and support themselves until they get there.  It is so important that they learn the lesson of supporting themselves while they find their paths.  This gives them a better grounding for a brighter future.

Gay marriage - a really good example of a first world problem

Gay marriage.  You either go red with anger reading those two words or shrug and go "so, let them have it." To me the issue of gay marriage is the best example I can find of a first world problem.

The issue of gay marriage is not restricted to developed countries.  There are many undeveloped countries where gay marriage would mean massive riots.  Even giving gay people rights in these countries would be a massive step forward.  But I'm not talking about these countries.  I'm talking about developed countries here.  And with good reason.

The term first world problem has been going around the internet for a long while now.  These are issues that people in developed countries essentially cry over but in the grand scheme of things they aren't issues at all.  Like internet speed.  My husband will have a full blown rage fit over a slow internet connection.  Or if you can't find your keys, your mobile phone drops out, can't get the colour you want in that shirt you were going to buy.

So how do these issues, pointless in the grand scheme of things, related to gay marriage.  Because at the end of the day allowing gay people to marry only affects them.  It doesn't affect those who are not gay.  And certainly in this world there are far more important issues.  Like the sex slaves that are being pulled out of European and Asian countries to service men against their will in Western countries.  Or children in poor neighbourhoods who have no lunch at school because there wasn't enough money in the household to buy food.  Or helping to give cats and dogs homes so that they don't pay for human ignorance with their lives simply because they didn't find a home in time.  Don't you think these issues are a little bit more important than two men, or two women, getting married?  And these are just a couple of the issues out there that I think are infinitely more important than gay marriage.

But marriage is a religious institution many will say.  I will argue that it is not.  First of all there are laws in every country in the world that govern marriage.  Doesn't matter where you  live in the developed world, there are very clearly defined laws that dictate the contract of marriage.  And contracts are not religious.  When we look at countries like America where church and state are supposed to be separate, then how can marriage be declared a religious institution if the state issues it?

Marriage is also not specific to one religion.  Every single religion has some form of marriage.  A religious institution to me says that it is a set of rituals specific to one religion.  And marriage is not specific to one religion.  You don't find Muslims practising communion do you?  In fact not all branches of Christianity practice communion.  But you have to be of that particular faith to practice or want to practice communion.  Therefore I would label that a religious institution.  But marriage not only is practised by all faiths, even the non religious among us, atheists and agnostics, can get married.  I'm atheist and I was able to get married.  I even had a couple of pagan rituals I found to be spiritually significant and beautiful in the ceremony.

You cannot claim marriage as a religious institution if people who follow no religion can practice it.  This moves it out of the realm of religion and into the realm of free for all.  Marriage in the past was often practised for reasons other than love - to join two families, to gain wealth, to prevent war.  Marriage was a union of convenience more than anything in times gone past.  Its only the last 100 years or so that marriage stopped being about what the two families got out of the union.

Then again modern celebrities have taken that aspect of marriage to a whole new level.  Lets look at the number of quickie marriages some celebrities have entered into only to abuse the legal system in America to get a quickie annulment.  Or the fiasco with one particular marriage of one Kim Kardashian.  You would have had to have been living under a rock to have missed her short lived marriage which she came out and said was essentially for the money (no matter how she tries to spin it).

Two straight people can pervert a marriage for their own ends.  That is a fact of life.  How many people have we all met in our lives that we look at and wonder about why they are married?  Marriage has lost its meaning as it becomes all about love rather than a legal formalisation of the partnership in the eyes of the law.  For that is what marriage is ultimately.  It is about forming a legal contract with your husband or wife that gives you protections and right under the law that you might not otherwise get if you were unmarried.

I'm going to expand upon this by asking you to think of a situation where you have fallen into a coma and are essentially a vegetable.  It doesn't matter how.  Under the law, the next of kin is your husband or wife if you are legally married.  They are the ones that get to make the final decision about what happens in this situation.  Whether the doctors should pull the plug or let you continue to be a vegetable in the vain hope you might awake one day.

If you have a husband or wife then you have probably described to them what you want to happen in this situation.  I have told my husband what I would like and he has told me.  But where you are not joined by marriage or similar contract the next of kin is your parents.  So if we look at a gay person, either gender is fine for this example, and they have been with their partner for the last 20 years or more, it doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter that these two have lived together as a married couple for this long.  The parents can come in and force their choices on the situation.

So what you say.  Why shouldn't the parents have a right?  What if they have disowned their child 20 years ago and haven't spoken to them since because they were gay.  What if they come in and instead of pulling the plug like said coma person would have wanted they decide to keep their child alive completely against their child's wishes.  Or visa versa.

Marriage gives a relationship a lot more than a piece of paper.  It gives legal standing.  And why should two people be denied that because they are not a man and a woman?  I don't even give a rat's behind if its called something else, like in New Zealand where you can get a civil union.  At least its something.  But to deny people the chance to have a legal standing and to have commitment in their lives is ultimately just another first world issue.

If two gay people get married does it impact on a straight couple?  Not really.  I don't care if the two guys two doors down from me are doing each other.  It doesn't impact my life.  Does it mean my kids will grow up gay?  Being gay is a choice and if my kids are gay I would still love them.  What about letting gay people adopt?  Well a gay woman can get knocked up easy enough and have children in a gay union.  And I can think of far worse straight couples who have children than gay men.  Why not give a family to the millions of children out there that don't have one.

