Original subtitles

(text clicking)

- [Interviewer] Is there any threat or danger

making a film like this?

- Yeah, you just wait and see.

You just wait and see.

(ominous music)

You have no idea of the far reaching power of the church.

They will stop at nothing

to keep this truth from getting out.

(ominous music continues)

(ominous music continues)

(ominous music continues)

(peaceful music)

- [Kip] My name's Kip, I'm a filmmaker from now LA,

and I thought I had it figured out.

My previous films exposed the meat, dairy,

and fishing industries' collusion with government,

big pharma, and nonprofit health

and environmental organizations.

And let's just say they were a bit controversial.

- This controversial documentary.

- "What the Health" have you seen this?

- Yeah, it's filled with a lot of propaganda.

- Documentary "Cowspiracy" shielded

by leading environmental organizations,

- The diabetes associations,

they are funded by these meat

and dairy organizations and these pharmaceutical companies.

- Just lump everything together.

- So off on the science.

- That is not science, that's a lie.

- I have an obligation to set the record straight

so that people don't die.

- [Kip] Though I wanted to be finished with the subject

of eating animals, I was constantly reminded

there was one more piece of the puzzle I was missing,

the ethics of eating animals.

(bell rings)

And though I consider myself a quasi-spiritual Buddhist yogi

because I love crystals, sacred geometry,

did yoga a few times a week,

and carried a picture of the Dalai Lama in my wallet,

I didn't know much about the ethics of eating animals

or where to begin, so I put the project on hold

until at a screening and Q and A for one of my films.

- Let's get right down to it,

we'll start off with any questions.

- 96% of what, - I heard a question

I'd never heard before.

- Is there a spiritual way to kill an animal?

I'll put it this way, how would Jesus kill an animal?

- Wow, It's a little much, I'm not religious,

so I don't think I'm gonna go there.

So I don't know what to answer about that.

Little did I know at the time,

but this bold question would soon launch

he and I on a journey into uncovering

one of the biggest coverups in the last 2,000 years.

(ominous music) (pictures flickering)

But at the time, I didn't know what to think about it.

Then after the Q and A, he came up to me

with his business card saying he was an aspiring filmmaker

trying to find a Christian way

to eat animals and needed help.

I was highly skeptical,

but something in my gut said I had to meet up

with him the next day where he was living out of his van.

And just start, just name who you are.

- My name is Kam, and I grew up in the heart

of the Bible Belt in the deep south

to a 16-year-old mom and a 17-year-old dad.

My entire life was church.

♪ Little lord Jesus ♪

- I was raised in the church.

- I baptized you, my brother.

(congregation applauds)

- I even had a career in the church as a Christian musician.

(upbeat music)

Recently, I had to take a step back

and question a big part of my faith,

which is the question around eating animals.

And it all started when I did the Daniel Fast.

- The Daniel Fast. - Yes.

- What is the Daniel Fast?

- It's inspired by the diet eaten

by the Old Testament prophet Daniel.

- Who only ate fruits, and vegetables, and grains,

and didn't have any animal products and

- Parts of the diet's goal is to bring

fasters closer to their religious roots.

- [Kam] Daniel was a prophet in the Bible who proved

to the king to be 10 times wiser, healthier,

and stronger than all the other men in the kingdom.

And his secret was that he refused meat

and only ate vegetables.

So I looked up this trendy vegetarian diet

on the leading Daniel Plan website.

- And I wanna welcome you to the Daniel Plan.

- [Kam] Yet, I was shocked to find a bunch

of meat-based recipes like guiltless chicken breast tenders,

grilled lamb chops, and even meatloaf cupcakes.

And then when I tried calling 'em,

So I've tried to ask this question multiple times,

but I keep getting sent to a voicemail.

If Daniel ate only vegetables,

then why is there meat on the meal plan?

- [Representative] I can't answer that, no, nuh uh.

Hold on, hold on just a moment, okay?

- [Kam] And then things got even more interesting

when I was on tour in the South and stopped by

to document the Noah's Ark Museum,

where I found out that Noah, like Daniel,

was also vegetarian, which was a surprise to me.

- If you go all the way back to the original creation,

God made everything perfect.

There was no death, no bloodshed,

which means nothing was eating meat.

And we see that in scripture in Genesis 1:29,

man was vegetarian.

So if you go back, Noah and his family

were still being obedient to that.

After the flood, of course, is a different story.

Noah was permitted to eat any meat.

- [Interviewer] Wait, so now that I think about it,

it seems kind of weird if he was vegetarian his whole life

and he loved animals so much,

- And he rescued 'em, yeah.

- [Interviewer] Yeah, he essentially pulls off

the world's largest animal rescue

and then he eats 'em after?

- (chuckles) Yeah, in one major sense, yeah.

So it's not that it's a sin to eat meat.

See, I grew up on a farm

and I know in in our modern culture, there are situations

where people are not doing the practices properly.

And I'd like to see that done a little bit better.

And I think most Christians would echo that, as well.

- [Kam] He did make a good point

about the farming practices.

So I went to the Noah's Ark Buffet to see

what their practices were like.

Yes, so do you guys have your own farm

where you raise and kill your own animals?

- No. - No.

- No. - Can you tell me

where you get your meat from?

- No.

No, no comment.

- Oh, why, - No comment.

So yeah.

- [Kam] She didn't really wanna talk about it.

So I looked it up myself

and it was Sysco Foods, the leading distributor

of factory farm meat brands, like Smithfield and Tyson.

- [Kip] And as it turns out, 99% of all animals

for food are factory farmed.

- So I started to think what would Jesus do when it comes

to eating animals?

And even more specifically, what would he do

when it comes to killing an animal?

- [Kip] Why does it matter if Jesus

killed or ate meat, what does that up to do with anything?

- To me, it matters if Jesus killed or ate animals

because my entire life has been based

on following Jesus.

There's even a phrase in Christianity called

what would Jesus do that we ask ourselves when we're faced

with a moral or ethical dilemma.

- Does everybody have their WJD bracelets on?

Do you know what that is everyone?

They're just a reminder to be a better person,

to live a better life.

♪ Jesus, walk with me, with me ♪

- The fact of the matter is

whether you're a Christian or not,

or even if you don't believe in Jesus your entire life,

everyone in the Western world's entire life

is affected by the church.

Christianity is the largest religion in the world.

There's 2.3 billion Christians worldwide.

65% of the country is Christian.

88% of members of Congress are Christian.

And every single president in the history

of the United States was a Christian or believed in God.

- In America, we don't worship government, we worship God.

- I, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. do solemnly swear,

- I'm a Christian, a conservative,

and a Republican, in that order.

- God bless the United States of America.

(Congress applauding) (dramatic music)

- [Kip] What does Christian values have to do

with eating animals?

- All Christians kill and eat animals based off of the fact

that we believe or have been taught

that God commanded us to eat animals.

So I wonder what would be the Christian

or Christ-like way to kill an animal?

Hi, my name is Kameron Waters

and I want to be baptized to express my love

and commitment as a born-again Christian.

- We have a wonderful situation here, Brother Allen Smith's

an ordained minister and his grandson came to be baptized.

(clock ticking)

- [Interviewer] Do you feel Jesus ate animals?

Did Jesus eat animals?

Certainly ate fish, I know that's not an animal but.

- He certainly would, if he were offered in this day

and time a hamburger, he'd eat it.

- [Interviewer] And when it comes to, say,

killing an animal, what would Jesus do?

- (chuckles) That I have no idea.

- Interesting question.

The possibility of him saying,

"I can kill this animal," or let's do that again.

That's not good.

- I don't think that my denying myself a filet mignon

every once in a while is gonna enhance the coming back

of the kingdom of God.

- But you have to ask yourself,

do animals have rights spiritually?

And I think the bottom line is this, when Jesus came

to die on the cross, he didn't come to die

for cows, and horses, and pigs.

He came to die for humans.

- All my pastors started pushing back,

community leaders started pushing back on those questions,

telling me that I shouldn't be going down that road.

And eventually it caused me to have

to really step back from my community, from my church,

from my band, which was how I supported myself.

So I left the church.

Now I just live in my van

and I'm trying to figure out this question,

which is the reason why I asked it to you.

(dramatic music)

- [Kip] Is there a Christian or spiritual way

to ethically eat animals?

I had no idea.

Supposedly, one of the most spiritual leaders today

was my hero, the Dalai Lama, who observes the first precept

of Buddhism to not kill any sentient being.

So to get some perspective on the flip side

of Kam's question, I decided

to look at why the Dalai Lama chooses not to eat meat.

(mouse clicks)

(dramatic music) What?

The Dalai Lama eats meat.

I was quite shocked to learn this

and immediately reached out to him to see how it's possible

to compassionately kill and eat animals.

But he didn't respond.

Maybe there was a spiritual way to eat animals.

And since religions are essentially the nonprofits

of ethics, then perhaps this was the missing link

to my previous films.

So I reached out to Kam

and told him I would help him find if there was

a Christian way to kill and eat animals,

if he would help me find

if there were any other spiritual ways.

Though when it came to Christianity, I had to admit

I wasn't even sure Jesus was even a real person,

especially since he was always depicted as a white guy,

even though he was from Nazareth in the Middle East.

But Kam showed me a book by the leading historian

of the time, Josephus, that does record

Jesus's birth and crucifixion.

And with that, we teamed up to find out first

what would Jesus do by going straight

to the top, the Vatican.

(plane whooshing) (dramatic music)

(bell ringing) (birds squawking)

- Where we are here at the Greco University

is the oldest university associated with the Vatican.

And this is my fourth year as dean.

- [Interviewer] Did Jesus eat meat?

