Our Meat-Eating Prophets

Moses and Jesus were not vegetarians... and neither was Mohammed.

Jesus was a Jew and, as such, was raised in a world in which the Torah -- the most sacred book of God -- was not only made of animal skin, but wrapped in animal skins as well.

His was a world of sheep and goats, camels and donkeys, horses, and mules.

Sheep and goats were routinely sacrificed and eaten, just as they are today. Larger pack animals were used to the very edge of their miserable existence, and then they were killed and skinned for water bags, saddles, drums, shoes, bags, and cord -- just as they are today.

While the Bible is not quite a recipe book, it does have instructions. In Deuteronomy 14 we are told:

These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the red deer, the gazelle, the roe deer, the ibex, the addax, the oryx, and the mountain sheep. Any animal that has hoofs you may eat, provided it is cloven-footed and chews the cud.... "Of the various creatures that live in the water, whatever has both fins and scales you may eat...You may eat all clean birds.

Jesus was born in a manger -- a place where beasts of burden and service are housed.

The story in the New Testament is not of loaves and Tofu, but of loaves and fishes, and it was fish -- a living thing -- that was killed and which Jesus fed to his followers.

In Mark 7:19 Jesus says all meat is now OK to eat (a major legal difference between the Old and New Testaments), and in Luke 22:8-15, Jesus intructs his followers to prepare lamb for the Last Supper.

Add to this the story in Samuel where the fox's tail is set on fire to help torch the fields of the Philistines (made famous in the Rudyard Kipling poem, "The Fox Meditates"), the Old Testament tales of frogs falling from the sky (not a good day for the frogs, I suspect), and the wholesale drowning of animals (see the Great Flood in Genesis and the un-parting of the Red Sea in Exodus), and it's clear that God is not a PETA member.

We have more direct evidence, of course. If God made man in his own image, as the Bible says, then God has canine teeth.

Try to reconcile that with vegetarianism.

God did not make man alone, of course. He also made spiders which bind up living things, inject them with poison, and then eat them alive, one piece at a time.

God made the hawk which will rip the head off a fluttering sparrow still grasped in its claw.

God made the fox, which will chew the hind legs off a living mouse so that the flapping rodent can serve as a toy for its kits.

In short, God made nature, red in tooth and claw, and I assure you it is not all a mistake.