Yes, their closing remarks are highly insightful

He's kinda like a modern day Schopenhauer

Is it Orthodox to not eat the flesh of animals... at all? Ever? I fast on fast days and eat on other days. I agree with you totally and completely. My one rebuttal is I don't think it's wrong to eat meat during feasts, especially if it's responsibly and ethically sourced. But "big food", factory farming is definitely an evil institution. It's not just the slaughtering of so many (hundreds of) thousands of creatures that's an affront to God: it's also the cloning and genetic modification of these animals, as well as the treatment and processing of these foods and all the harmful things that are added to them. One should also consider the lust for power and money that dominates this system, and the damage it does to - as you say - man's stewardship of God's creation and man's place in this creation as His image and likness. But that said, I haven't yet made it to the timestamp you sourced. I'm about 25 minutes into the video now, so presumably I am missing significant context to your comment. I look forward to getting there. God bless you, friend.

@@AJ0223 Hello, friend! I have no doubt that is totally Orthodox not to eat the flesh of the animals, or even any sort of animal product. The fasting itself has the purpose to remind us of, and put us in our original, uncorrupted state from before the fall, without passions and carnal appetites, when we were closer to God and were indeed supposed to eat only plants, Genesis 1.29, so to not eat animal flesh is basically more Orthodox than to eat it, or truly Orthodox, as it is closer to sainthood, and most saints and ascetic indeed were not meat eaters, but vegetarians. There are even monasteries in which meat it's not eaten at all, as in the Mount Athos. In the Orthodox Church there is no rule or obligation to eat meat or anything at all, except the body and the blood of Christ, who, BTW, gave His life willingly, it was not taken from Him, as Himself said, and He even commanded us to eat His body and to drink His blood. It is allowed, of course, even since after the fall, but there's no obligation. Also, as it is said, Orthodoxy is the cure for our sinful and corrupted state and nature, which is supposed to bring us back, throgh Christ, to our original, pre fall state and closeness to God, which includes the vegetarianism, the non violence. Regarding the provenience of the animal flesh or of other animal products, we must realise that, first of all, that still implies the killing of the animals, the stealing of the babies from their mothers in order to take their milk, and many other more or less abusive or violent procedures necessary for an efficient or rentable production, and that, ultimately, there's no such thing as "humane" killing. Killing is killing and is violence. Almost all animals are still killed at a very early age, basically in their childhood, and, especially at the country side, in free range farms, there's also a connection between the animals and the farmers, where the animals trust their owners and considers them their protectors, part of, and the leaders of their group. So, to be honests, killing them is actually a betrayel of their trust. It is just as killing your dog for food, which, in some countries it is done, and, to be honest again, it is allowed even in Orthodoxy and it's biblical, as God declared all animals clean in the new testament, and even after the fall He said that we can eat everything that moves. But, of course that we don't have to. I recommend the documentary "Peaceable kingdom", in which former farmers speak about their experience and relation with the animals. Secondly, we must also realise that the free range farms does not cover, not even by far the present and constant growing demand for animal products, so it is even more unsustainable than the factory farming. That's precisely the reason why factory farms were invented, in order to produce faster, more and cheaper, with all the horrible consequences, both for the animals and the environment. But an exclusive free range system would require even more space than the one used by the intensive system, that is even more clearing of forests and of other natural areas for pastures, as it still happens with the Amazonian forest. There is not enough land and the planet would not be able to sustain a free range farming system to feed 8 billion people and more. Animal agriculture is, overall, a highly resource consuming industry, of land, crops and water. Without it, we could easily produce more than enough, diverse, cheap, healthy and nutritious plant food to feed all the people and eliminate world famine, instead of giving almost half of the crops to the farmed animals. And it is even more Orthodox to do so, as we would and we should allow more people, more human life to come into existence, by using the resources for this purpose, instead of using them to bring tens and hundreds of billions of animals who live a short, miserable and often unnatural life and are ultimately killed without the chance to defend themselves and to fight for their lives. That's not fair, but just a consequence of our fallen state, which we should struggle to overcome. And it's not even that hard, to eat only plants. Not in our times. There are much harder things in our spiritual battle in this life. God bless you, brother!

"When you go and get a PHD, you learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing and so your knowledge of things is like this cone that comes down to a tiny point......this is one of those things: that people tend to treat scholars sort of the way Marvel Comics treats scientists. Like, if you're in a marvel comic and you're a scientist, you can build an interdimensional portal--that's what scientists do--and make a chemical potion to shrink people, you can do anything like there's no particular science you've studied you just know science. You can invent things; engineering you know too apparently." "People treat scholars that way, but the reality is that being a scholar means you know an incredible amount about something very specific and so, when you're talking, the further you get away from that specific thing the less you actually know, right? So, anytime a scholar is talking outside his field you shouldn't listen to him at all because--usually they'll say if a scholar is talking outside of his field it has the same value as a layman--I think it has less value than a layman because we get pompous from having a PHD and so we think we know more than we do." -Fr Stephen De Young