- Yes, of course, I mean,

I don't think there is any doubt that

Jesus had meals including meat

because it was part of the Passover meal, for instance,

as we know that a lamb was sacrificed.

- T How would Jesus kill an animal?

- I suppose Jesus would kill an animal

in the less painful way possible.

- [Interviewer] And how is that exactly?

- I don't know. I mean it depends on

what you have at your disposal.

- [Interviewer] If he had a lamb

and he had anything at his disposal, how could he do it?

- I suppose imagining Jesus with a knife in his hand,

slitting the throat of a lamb,

isn't this particularly cruel, isn't it?

Because it's a lamb is something that aspires for life

as all living things do.

So it seems very inconsistent

to consider Jesus engaged

in terminating a life in that way.

- [Interviewer] So maybe he didn't kill or even eat animals?

- I think we need to wrap things up, sorry.

(ominous music)

- [Kip] We realized our best chance to find out

what would Jesus do was to find an expert on religion

and animals and found Oxford theologian Dr. Andrew Linzey,

who has written over 35 books on the subject.

He was reluctant to do an interview but finally accepted.

(ominous music continues)

(door rattling)

- Am I a lamb to the slaughter?

Excellent, do come through.

- [Interviewer] Why have you spent 50 years

on religion and animals?

- Give an answer now.

Yeah, what's impelled me to stay with the animal issue

is that I believe religious people

and Christian people especially have just lost the plot.

Disrespecting the creature is disrespecting the creator.

- [Interviewer] And what would Jesus do when,

- I'm sorry, wait a moment.

I thought I was sitting down.

Sometimes people say, well, what did Jesus do for animals?

Well, in fact, you only have to look at the incident

of the cleansing of the temple.

(dramatic music)

I mean, the temple was a place of enormous animal sacrifice.

He goes in and he cleanses it of all those who buy and sell.

- It is written, my house will be a house of prayer

and you have turned it into a den of thieves.

(group clamoring) (coins jingling)

- And of course it had momentous consequences.

It was that act that precipitated,

especially if not exclusively, his trial and his execution.

- [Interviewer] Wow, but what did that

have to do with animals?

- Well, what were they buying and selling?

Well, it's not chocolate.

They're buying and selling animals for sacrifice.

- [Kip] I had no idea there was a specific historical event

that led directly to Jesus's crucifixion four days earlier,

known as - Den of thieves.

- A den of, - A den of,

- A den of thieves. - But sermons today

only mention Jesus being mad about the money.

- No more exchanging money.

- He poured out the coins of the money changers

and he overturned their tables.

- [Kip] But looking into the past, there were hidden clues.

(dramatic music) (animals bleating)

- Because the buying and selling of sacrificial animals

was what sustained the temple.

The truth is that the temple at the time

of Jesus was a mass slaughterhouse.

(ominous music)

- [Kip] It was hard to believe one

of the world's most sacred temples

for all western religions was a slaughterhouse.

Yet historical records do show millions

of animals being sacrificed

and priests wading up to their knees in blood.

It was time to visit the holy land.

(plane whooshing) (dramatic music)

- Welcome to Jerusalem, the place where the history

of the Abrahamic faiths all began.

From here, we can see the southern wall

of the Temple Mount

and that was the place that thousands

of Israelites will come

to bring their own particular offerings.

- [Kip] During the temple tour, I stayed back while Kam

snuck away to find any signs that the temple

was a slaughterhouse.

If it were true, there would've had to have been some sort

of drainage system connected to the temple

to flush out all the blood from killing animals.

Kam could not find anything

until he came across an informational sign

and realized he had been walking through it.

- [Kam] I am in this massive drainage channel

where scriptures say All the blood streamed out

from the millions of animals being sacrificed

in the temple above.

- We're talking rivers of blood, the entrails,

the smell, the flies.

It's a huge operation with thousands

and thousands of animals.

- [Kip] And next to the temple,

archeologists recently found thousands of animal bones

that came from hundreds of miles away.

- Jerusalem has no natural resources

and therefore certainly animal flesh was the major driver

of the economy that was functioning

at that time, no question.

- [Kip] All of the sacrificed animals

were barbecued on the altars and sold by priests for meat.

(ominous music)

- Millions of animals were sacrificed in those walls

and it is something so trippy to be here on the feast

of sacrifice with rivers of blood in the streets

where so many animals are being slaughtered

just like they were then.

It's still happening today, and soon,

the Temple Institute is planning

to sacrifice a prophetic perfect red cow

to bring back the millions

of Jewish animal sacrifices inside the temple.

And this massive wall is just separating

the Muslims from the Jewish people.

You've got more walls separating the Christians in the back.

(dramatic music)

What a trippy time to be alive.

- [Kip] We wondered how did this link between religion

and killing animals even begin?

We had to go back, way back, to where this all began.

(dramatic music)

- Prehistoric societies saw animals

as ancestors of the tribe.

They were the totems, they were sacred.

That changed anywhere from six to 8,000 BC

when the first humans in the Middle East

learned to domesticate animals.

We controlled their breeding, their sex lives.

We castrated the males, we separated the females.

There's kind of a transition there where you had to be

kind of careful because animals, they were still sacred.

You couldn't just kill them outright.

They had to say some guilt-reducing things to the animal

that was about to be killed.

I'm sorry to have to kill you,

but the gods want me to do this.

This is where animal sacrifice becomes a way to provide meat

to the cities in a religious context

and turn it from this being that might've been sacred,

might've had power, turn it into food.

And eventually it evolved into a religious system

where our God says, "Yes, you have a license to do this.

"You have dominion over the earth."

- [Kip] ] Dominion is the principle which guides

all Western religions' views towards animals,

which led to the widely known spiritual ways

of killing animals for the marketplace

known as kosher and halal.

- Animals were the first form of money.

We took animals out of the wild

and made them property, tradable objects.

In fact, the word capital comes from head count of the herd.

A herd measured their wealth in terms of heads of animals.

One of the words for money is pecuniary.

That's from an old Latin word from livestock, live stock.

(dramatic music) (cow mooing)

- The livestock industry has been under regulatory attack.

Those are harsh words, I intend them to be.

- [Kip] Government and religion have been intertwined

by killing animals for profit for thousands of years.

During the time of Jesus, the temple was making tons

of money and taxes from killing animals

for meat that funded the Roman Empire.

Was this kind of money still being made today?

It turns out where it costs 500 to a thousand dollars

to be organic certified,

it costs anywhere from a thousand to $40,000

to be kosher certified.

And its market size may reach over $25 billion in two years

only to be rivaled by halal,

the Muslim equivalent to kosher,

which expects to reach $1.1 trillion this year.

This all made us think when Jesus called the temple

a den of thieves, was Dr. Linzey inferring

that Jesus was not only speaking out against

the money changers, but also killing animals

that led to his crucifixion.

So while we were in Israel, we wanted to go visit Nazareth

to see if we could find any historical clues

of who Jesus really was.

But when we looked up from Josephus

where in Nazareth he lived, everything took another turn.

- Josephus records all 204 villages and cities

in Galilee, and Nazareth, there's there's no Nazareth.

- [Kip] What, no Nazareth?

The only thing I thought I knew about Jesus

is that he's from Nazareth.

But we then looked into the "Encyclopedia Biblica"

and it states it's very doubtful

Nazareth was the dwelling place of Jesus.

It's not in the Old Testament or the Talmud.

And it doesn't even appear in any historical map

or records until 200 years after his death.

So why do we all know him as Jesus of Nazareth

if there may not have been a Nazareth?

What was this title referring to?

(dramatic music)

(computer beeps)

After we got back, we received an email from Dr. Linzey

saying the situation in general

with the university was difficult.

(dramatic music continues)

And around the same time, the subject

of Christianity and eating animals

was becoming a hot topic with pastors.

- That the reason God put animals on this planet

is for humans to consume, kill, and eat.

- You can eat meat, it's not a sin.

- We basically just need to make sure

that we're nice to people

if they wanna order a vegetarian option

or whatever, just humor 'em.

It's a substitute for biblical morality.

It becomes save the animals.

Okay, great, but if you're gonna say it's

because God wants us to, that's a doctrine of devils.

- [Congregant] That's right.

- [Kip] But when we reached out to the bigger megachurches,

everyone refused an interview.

(dramatic music)

So it's January 19th

and this drone has been outside the window

for about six of the last 10 nights, just hovering.

What's going on?

Ever since we began investigating this topic,

I started seeing drones outside my window.

February 24th.

And feeling I was being watched and followed.

It's been about 15 of the last 20 days now.

There's a drone again.

I don't know what's going on.

As all this was happening,

we wondered if Christianity had any ties

with animal agriculture.

It turns out several fast food chains, like Chick-fil-A

and In-N-Out Burger, are openly Christian

and even have secret Bible verses hidden in their packaging.

And the president of Kam's church, the SBC,

which is the largest Christian organization

behind the Vatican, had ties to the founder of Chick-fil-A

and Tyson Foods.

- We're about a $40 billion company.

Beef is about 40% of our sales, chicken's about 30.

- Can we just lay our hands towards these two brothers?

Let's just pray for them.

(haunting music)

♪ You my Chick-fil-A ♪

- [Kip] And the SBC recently posted a video

on respecting animals. - And I think

non-human animals merit our serious attention.

They're also vulnerable, they're also voiceless.

- [Kip] But then immediately deleted it

with an apology saying it didn't align with their mission.

Then when the same producer made a video

on what would Jesus eat,

the world's biggest factory farm lobby group,

the Animal Agriculture Alliance, retaliated with a book

called "What Would Jesus Really Eat" on their homepage.

(ominous music)

- [Interviewer] So did you pull down the video

on animal ethics because you received funding

from Tyson Foods or you have close ties

to the industry or dining?

