In those pre-Fall days, after all, animals were off the Garden menu:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.  Genesis 1:28

In the very next breath man is told to keep his mitts off the critters (and vice versa) and be content with the herbs and the fruit of the trees:

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.  Genesis 1:29

If any passage in Scripture lends credibility to the writers, it is this, for of course they were not themselves vegetarians.  The alternative vision must simply have seemed inconceivable – a world in which it actually pleased our Maker to see His creatures stalking and slaying and absorbing one another.  The Catholic “meatless Friday” … came to us … from this same idea of predation as a consequence of the Fall and corruption of the world, as does the “grace” before meals.  Indeed there was a time when Christians fasted from animal products throughout all forty days of Lent…

The next step seems obvious to me.  If sanctity is the goal, and the flesh-eating a mark of the Fall, the one is to be sought and the other to be avoided.  Why just say grace when you can show it?  …. I am betting that in the Book of Life “He had mercy on the creatures” is going to count for more than “He ate well.”

Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy , pp. 44-45.

Mr. Scully, like Mr. Webb in On God and Dogs, argues that vegetarianism is an ideal that Christians should seek.  And I think that slowly Christians are starting to listen.

Pastor Greg Boyd, senior pastor of the evangelical megachurch, Woodland Hills Church, blogged a year ago about the five reasons he became a vegetarian.

1. God Told Me To
2. Increasing the Capacity to Love
3. Seeing the Sacred Beauty in All Living Things
4. The First Fruits of the Coming Non-Violent (and thus, non-carnivorous) Creation
5. Compassionate Dominion and the Factory Farm Industry

Of the five of these, increasing the capacity to love appealed to me the most.  It might have been coincidental but I remember that at the moment I made a decision to reduce my consumption of meat I found myself forgiving certain people that up to that point I could not completely forgive.  Greg Boyd mirrors this experience in his own life.

Almost immediately after making this pledge I began to understand why the Lord had wanted me to make it. Scripture says a little yeast leavens all the dough (1 Cor 5:6). Well, I discovered that the little yeast of my willingness to engage in violence towards animals and other creatures for self-serving reasons (e.g. appetite, convenience) was polluting my heart and to some degree compromising my capacity to love. It felt like – and still feels like – my commitment to total non-violence has had, and is yet having, a purifying effect on my heart.

Along the same lines, my commitment to purge violence completely from my life has increased my sensitivity to the ugliness of violence, both in my own heart and in the world…  I have found that my commitment to non-violence has helped me wake up to all of the violence I have in my thoughts and speech, which in turn has helped me get free from this ugly violence. And this, in turn, has deepened my capacity for love.

Five years ago I never dreamed there was a connection between eating meat, anger in the heart and my ability to love. But for me at least, there definitely was. A little yeast leavens all the dough.

Tags: bible,creation care,vegetarian
Categories: Christianity, Society
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In our generation it is quite uncommon to see anyone wearing fur.  Most people recognize we don’t need fur and that killing animals just for their fur seems cruel.  This is a generational change because in my parents’ generation such concern generally does not exist.

This kind of logic can now be further extended to meat.

It was the use of livestock that first freed us from the chase, allowed man to settle and civilize himself…  Meat and dairy products undeniably furnished a wide array of protein sources, like the soybean today…  For ages people needed furs to survive in the severe elements we faced.

When substitute products are found, with each creature in turn, responsible dominion calls for a reprieve…  What were once “necessary evils” become just evils.  Laws protecting animals from mistreatment, abuse, and exploitation are not a moral luxury or sentimental afterthought to be shrugged off…

Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy , pp. 42-43.

