[Angry_Chimp]

"At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed—a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time—and still bothers ours—is that he showed this bone-crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feed horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of gourmet, of even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."

Escape from Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1975), pp. 1-2.

[Angry_Chimp]

"What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man’s torments for their own amusement."

...



“Man has a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew. Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways the strangest and most repugnant being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”

The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 26.

[roccman]

Another excellent post AC.

BTW - Bar-b-q chicken was a tasty lunch today!

[greenworm]

I really dig that last quote, thanks for sharing that.

[Angry_Chimp]

This is the uniquely human need, what man everywhere is really all about each person’s need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life the heroic contributor to the destiny of man. This seems to be the logical and inevitable result of the symbolic constitution of self-worth in an unbelievably complex animal with exquisitely sensitive and effusive emotions. Once you took the general instinct of self-preservation of the lower animals, the basic irritability of protoplasm, the self-identity of the physio-chemistry, the vague pulsation of the warmth of the animal’s inner processes, the nameless feeling of power and satisfaction in carrying out his instinctive behaviors once you took all this and gave it a directive self-control via the ego, and a precise, symbolic designation in a world of symbols, then you resulted in nothing less than the need for heroic self-identity. Self-preservation, physio-chemical identity, pulsating body warmth, a sense of power and satisfaction in activity all these tally up in symbolic man to the emergence of the heroic urge. Freud saw the psychic nature of these facts, and he tallied them up under the label of narcissism; it was a truly brilliant formulation, and Fromm recently stressed that this is one of his lasting contributions: the exposure of man’s utter self-centeredness and self-preoccupation, each person’s feeling that he is the one in creation, that his life represents all life, and apotheosizes it.

The Birth and Death of Meaning (New York: The Free Press, 1971), p. 76.



…the first task of psychotherapy is to free the person from other peoples’ opinions; he learns not to be crushed because someone says his tie doesn’t match, or he has ugly ear lobes, body odor, or is not a good mixer. This is why therapists often put such a low valuation on the mind, on thought processes: the mind is the social self, the ways we have learned of attuning our self-esteem to the expectations and valuations of others; the mind automatically channels our self-esteem into society’s roles. Thought processes are mostly rationalizations that we use in order to keep our self-esteem in balance, they are the feverish direction of the metteur-en-scene of our inner newsreel. The person has to learn to derive his self-esteem more from within himself and less from the opinions of others; he has to try to base it on real qualities and capacities, things he can make or do, as Goethe argued, and not on the mere appearances that others like to judge by. He has to try to get as many ways of earning self-esteem as possible, to constantly broaden his skills, the things he genuinely takes pleasure in, in place of what others think he should take pleasure in.

The Birth and Death of Meaning (New York: The Free Press, 1971), p. 192.

[Falconoffury]

And the angel of the lord came unto me,
snatching me up from my place of slumber.
And took me on high, and higher still until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself.
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own midwest.
And as we descended, cries of impending doom rose from the soil.
One thousand, nay a million voices full of fear.
And terror possesed me then.
And I begged, "Angel of the Lord, what are these tortured screams?"
And the angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!
You see, Reverend Maynard, tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust."
And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared, "Hear me now, I have seen the light!
They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul!
Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers!"
Can I get an amen?
Can I get a hallelujah?
Thank you Jesus.
Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on........

[bodigami]

There's at least a complete kingdom that is free from hunting: Plantae.

[I_Like_Plants]

Nope not even Plantae, you have things like mistletoe.

And I was certain reading it, that the original quote was from Richard Dawkins.

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'N')ope not even Plantae, you have things like mistletoe.

And I was certain reading it, that the original quote was from Richard Dawkins.

[katkinkate]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('zensui', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'N')ope not even Plantae, you have things like mistletoe.

And I was certain reading it, that the original quote was from Richard Dawkins.

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('katkinkate', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('zensui', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'N')ope not even Plantae, you have things like mistletoe.

And I was certain reading it, that the original quote was from Richard Dawkins.

[Narz]

It's all about the way you look at things.

There is nothing inherently wrong w/ eating & eliminating (and certainly nuttin' wrong with sex ).

Also, mankind need not live on flesh. In fact technically you could live entirely without killing - fruit, nuts, milk, eggs, etc. all are harvestable without the death of the "host" organism (and host is a misnomer actually since the relationship is symbiotic not parasitic, ideally anyway).

[I_Like_Plants]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Narz', '(')and certainly nuttin' wrong with sex ).

[jboogy]

I think Mufasa or Grafiki said it best, " the circle of life" I got a picture of me skinning a wild pig that my boy shot that kind of illustrates what angry-chimp is talking about, in graphic living color, but I'm having trouble downloading to image shack lately.Once I get it onto image shack I'll post it.