All Comments (18)

"Notwithstanding the obvious differences among animals and between animals and humans in matters such as reasoning abilities, Buddhists believe that the differences are for the most part not of great significance,..."

Lol. Those differences have made all the differences in the world.

"Looking at the point of view of the sentient being who is afflicted by the cruelty of another, it may well be that cruelty toward an animal is worse than cruelty to a human."

My ability to comprehend my suffering has potential either to mitigate it or to aggravate it, no? But my subjective comprehension, either as mitigating or as aggravating, actually change the outward nature of the act done against me.

It's precisely the ability to abstract that enables us to not only experience pain, as animals do, but to suffer - which is the experience of reflecting on our pain.

I suggest that it is wrong for us to be cruel to animals because it violates our nature as creatures capable of better. If a lion mauls a wildebeast and leaves it half-dead to be pecked alive by vultures under the hot African sun, that's not cruel - it's just nature. The same act done by a human is cruel, precisely because we humans are capable of better. If we weren't we wouldn't go around campaigning against cruelty to animals.

If we want to secure kinder treatment of animals, and I for one don't object in the slightest to that goal, it's an unproductive path to go on insisting that we are basically just the same as animals, because animals aren't very kind to each other.

Ryan,

Notwithstanding the obvious differences among animals and between animals and humans in matters such as reasoning abilities, Buddhists believe that the differences are for the most part not of great significance, though they give humans a head start on the path to enlightenment.

They believe that all sentient beings have the same inner Buddha nature. I side with the Buddhists.

"While I wouldn't deliberately for its own sake be cruel to a cow, or even a cricket, I cannot see how someone cannot see the difference between cruelty to a cow and cruelty to a Jew, a Czech, or a Russian."

Looking at the point of view of the sentient being who is afflicted by the cruelty of another, it may well be that cruelty toward an animal is worse than cruelty to a human.

An adult, competent, human understands what's going on with the cruel act. The animal doesn't. As opposed to the animal's bewilderment, the human has the handle of reasoning with which to deal with the cruel act. That can mitigate the impact of the cruel act.

Regards.

Terra,

I wasn't arguing that each creature hasn't a place on God's green earth. Of course, each species has its particular role in the ecological structure in which it participates. In an analogous way, each person has his or her particular role in the social structure in which he or she dwells.

For that matter, I'll grant, by way of making fine distinctions, both emotions and particular reasoning to animals. Absolutely. When I wrote that animals don't "think the same way," I was getting at a distinction. When I wrote that they have never thought at all, I overshot the distinction for rhetorical purposes. My apologies.

The distinction is this: particular (concrete), as constrasted to abstract, reasoning. Particular reasoning is the sort of reasoning that is easily modified by behavioral modification programs using Pavlov's principles. "When the button is pushed, the bulb lights up and cat food comes out," is an example of particular reasoning. "The dog is very big and fierce looking," is another example. Animals all do this sort of reasoning to one degree or another, and some even with a real sophistication.

Abstract reasoning is the ability, let's say, to make articulable identifications, distinctions, and generalizations from a set of particular experiences. Abstract reasoning is what yields the ability to design buildings (even badly), compose music (even ugly music), translate languages, and perform mathematical operations. We, as a species, haven't a single experience of any other species performing this sort of abstract reasoning.

The difference makes all the difference in the world.

This distinction is not a subtle plea for humans to begin exterminating animals. On the contrary, we have a real duty to be mindful of them and their place in creation. The fact that environmentalists and animal-lovers everywhere agree on this fact, but that not one has ever suggested that animals have a similar responsibility to us is a tacit admission that there is a qualitative difference between ourselves and the rest of animals. We have campaigns to save baby seals; what a shock we would have to see seals campaigning to save baby humans, or even campaigning to protect their own babies. I am not making fun here, but being very serious. Precisely their ability to get on nicely without us, and our ability to destroy them almost at will, are two manifestations of the difference that sets us apart from every other animal species. It's a very real, substantial difference and it carries with it very real, substantial similarities.

If we were JUST animals, we wouldn't have responsibilities toward the other animals. Lions either eat too few gazelle and go hungry, or too many gazelle and go hungry later on down the road, but nobody speaks about lions having a responsibility to control their appetites for gazelle - much the lions themselves so speaking. But we do rightly speak about humans hunting too many lions; we do so rightly precisely because we have can speak, that is, because we have a faculty for articulable abstract thought.

While I wouldn't deliberately for its own sake be cruel to a cow, or even a cricket, I cannot see how someone cannot see the difference between cruelty to a cow and cruelty to a Jew, a Czech, or a Russian.

