Weekly Newsletter from Christian Vegetarian Association CVA - May 26, 2021
From Christian Vegetarian Association (CVA)

  1. Impressive Greta Thunberg Video
  2. The Purpose of Cancel Culture
  3. All-Creatures.Org Ministry

1. Impressive Greta Thunberg Video

https://youtu.be/7WvehTbuvIo

2. The Purpose of Cancel Culture

Last week I discussed how cancel culture forces people to choose sides and join a tribe. To acknowledge nuance or to admit that the other tribe has some valid points results in cancellation with consequences ranging from social ostracism to loss of one’s job and professional opportunities. This effectively silences discourse in the public square. What is the purpose of cancel culture?

Silencing dissent is always done for the same reason – to hide dangerous truths. Both the political left and the political right in the United States have legitimate concerns and powerful arguments for their positions. However, neither countenances dissent from within their ranks. Such dissent would expose falsehoods, and these falsehoods are crucial to permitting the harm, and sometimes outright cruelty, that derive from their positions. I choose not to articulate the falsehoods of the left or the right, lest I be cancelled like so many others. Perhaps the reason that I don’t fully speak my mind reflects a lack of courage, but I insist that it is more my dedication to help animals. If I were cancelled, a voice for animals would be cancelled. Perhaps if there were more voices for animals, this would not concern me so much. In any event, I really don’t think I need to articulate the falsehoods – I think just about everyone can easily recognize obvious falsehoods articulated by both the left and the right and knows what I mean.

For those convinced that their “side” speaks only truth, please consider the following. Historically, people in general largely agreed about the facts upon which public policies were based, but they often disagreed on questions of values and priorities. Today, however, people on both sides are convinced that the opposing side’s positions are based on obviously incorrect factual claims about the world. Either a lot of people on the left or on the right are delusional about the facts-on-the-ground, or both sides are wrong about important factual claims. The former hypothesis seems unreasonable. Both the left and the right have many thoughtful, intelligent people in their ranks. Further, people who ideologically endorse liberal values, such as Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Bari Weiss, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying, have called out falsehoods frequently articulated by progressives, and conservative ideologues, such as David Frum, Peter Wehner, and Liz Cheney, have similarly rejected publicly falsehoods from the right. I strongly suspect that most people from both the left and the right recognize that some of their claims are false, but due to either loyalty to their tribe or fear of being cancelled by their tribe, they assert as truth claims that are patently false.

I discuss this here in the context of the Christian Vegetarian Association not because I fear for the future of our democracy (though I do hold such fears), but rather because a post-truth world in which obvious falsehoods are widely treated as self-evident truths is bad for vulnerable nonhumans as well as humans. I will elaborate on this next.

Stephen R. Kaufman, M.D.

3. All-Creatures.org Ministry

Newsletter: We Just published this week’s edition of our all-creatures Newsletter, which we hope you like and share with others to help stop the exploitation and killing of animals.

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