- There's no connection, there's no corporate connection.

I mean, there's no pressure to do it.

It's just this is we're following our mission, you know?

So,

- And the mission is? - The mission is

to help equip Christians to live, to apply the gospel

to moral and ethical issues.

I think I have to take this.

(phone ringing)

So,

(dramatic music)

(phone ringing)

It's very clear throughout the scripture

that humans have a higher place

in God's hierarchy than animals.

Furthermore, God has given human beings a mandate to rule.

- People often say, ah,

but Andrew, human beings are made in the image

of God and they're given dominion.

- And God said, let them have dominion

over the fish of the sea, and over the birds

of the heavens, and over the livestock.

- Dominion is power to control or dispose of

at your discretion.

- Because God has given us dominion over the earth

and over all the beasts of the earth.

They're ours to do with as we see fit.

- [Kip[ Yet researching dominion's original translation,

we were surprised to learn that dominion actually means

to serve in stewardship for others as God does over us

or as parents do with their children.

- So the word that's been used is stewardship,

being the leader, the guide,

the superintendent in a responsible way.

- Dominion simply means that we have a responsibility

to look after the created order.

In other words, we are the servant species,

not the master species.

(dramatic music)

- [Kip] The true translation of dominion reminded me

of compassion for others in Buddhism,

reflected in the first precept

to not kill any sentient being,

which is why it was difficult to understand

how the Dalai Lama could eat meat.

So we found some Buddhist monks to talk to,

including a professor of animal law.

- There is no Buddhist way to kill

an animal and eat an animal.

Buddhists wouldn't do that.

The Buddha at the time was very critical

of animal sacrifice in India.

The Buddha therefore urged compassion

towards all sentient beings.

- Part of the vows is to not kill,

to not kill, period.

If we've had previous lives, all the living beings

that we see today at some point have taken care of us.

You're killing your mother.

- If I'm out in the woods,

I'm in the death valley or something,

and there's a rabbit that shows up

and I haven't eaten for three days, seven days, two weeks,

I will not be able to actually throw a stick,

a pebble at the rabbit to kill it

in order for me to sustain my life.

I can't, I will die.

That's what the Buddha teaches.

- [Interviewer] So the vow to not kill means a Buddhist

can never eat animals.

- No, I cannot say never.

Buying and and killing is not the same thing.

- No? - No, there isn't killing.

- There's no killing. - There isn't.

As far as Buddhism is concerned, it's not.

- In the 21st century,

we know that all animals that are served up

and bought at supermarkets are killed

for the specific purpose of eating, for being consumed.

Therefore, the question becomes,

does the person incur the karma of some participation

in that industrial killing machine by consuming the food?

The answer is probably some degree of yes.

But because karma is intention

and this person has not had the intention to kill,

but the intention to consume an animal

that has already been killed, the karmic weight

of the eating of the meat is very different, it's lighter.

For example, if someone invites me to a meal

and they serve a chicken or some meat, then I will eat it.

- (chuckles) Well, as an example, I'm staying

with some friends of mine in San Francisco

and they had two sausages that they were gonna put in pasta

and they asked me to cut the skin off the sausage.

So anyway, I cut the skin off the sausages

and had dinner with them.

- [Interviewer] Couldn't this pig have been one

of your parents from a past life?

- It couldn't have been, it was.

- [Interviewer] And you still ate it?

- I ate it and was really good too.

- The host and the comfort of the host has precedence

over the fact that this animal's

been killed sometime before.

- [Interviewer] Well, what if a Buddhist is at a buffet

and they can serve themselves?

- The way you do that at a buffet is very different

to the way you do it at a private dinner party.

- [Interviewer] So like the buffet here,

a Buddhist would never choose any animal products.

- Yeah, that's right.

- [Interviewer] So if a Buddhist chooses to eat meat,

who's the animal killed for?

- It's killed for the individuals who actually

had the intention of killing the animal.

- Well, why did they kill it? - For the money.

- [Interviewer] And whose money did they take?

- The consumer's. - And who's that?

- Not just me.

(bell ringing)

- [Kip] It seemed in today's times,

the subtleties and interpretations

of the first precepts were difficult to navigate.

So we wanted to go back to the root

of Buddhism and speak to one

of the highest-ranking Buddhist monks, the Karmapa.

- [Interviewer] How does a Buddhist compassionately kill

or eat animals?

- [Translator] There is no Buddhist way

to kill compassionately

because we view all sentient beings

as being like our father and mother.

We have to consider it like eating our parents.

And that is really quite difficult to do.

(dramatic music)

- [Kip] We learned another reason it was difficult

for Buddhists to eat meat is because during Buddha's time,

Hindu Brahmans were sacrificing animals like priests

were during Jesus's time.

And according to some traditions, to save the animals,

Buddha offered his own life instead

It was surprising to learn Hindu Brahmans were ever

killing animals because Hinduism is known

as a vegetarian religion whose God Krishna reveres

cows as sacred and holy.

So on our quest to find a spiritual way to kill an animal,

we never thought to look into Hinduism

for the answer until

- Now this is a big breaking news that is coming in

of the government has decided to ban the slaughter

of cattle across the country.

- [Newscaster] The Modi government's decision to ban

the slaughter has sparked a widespread outrage.

- [Reporter] It's all begun with activists protesting

to shut down Nepal's Gadhimai Festival,

the world's largest animal sacrifice.

- [Kip] We couldn't understand,

how are they banning slaughtering cows in India

if we thought they didn't kill their holy cows?

We found a local animal activist to explain

what was going on.

- There are more cows killed here than anywhere else

in the world and no one knows it.

It's our country's biggest conspiracy.

(haunting music)

It is very dangerous, but you have to help us

make this international news.

- The cow, which is revered in India,

is now smuggled across the border, trafficked from India,

- By the alleged illegal beef mafia.

These illegal beef smugglers

terrorize a society of people.

We will track the story very closely.

Many thanks for joining us here.

- [Newscaster] Disturbing news, the cow mafia

has struck again, targeting animal rights activists.

The mafia has started to (radio crackles)

- [Kip] When we arrived, Altab had tracked

a cow smuggling truck seemingly headed

for the Gadhimai animal sacrifice.

- [Walkie] A cow smuggler has been identified,

headed for the border.

Estimated cargo:v70 cows.

We need photo confirmation To turn into the police.

(tense music)

(engine revving)

- [Walkie] Get visual proof that there are cows in the truck.

- They're pulling over.

- [Walkie] Careful, they may be armed.

(tense music continues) (group murmuring)

(door rattling)

- [Kam] This is super illegal.

- Let them pass and we can, here we go. Click it!

(horn blaring)

(tense music)

- [Walkie] 7 miles to the the border,

you must get it now!

- Get the drone, get the drone.

- [Kip] Here it is, here it is.

Go, go, up, up, up, let's go. - Left, left.

(tense music continues)

(camera clicking)

(somber music)

- [Kip] We reported the smuggling

of the 70 stuffed cows to the police.

But surprisingly, they turned us away.

for smuggling arms, explosives, drugs,

and most of all, cattle.

All of it is done with the complicity of the police

and border security forces.

- [Kip] In the meantime, we had to figure out

where all these smuggled cows were coming from.

Altab sent us undercover to find the surprising answer.

(In Hindi) No cameras allowed!

- So they don't want women to see this

because there can be problem.

- We use only the security camera, the spy camera.

We have to blur out this guy's face

if we're gonna shoot here,

otherwise they're going to kill him.

(flies buzzing)

- [Kip] Even though this was actually better

than most dairy farms in the West,

there were still many similarities, like how each cow

is artificially inseminated to become pregnant.

Then after birth, her newborn is placed next to the mother

until she starts milking, then taken away.

If her newborn is male, he's useless.

So in India, he's tied

outside in the sun and starved to death

since Hindus aren't allowed to kill cows,

whereas every other dairy farm

around the world kills them for veal.

Then the mother is injected with oxytocin,

which tricks the cows to contracting

as if she's having another baby,

thus causing her to release milk more rapidly.

Females repeat this cycle, three to four more pregnancies.

- And what happens after that? - They die.

They say they die naturally after that.

- [Kip] How do they die naturally?

(rancher speaking in foreign language)

- Once they stop giving milk,

then they are sent to slaughter.

- [Kip] So all these holy dairy cows are sent to slaughter?

(rancher speaking in foreign language)

- Yes. - Yes.

(cows mooing)

- It's true.

We are the biggest exporters of beef shamefully.

It's very difficult to make people who drink milk understand

that the meat industry

and leather is fed into by the dairy industry.

- All the dairy cows

and dairy buffaloes end up as leather.

- Yes. - Of course.

Mammary glands.

(somber music)

Fucking shit (coughs)

- [Maneka] Leather is made killing lots of people.

The poorest of the poor work in them

'cause they're paid almost nothing.

They stand in chemicals the whole day curing the leather.

And most of them have not only skin diseases,

but cancer of everything.

And all the leather chemicals are thrown into the rivers.

- [Kip] And where does all the chemicals go?

- It's going to the Ganges.

- [Kip] The Ganges, the sacred Ganges River?

Isn't that bad?

- No, no, no, Ganges are very big.

- [Kip] And what is the spiritual community

doing about this?

- Just increasing it, increasing the export.

All across the world,

this industry operates on the base of guns.

Political support, media support, both of them manipulated

with money and backed by religious feelings.

- [Interviewer] But don't Hindu scriptures

encourage consuming dairy?

- All rubbish. - Many scriptures

have been really tampered with,

verses have been inserted, parts have been deleted

because man wanted to use the scripture

for his own convenience.

- [Kip] And it wasn't just Hindu scripts whose texts

were being brought into question.

