seriously, confining oneself to a traditional religious school of thought really puts a barrier up against personal, undiluted revelation. How can you concentrate on being open to ethereal influences when you're focused on praying the specific way your clergyman taught you?

You're right on when you say that people simply don't want to face the stewardship of their own lives, so they look to who they consider 'holy men' so that they can wallow in temporal pettiness, feeling satisfied that their salvation is guaranteed cuz they are right with an earthly institution. It's embarrassing.

I definitely consider humans as part of the earth, not as detached intellectuals that can look at the earth as just a middle point until jesus comes or whatever. If you want to consider us equal to animals, you have to concede that animals eat other animals, there is nothing more natural and more necessary to the food chain, therefore veganism is spiritually unnecessary, speaking from a naturalist perspective.

I'm all for ethical treatment of individual animals, but I only get disturbed when species get threatened, cause that effects everything. I'm also disturbed when people take it more harshly when animals are being abused than when people are being abused. Afflicting other animal life is natural (as long as it's not widespread), afflicting your own species is wholly unnatural.