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Short answer: if it's based on religious beliefs and practices, then you can factor in the irrationality. It may annoy you or you may be able to tolerate it, but you expect something like this in all religions. And Jainism has applied its principles practically and understands the limitations involved, as well as the costs of actually practising ahimsa.
This isn't religion, even if it's like a secular version of it. This is a philosophy, and okay on a philosophy of life, but really it's just "my superior feeeeeels" at work. There's a lot of dancing around to avoid the fact that this is goddamn stupid to be worrying about dust mites. Everything lives at the expense of something else, and taking his attitude to the absurd extreme, he ought to kill himself in order to prevent any more harm, damage and death caused to microscopic organisms.
The end parable about the slime civilisation and guitars and fires is so dumb, it makes me want to scream. The conclusion he draws is at once flattering to his exquisite sensibility about "even the very least of these" and absolves him of having to actually make those major changes he talks about that humanity would have to make (if we found out that there was an invisible slime civilisation around us).
I'm fairly sure dust mites do not have sentience, sapience, or a sophisticated civilisation. Being so boastful about your tender heart that you admit you let your house become unhygienically infested by insects does not make me want to hang out with you or yours. This philosophy does not seem to stop him doing what he really wants to do, so it involves unnecessary hardship (let your house get over-run by ants while you dither), doing in the end what you should have done in the first place (and crushing individual ants is a lot crueller than putting down poison or bait) and is just a useless generator of worry that goes nowhere and does nothing. If he had real problems in his life, he wouldn't have the time or energy to spare to worry about "there is no forgiveness for killing ants".
No, there isn't, because the universe does not deal in blessings or curses. And it does not care a straw about your masturbation with ethics to get that climax of "ooooh yeah, me so moral, uh uh uh!" while you and your housemates all sit around agonising over how to deal with the ants that are walking over all the kitchen surfaces, in your food, in the bedroom, etc.
This ties into my
hot taketheory that veganism is only acceptable if you're not doing it for ethical reasons. (opposition to factory farming, etc is I think different)More options
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