Every argument I have heard about gay marriage I can invalidate with examples.  I have not heard one good one yet.  And to be honest, if they want to get married let them.  Let them have the same headaches and triumphs as we do in marriage.  And lets get on to worrying about more important things in life.

The hypocrisy of vegetarianism

Hypocrisy ... doing one thing while believing another.  You may ask why I am singling out vegans and vegetarians on this day.  There is good reason as I believe they are the moral example of our modern society.  And with good reason.  

Vegetarianism is to not eat meat.  Vegans deny themselves all animal products.  And in a way I have no issues with vegans.  Vegans live by their moral code, they stick true to their beliefs that they shall do no harm to any animal.  So in reality I have no issue with them.

The true issue I have is with the self righteous vegetarian.  The holier than than attitude I have come across countless times in every vegetarian I have ever met.  The one that sits there telling me how they can't stand the thought of harming an innocent animal while drinking a latte.  Or then pops a prawn or piece of chicken in their mouth.  The one that then looks down their nose at you because you do eat meat.

Let us look at some practices surrounding the food we eat.  Milk is produced by getting a cow pregnant then when the calf is a day old it is separated from its mother so that the milk can be collected for human consumption.  The calf is allowed a day with its mother so it can drink her milk and begin to build immunity for its life, if that life is to be longer than a couple of days.  Most male calves born to dairy cows are dead within a couple of days as they are bred to be dairy cows, not meat cows.  Growing them for meat is unproductive.  Most female cows will then go on to continue this cycle.

Now perhaps we should assess fish.  Fish are hauled out of the oceans in nets or on long lines.  They are often tossed alive into tanks on board a fishing vessel.  There is water in these tanks, not to keep the fish happy and healthy but to keep their dead bodies fresh.  Often there are so many fish in a tank that the ones at the bottom are crushed to death and the ones at the top drown from not being in the water.  

As a specific example I will outline tuna.  Some tuna species have been fished so extensively that they are about 80% of what they once were.  Tuna are an apex predator in the ocean, a predator much like a shark, whale or dolphin, that is needed to weed out the sick and dying while keeping populations healthy.  Tuna are fast becoming an endangered species as there is no means to farm these ocean going wanderers currently available.  There is a huge demand for their flesh and they are being fished to extinction because we can't say no to their wonderful taste.  It could be only a number of years before this valuable fish stock collapses and we have no tuna at all ever again.  

There are many many fish species facing this fate.  Sharks for instance are facing slow deaths after being hauled out the water to have their fins cut off then being tossed back, still alive.  A shark cannot swim without its fins and if a shark cannot swim it cannot breath.  It is doomed to drown in a horrible manor for a soup that needs chicken stock to flavour it because shark fins have no flavour.  

Now let us look at chickens.  Most chicks are packed three to a cage where they spend their whole lives unable to move.  If they are lucky they might be "cage free" where they are packed tightly in a high stress environment that sees several chickens per square foot of barn space.  Cage free doesn't mean cruelty free.  It just means instead of three to a cage, there is thousands in a small space in a warehouse.  They have to be feed antibiotics to prevent infection because they are so packed in.  Free range chooks can be in a better situation but most laws do not enforce the ideal chickens running around a barn yard view a lot of people would take.

So a high and mighty vegetarian sitting opposite me who claims that they are looking out for the welfare of animals by not eating meat is really a hypocrite when they drink their latte, when they eat any animal product really.  I have lived on farms, I have seen what happens to animals raised to feed the masses.  I have heard the farmers talk about how sad they feel having to take a calf away from its mother, how they dislike disposing of the unwanted male calves.  Farmers are human too and often in countries like Australia and New Zealand they take the utmost care of the animals in their charges.  But it doesn't mean that there aren't things we wish we could change.

Animals like sheep, cattle and pigs in Australia and New Zealand largely have good lives.  I have seen the meat sheep on a station in Australia living out happy lives.  I have seen the dairy cows in New Zealand and I have seen the affection the farmer looking after them gives them.  One farmer I knew in New Zealand had a name for all 200 of his dairy cows in his herd and knew each one's personality and each one was more than just a cow, it was a friend.  I have seen pig farms in these countries where pigs are free to root around and I have watched the little piglets galloping around playing with each other, even going under fences to play with other litters of piglets.

In Australia and New Zealand I have seen that the welfare of these animals comes first and foremost for any farmer.  The last couple of days at the end of their lives is the most stressful.  I don't think you could make it less stressful.  But they are treated with a great amount of care and dignity in these countries.  Yes an animal has to die so we can eat but for most of their lives they live a very happy carefree life.

Humans are meant to have an diet containing protein.  If you delete this from your diet you need to replace it.  Did you know that if you happen to need surgery you need to have a high amount of protein in your blood to help you recover.  My mother in law almost died twice because she was on a largely vegetarian diet before having surgery (she had to cut fat out an forgot to replace the protein she wasn't eating because to avoid fat she wasn't eating meat).  After the surgery she wasn't able to recover properly and it almost cost her her life. Doctors told her that they fear doing surgery on vegetarians because they often don't replace the protein in their diets and it causes complications with the surgery.

All I ask is that those of you out there who are a vegetarian, please do you research before cutting meat from your diet.  And those of you who do choose to not eat meat because you don't want to harm an animal ... think about how hypocritical that sounds when you are drinking your next coffee.  Or eating fish.  And I ask that you don't judge those of us who just love our steak or bacon for doing so.

If you think about it vegetarianism could be replaced with other belief system words in this article ... And get the same result.  Unless you practice what you preach, don't get on your high horse and look down your nose at the rest of us.