Dear All, I intend to publish an illustrated summary of my book, Vegan Theology, before releasing the full version. Every other page of this summary will present a concise overview of an article, while the adjacent page will feature an appealing, relevant, and engaging image generated with the help of A.I. The work will contain around 60 such images altogether. I am currently looking for a publisher for it. Any suggestions? Thanks. God bless.
Below please find the preface of this book.
Introduction: Three trillion innocent creatures of God are murdered by humans annually. And there are 2.4 billion Christians on earth, most of whom misbelieve that God permits or even encourages them to kill and eat animals. For five years, it has been my soulful mission to work on this book, which argues that it is ungodly and unChristly for humans to choose to exploit, abuse, rape and murder sentient beings. Let me trace the origin and development of this book.
1. My Initiation into Veganism
In 1996, while teaching at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as an assistant professor of translation, I joined the Hong Kong Vegetarian (Vegan) Society, upon its founder Hong Kong translation scholar Dr. Simon Chau’s invitation, and became vegetarian after taking free organic vegan meals provided by them. From their talks, I learnt that meatism, especially animal agriculture, is unnecessarily inhumane to innocent animals, harmful to our physical, mental and spiritual health, destructive to our environment and conducive to the human food crisis. I thus transformed from an atheist to a spiritual practitioner, an admirer of Jesus Christ and Buddha. At that time, I somewhat sensed that Jesus as a compassionate master must be vegan, but I did not go into the matter in any depth. I merely learnt from an article of the Society that the Greek word for “meat” in many places in the NT is broma, which means food in general instead of animal flesh. What impressed me most was one of Dr. Chau’s most famous statements:- “Christianity is a religion based on mistranslation.”
2. Two Articles on Vegan Theology
In 2008, I moved to Finland and, being single and alone, easily became vegan. In 2013 I returned to Hong Kong, and resumed my participation in many vegan, animal rights demonstrations and vigils.
On June 4th, 2020, the 31st anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, I was baptised by an American pastor. One month later, I moved to the U.K. and began to seriously ponder whether Jesus was actually vegan. This was externally triggered by my coming across online a 2018 article by New Zealand evangelical physiotherapist Brad Dixon, which contends that two opposing camps of Christianity emerged after Jesus’ crucifixion, the first one being the vegan Jewish sect headed by Jesus’ brother, James the Just, the second one being the flesh-eating Gentile sect led by Paul the “apostle”. Following this article, another 2018 article, which was authored by SantMat, caught my attention. It argues that Jesus was vegan, that he neither distributed nor ate fish. These two articles sparked the flame of my interest in vegan theology.
3. Immediate Challenges
But immediately, I was encountered with a number of challenges, e.g., Didn’t Jesus eat fish upon Resurrection? What about the miracle, “five loaves and two fish”? Didn’t St. Paul tell us that we can eat anything sold in the market without questions of conscience? Didn’t God give humans “dominion” over the animals? Didn’t God permit Noah and his offspring to kill and eat animals? Aren’t there many animal sacrificial rituals in the OT as instructed by God?
4. Scrutinizing the Bible
I then started to scrutinize different editions of the Bible word by word, often referring to the Hebrew, Greek, English, and Chinese versions of key phrases. For example, I discovered that God gave not only humans but also other animals a soul. The phrase 'nephesh chayyah' ('living soul'), used in association with animals in Genesis 1, is rendered in most versions simply as 'life.' In addition to the canonical texts, I also reference apocryphal writings, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Clementine Homilies, the Ebionite Gospel, and the Gospel of St. Thomas, as well as works by theologians over the past 2,000 years and historical writings by authors like Josephus, Eusebius, and Epiphanius.
5. Meeting the Right People & the Right Books
I have been working on this book for five years. I am grateful to God for providing for my living so that I can concentrate on this writing mission. I am also thankful to God for regularly arranging for me to meet the right people or find the right books at the right times and in the right places. For example, Pastor Robert Munro, Dr. Will Tuttle, Pastor Timo, and Pastor Shells often encourage me to keep up my vegan theology research; Pr. Munro (2023) has also reminded me that Jesus did not die for the forgiveness of our sins; Dr. Tuttle (2024) has also pointed out that God lives through all sentient beings; Mr. Keith Akers’ 2020/2000 book, The Lost Religion of Jesus, convincingly argues that Jesus is a pioneering martyr for animal liberation; Prof. James Tabor (2012) contends that there are two forces in Christianity – the pro-animal-sacrifice priests with their lying pens versus the vegan prophets in the OT, who was succeeded by Jesus in the NT; Prof. Robert Eisenman (2012), in referencing Josephus’ historical writings and the Dead Sea Scrolls, concludes that Paul was a mole sent by the Roman Empire to corrupt Jesus’ Jewish veggie church from the inside out. Craig Douglas Wescoe (2021) interprets in a scholarly way the land of milk and honey as a land abounding in vegetation where all species multiply greatly and babies are well fed with milk by their mothers from sundry species.
Moreover, Prof. Andrew Linzey’s 1995 classic, Animal Theology, interprets “dominion” in Gen. 1:26, 29 as stewardship instead of domination or despotism, and stressed humanity’s unique potential to become a servant species following the example set by Jesus Christ; Prof. David Clough’s (2012) systematic theology contends that in becoming flesh (John 1:14), God breaks the boundaries among all sentient species and even the boundary between the creator and creation; the 2024 Christspiracy interviewed most of the animal theologians above and did a field study of the ravines of the Holy Temple which served to drain away the huge volume of blood shed by the sacrificed animals during Passover 2000 years ago.
Last but not the least, the support shown on a daily basis by members of my Facebook group Vegan Theology, my IG, YouTube and X with the same name has been contributing a lot to my will to keep up this work.
6. My Unique Contributions
Having said all these, my innovative contributions to vegan theology can be summarized the following theses: 1. The pre-masoretic Hebrew root of “Dominion” (Gen. 1:26, 28) is yirdu which means serving the animals instead of lordship or even stewardship given the context; 2. Non-vegans violate all Ten Commandments; 3. A combined biographical account of Jesus, the Vegan Christ, and Paul, the anti-vegan apostate mole, will shed fresh light on vegan theology.
7. My Past Experiences Coming in Handy
Thanks to God’s perfect plan, all my past experiences have come in handy regarding my vegan theology research. For my scholarly training has enabled me to browse quickly through huge volumes of data and gather relevant materials, my court interpreting experience has enabled me to objectively judge the validity of evidence, my past psychoanalytical research has enabled me to interpret Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son or a ram to God as his psychopathic projection of his father-son complex and faith crisis to God Himself, my journalistic experience with HKLP and HKBNews has enabled me to manage my Facebook group Vegan Theology efficiently, to present my arguments in a succinct and clear way, with a summary before each article or chapter, and to come up with vivid, interesting, informative, and appealing pictures with the aid of A.I.
8. Conclusion
Talking about A.I., with the help of the image generation function of ChatGPT, I am going to publish an artistically illustrated summary of the book to arouse interest about this topic, to be followed up subsequently by a full version.
Put down our evil knives; Follow the Vegan Christ!
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