Altab told us,

- Islam wants you to protect the environment.

God says in the Quran that I have made human

the guardian of the planet.

- [Kip] Altab told us that Islamic scripture states

that the prophet Muhammad was appalled with the ills

of Meccan society at the time, including the sacrifice

of animals made to idols.

This drove him out of the city where he entered

the Cave of Hira, which is where he received

the first revelation of the Quran from the angel Gabriel.

(dramatic music)

Later that night, activists tracked down

another cow smuggling truck.

(engines rumbling)

(cows mooing)

This time, the cows were rescued and sent to a sanctuary.

(somber music)

- My grandfather started the first dairy farm in India.

There was no organized dairy before then.

- [Kip] Do you drink dairy yourself?

- No, no. - No, why?

- Because it's unnecessary.

It doesn't do anything for us and it's cruel.

The meat industry is just a conspiracy of silence.

Nobody talks about it, nobody shows it.

- [Interviewer] Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

- No. - No, no.

- I believe that doing is better than praying.

(dramatic music)

- [Kip] Before leaving India, we gave one final attempt

to interview the Dalai Lama.

Just after, though, he made an official statement that said

it's all right to have meat of dead animals

that's not slaughtered for meat.

We couldn't figure out how that was possible.

But on the way home, Kam realized he had a Christian friend

who was famous for eating animals

who weren't slaughtered for meat.

(logo squishes)

- Hey, welcome to "Food for Louis."

We're gonna continue with the the roadkill series

and we've stumbled across a fox.

Oh yeah, look at that meat.

I started YouTube back in 2012 with a channel,

"Food for Louis," where I just kind of pushed the limits of,

I guess, what it meant to be a carnivore in its rawest form,

eating roadkill, squirrels, pigeons and rabbits.

But there was one thing I did

which really just got me in a lot of trouble.

I'm gonna be eating my goldfish.

That caused uproar.

All the national papers were printing

massive articles on it.

Seven of my videos got taken down.

I was the number one-wanted person from the RSPCA.

Friends from church were really worried

and they said we'd love to pray for you,

we think you need help.

- [Kip] People are gonna know you as a psychopath.

- I was like, can't you see this is

just completely hypocritical that you're offering

to pray for me and that you're worried about me

and yet everybody in my church was happily eating

hamburgers, and chicken, and fish, and everything

and they just had no issue with that

and didn't make the connection.

- [Kip] Realizing how his church was morally all right

with him eating certain animals

but not others was a bit confusing

and made us feel like we were in some sort of matrix.

- So in the movie "The Matrix," the characters believed

that they were living their lives freely,

but really they weren't.

All that they saw was an illusion that was created

by this matrix.

And we can see a similar mentality

when it comes to eating animals.

I refer to this as the the carnistic matrix.

Carnism is the invisible dominant belief system woven

through the very structure of society that conditions us

to distort our perceptions of our behaviors

and creates a gap in our consciousness.

So we don't really realize what we're doing.

Without awareness, there's no free choice.

Carnism is why we are able to love dogs and certain animals

and eat others and not recognize the contradictions,

how they're not in alignment with our values.

We don't make the connection between the meat, eggs,

or dairy on our plate

and the living individuals those foods once were.

- Would you like give if someone ate you?

(adult laughing)

- No, I wouldn't. - Well then why should I

eat this poor harmless animal (crying)?

- [Adult] But do you understand what I'm saying?

We didn't kill this animal.

It's good for your body.

Jesus created animals for us to eat.

- God has given those animals unto us.

And this is, of course, where you'll have the sick people

of the world, that are just twisted in their head

because they don't have God and they don't know the Bible

and they don't know the truth,

who will elevate the status of an animal

or of a beast to be that of a human being?

- Let me just put this thing to bed once and for all.

It was impossible to be a vegetarian in the Old Testament

and be right with God.

Could not do it.

Impossible.

Yes to meat, all meat,

dog, cat, whatever.

- [Interviewer] What if a host served Buddhist dog teat?

- Why? - Would it be different?

- Why would it be different?

- [Interviewer] Oh, so a Buddhist would eat a dog?

- Well, I wouldn't eat it.

- [Interviewer] But wouldn't that offend the host?

- What if they were serving a unicorn?

I've never even heard of that situation occurring.

- [Narrator] Today on the summer solstice began

a week-long festival featuring dog served up as food.

- People from all over Asia come to this city to eat dogs

and we've rescued thousands and thousands of dogs.

I started going undercover into these slaughterhouses.

It was so shocking and so devastating

and it's sad that pushed me towards making the connection

that there's no difference between a cow, or a pig,

or a sheep, or a dog.

And a lot of people don't know, but I don't just do dogs,

I go into pig slaughter houses and cow farms.

But every time I rescue one, I saw myself dying there.

Anyways,

(grunts) sorry,

messed up.

(dogs barking)

My belief in a religion died while I was there.

There's no God on a kill floor.

(dogs squealing)

In that moment when an animal is being pushed

to their death, there's no hope,

there's no chance of a better life,

there's no tomorrow, no divine intervention.

(prod buzzes)

(prod buzzes)

(door sliding and rattling)

(metal clanging)

I don't know what I am now,

but definitely not religious.

I think we're living through the modern-day holocaust.

I think that's atrocity of the 21st century, eating animals.

(somber music)

- The oppression has these qualities

of both being very subtle and being universal.

Well, the beginning of discrimination

and oppression is first given to the child

when she asks, what am I eating?

- [Adult] We only eat turkeys.

- Why?

- And chicken, and pigs, and cows.

- But pigs are nice, and chickens are nice,

and cows are nice.

- And then it continues, it's similar living beings,

one should be cared for and the other must die.

And that's basically what happened to my family.

(bomb explodes)

After the war, eventually I went to work

for an environmental consulting firm at the slaughterhouse

and I was walking around taking notes

and I suddenly came across piles of heads, hearts,

hooves, and animal bodies.

My first reaction was remembering the body parts

that I saw in Auschwitz,

the Jewish victims, the members of my own family

that perished in those camps.

The use of cattle cars to transport my people

to the death camps,

the housing in tight wooden crates,

and identifying the victims by a number,

the deception so that people outside the walls

didn't really know what was going on.

The famous Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer said

that for the animals, all men are Nazis,

and for the animals life is an eternal Treblinka.

- [Kip] It felt uncomfortable to compare the holocaust

to killing animals.

But Alex told us that the word holocaust originally referred

to a Jewish animal sacrifice barbecued on the altar,

a common practice from the temple that Jesus called

the den of thieves, which developed into the system

of spiritually raising

and killing animals for food known as kosher.

We realized we had to visit a kosher farm

to see if perhaps this was the spiritual way

to raise and kill animals.

But interestingly, every farm turned us down for a visit.

So we linked up with an Israeli undercover activist

who got us into what she called one

of the best kosher farms around.

(dramatic music)

It wasn't what we expected.

- Something is wrong with them.

It's a lot of suffering

with tumors, with pus from their eyes.

The rabbi will explain you that is culture,

that we can all eat him

because it doesn't affect nothing.

- They just waiting to the slaughter.

In age one years old, they still baby,

so this is all their life.

They just sitting on the shit,

a lot of disease and sick.

See what they're doing.

(somber music) (cows mooing)

- We are eating energy of misery, and suffering,

and a lot of pain.

And it's get inside of us.

Their suffering is so big really.

And they're kind and they're beautiful

and they don't deserve it.

(birds chirping) (cows mooing)

- [Kip] Kosher farming didn't seem any different

but Tall took us to a rabbi

who has killed over a million animals

to see if the kosher killing is what made it spiritual.

- I can show you a video

- [Narrator] For kosher, you first take the cow

into the machine, stop up the neck,

and rotate the body 180 degrees.

Then the throat is slit.

The cow is hung upside down to drain the blood.

This is not to be confused with halal,

the Islamic interpretation,

which requires only rotating the cow 90 degrees,

facing the cow, saying Allah Akbar, praise God,

before slitting the throat and hanging upside down.

These methods are intended to reduce suffering.

- Like this, ah ha, one, two.

That's all, okay.

This is good for anyone.

- You seen the movies, everything is so clean

and how they have this slaughter box,

and with this music, it's not like this at all.

They can see everything, they can hear everything.

They smell the blood.

It's just, it's like a massacre.

And with a lot of violence, this is it,

it's a violent thing to do.

(dramatic music)

- Well I just caught a flashback,

(workers exclaiming) (metal rattling)

I saw the suffering in their eyes.

That was the first time I saw an animal cry.

(dramatic music continues)

Then I said to myself, this is really terrible.

There's no kosher in Israel.

What do you mean by kosher?

There is none.

- [Kip] Not feeling kosher was any more spiritual,

we wanted to see if humane slaughter was the answer.

And we found a certified grade A humane slaughterhouse

in Kam's hometown.

- Hey, nuh uh, y'all can't be here.

Y'all need to back up now.

Y'all need to back up. (siren blaring)

- [Kip] They really didn't want anyone

to see what's going on in there,

especially how slaughterhouses

use ex-prisoners on parole to kill the animals.

- Don't take no pictures of me, man, I'm on federal papers,

man, don't take no pictures.

- They kill at least about two, 3,000 cows a day.

That's a lot of killing and a lot of blood going on.

80 hours a week, might even work more.

It's really mentally disturbing.

Sometimes you can have nightmares just dreaming

about slaughtering and all that.

And there's always possibilities that you might just snap.

85% of 'em have been in prison.

It's just really a bad idea for a person

that's been locked up for a long time.

And you carry knives and blood everywhere,

killing them cows or being around it.

- And these workers have the highest rates

of worker injuries and among the highest rates of suicide,

and drug addiction, and alcoholism, and spousal abuse.

