Our very lives are a demonstration of the correctness of Jesus" observation that it was a perverse and wicked generation that needed, or was eager for, a sign.  The real Jesus, we may readily conclude from the "Book of Matthew," realized that the misery of the orthodoxy of his time was itself a perfect commentary on Divine justice, on the fact that orthodox Jews suffered because they deserved to suffer, and that orthodox Jews felt deprived of feeling the joy of Diety, precisely because they had chosen to justify the sins of their lives by following the revised and not original scriptures.

    Having a choice to follow either covenant, that of Gen. 1: 29-30, or that of Gen. 9: 2-3, they made the choice to rationalize the brutality and injustice of the animal sacrifices as being sanctioned by God; by a God, we may add, who changed his mind, which is a very imperfect and mixed up notion of God, to say the least.  Only those in denial who are addicted to eating flesh (cholesterol junkies), those with the ulterior motive of profiting from trafficking in selling corpses, that is, the meat industry, and the braindead, will deny that such scriptures have been corrupted.
 

    Under the category of those who need a sign are orthodox Jews waiting such for their messiah, orthodox Christians waiting for the return of Jesus, and Sunni Muslims waiting for the Imam, the next great teacher of Allah.  In contrast to the longing felt by the above carnivorous sects, who are suffering because of their carnivorism, and because of the unrighteous scriptures that have been written by humans who falsely claim they are the word of God, the Hindus waiting for Kalki or Brahma, and the Buddhists waiting for Maitreya, except for those who have lapsed into carnivorism, or the grievous error of materialism, do not yearn so much for clarification as observe the process of such clarification in the world of humanity.  Similarly Maya wait for Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, about whom so little is known in the United States, because the academic community, ruled not by objectivity but by the narrow-minded policies of orthodox Judaism and orthodox Christianity, have not wanted the young of their nation to know about a religious figure as influential as a Buddha or Christ or Muhammad during his time in the Yucatan, especially because Quetzalcoatl forbid not only human sacrifices, but animal sacrifices. That's right, another vegetarian swept under the educational carpet by the orthodoxies of Judaism and Christianity!
 
 

     Instead of the orthodox acknowledging that they feel separated from God, because they, through their wrong choices, have separated themselves from the God's real commandments and God's real Will, the orthodoxies of Judaism, Christianity and Sunni Islam justify their sins as sanctioned by God. And when they sin, they feel bad, as all the rest of us do when we do something wrong, but because their sins are justified by false scriptures, they are confused.  Therefore, because they are confused, they need hope that they can go beyond the pain they are now feeling to once again feeling good on a more regular basis. And the preachers of these religions emphasize that they need Faith in God, because what they often feel is obviously not Godly, namely pain and depression and despair.  The wages of sin are not only physical death, but emotional death or despair as well.

   I've been a vegan now for over 30 years, and my observations regarding the emotions I have seen among vegetarians, vegans and carnivores support Matthew 12: 39 perfectly. Those who are living according to God's original vegetarian dietary covenant in Genesis 1: 29, are far less in need of signs to prove the validity of living as they do, than those who have rationalized the validity of the nonsensical notion that God changed His mind. Many of the vegans and vegetarians I know are excited about their life style, because it is healing rather than degenerating. Moreover, among vegans especially, and among vegetarians too, there is rarely a serious doubt  that the spirit is immortal and does not die with the body.  Because so many of us have in common the experience of having lived carnivorous lives containing a much higher ratio of anxiety, emotional pain, depression and despair, before changing to a vegetarian or vegan diet, in which we feel good most of the time, we have collective empirical evidence testifying to the validity of Genesis 1: 29 and the falseness of Genesis 9: 2-3.  The validity of such scriptures are proven more in our hearts and feelings than they are in the unhallowed halls of the orthodox carnivorous religions.

    Our time has been blessed with the channelings of psychics like Edgar Cayce whose readings verify reincarnation, and with an abundance of testimony from those who have died briefly then come back to life on earth, those having what is called near death experiences.  Spiritualism, connecting with the spirits of those passed, is a universal religious experience in the world, practiced by indigenous people throughout the world, and has always been a source of comfort to those still in physical bodies.  Recently with the appearance of John Edward on international television, a program which advertises that the afterlife will be televised, spiritualism has been given a new impetus. Unless this is one of the most elaborately staged hoaxes in history, John Edward appears totally genuine, humble toward his role, and content to give helpful advice, and he is not being paid by those in his audience.

