Honesty about meat

Your piece on kosher meat (“Meat-ing the challenge: Bay Area buyers’ club focuses on kosher and ‘conscientious,’ ” Aug. 19) did not mention the kosher requirement that animals be conscious when killed, which precludes the use of stunning that occurs in ordinary slaughter.

The animals we eat cannot vocalize it, but they do have nervous systems and consciousness, and they do feel fear and pain. I think we need to be open and honest about the effects of our actions, and if we are going to commit to conscientious consuming and living, then we will need to stop intentionally killing other sentient beings in order to eat them.

Baron Miller   |   San Francisco

Eat like a caveman

As a former vegan and now Paleo eater, I strongly disagree with Richard Schwartz on meat. (Letters, Aug. 12).

Jews everywhere suffer from health and digestive issues far out of proportion to other people, but it is not the meat that is making us sick. Most vegetarian crusader-types like Schwartz cite disproven studies that fail to distinguish between the healthfulness of eating grass-fed meat high in vitamin B and Omega 3 oils and the truly health-damaging “foods” these study participants also ate, including sugar, grains and vegetable oils, all of which lead to leptin resistance and a whole host of health issues such as obesity and depression. See: www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6823/5/10.

Also the “sustainability” argument is thoroughly debunked at websites like: www.morehouse.edu/facstaff/nnobis/papers/Davis-LeastHarm.htm.

Our bodies have evolved over millions of years of eating meat and we have not yet adapted to eating agricultural products developed only in the last 8,000 years, let alone sugar and things like canola oil.

My HDL or good cholesterol has tripled since I gave up grains, sugars, dairy and legumes and started eating bison meat and vegetables for breakfast. (See: www.tripleyourhdl.com).

Jonathan Carey   |   Oakland

‘Atheist’s shrug’ is a sad thing

As a teenager, I rebelled against God as a bearded old man on a cloud. As an adult, I understood that was a stupid caricature, a cartoon. God is not an Angry Santa Claus. That image is for children and the ignorant. Literate people have never believed that.

The Big Bang implies that everything in the universe has a common origin, a common cause, a common nature, and that all events are one common process.

According to Spinoza, the universe is the Face of God.

The Big Bang is not a moving outward into space, but an expansion of space itself. The act of creation, the expansion, is continuous, goes on now, will go on forever.

Denying the implications of the Big Bang theory requires the same denial as fundamentalists denying the existence of dinosaurs. Only denial supports the atheist’s 19th century mechanistic assumptions. DNA-RNA demonstrates the common origin and unity of life.

In quantum mechanics a particle’s wave function collapses in the presence of an observer. Human observers are recent; quantum particles are ancient. Yet particle properties depend on an observer. The atheist’s shrug in reply is more fundamentalist denial.

Widespread atheism (“Deity dilemma: ‘God doubters’ look for place in Jewish life,” Aug. 19) shows that Jewish education is pathetic.

Jack Kessler   |   Berkeley