I Was a Quiet Vegan Until I Started Asking Questions

For about a year and a half, I was a quiet vegan. I wasn't constantly posting about it, challenging people, or trying to start arguments. Now that I've finally started speaking openly about why I'm vegan and asking people to seriously examine the ethics of unnecessarily harming and killing sentient beings, I honestly feel like I've stepped into absolute madness. I've watched people I know, respect, and even love defend things I never imagined I'd hear them defend. I've heard everything from God supposedly giving us animals to exploit, to lions eating zebras, plants feeling pain, crop deaths, human evolution, survival situations, economics, nutrition, and every hypothetical imaginable, while the basic ethical question keeps getting buried: if we don't need to harm and kill a sentient being, what morally justifies doing it anyway? What's been especially disturbing isn't simply that people disagree with me. It's watching how quickly compassion, mercy, personal responsibility, and even religious morality can disappear when those principles challenge something a person has normalized their entire life. I've been insulted, mocked, had goalposts moved, watched conversations get deflected into completely different subjects, and seen people construct increasingly extreme scenarios rather than confront the original question. Jeremy being a preacher makes that contradiction especially difficult for me to process, because I've watched someone who speaks about God and morality resort to ridicule and personal insults instead of explaining how unnecessary harm fits those principles. I sometimes describe it as "the demons exposing themselves," not because I'm literally claiming these people are demons, but because that's genuinely how surreal it has felt. I spent a year and a half quietly living according to this conviction, and the moment I started speaking about it publicly, I began seeing sides of people I had never seen before. At the same time, I don't think everyone I'm arguing with is an evil person. Some of these are people I genuinely care about. That's part of what makes this so difficult. I'm beginning to understand just how powerful culture, tradition, religion, identity, convenience, and cognitive dissonance can become when someone is asked not merely what they believe about compassion, but whether they're willing to apply those beliefs consistently when doing so requires changing their own behavior. That's the experience I've been having, and frankly, it's been exhausting.