And so they go back after work

and take out on others or on themselves, the frustrations

and misery that they're inflicting on other living beings.

- [Interviewer] What if all the killings too much

and you just can't do it?

- They give you a job, you have no choice but to work it.

You have to do what they tell you to do

and if you don't, they send you back.

- Back where? - Get sent back to prison.

- [Kip] We found out that many slaughterhouse workers

are either prisoners on parole

or immigrants that are forced to work

under these conditions for as low as 93 cents per day,

which makes this essentially slave labor with PTSD.

- The model for slavery actually begins with, again,

animal domesticators in the ancient Middle East.

And the next form of it becomes human slavery

when females and children were traded

among the early herdspeople.

- You look at slavery, you look at indentured servants

as children, you look at a lot of things that used

to be normal, certain things that we used to do

that now we would look at and say, oh no, that's terrible.

As we evolve, they fall away.

We can eat them, we can do whatever we want to do

with them because they're just animals.

And that was the same rationalization

that people used for slavery.

These people aren't human, they have dark skins.

This is a woman, she's not totally human, she's a woman.

We can do whatever we wanna do with her.

- Anybody who says we've gotta deal

with the human issues first, doesn't understand

how animal oppression is informing human oppression.

The oppression of animals is intensifying

the oppression of women.

In objectification, we no longer are in possession

of our own bodies and we see that in meat eating.

We say chicken wings, not a chicken's wing.

It's like leg of lamb, no, it's a lamb's leg.

Reinforcing the idea that someone's only,

you know, are you a breast man, are you a leg man,

an assemblage of body parts because body parts can't talk.

So when we construct humans as better than non-human animals

and then create oppressive systems, we are speciesist.

Speciesism is an oppression interlocking with racism,

sexism, they're all working together as oppressive systems.

- [Kip] Seeing how animal oppression is interconnected

with human oppression in this industrial system,

we wondered maybe the spiritual way to raise

and kill animals lied outside the system

in local free-range regenerative farms

that were getting so popular

with morally conscious meat eaters.

The most popular in the country is Polyface Farms,

led by Christian Farmer Joel Salatin,

who says he kills animals on his farm

in a way he hopes Jesus would.

(dramatic music)

- Well, when the New York Times calls me a rebel

and an evangelist, yeah, I'm certainly an evangelist

because I'm preaching that this is actual food

and farming truth.

We believe in providing a habitat that allows the animal

to fully express its emotional distinctiveness.

- [Kam] Oh, in this cage?

- Just so you know, it's a shelter, it's a shelter.

Cage sounds restrictive. (chickens clucking)

Hi, ladies.

The pigs now, they're not just bacon and pork chop.

They actually become co-laborers

and fellow team players in this great healing ministry.

- [Kam] And their lifespan is how long?

- A pig would live,

I don't know how long a pig would live,

they'd live a long, long time.

But, we harvest them before they get old and tough.

- [Kam] When is old and tough?

- Six months.

How are you, pig?

Oh, it's just a good life, isn't it?

Yeah, it's just a good life.

- [Kam] How do you think Jesus would kill an animal?

- Yeah, I certainly would hope

that he would kill an animal the way we do.

We call this the wheel of fortune.

If we put 'em in head first here, a hug if you will,

makes 'em quiet.

And then we slit their throat here

and then this is the automatic feather picker.

We pull the heads off and the feet off

and then they go into these chill vats.

So from kill to chill, it goes right along.

(dramatic music)

- [Kip] Are the pigs slaughtered here, as well?

- Pigs, cows, goat, sheep all have

to go to a slaughterhouse.

- [Kam] So the chicken's the only one processed here.

- And rabbits. - And rabbits, got it.

So tell me what you're doing.

- [Worker] I'm gonna stun it first.

- Now what does this mean if you stun?

- Stun it, then it's not feeling anything.

It's unconscious, so it's way more humane.

- We now have a lot of people

who kill animals every single day.

And it's just not good for your psyche.

- [Kip] This didn't feel like what Jesus would do.

And we found out there were further impacts

from these free-range, grass-fed farms

beyond just killing farm animals.

- Every time you eat a free-range

or a grass-fed animal, you're contributing

to the killing of other animals

because farmers have to kill other animals

that compete for the cows' land,

wolves, bears, hawks, and eagles.

- The hawks and eagles need to be reduced.

- This is devastating to wildlife.

It's devastating to the Amazon Forest, the Chaco Forest.

They're on fire right now, why?

To clear for pastures to grow grass-fed meat.

(somber music)

Every second an acre of rainforest

is cleared partly for grass-fed beef,

but mostly to grow soy to feed livestock around the world.

And this is wiping out the forest,

it's wiping out the precious medicinal plants,

they contain the amazing diversity of animal life.

It's forcing indigenous tribes

to live homeless on city streets.

And their wisdom also is now at risk of extinction.

(dramatic music)

- [Interviewer] What if you pray or give thanks

for the animal before you eat them?

- [Kip] With all this killing and environmental destruction

even regenerative animal farming causes,

maybe hunting wild and free animals

is the ethical way to kill an animal.

(gun shoots) And Kam said he

actually belonged to a Christian youth hunting club

that did just that.

(somber music)

(group murmuring)

- Lord, in the name of your son Jesus,

send us some deer, whether you'd stir 'em up,

get 'em moving, help us to be successful shots

for you, while being humane 100%.

In Jesus's name, men. - Amen.

- My heart was beating fast.

He was like, there's a deer.

When I grabbed the gun I was just like, oh, it's here.

(somber music continues)

- Wait 'til he gets broadside,

and then I want you to put a bullet

right behind his shoulder.

(gun shoots) (somber music continues)

- [Logan] When I saw the deer dead, I felt like,

well I felt, I don't know how to explain it,

just kind of bad.

But he got the blood from where I shot the deer

and put a mark on each side.

- And you cannot wipe it off until tomorrow morning.

- [Logan] That's kind of weird.

Then he told me that,

- And this is the initiation

Logan, there's a tradition. - And it was just a tradition.

- In our ministry. - Yeah,

I just went along with it.

- Lord, I just come to you this morning.

I just want to thank you for the deer

that you've allowed us to harvest.

Thank you for allowing Logan to give that deer a clean shot.

And we just want to thank you this morning for a good hunt.

- [Logan] At the time, I was just really excited

and my adrenaline was rushing

and I was just like, yay, I killed it.

And then after I was like, dang,

I really just killed an animal.

I don't know how to explain it.

(somber music continues)

When I saw the calf, they used his (whispers),

it was kind of cute.

It reminded me of the deer really,

because it wasn't really that much of a size difference.

They're both beautiful animals.

So that's basically how I feel.

- [Interviewer] Was that your first one or?

- Act like you're happy about it.

(group laughing) (somber music continues)

- Growing up I was always trying to be macho.

I was trying to be tough.

That's probably when I was most desperate in my life

to be heard, to be someone,

to have some sort of authority.

And I chose to try and do that by exploiting something.

The alpha males wanna be more alpha, so they look for things

that we can grab onto and say, fuck, you know, I'm bigger,

I'm stronger, beat the chest type thing.

So I was basically being a bully man.

I wasn't even being a bully

to something that could fight back.

I was being a bully to something that I was standing

50 or 100 meters away from shooting with a rifle.

And I suppose that's one of the reasons

I joined the military.

'Cause it wasn't sport running around out there hunting

something that couldn't fight back.

- In primitive societies, because we hunted other animals,

it fostered the use of tools and technology

and the development of weapons.

So there was a lot of fighting going on

among people that kept herds.

- Herding animals was a direct cause of the first wars

and the ancient word for war from Sanskrit,

gavia, it comes from the ancient word go, which means cow.

So war was the desire for more cows.

It was a way to increase wealth.

So we had the arising of war and slavery.

We had the arising of a wealthy elite class

and we had the arising of religions

that enabled the fundamental foundation of the society

that we live in, which is owning animals as property

for food and routinely and relentlessly

killing them and eating them.

- Meat is so identified with patriarchal ethics,

the ends justifying the means

and violence as a way of having pleasure.

We see it in ads that tell men to eat meat.

♪ Oh yes, I'm a guy ♪

♪ I will eat this meat ♪

- [Announcer] Eat like a man, man.

- This desperate masculinity, trying not to be vulnerable,

so exploiting something that is vulnerable.

After Iraq, I never hunted again

and whatever was in my system was out

'cause you know what it's like to be hunted.

And once you're put in the other position,

hey, the tables turn.

- [Kip] And the tables were turning on our quest, as well.

Learning of all this war, disparity,

and oppression, seemingly rooted from temples

becoming slaughterhouses brought us back

to what did Jesus do in the temple he called

the den of thieves that led to his crucifixion.

And we had a strong inclination that finding out the truth

to this Nazareth mystery may somehow be connected

to Jesus's motive for cleansing the temple.

But we didn't know where to look until

- Dead Sea Scrolls rises back to life again

with new findings leading to possible scroll connections.

Archeologists and antiquities excavators are returning

to the original site of the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls

in the Qumran Cave area of the West Bank.

- [Kip] These scrolls were hidden by the church for decades

until archeologist Robert Eisenman

daringly released them to the public.

And it just so happened he lived only miles

down the road from us.

So we packed our cameras to see if he knew

what Nazareth really meant.

Why can we find no solid historical record of Nazareth?

- Nazareth is not a town that we can chronicle

in Palestine from the known sources.

The term Jesus of Nazareth was originally based

in the Hebrew to describe not where he came from,

but what he was, Jesus the Nasaraean,

which is a movement that opposed in the temple,

which had been put in place by the Romans.

