Joe Hernandez:
CLASS OF 2000
El Paso Community CollegeClass of 2000
El paso, TX
Joe's Story
Joe is from El Paso, Texas.
Music Joe likes includes Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman, Greg Graffin, :TWiNGiANT:. Movies Joe likes include PLANEAT, Bold Native, Earthlings. TV shows Joe likes include Louie.
One of Joe's favorite quotes is:"The unexamined life is not worth living. -Socrates
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
â Richard Dawkins
Yes, lets not say animals, lets say non-human animals, thatâs consciousness raising by the way, thatâs a good example, just like the feminists did with consciousness raising about sex bias language. It is a logical implication of the Darwanian view, that there is continuity between all species, at least theoretically - continuity. Iâm very fond of pointing out that itâs an accident of history that the evolutionary intermediates between ourselves and for example chimpanzees - or actually between any species and any other species - itâs an accident that they happen to be extinct. If they were not extinct and the thought experiment would be; suppose we discovered relict populations of austrilopethicus âlucyâ in the jungles of Africa and relict populations of a continuous series of intermediates from ourselves back to the common ancestor with chimpanzees and a continuous series back from chimpanzees to the common ancestor with chimpanzees, and lets say that the series is sufficiently continuous, so thereâs no reason why it shouldnât be, that we could actually mate and reproduce all the way along the chain so I could mate with a female in the jungle who could mate with a male who could mate with another one and we could link all the way, in a chain, all the way to chimpanzees. Now, it is pure historic accident, that we actually canât do that if only all the intermediates had survived we could literally do that and if that were the case, then the only way we could maintain our present speciesist morality - which draws an absolute wall around Homo sapience - and distinguishes us from every other species on the planet, the only way we could maintain that under the conditions of the thought experiment that Iâve advanced, would be to have courts exactly like the apartheid courts in south Africa which decided whether so and so would pass the âwhiteâ and when you put it like that, we all of course shrink back in horror from such a prospect and yet most of us accept without question the ...Expand for more
presumption that we are completely unique species. Well in many ways we are unique species, but lots of other species are that, the point Iâm making with the thought experiment is that there is a continuum...it shouldnât be necessary to do it in actuality, because the thought experiment is clear, I mean nobody could possibly deny, unless they deny evolution of course, but as long as weâre evolutionists, as long as weâre Darwinians, nobody could possibly deny that, which means; that all of us that are meat eaters including me, are in a very difficult moral position, we are, at least speaking for myself, what I am doing, is going along with the fact that I live in a society which is where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of sort of social courage which I havenât yet produced, to break out of that. Itâs a little bit like the position that many people would have been a couple of hundred years ago over slavery, where lots of people felt kind of morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because, I donât know, because the whole economy of the south depended upon slavery, (and of course non of us like the idea of slavery but you canât seriously contemplate doing away with it, I mean the whole economy would collapse) so I find myself in something like that - that situation. I think what Iâd really like to see would be a massive consciousness raising movement so that we all become vegetarian, and then it would be so much easier for those of us who find it difficult to go along with that.â
-Richard Dawkins
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
-Albert Einstein".
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