Ryan Haber,

Do you have a pet? Have you seen a mother dog grieve for her dead baby? I have. My cats think...no they do not calculate like we do..they are basic and truthful. If they did not think and reason they could not be trained or reasoned with...and they can. They have personalities and games they play. And cats are smarter then dogs.

Aniamals are not human...but they have emotions, reason power and playfulness. They do not have to have what we have...we lack some of their powers. We each fit our nitch. And think about it...

This planet and all that is on Her can do very well without us. But take away the Bee and where are we?

terra

Norrie,

I just want to point out, before passing the topic entirely, that "...To me, Nazi death camp victims, me, my family, our cats, animals in slaughterhouses, and all sentient beings are basically in the same situation," is an ideological dogma. There is NOTHING in our sense experience that speaks to it. In fact, our sense experience flatly contradicts it. You may feel that you are no better, no more, than a cat or a cow; but I assure you the cat does not think the same way, because to all our sense experience, the cat seems never to have thought at all. Not in that way.

As for your work in the kibbutz, thank you for it.

You didnt deserve, Williams Bush, You didnt deserve. and i havent either.

Ryan,

As I think you know, I call myself an "agnostic with Buddhist sympathies".

I'm sure you're also aware that from that perspective a cow is not a lesser being than a human.

All sentient beings are thought to have the same, equally valuable inner Buddha nature, and all can progress to liberation and enlightenment.

Consider any example of pain or fear in the universe: it exists equally with any other example of pain or fear in the universe.

Considered against the background vibrations of the universe, a cow's fear and pain in a slaughterhouse is not that different from the fear and pain of a human in a death camp.

If a cow could speak, it might say with Shylock:

"Hath not a cow eyes? Hath not a cow limbs, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a human is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a cow wrong a human, what is his humility? Revenge. If a human wrong a cow, what should his sufferance be by human example? Why, revenge.** The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

**[Consider the recent example of humans tormenting a tiger in a zoo: the tiger responded by mauling and killing the humans. Humans then shot the tiger.]

Ryan, you wrote:

"I am a little startled by your comparison (although it seems borrowed, you seem to have appropriated it) of slaughterhouses that kill animals with Treblinkas that kill people. It is the coarsest ideology that cannot see the difference between a cow and a Jew.

"Two of my grandparents, Jews, fled Nazi Germany - and lost many relatives to the Holocaust. Really, the only words I can think of to convey my displeasure at the comparison of my family to cows would be uncivil."

My response:

You're right: I borrowed the phrase "Eternal Treblinka". It's the title of a 2002 book by Charles Patterson.

I tried to copy the table of contents for you but was unable to because of the computer form in which it appears on my screen. I urge you to go to:

http://books.google.com/books?id=9JlhaY0wxjYC&dq=%22eternal+treblinka%22&pg=PP1&ots=8Kw8sbFzcG&sig=KOhxayjv39hLq8IjPe-9KtPlXhs&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Eternal+Treblinka%22&search=search&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail#PPP1,M1

so that you can see for yourself what the book is about. Or you can simply google "Eternal Treblinka".

Among many other things it posits the invention of the American-style slaughterhouse as a model for the Nazi death camps, and points out other connections between those two "institutions".

I was ten years old when the Nazi camps were opened by the Americans. Those reports made a profound impression on me. When I graduated from college, though not Jewish, I went to Israel to work on a kibbutz.

It was my feeble attempt to expiate the horror of the death camps. "The gesture may be futile, but the gesture must be made."

I hope this post makes clearer what I was trying to communicate. To me, Nazi death camp victims, me, my family, our cats, animals in slaughterhouses, and all sentient beings are basically in the same situation.

"Life is suffering" said the Buddha, but he pointed the way toward liberation.

Concerned Christian Now Ours:

I am happy to see your progress in regards to your personal intolerance, and slavish devotion to popular writers who decry The Enemy. You do well to believe that the one sent to our patients by The Enemy was an illiterate peasant in spite of his sophisticated philosophy and perceptive rhetoric. In essence, you have come to our truth.

Though you yourself are well on your way, our Father Below is concerned that you are not well enough versed at the arts of seduction to bring others along.

Your unremitting scorn for others is delicious, I grant you that, but we fear it does not interest other potential patients. But your approach, though it pleases you, may not attract others to our cause. You must let them feel wise in denouncing the Enemy, rather than reserving that singular honour to yourself.

