It has been pointed out to us that following the "Six Principles of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights" on Francione's website, it reads:
A Note: In order to embrace the abolitionist approach to animal rights, it is not necessary to be spiritual or religious, or to be an atheist. You can be a spiritual or religious person, or you can be an atheist, or anything in between. It does not matter.
Of this note, assuming it was added prior to our previous comments, we were not aware at the time. It has, in any event, no bearing on our criticism in that we did not claim that Francione had declared being religious to be a prerequisite for embracing the abolitionist approach or veganism.
The object of our criticism was, and still is, Francione's inappropriately enlarged vegan message, whereby veganism is declared to be not only about nonviolence to animals, but also about nonviolence to "yourself" - quite as though the latter were merely a extension of the former, with which anyone (religious adherent, atheist, or agnostic) could agree, rather than a step onto a quite discontinuous plane, the religious, or more accurately, into the ideology of Jainism.
This, in our view, is the problem and is not remedied by Francione's using something like a disclaimer as a way of deflecting criticism of his ideological equivocation.
As a general matter, "nonviolence," or "Ahimsa," is not a political message. Besides being implausibly broad in its construction, ranging for example even over not smoking cigarettes, "(even a 'few')" (Francione in his blog essay, "Veganism: Morality, Health, and the Environment"), it is not a political answer to the issue of animal exploitation - no more than it is to any issue of injustice committed against humans. We would not, when commenting as human rights advocates on domestic abuse or on the crimes committed against civilians in Syria, or in the Israel/Palestine conflict, relate these human rights violations to the violence you may be doing to "yourself" or to the "earth"; still less would we offer as an explanation of any of them our "spiritual addiction to violence... that is part of what it is to live in the material world" which is "inherently flawed" (Francione in an interview on Vegan World Radio on what he takes to be the moral causes of nonveganism; see Abolitionist Approach "Audio" page).
We would not do so, in any event, unless we were explicitly speaking as religious adherents, in an explicitly religious context, since it would mean providing apolitical answers to political issues, taking the focus off the real world causes of injustice, which amounts to religious fatalism. This is a form of political escapism that seeks, not inspiration in utopian visions of a better world, but consolation in idle imaginings of empty transcendence such as de-materialization.
As with human rights abuses, so with animal rights abuses, their explanation can be specified, without simplification, solely by reference to a combination social, economic, political, and moral factors. On these factors, light needs to be cast in sober analysis; the unsubtly moralistic notion that people act they way they do because they ''celebrate oppression'' (Francione in the aforementioned interview) does not do the job. Nor, all the more, do dogmatically religious misgivings about our embodied condition, misgivings which, in the present context, are as politically inappropriate as are assurances, especially when frequently reaffirmed, that corporate welfarists who earn a living (and sometimes a fortune) from welfarism are nonetheless "sincere" in promoting it.
Ceasing to live in the material world may be the ultimate form of "Ahimsa"; as a solution to the world's ills, however, de-materialization appears to be a little overdetermined.
