Fireside Chat: Causality

Life and death are nothing more than two halves of a causality cycle. When we eat, we sustain our life through the extinction of our prey's life. When we drink milk, crush grapes into a press, or drink the water of a spring, we delay our death through resources that cause harm to something else. When we realize this, we begin to understand the fullness of life and its consequences of it. Some may think that only humans partake in this cycle, but this could not be further from the truth! Even if man disappeared from the globe's surface, the grass would still be the prey of cows, the rabbit of the fox, and the sheep to the wolf. Despite what the Weather Underground would like people to believe, no animal under the banner of Heaven is guiltless of this cycle. As Kahlil Gibran put it:

When you kill a beast say to him in your heart.

"By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed. For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of Heaven."

If we are ever to come to terms with reality, man must understand that it is natural to consume animals and the fruit of the land, for it is held in the hands of causality. If philonoists cannot agree on this, we will face extinction not from factors outside of our hands but through fighting against nature itself.