     I don't deny that the word Faith can have positive significances, if it includes a logical acceptance of the huge body of spiritual experiences of the past by our ancestors, which confirms the on-going existence of the spirit.  Humankind is by its nature religious: our history proves it, and the lives of all sincere seekers prove it as well.  In a world ruled by a just God, the sincere seeker always finds the goal.

    But when people like Paul, or those who revised the Torah and the Quran, define Faith, it is with corollaries that include subjection to religious authorities and to the state, the institution of slavery, sexism, bigotry toward homosexuals, and promotion or acceptance of the disease promoting diet of carnivorism. To such it can be said:

   Faith and Hope, as preached by Paul, for example, can be considered as the virtues
that those who do not feel the presence of God directly need to have, in order to continue to be members of the establishment's impure faith.  As Muslim writers throughout history have informed us, and as James said in "Ascents of James" (as described by Epiphanius in the Panarion) Paul was considered an apostate to the teachings of Jesus.

    The generation that is unfaithful to the purity that existed at the beginning of their religion, will not feel the elation that was felt by their founders who lived a life in which they practiced purity of diet. In other words, the purity of a vegetarian diet that was practiced by Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, gave them the elation that is felt when one does not offend other creatures. One literally feels good internally and wants to share the healing feelings with others.

   Though one may feel physically weak when fasting for a long time from solid food, one feels mentally and spiritually more clear during those times. So too, one's body is not to be a whitened sepulchre, that is a grave of animals that is made to look pure on the outside. One is not to be a hidden grave, as Jesus said.  A "hidden grave" is the description given to the carnivorous Pharisees by the vegetarian Jesus who overturned the money changers tables and chased the animals out of the temple so that they wouldn't be sacrificed. He was--that one day--fulfilling his mission clearly stated in "Epistle to the Hebrews:" to abolish the evil animal sacrifices.  So too early Christians did not eat flesh, as is well-documented in Roman chronicles the Clementine literature and other documents written by the early Church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian.  The vegetarianism of the earliest Ebionites is found in Epiphanius' critique of the Ebionite Gospel described on this site as well as in the Gospel of Philip, for example.

    An evil and unfaithful generation or age is eager for a sign precisely because they no are faithful to the principles of compassion that were practiced by the founders of their religion. That is, they are not following the original teachings of their religious founders.  They are following revised religious scriptures, such as the Torah, the New Testament and the Quran, all of which have telling remnants of the original Vegetarian Scriptures, but all of which have been revised to sanction the very animal sacrifices and carnivorism that were denounced at the beginning of their respective religions.  Once again the rabbinical tradition admits what is incontrovertible: that the original dietary covenant stated all creatures were to be vegetarian as it is clearly seen in Genesis 1: 29-30.

   But, then the original Vegetarian Torah was revised by those who had the audacity to assert that God changed his mind! What was Absolute Truth is no longer Absolute Truth!  Only irrational addicts in denial, or those profiting from the animal foods industry would promote such nonsense.  and that is what the adherents of these orthodoxies are, cholesterol junkies not wanting to see that animal sacrifices are brutal atrocities leveled on God's creatures, and not wanting to admit that ingesting the corpses of murdered animals is harmful to human health.  Even the research of the orthodox medical establishment documents those truths. The fact that only a small minority of physicians is exposing these truths--Physicians for Responsible Medicine are a notable and laudable exception--shows how morally degenerate the medical establishment is and how the rich animal foods people in government such as our own President Bush, who is a rancher, refuse to expose these truths to the masses because the industrialists in the animal foods industries would lose vast amounts of money if the truth were known.

    This scenario existed in Hindu history as well as in the histories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, wherein the original Vedic scriptures were revised to sanction evil institutions such as the caste system and animal sacrifices performed under strict conditions by a Brahmin priest. However, although we see in the Laws of Manu and in the Institutes of Vishnu the occasional scripture justifying animal slaughter, the preponderance of scriptures in those works denounce animal sacrifices and even the mistreatment of plants.  The opposite is true in the Torah, the New Testament, and the Quran: the preponderance of scriptures justify animal sacrifices, and a minority of scriptures denounce them.

     All objective readers understand that it is easy for people in power such as Constantine, or the revisers of the Torah and Quran, to put a greater quantity of scriptures justifying evil next to scriptures justifying good.

    So now the orthodoxies of these religions have words telling them that their actions are right in the scriptures, words telling them that God sanctioned animal sacrifices and the eating of flesh, but after eating a certain amount of flesh and animal foods, the body feels depression and despair, and because these carnivores generally speaking do not cleanse themselves periodically, which their religious founders, who were pure to begin with, practiced in their retreats into the wilderness where they fasted.