- [Kip] So you're saying it's not about where he's from.

- [Robert] It's not where he is from, it's who he is.

(dramatic music)

- [Kip] Apparently this Nasaraean movement

against the temple was well documented

in historical records even before Jesus.

And we wondered,

- [Interviewer] Did these Nasaraeans

ever kill or eat animals?

- I don't think killing was part of any

of these righteous ones lives, though I'm not a vegetarian,

but I don't do the killing myself

so I can avoid any responsibility in my own own mind,

but it's hypocrisy obviously.

Still, I don't think people like James, or Jesus,

or those kind of righteous ones killed

any animals If they could avoid it

And I don't think they would've.

- [Interviewer] Not even for food?

- Well of course they didn't eat,

if they were weren't killing animals,

they weren't eating animals, that's obvious.

- [Kip] This wasn't obvious to us.

But Dr. Eisenman showed us that this Nasaraean movement

that Jesus seemed to be a part of would not

sacrifice animals or eat meat

because they differed from other movements at the time

by following the commandment thou shall not kill

to include animals.

- Seven-eighths of the people who deal with this material

and teach others who know nothing about it

are just repeating things

that they've been taught by other people.

Nothing that I learned was I taught by anyone else, period.

I was taught by the literature itself.

(dramatic music)

- So this guy keeps following me.

This is like the fourth time

I've seen this guy walking back.

What's up?

This is super sketch.

As things were ramping up, I hired a private investigator

to see if the industry or government was following me.

In the meantime, we felt we had

to find experts in the historical Jesus

and Nasaraean movement.

- What facts do we know about Jesus that all scholars,

Christians, and non-Christians

will all agree actually happened.

One is his baptism by John the Baptist,

the second is an incident in the temple,

and the third is his crucifixion.

John the Baptist is the leader

of the Jesus movement before Jesus.

The gospel of the Ebionites and Josephus both agree

that John the Baptist eats nothing but plant foods.

So John the Baptist certainly did not eat meat.

And Jesus and John the Baptist are cousins.

Jesus is simply carrying on the family tradition.

And all the people in this family seem to be vegetarian.

- Matthew is recorded as being a vegetarian.

Peter is recorded as being a vegetarian.

Epiphanius records that the whole Nasaraene movement

in the fourth century were vegetarian.

And when Epiphanius talked to one

of the Nasaraenes personally,

that Nasaraene said to the question from Epiphanius,

why are you a vegetarian?

The Nasaraene responded

because Jesus taught us to be vegetarians.

(dramatic music)

- Did Jesus eat animals?

Certainly ate fish.

- Do you wanna get really specific,

Peter and Jesus ate fish.

- Oh, the fish stories, yes.

Well, the problem with the fish stories about Jesus feeding

the 5,000 and the 4,000, the earliest references

describe the miracle of the loaves and the fishes

as the miracle of the loaves

without referencing the fishes at all.

And in fact, even Jesus's own retelling, he says,

don't you remember when I miraculously

multiplied all the loaves?

He doesn't mention the fish at all.

- [Kip] In these stories, the words used

for fish are actually a mistranslation,

like the Greek ichthus, which is also a secret symbol

for Jesus, and phosphagion, actually meaning a relish

or anything eaten on bread.

In another story in the gospel of John,

Jesus helps his disciples miraculously catch 153 fish,

but then tells them to follow him

and become fishers of men instead.

Nearly the exact same story is told 500 years earlier

by Pythagoras where he wages a bet

with some fishermen that if he's able to guess the number

of fish in their nets, they must release them.

They agree to the terms

and are shocked when Pythagoras guesses

the exact number of fish.

And the exact number in the Jesus story,

153, is the ratio height of the vesica piscis.

This symbol originated by Pythagoras,

who was a lifelong vegetarian

and fiercely against animal sacrifice.

- If we want to understand where Jesus came from,

we have to go back to the teachings of Pythagoras.

That is vegetarianism, pacifism,

and communalism, which became incorporated

in the Essene doctrine and the Nasaraean doctrine

that Jesus grew up in.

- ]Kip] And it turned out Pythagoras was a contemporary

of the Buddha and seeing Buddha was also

against animal sacrifice and trained in yoga,

we had to have a look.

- What yoga is is that union to the self.

There is a part of the life of all of us

that are in this room, including these two chihuahuas here

on my lap, which is the self that's within us all.

These girls are just driving Chihuahua bodies.

I just happen to be driving a human body.

No big difference (chuckles).

- The path is pretty clear to happiness.

Do everything you can

to enhance happiness in the lives of others.

The yamas are specific to how you should relate to others.

Basically, this is what the Buddha is teaching,

this is what Jesus is teaching, that we are all connected.

- [Kip] We had a revelation.

If you put yoga and Buddhism's precepts

and Christianity's, Islam's,

and Judaism's commandments side by side,

they're essentially the same thing

and all of them begin with not harming or killing others.

Yet all these religions seem

to contradict themselves when it came

to sacrificing animals.

Even Jesus calling the temple priests

a den of thieves rather than murderers

or killers seemed maybe he was more concerned

with the money than the killing.

So was animal sacrificed the answer of how

to spiritually kill animals?

If only we could travel back in time.

Maybe Jesus was all right with ceremonial animal sacrifice.

Just then, Altab sent us an email saying

that the world's largest animal sacrifice

at the Gadhimai temple was back on.

Despite the Supreme Court banning it,

trucks were continuing to smuggle thousands of cows

to be sacrificed by priests at the temple,

but there were activists trying

to shut the sacrifice down, led by activist Manoj Gautam.

- It looks like the Gadhimai sacrifices are back on.

The temple has gone back on their words.

And we only have 48 hours to knock the doors

of the Supreme Court back again.

And these 48 hours will be very crucial.

If you guys are thinking of coming,

this is the time, come now.

(tense music)

There you go, we just got a message.

It says there are already

900 buffalo calves already collected.

The time's running, the animal number is increasing

and it will increase as the time comes closer

to the commencement of the sacrifice.

But we barely have any time.

- [Kip] Manoj signed documents to take the temple committee

and government to Supreme Court to end the animal sacrifice.

(tense music continues)

- [Manoj] Yeah, so I've been working on this

for the past 11 years and I'd just like to see it done.

- [Kip] But his court request to stop

the temple sacrifice was denied.

- [Manoj] It looks like the government's

working in collusion with the temple committee.

Again, our hope lies in bringing it up to the attention

of the media with which we hope we

can still get to the sacrifice.

It's a question that media people like yourself

from Guardian should ask these government officials

what kind of society do you want to create?

What kind of religion?

What kind of religious practices do you want to create?

A practice of violence, practice of activists being killed?

I was recently attacked,

all they seek is my blood at this moment.

What more do they want, for me to die,

for me to be killed?

Do they want us to be crucified now?

I would like to repeat this.

Do they want us activists to be crucified?

In one of the Vedas that are the founding scriptures

of Hinduism, one says that if by killing animals,

if by consuming animals' tears and blood,

and by chopping off trees and destroying life forms,

one goes to heaven, then what is

the staircase to go to hell?

(ominous music)

- [Kip] Manoj was worried that he may be killed

if he went to Gadhimai.

So he asked if we could risk going as undercover press

to document if they sacrificed the animals or not.

We arrived amongst the sea of four million Hindu devotees

toting animals for sacrifice and Manoj connected us

to an undercover activist named DeepJay who was trying

to shut down the sacrifice at ground zero.

- There are some people from the Gadhimai Temple Committee

who would like us not to be here.

(ominous music continues)

- Do you think it's risky out there?

- Oh yeah, oh hell yeah.

The Temple Committee put the bounties on Manoj

and our heads if we come here to kill us.

Maybe now we should put the camera away from our face.

(ominous music continues)

(group murmuring)

This is the pit they have dog to bury all the heads

when they hack the animals.

- [Kip] We used fake press outfits

to get us into the private priest area,

where at 5:00 a.m. if the priest decides

to kill these first five animals, a cow, goat, pig,

chicken, and a rat, only then would the sacrifice

of the thousands of cows in the temple grounds will begin.

(dramatic music) (animals bleating)

- [Interviewer] So we heard the sacrifice might not happen?

- They have not asked us to totally stop it

because this is related to our tradition and Hindu custom.

- [Interviewer] What do you say to someone who's in America

if they're saying this is wrong?

- Comparing the Christian, who followed the Thanksgiving,

there are billions of turkey

that was slaughtered like just a few months ago,

so it's their tradition.

It's ours as Hindus.

- All right, so it's past six.

An hour ago they were supposed

to kill the first five animals and they haven't done it yet.

(group clamoring) (drums beating)

(whistle blowing)

- [Kip] Soon after, the military showed up

to shut the sacrifice down

or so we thought.

(group clamoring) (dramatic music)

(dramatic music continues)

(group cheering)

(group clamoring) (whistles blowing)

And that's when it hit us,

this felt like a glimpse into what was happening

in the temple of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

There were the temple guards, the military,

and the government in collusion

with the priests killing animals in exchange for money.

Once the cow sacrifice began inside the barricaded temple,

they demanded we stop filming

(group murmuring) (dramatic music)

(cows mooing)

(drone whirring)

- Because of the Supreme Court order,

I don't think all of them will be sacrificed.

(drone whirring)

(dramatic music continues)

- [Colleague] The worst we believe could happen is they

might slaughter about 20%. - Wow, wow.

Wow.

(dramatic music continues)

(dramatic music continues)

- [Kip] It was becoming clear

that we may never find a spiritual way to kill an animal.

I felt horrible and it felt wrong to just stand there

and do nothing for the animals, but it felt wrong to intrude

and disrespect someone else's religion.

