My Return to Vegetarianism

     So Easter Sunday a couple of years ago I'm at the Cheesecake Factory with my wife and best friend from church and I order the stuffed mushrooms.  They were incredibly delicious.  I couldn't believe how good they tasted!  I scarfed them down with great gusto and commented frequently how much I liked them.
I was thinking to myself self-pityingly how little enjoyment I had in this life and how much I enjoyed these mushrooms. 

     Well, it turns out the mushrooms were stuffed with sausage!  Thus ended 15 years of vegetarianism.  The next thing I knew I was guzzling Metamucil and stuffing my face with the carcass of every sentient being I could legally order.  In particular I enjoyed steak.  OH MY GOD did I enjoy steak.  I blew a ton of money on every variety of steak, I preferred a good marbled one.  Getting hungry?

    I could eat a gargantuan amount of meat in a single day.  It reminded me of the halcyon days of my youth when I could eat two bacon cheeseburgers at a time.  My dog started being afraid of me(that's not true, I would never eat my dog).  But somewhere in the back of my mind was the sense that I had allowed all of this self-indulgence to blind me to the the evils of meat-eating.

     So, I started to feel guilty about eating meat.  I tried to become a vegetarian but failed miserably a few days later when we went to a restaurant that had steak.  It wasn't even a good steak.

     Since the time I started eating meat I lost my religion and became an atheist.  Now, the orthodox thinkers among you may think that would mean, absent any theological reason to be kind to innocent creatures, I would redouble my meat-eating.  Such is not the case, however. 

     I started to reflect more deeply about the suffering animals endure.  I found myself feeling increasingly like eating meat was wrong.  Now, other animals eat meat; this I know.  It's natural.  An atheist like me ought to revel in the the Discovery-Channel-After-Darkness of eating animal carcasses.  But it had quite the opposite effect.  Instead, I found I focussed more on their suffering.  But I continued eating meat.  Was I a sadist?  What was the matter with me?  So one day I went out to a shish kabob place and had the lamb kabob(with extra meat).  Something about this experience finally pushed me back over the edge.

     So I have been a vegetarian for 5 days.  So far I've had no craving for meat.  But the cravings will come.
I think I will successfully fight them off.


     It seems that since we can survive as vegetarians, and since we have vegetarian options all around us, and we are aware of the suffering of the animals we eat, that we ought to not eat them.  Other animals have an excuse I think.  But we don't.

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