A very prominent vegan activist took an informal poll on Facebook, asking her followers to comment "God" or "No God." Most people put an explanation with their comment, so we could learn more of their reasoning. The results were quite surprising to me: the overwhelming majority of the responders were atheist! I cannot remember how many people responded, but it was a sizeable number of people.
A very rough guess at the statistics would be that 80% of the people were atheist, 15% were spiritual or agnostic, and 5% were Christian or another religion. I thought the spiritual number would be the highest, followed by Christians since they are the majority in society, so this was a real revelation.
What could these results show? I am not sure, but I will guess.
1. The vegans may have become atheist because of the unfairness of animal cruelty. They could have looked at the concept of a loving god who fixes wrongs, and they could see that help never comes for the animals.
2. Vegans look at the unfairness of life itself;
3. Vegans may have been atheist in the first place and are just more likely to become vegan because they take action in this world, and are simply good people.
4. Religious people are taken in by all the excuses in the Bible to eat meat - God says people started eating meat after "the fall"; God loved the smell of burning animal flesh; God said animals are here for our use; God says we have dominion over the animals. 5. God had a thing for bloody sacrifices. (Vegetarianism was rather popular in the first century AD, but all those religious groups were wiped out by the Christians.)
Again, I do not know the reason for so many atheists in the vegan ranks, but it sure surprised me. What a welcome surprise!