Try some honey rather than the so satisfying vinegar of scorn and insult we all love.

Your Affectionate Uncle

Norrie,

I am a little startled by your comparison (although it seems borrowed, you seem to have appropriated it) of slaughterhouses that kill animals with Treblinkas that kill people. It is the coarsest ideology that cannot see the difference between a cow and a Jew.

Two of my grandparents, Jews, fled Nazi Germany - and lost many relatives to the Holocaust. Really, the only words I can think of to convey my displeasure at the comparison of my family to cows would be uncivil.

"Based on what He did during His lifetime, I imagine that Jesus would be part of a radical not-nonviolent fringe group. He'd be with ELF, burning down McMansions and overturning tables in bank lobbies."

You haven't read the gospels, have you? Don't you remember what Jesus did, rather than harm others when he had two options left?

In any event, I cannot see him putting fire to the house of overmortgaged idiots whose sense of their worth is so depleted that they have to work themselves into family turmoil and early graves so that can keep up with the Joneses.

Yours,
Ryan

Terry Bond,

Respectfully, you may have more bias against religion than understanding of it - at least of the Catholic religion, anyway.

For instance, if you examine a condom wrapper from a condom made for distribution in the United States, you will note that it says something like, "99% gauranteed for safer sex." The "-er" was added to "safe" because of a HUGE lawsuit by AIDS victims against condom manufacturers. Even when used properly, condoms give more a sense of security than actual security, particularly against HIV. The reason is the HIV virus is considerably smaller than the microscopic gaps in the latex from which condoms are manufactured. The virus passes through with more ease than is usually expected by its users. The distribution of condoms in Africa has been succeeded not by success in restraining the spread of HIV, but by notable and catastrophic failure.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, for purely philosophical reasons (not religious ones) has refused to participate in this endeavor but not so as to cripple and render helpless African men. Rather the Catholic Church, according to a recent Time Magazine cover article, provides over 25% of AIDS/HIV sufferers with their primary or only care - more than any other single organization.

Lastly the Catholic Church, for one, does not hold that material desire is sinful. She only teaches that when we give ourselves over to material things, we sell ourselves short. Those things cannot make us happy because they were not meant to from the beginning. This assertion is more observation than dogma. You'll note that the richest countries are so happy with all their stuff that they have the highest suicide rates. Why does a 12 year old need one new video game after another? Why does a 40 year old need one new car after another? Always acquiring and never satisfied, because the things they hope will satisfy cannot. This observation is a complete contradiction of the Enlightenment's dogmatic ideology that more stuff brings about more happiness. No, the Catholic Church doesn't teach that material desire is a sin - it's just a fact of life. What She teaches is that we will not find happiness in material things.

Happiness comes from immaterial things because what we are, in our innermost essence, is not material. Relationships, experience, love, encounter with truth and beauty - these things bring us what measure of abiding joy we can have on this earth. Buying lots of stuff is a way of avoiding a deeper, spiritual bankruptcy. I know from experience. That's what Mother Teresa was talking about in the quotation you provided, I suspect.

Yours,
Ryan

Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite:

You say that, "Thirty years after the death of Jesus, a Jewish rebellion broke out against the Roman occupation." I have no reason to doubt that's so but what we seem to be missing is why. Weren't the Romans civilized enough? What went wrong with a setup that had lasted a long time?

Coincidental with that era was a fellow named Josephus rapidly becoming known in the scholarly world as, "the great Jewish fiction writer." His history of Masada is discredited along with a lot more. You don't suppose he was really a propaganda minister for Jewish rebels do you?

What is the Jesus connection to that event? Didn't the rebels need something to stir people up, get their blood up so to speak so the rebels could raise the army etc to eject the Romans? You don't suppose there may have been more than one group of rebels? Was there a traditional gang and a new idea gang that became known as Christians later? Was the traditional group all that traditional or did they add a few absolutes to an already foundation-less way of serving God?

We are making the same assumptions they made and the results are beginning to look a lot like what happened to the Jews then. Same old lies being told as truths to stir people up and get them to do the wrong thing. You know the Bible is as phony as W's reason to attack Iraq.

I have been reading "On Faith" for some time now and have always found your insight on the issues refreshing. Your views on the issues are not what I would expect from an ordained United Church of Christ minister.

However in researching one of your books for possible inclusion in my library, I came across a quote that I find somewhat puzzling. You say that evil should be conceived as whatever increases human helplessness without a healing purpose. Is this not the basic creed of Judeo-Christian religion?

