Replies to post #32193 on A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board (AIMUSERS)

[extelecom]

It's people.........

[1step]

Malthus one of the sources that Charles Darwin used in his synthesis of his theories dealt with a hypothetical bubble of unlimited population exspansion
by elephants that eventually filled the universe.

WE might keep putting off the peak but it will be reached and there will be a collapse. As the Buddah said nothing is forever. Hopefully we can plan for it and pre vent the human misery that will ensue.

[Conrad]

No! It's people!

and

. . .what we really need is a paradigm shift.

The objection to turning "dead people" into food stems from our western christian oriented upbringing. From a neutral perspective there should be nothing wrong with eating food made from recycled flesh of corpses. . it happens every day continuously on various fronts.

Besides that there is(or was) at least one group of people in Indonesia that considered eating parts of a corps of a family member
a means of "saving" or "retaining" the existence of the died person somehow.

On the other hand it is know that cannibalism in some way. . (either some times or always. . .I forgot the details of the research) causes serious human ailments in the cannibals. . .apparently a sort of Darwinian extermination mechanism evolved for preventing "eating you own kind" . . .

Taken these different factors in mind the resistance to making food from corpses "of you own kind" is psychological. With potentially and absolute future effective recycling process in which the history of the source material is destroyed. . .without destroying the nutritional value of the flesh of course . . . making food from corpses should not be objectionable. . .for this to happen a paradigm shift is required: people can be healthy food.

If we ever can rise to that level is questionable, but I admit that the proposition that we could come to such a point does not make it necessarily desirable to do so. . .if we can not, collectively, cast off the idea that after death a corps is more than a heap of chemical substances then we should not turn human corpses into food. . .the lingering belief that it would be an evil thing to do will make it so. . .in the same way that all sorts of belief structures that people hang onto now-a-days
also create evil behavior.

So, in the same way that some of us condemn religious fanaticism because it's fundamental evil character we should condemn any suggestion making food from people until we are ready to do so.

The essence of the "Solyent Green", which I considered one of the best issues for thinking about an answer to the question: "What are people for?" (1)(2) is not that food made from people is bad but the deception exercised during inhumane control and coercion of the masses is the evil, in contrast with the other aspect of allowing some people to die in a way that families and friend could "live" with.

In the same sense for me this question(rather the essential issue) arose also in other novels that I would recommend anyone to read.

(1) Cat's Cradle. . . Kurt Vonnegut
(2) Brave New World. . .Aldous Huxley