Vegetarian In Boston Maynard S. Clark's Veggie and Boston Blog talks about vegetarian topics AND Boston-related topics, often intersecting them interestingly. Maynard S. Clark is a long-time and well-known vegan in Greater Boston, who often quips in his 'elevator pitch': "I've been vegan now for over half my natural life, longer than most human earthlings have been alive."
“. . . no matter how narrow the gap between the chemical and the living becomes—and discoveries about the nature of viruses and colloids do indeed narrow that gap—we must remember that the gap is a qualitative and not a spatial one. Suppose we consider the colloids the ‘missing link’ between living and dead matter. This may impress our minds with the wondrous continuity of degree between one order of being and another. But let us take a closer look. Has the gap between life and matter really been crossed, let alone explained? Even though a colloid may reproduce as living things do, it otherwise behaves like a chemical. But a cell acts throughout like a living being and not like a chemical. The fact still remains that when life appeared,life appeared. . . . This collocation of events, this close interrelation of living and nonliving beings, is an opaque fact unless we postulate a purpose which uses one order as an aid to the continuance of another. Obviously this appeal to a broader purpose will not explain how the food enters the stomach becomes part of the living blood, bone, nerve, and brain. Any biochemist can give us the sequence, but he is as silent before this fact of transmutation as we are. However, we’re not trying to introduce a Purposer to describe what science has not so far described; here we seek to explain the harmony between two orders of being, the harmony between two differing and interacting qualities of existence. We are seeking a view which, far from denying established scientific facts, will allow them to fit into a broader scheme which decreases the mystery. What mystery? The fact that living beings should appear and be so closely interconnected with nonliving beings—especially if all there was to begin with was the nonpurposeful, nonliving, nonthinking hustle and bustle of units of energy. . . .”
“. . . Our interest here is to emphasize the greater coherence which comes into our thinking if we consider the interrelation of the physical universe and life and the developing evolution of species as the handiwork of a creative Intelligence intent on producing a world rich in life, and, in the existence of man, rich in mind and value. The evidence so far adduced enables us to envisage a Mind which is responsible not only for the ultimate physical preparations for life but for the first appearance of life in its many forms and for the additional mutations and variations discovered by our scientists.”
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1951, pp. 333-34, 337 (italics in the original).
“[We may now know] how—by evolution through natural selection—one or more very primitive kinds of organism evolved into the enormous variety of species now known either still to exist or to have existed during some period in the past. But that is a very different thing from knowing the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life or even of any life. For, so far as I know, no one has as yet contrived to produce any plausible conjecture as to how even the most primitive kind of organism with a disposition to reproduce and thus to expose itself to natural selection might have evolved from a mixture of the many kinds of complex molecule which are now known to be required for that construction. [My italics; Flew has been dealing with these issues for over fifty years.]
“Conway sees here a threefold challenge to the materialist, of which I consider two of the elements to be much more formidable than the third. The first of these two is to produce a materialistic explanation for ‘the very first emergence of living matter from non-living matter. In being alive, living matter possesses ateleological organization that is wholly absent from everything that preceded it.’ The second challenge . . . is to produce an equally materialist explanation for the emergence, from the very earliest life-forms which were incapable of reproducing themselves, of life-forms which a capacity for reproducing them-selves.”
Review of David Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, Philosophy, January 2001, p. 161.
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Wheeler’s place is near the Symphony stop on the Boston MBTA - in a shop that intersection.
Wheeler is the creative international traveler who has rightfully become much loved in Boston (particularly around NEU, Colleges of the Fenway, and LMA) because of what he's made for those of us who pass through the Fenway area.
He passed around vegan ice cream samples, and I’m confident that 98.5% of all humans alive today would consider his vegan ice cream SUPER DUPER!
While there's a Vegan Ice Cream for All! Boston, MA meetup, I’d like to see Wheeler’s storefront operation inundated with numerous small group outings, perhaps once or more each month.
It could be possible for someone to organize some social event (likely working with Wheeler to just call 1-2 (or even 3-4) monthly outings to Wheeler's, maybe hold some discussions, or more.
For a college student to do this, the ~$20/month could become a challenge, problem, or possible issue in organizing a Meetup group, but perhaps Wheeler could get a local ‘sponsor’ who could front the ~$20/month fee (if asked, I’d suggest someone who might be eager to sponsor the Meetup outreach tool).
Labels: Boston, dessert, Meetup, NEU, Northeastern, outing, party, social, Symphony, vegan, vegetarian
Published Author, Copywriter, Grammar Guru - 50 years of helping universities, companies, nonprofits, and individuals do their work, remain organized, and develop facts and useful products and services, and in that process telling their stories with clarity and impact -- attracting revenue and donations, students and researchers, staffers at various levels, and volunteers and journalists who want to participate in those stories.