Religion, by its own definition, is only interested in the ‘poverty of the soul’ and teaches that material desire is a sin. As Mother Teresa said “The dying, the crippled, the mentally ill, the unwanted, the unloved -- they are Jesus in disguise. … The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have, the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. … The joy of the poor people is so clean, so clear. The real poor know what is joy.”

The Catholics say that they are committed to fighting AIDS in Africa, but teach the people of Africa that condom use is a sin.

It seems to me that the unstated goal of religion is to increase human helplessness without a healing purpose.

CC-bound,

Have you not read your history? Do a search for the era directly predating the first great awakening.

You're more off base than your friend who is crying out for you from Hell, "Please send someone to tell all of the fools who would not repent and believe." (Voltaire) who insinuated the same thing you have said. The Geneva Bible Society printed Bibles in his house after his untimely departure. :-P

Repent, lest you likewise perish.

Kerusso/Canyon aka Bible Thumper, Fortune Teller and Severely Brainwashed in that Old Time Religion,

Fools are those who have read only the bible. God cannot be proud of such lazy creations!!!!

The reality of it all is that the "pew sitters" and "bowers" are coming to grips with the flaws in their religions and in ten years the religions of today will be unrecognizable or extinct as the "pretty and ugly wingie flying thingies" are finally buried in the piles of utter stupidity.

"Historical Jesus"?
There is little evidence of such: http://nobeliefs.com/exist.htm

Highly unlikely a gospel of "love thy enemy" and "turn the other cheek" would be written during wartime, especially by someone descended from a people who knew as much war as the Hebrew people.

Thanks for sharing that historical information Ms. Brooks.

Based on what He did during His lifetime, I imagine that Jesus would be part of a radical not-nonviolent fringe group. He'd be with ELF, burning down McMansions and overturning tables in bank lobbies.

If He had Buddhist tendencies [as some say], He'd also be with ALF, freeing confined animals and blowing up slaughterhouses [our "Eternal Treblinka"].

Should George W. Bush run for head of the PTA? Should John McCain run for little league coach? Should Sean Connery seek understudy to Romeo in the 9th grade rendition of Shakespeare’s play?

What a foolish and worthless question. The King of kings and the Lord of lords is not running for God. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. There is no authority on earth that exists without his say-so, the government rests on his shoulders.

He changes times and seasons;
he removes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to those who have understanding;
he reveals deep and hidden things;
he knows what is in the darkness,
and the light dwells with him.

If a man named Jesus were to run for president today, we’d say he was the antichrist, antithetical to the Christ in every way. The first coming of Jesus was marked by submission, humility, and to save those who would believe. The second coming will be as Judge, as Executioner, as King, and as Supreme Ruler. He is the most conservative, intolerant, judgmental man ever to live. He loves life so much that one sparrow cannot fall from the sky without his notice. He is also merciful, and not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance and eternal life.

Will you face him as Judge? Ask yourself these questions;

Have I ever killed anyone?
Have I ever hated anyone? Jesus said that hatred will be judged as murder.
Have I ever committed adultery?
Have I ever looked with lust? Jesus said that lust is adultery of the heart.
Have I ever told a lie? Jesus said that all liars will have their place in the lake of fire.

Jesus is not necessarily for the death penalty, but because he is perfectly just, he must see to it that law-breakers are punished, and a transgression against an infinite God demands infinite retribution. The only way you can pay your infinite fine is by suffering for eternity in the fires of Hell, separated from any ounce of God’s mercy and love, where the flames are never quenched and the worm dieth not.

But because Jesus is full of grace, even while you were yet sinning, he willingly gave himself up to be the propitiation, the substitution for your judgment, when he came to the world, born of the virgin Mary of Nazareth in the line of David and the Holy Spirit, continued to live his perfect life which he has lived for all eternity, and then became sin, your sin, on the cross outside of Jerusalem. You broke the law and Jesus paid your fine.

A beautiful song says, “Amazing love, how can it be, that you my King should die for me?” Your fine is paid, now Jesus demands all men everywhere to repent, because he has appointed a day to judge the world in righteousness. When you repent and receive this gift of atonement through your trust in Jesus Christ, you will be born again into eternal life, all of your sins will be forgiven you, of this we have assurance because on the Third Day, Christ raised himself from the grave and lives forevermore, as will your spirit after you are saved.

I implore you, while you still have time, be reconciled to God. Today is the day of salvation, do not trifle yourself with vain babblings like, “Which party would the Creator of the Universe pick?” instead repent and place your full trust in almighty God, Jesus Christ, to save you.