Burgers: Burgers, fish burgers, turkey burgers, buffalo burgers, and hamburgers of all kinds are a staple of the omnivorous diet. People eat untold amounts of hamburgers every day in countries around the world. However, has the consumption of hamburgers, those derived from the death, in fact murder, of living beings been considered? Given that untold numbers of hamburgers are eaten every day in this world, how many animals, fish and birds must be sacrificed to satisfy the appetite of those who crave hamburgers?
And love in relation to hamburgers? Have hamburger eaters ever thought about killing the animals they eat? Frankly, it’s impossible to talk about love, let alone be loving, and then eat a hamburger, a fish burger, a turkey burger, or any kind of meat engendered by meat.
Tukaram, the saint of Maharashtra, lived in the 17th century. He asks, The Lord dwells within each being. Doesn’t man know that he also resides in animals??
Tukaram’s question is valid, especially for people who align themselves with spiritual values, values intrinsically rooted in love and compassion. God is life. Human beings are not the only beings to whom God gives life or love. This raises the question: “If we love, how can we kill?”
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright and 1925 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, beautifully states:
Animals are my friends … and I don’t eat my friends. This statement is fully expressed in his poem, “We are the living graves of slain beasts.”
We are the living graves of slain beasts
Slaughtered to satisfy our appetite.
We never stop to marvel at our parties
If animals, like men, can have rights.
We pray on Sundays that we have light
To guide our steps on the path we travel.
We are fed up with the war. We don’t want to fight.
The idea now fills our hearts with dread
And yet we gorge ourselves on the dead.
Like scavenger crows we live and feed on meat
Regardless of suffering and pain
We cause by doing so. If so we treat
Helpless animals for sport or profit
How can we hope in this world to reach
the peace we say we are so anxious for.
We pray for it over hecatomb of the dead
To God, while he outrages the moral law.
Thus cruelty begets its offspring, war.
Gloomy thought, isn’t it, this observation from Shaw? Kill and eat our friends? It is not a pretty thought, much less a pleasant sight or a commendable demeanor. We pray for peace, but we participate in the slaughter of defenseless creatures just by consuming their rotten and decomposing corpse. In doing so, we guarantee, through the law of sowing and reaping, cause and effect, karma, that we will experience the cruelty of war, a just reward for our own cruelty.
The 20th century saint, Charan Singh, asks: Where is the need to kill birds, fish and animals and turn our body into a graveyard? The human body, in which the Lord resides and which is the only species in which it can be realized, must be kept as pure and clean as possible … Animals, birds, etc., were not created as food for humans. .. Plants have souls, insects have souls, birds have souls, animals have souls and, of course, human beings have souls.
Charan Singh’s comment eradicates the delusional belief that animals, birds, fish, and other creatures have no souls and are therefore acceptable to eat. Therefore, we cannot use the excuse that other living beings are devoid of soul simply to justify killing and eating them.
Summary
Are love and hamburgers compatible? This article says, “Absolutely not!” If we are loving people, if we profess to love and follow a spiritual path, it is axiomatic that we cannot just talk about love or be loving and then go have a hamburger, a fish burger, a turkey burger or whatever. Regardless of how you try to disguise it, there is no love in murder or eating the sacrificed remains of living things. We can try to justify our actions until we are sad and on our deathbed, but the plain and simple reality is that love has, and will never have, anything to do with eating the flesh of living beings.