- [Speaker] Comparing the Christian who follow Thanksgiving,

millions of turkey that was slaughter just a few months ago.

- [Kip] All this paled in comparison

to the 46 million turkeys we kill each year for Thanksgiving

and the near 16 million pigs we eat for Christmas

to ironically celebrate the birth of someone

who may have never killed or eaten any animal.

Seeing this made us feel compelled more than ever

to find out what did Jesus really do at the temple

that led to his crucifixion.

(tense music)

This is what I come home to.

My place has been completely ransacked,

everything is gone through, yet nothing is taken.

They even purposely put things like expensive equipment,

phone, saying that, hey, we're not here to steal anything,

we're here to try to scare you.

My camera bag, $10,000 worth of equipment was found

two blocks away.

- [Kam] I just came to my van here to find

it's been broken into, but nothing of value was taken.

The only thing they took were my memory cards.

- [Kip] I immediately followed up

with a private investigator we hired

and he said to meet up with him right away.

- Well, you definitely have industry scared.

We've got 80 pages of documents that we've obtained

through our Freedom of Information Act requests

showing the USDA's Beef Board identified your films

as a potential crisis that must be protected

and defended against.

Lobbyists for big animal ag

and their allies in government are really doing

whatever they can to surveil your films closely,

monitor your social media, track your screenings,

and at times even shut your screenings down.

We're talking about some of the most powerful,

profitable industries on the planet

that kill over 70 billion animals a year.

If your films affect people's beliefs about animals

and our treatment of animals,

that will make you a threat in their eyes

and industry will move to neutralize the threat.

(ominous music)

- [Kip] We wondered if all this risk was worth

making the film.

But after some deep soul searching,

despite all the threats, we knew the biggest risk would be

to be scared into silence and not tell the story.

- Check this out, remember that red cow sacrifice prophecy.

It looks like it may be the cause

of the recent conflict in the holy land

and no one's talking about it.

Weeks before the attack,

the Jewish Temple Institute announced that

after 2,000 years an unblemished red cow was born

and paid $250,000 to fly the cows over

to Jerusalem from a Texas cattle rancher.

And right after, the Middle East Monitor said

Israel's red cow will blow up the region.

(explosives blasting)

Hamas stated the trigger of the attack was from the concern

that this prophetic cow sacrifice would lead

to demolishing the Islamic Dome of the Rock to clear way

for the new Jewish temple to be built.

And the Temple Institute's website actually verifies this

along with a plan to restart animal sacrifices

inside the temple, just like in Jesus's time.

We gotta talk to this Texas cattle rancher

who shipped over the red cow.

- The temple is the fulcrum

of the conflict, that's for sure,

and the red heifers are the start of that.

- [Kam] So you're saying the red heifer sacrifice

could start something bigger?

- Well, I'll say this, today we're closer

to a World War III type event than we were yesterday

and tomorrow we'll be even closer and it is coming, period.

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music continues)

- When going against mainstream beliefs,

especially religious beliefs,

you can expect to be threatened.

The humanitarian church is constantly under attack,

whether it's verbal attacks, online attacks,

or people breaking in without stealing anything

and just ripping out the electric

so that the Sunday service could not be produced.

I get stalked out there all the time.

They know my schedule, they know when I'm leaving,

when I'm coming back, they will stop at nothing

to keep this truth from getting out.

The church will tell you that the story

about the den of thieves was about Jesus Christ

knocking over the money changers' table.

That's not the case.

The truth of the story is Jesus Christ was striking

at the root of all there is that is evil,

of oppression of people,

of the construct of war in one fell swoop.

He was crucified for disrupting the culture of the time,

which was killing animals for profit

and eating them for food.

- [Interviewer] If that's true, though,

then why did Jesus call them thieves?

- And he turned over their tables.

- He cried out, you've made my father's house

the den of thieves. - The den of thieves.

- Well, in that case he shouldn't have

driven out all the animals.

- He drove them out of the temple, cattle, sheep and all.

- Jesus would not allow anyone

carrying these animals in and out.

He shuts the temple down for the whole day.

And everybody's listening, what is this guy gonna do next?

(dramatic music)

- What's wrong, Jesus, why are you so upset?

What does he say and what's wrong?

- [Interviewer] If it were really about killing animals,

it seems like you wouldn't call them thieves,

you'd call them violent or killers.

- Jesus Christ did not really call

the temple a den of thieves.

Find out the true translation of the word thieves

and you'll know what Jesus was calling them.

- [Kip] To finally see once and for all

what Jesus's true intentions were

when he stormed the temple that led to his crucifixion,

we found a leading scholar on biblical Hebrew translation.

- He's in Jerusalem for the final few days

of his earthly life,

but it's quite unusual for him

to go off at the deep end, so to speak, like this.

And it's like he's going, okay, now I can really show you

who I am and let rip and creates havoc

and says, this is my father's house.

It should be a house of prayer for all nations,

but you have turned it into a den of robbers.

- [Interviewer] So we've heard he called them thieves

and now you're saying robbers.

So what is the real Hebrew translation

for what Jesus called the priests in the temple?

- Right, let me have a look and see where it comes

and what exactly it says.

(pages rustling)

(speaks in Hebrew) Yeah, so that's interesting.

Yes, do you know, I never realized that,

that's a kind of a-ha moment, yes.

- [Interviewer] And what does the word,

- (speaks in Hebrew) mean.

Another book! (mutters in Hebrew)

Well, we'll have to look up (speaks in Hebrew)

in the Hebrew dictionary, as well.

(speaks in Hebrew) Yes, a violent one.

(ominous music)

- [Interviewer] And that's what he called the priests

doing the sacrifice?

- Yeah.

- [Interviewer] So it's the killing then.

- Yes, ferocious apparently.

(ominous music continues)

- [Interviewer] So not only did he sacrifice his life

for humans, but to stop the killing of animals, as well.

- Yeah, it is interesting.

And it certainly raises a number of questions

- On the eve before Jesus's crucifixion,

he held his final protest, the Last Supper,

which should have been centered around a Passover lamb.

- In the Ebionite gospel,

Jesus specifically rejected eating meat at the Passover.

Jesus says I've come to destroy the sacrifices

and if you do not cease from sacrificing,

wrath will not cease from you.

- And he says this is my meat, this bread,

and this wine is my blood, so to speak.

Meaning this is all we need.

We don't need the lamb.

Let's do the things that belong to the kingdom of God.

What would make the planet go back to an Eden state?

(dramatic music)

- You know, if we look close enough, we can see the hints

in paintings and scripture.

It's just that it's easier

to cover up the truth than to talk about it.

(dramatic music continues)

- [Interviewer] How has this truth about Jesus

been covered up for 2,000 years?

- (chuckles) Because of course the meat eaters won.

As it's often been said, history is the province

of the winners and now we're living with the consequences.

- [Interviewer] And what do we know about the winners?

- What we do know is that

Paul was fiercely anti-vegetarian

and his influence has undoubtedly influenced the direction

of Christianity and especially during the first century.

- St. Paul is a Roman leader who spread Christianity

to the masses, encouraged converts to eat meat,

condemning the movement that didn't.

Funny, many people don't know

that Jesus had a brother James.

And why is that?

We have all of these additional sources,

the main thing is his lifestyle.

He doesn't eat meat.

He lived off what grew of itself.

- James, the brother of Jesus, was clearly a vegetarian

and he was head of the Jerusalem church.

- He's called the pillar of the church.

The so-called pillars, Paul says,

'cause Paul didn't necessarily always agree with James.

Later, James was brutally murdered in the temple

by the same gang of priests that killed his brother Jesus.

And then he's largely written out of the New Testament.

- [Rob] The church amplified Paul's pro meat writings,

while burning the books that didn't align

with their new doctrine.

- We know that the gospel of the Ebionites that portrays

Jesus as a vegetarian was actively suppressed by the church.

- [James] These texts of the followers of James,

the brother of Jesus, were lost to history.

They were overshadowed by what Paul wrote

and his writings effectively replaced

the original message of Jesus

and James for which they lived and died.

- [Rob] The remaining Nasaraene movement was weeded out.

Eventually they were all killed off

(dramatic music)

over the argument of the consumption of animals.

Only years after their leader, Jesus,

was crucified as a terrorist.

- Well that's why I say he's the lamb

who liberates the lambs.

You see, the good,

the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

A reversal of the traditional practice of shepherding

who looks after the animals and slaughters them.

It is the good shepherd who lays down

his life for the sheep.

Quite a radical line, isn't it?

(dramatic music)

- If Jesus was walking the earth now the way he did,

and for what he did, today, what do you think he'd be doing?

♪ Is there a right way to kill a beast ♪

♪ Justify energy and blood on the streets ♪

- If Jesus were to do the same equivalent kind of thing

today as going into the temple,

he'd be considered a terrorist,

a threat to public order.

♪ Religious doctrine never made a profit ♪

♪ Souls of the innocent creation get adopted ♪

♪ Slit the throats of the lamb ♪

♪ See, the nation nation's gotta stop it, huh ♪

♪ Pharisees right now the temple ♪

♪ Slaughtering sheep while making an event ♪

♪ We'll flip the tables ♪

♪ No intentions of being gentle, that's crazy ♪

♪ I'm getting mental on these ♪

- What Jesus did was actually an act of animal liberation.

♪ Unalive what, for the cause to make credentials ♪

♪ Thou shall not kill is the law, let's make it simple ♪

♪ Den of thieves, what's the right way to kill a beast ♪

- 2004, the FBI designated animal rights movements

the number-one domestic terror threats in the country

despite the fact that neither of these movements

has ever once physically injured

a single person in this country, ever.

