Indian School Textbook Says Meat-Eaters Lie and Commit Sex Crimes

another random user writes with bad news from the BBC for anybody who enjoys a hamburger now and again: "Meat-eaters 'easily cheat, lie, forget promises and commit sex crimes,' according to a controversial school textbook available in India. New Healthway, a book on hygiene and health aimed at 11 and 12 year-olds, is printed by one of India's leading publishers. 'This is poisonous for children,' Janaki Rajan of the Faculty of Education at Jamia Millia University in Delhi told the BBC. 'The government has the power to take action, but they are washing their hands of it,' she said. 'The strongest argument that meat is not essential food is the fact that the Creator of this Universe did not include meat in the original diet for Adam and Eve. He gave them fruits, nuts and vegetables,' reads a chapter entitled Do We Need Flesh Food? The chapter details the 'benefits' of a vegetarian diet and goes on to list 'some of the characteristics' found among non-vegetarians. 'They easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes,' it says."

Comments

Re:PETA agrees!

[__aaltlg1547]

This is a hard sell for the Christians and Muslims. Jesus ate meat and according to the bible, was perfect. Muhammad ate meat and is much revered by Muslims. Surely God would have informed him if eating meat led to sin...

Re:India

[Kjella]

First of all, it has been my experience that, as ESL speakers, Indians are among the most fluent in the world. It seems to me that they take great care to learn and use English well, unlike the stumbling parody you provided. No doubt a consequence of British colonialism, but perhaps a happy one.

There's a huge selection bias that the people you're likely to communicate with in English are those who know it well. Only about 12% of Indians are considered English-speaking, I'm not sure if a person like the grandparent would be counted to the 12% or the 88% but there's extremely many of them. There's a lot of non-English colonies doing more, for example here in Norway some 89% are now English-speaking and it's a compulsory subject from the first school year (age 6), by the time you've finished high school you'll have had 1800-2000 hours in your primary language and 700 hours of English. Also we don't generally don't dub English-speaking TV series and movies except for small children and at least in higher education you're expected to read English textbooks. I think you'll find the average Indian is far from the most fluent in the world.