♪ Why you got a knife, what's this ♪

♪ How you take a life with the life's that's within you ♪

♪ Then you caught me writing, got Christ deep within you ♪

♪ What's the cost of a soul, check the price ♪

♪ That's within you, den of thieves ♪

- [Kip] After all that we had learned,

it felt now the only choice was to stand up and take action.

It felt daunting and dangerous to be considered a terrorist

or face jail time.

But we push forward and join marches

for the animals, rallied against slaughterhouses,

and sought out activists

to learn from, including one terrorist awaiting trial.

- Hi, Kip.

- Is this what a terrorist looks like?

- Yeah, apparently so, that's what I'm told (giggles).

I was on a particular open rescue where we became aware

of a company in Utah called Norbest.

Their website shows an open field,

beautiful bucolic setting.

And we went to investigate

and see what actually condition the turkeys were in.

They were packed together, very distressed,

many of them laying on the floor already dead.

Some were clearly dying, gasping for air.

So it's basically it's humane washing.

They want people to feel

that these turkeys are living beautiful, happy lives

and nothing could be further from the truth.

We saved three baby turkeys

and I helped carry them to safety.

- [Kip] And what are you being charged with now?

- Felony burglary and felony theft.

And each one carries a maximum sentence of five years,

so that would be a total of 10 years.

- So are you a threat to society?

- Gee, I don't think so (chuckles).

I hope not.

(dramatic music)

- [Kip] It seemed to Diane her charges were worth it

if just one life could be saved,

which reminded us of DeepJay and how despite the threats

and loss of Gadhimai, he said it would all be worthwhile

if he could save just one life.

- What do you think? - Yeah, I think it is.

- [Kip] He says it's his?

(peaceful music)

Kam, say yay.

- Yay. (goat bleats)

Yay. (goat bleats)

Yay.

- [Interviewer] Do you feel it's possible

to be spiritual and eat animals?

- No, it is not at all possible.

It is just not possible.

Because to be spiritual is to simply know

that killing this, destroying that

is about moving from completion to incompletion.

How can a spiritual man do that?

Spirituality is about moving

from incompletion to completion.

- You know, I think a more appropriate question is,

what does it mean to be human and eat meat?

That's maybe a more important question.

- Sometimes people think we're called human beings

for a reason, but the only reason is we've named ourselves,

we're called human beings, which shares the the same root

as the word humane beings.

The kind ones, in a way

we've named ourselves aspirationally.

Do we want to make the most of our most human ability,

which is our ability for empathy?

There've been studies that show for vegans, for example,

the parts of the brain that are involved

in their emotional lives really fire.

As a biologist, what that shows is that there's

a really deep connection there, felt connection.

- [Kip] Neuroscientists studying 12 years

to find the happiest human on earth

found that when Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard,

who's vegan, meditates on compassion

for all beings, capacity for happiness increases,

and his brain fires the highest levels

of gamma waves ever reported in history,

linked to consciousness, learning, and memory.

- That's why the great thinkers throughout history

ultimately were vegetarian.

Just Google who are the famous vegetarian

and you find Einstein, Tesla, Leonardo da Vinci,

on and on and on.

(dramatic music)

Leonardo da Vinci when he started making money,

would go into the market

and buy up all the chickens in the marketplace

and then take 'em out into the woods

and then let 'em all go.

- [Kip] It all came full circle.

The holy land now has one

of the highest vegans per capita in the world

with the first fully vegan hospital.

And even Chief Rabbi Zarki put down his knife

and became vegan.

And there's even an entire vegan village

of African Hebrew Israelites.

- The word vegan in Hebrew is (speaks in Hebrew).

It comes from the root word of (speaks in Hebrew),

which means nature.

That means connect to the earth, the trees, the flowers,

all the animals, and everybody praise God in their own way.

That's really a vision of the new Garden of Eden.

- All around the world now we're seeing

an amazing transformation as land

that was used for animal farming is being re-wilded.

And I feel we're there, we have it in our hands.

We just have to remember who we are.

- [Kip] Even Texas cattle ranchers like Renee King Sonnen

are turning their ranches into sanctuaries.

- Well, you know, Kam, you and I have

a very similar background.

I grew up Christian, writing gospel music,

and I am so grateful that I've learned the meaning

of stewardship, the meaning of true dominion.

'Cause there ain't nothing in my brain that tells me

that there's a spiritual way to kill an animal.

There is just no right way to do the wrong thing.

- To access the deepest part of yourself,

which has been suppressed through a variety

of lessons about not caring,

when we remove all those sort of boulders,

when we roll away the boulder, what's within?

Well, that's the gift.

- [Kip] From the environment to spiritual health,

more and more I feel the most important question I can ask

is how to spiritually honor and protect animals as equals

and treat them with the same level of respect

as we treat each other.

- I think not eating animals is a first step

in the quest towards humanity.

- I think on the journey of being where I am now

as plant-based, it's a long way from where I was.

For the first time, everything kind of makes sense

in terms of my mission and my purpose.

My spirit feels elevated.

- When you look into someone's eyes,

you're looking at their personhood,

you're looking at their soul.

- And if you are really awake,

you will only see your own deep innocence,

which might be hidden from you.

- I see a being that desires to live as much as I do

and has the right to do so.

- My life is that of an advocate

for the most vulnerable living beings on Earth.

- [Maneka] The basis of all religion, it is simply this,

always be kind

(camera clicking)

- Along this journey, I felt at times as if I was

moving away from my faith.

But what I now realize is

that all the while I was actually moving closer

to what it really means to be a Christ follower.

And the one thing that unites all religions

and spiritual traditions at the root

is compassion for all beings.

- See, animals are not just beings.

They have anima, a life.

They do something fundamentally

spiritually important for us

and that is to take us out of ourselves, to give us a sense

of wonder and awe at the universe to see

beyond the natural world, to the spirit moving within it

with which one can connect,

with which one can have a relationship,

which can indeed mediate the grace of God.

Is that what you mean by spirituality?

- We're actually speaking about a moment in which everyone

sees that, that same spark of divinity is in all beings,

whether they're winged, or four-legged,

or whether they're swimming in the sea.

- And one by one by one, we become those understanding,

compassionate creatures and we create a gigantic game

of tag around the world.

I'm talking about 10, 20 million prophets,

masters on this earth, all being as Christ-like

as Jesus, as the Buddha, as Prophet Muhammad,

as any of the great masters that have ever lived.

This is not the age of one great leader.

This is the age of great leadership.

And what I basically have to say

to anybody watching this is tag, you're it.

♪ One, two, three, four ♪

♪ Oh, Jesus, I love you ♪

♪ And I love Buddha, too ♪

♪ Rama Krishna Guru Dev ♪

♪ Daodejing and Muhammad ♪

♪ Why do some people say ♪

♪ That there is just one way ♪

♪ To love you, God. and come to you ♪

♪ We are all a part of you ♪

♪ You are unnameable ♪

♪ You are unknowable ♪

♪ All we have is metaphor ♪

- Thank you for watching "Christspiracy"

and bearing witness.

You may be feeling some conflicting emotions right now,

perhaps some confusion, sadness, anger, a sense of betrayal

or injustice, or maybe you're feeling energized

and inspired to do something to make a difference,

just as all of these people whose names here

on the screen have boldly done.

- While you watched this film,

five million animals were slaughtered.

Each one of them an individual

with a soul who wanted to live.

The scale of their killing is unimaginable,

just as the length of time this historical coverup

has been perpetrated is unimaginable,

but the truth has been set free.

And now it's your turn to raise your voice

for those whose voices we can't hear

and get this truth out into the world.

- You may be asking yourself, what can I do?

And the absolute number-one priority is

to get this film seen.

It's vital that people learn the realities

of animal agriculture and how this spiritual

and ethical call to treat animals compassionately

has been covered up for so long.

- Our first goal is that "Christspiracy"

gets three million views,

one for every animal killed for food every single hour.

They are the reason we made "Christspiracy"

and they are the reason we need your help

to get this film seen.

That's why we built this pay it forward platform.

- Because of you, "Christspiracy" is accessible

to everyone, no matter where they live

or what their financial status is.

And the power of this film resides into those who are able

to keep the chain of compassion going

by paying it forward for someone else.

- And when you do for others what someone has already done

for you and pay it forward,

you'll also unlock some fantastic perks,

the full HD version of the film, extended interviews,

deleted scenes, behind the scenes stories,

access to our online community,

a 30-day spiritual meal planner,

a seven-day challenge, and so much more.

- It's really worth paying it forward

for so many reasons if you can.

But even if you can't,

you can still play an essential part

in this compassionate movement by recommending

"Christspiracy" to everyone you know.

You may already have someone in mind

that you know just has to see this film.

So send it to friends, send it to family,

tell your neighbors, and even strangers

that you may meet on the street.

Awareness is everything.

- Compassion and the golden rule is at the root

of all religions and spiritual traditions.

This empathetic, humane teaching unites all traditions.

It allows us to build bridges between us.

It allows each of us to connect to each other

and together become all that we are truly meant to be.

- "Christspiracy" just scratches the surface

of what certain scholars, theologians, archeologists,

and others are coming to understand about the true roots

of religion and our cultural traditions.

Their work in this film will,

because of your action, start a domino effect of discussion,

debate, and compassion for all beings.

- And when you pay it forward, 100% of all proceeds

go to animal charities, activism,

and reforestation projects.

The very real and beautiful transformation

of our world is already under way

thanks to people like you who have seen "Christspiracy"

and ensured others get to see it too.

- Having spent seven years making this film,

we are now handing the baton to you.

"Christspiracy" is more than a movie, it is a movement.

So go ahead, play your part, pay it forward,

and be part of this powerful

worldwide transformation for good.

Tag, you're it. - Tag, you're it.