Tags: creation care,vegetarian
Categories: Society
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It began with one pig at a British slaughterhouse.  Somewhere along the production line it was observed that the animal had blisters in his mouth and was salivating. The worst suspicions were confirmed, and within days borders had been sealed and a course of action determined. Soon all of England and the world watched as hundreds, and then hundreds of thousands of pigs, cows, sheep and their newborn lambs were taken outdoors, shot, thrown into burning pyres, and bulldozed into muddy graves. Reports described terrified cattle being chased by sharpshooters, clambering over one another to escape.  Some were still stirring and blinking a day after being shot.  The plague meanwhile slipped into mainland Europe, where the same ritual followed until, when it was all over, more than ten million animals had been disposed of.  Completing the story with the requisite happy ending was a calf heard calling from underneath the body of her mother in a mound of carcasses to be set aflame.  Christened “Phoenix” … the calf was spared.

Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy , p. ix.

Ten million animals killed.  And it was completely needless.

Foot-and-mouth disease is a form of flu, treatable by proper veterinary care, preventable by vaccination, lethal neither to humans nor animals.  These animals, millions of them not even infected, were all killed only because their market value had been diminished and because trade policies required it – because, in short, under the circumstances it was the quick and convenient thing to do.

Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy , pp. ix-x.

As they say history repeats.  In April and May 2009, Egypt slaughtered all of its pigs, about 300,000, because of their fear of the H1N1 flu despite the fact that not a single case had been reported.  The World Health Organization said there was no scientific basis and that “it is entirely unnecessary because the illness is being spread through humans.”

A leading animal rights group criticized Egypt on Monday for using “shocking and cruel” methods to slaughter the country’s pigs over swine flu fears, responding to a YouTube video that showed men skewering squealing piglets with large kitchen knives and hitting others with crowbars.

Egypt criticized for ‘inhumane’ killing of pigs

(I looked on YouTube myself but was unable to find the mentioned video.  I found an AFP news account about the world outrage and the video it cited about the cruel slaughter.)

And finally, as is typically the case with any animal and/or environmental abuse, there is a human cost.  In this case it is the loss of most of their income for the tens of thousands of Coptic Christians.

In both of these cases there was world wide outrage.  But what’s both sad and hypocritical is that this kind of cruelty happens everyday in our factory farms where we get the meat that we eat everyday, in our scientific laboratories, in our oceans, zoos, parks, etc.

Tags: creation care,youtube
Categories: Society
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In fact, let us just call things what they are.  When a man’s love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity.  When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony.  When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride.  And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.

Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy , p. 121.

This paragraph I think sums up the book Dominion for me.  As a society we have created systems, the most egregious being the factory farms, which cause unspeakable abuse of animals yet are designed so that we never have to know about any of these abuses.  Matthew Scully’s book brings to light the myriad ways we cruelly exploit God’s creation for profit and/or pleasure.

Though not a Christian book, this book gets it title from Genesis 1:26.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

God gave man dominion over the earth and Scully argues, convincingly in my opinion, that man has abused this privilege almost beyond redemption.

I first learned about this book in 2003 after reading a review of Dominion in Christianity Today.  Afterwards I endeavored to only purchase meat that was humanely raised.  But over time my concern for the bottom line became stronger than my concern for animals so I slowly stopped doing this and tried to justify it in many ways.

However I never forgot the image on the cover of Dominion.  And recently I became convicted again to reassess the moral implications of what I eat.  So I requested Dominion from the library and read it cover to cover.  You can read much of Dominion for free online.

I will be writing a few more posts about different things I learned from Dominion.  I hope you will enjoy them and/or find them thought provoking. Thanks to my vegetarian friends for inspiring me.

Tags: bible,creation care,vegetarian
Categories: Society
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Recently I was inspired by Pastor John March and his post Animals: Another Other to Love (Or, Why I’m a Vegetarian) to read the book On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals.

Halfway through Chapter One I realized Pastor March is much smarter than me and that this book is far too academic for me.  However just in that short amount of reading I felt I had learned quite a bit.

Stephen Webb’s audience for this book is those that are interested in animal rights and those who study Christian theology.  These “two different audiences … ordinarily do not read the same books.”  I happen to be a Christian who is not too interested in theology but is becomingly interested in animal rights and how they affect my everyday decisions.

It is obvious that Mr. Webb’s love for animals originated with the special relationship he had with his pet dog as a boy.  The moving story of his elderly arthritic dog painfully climbing up two flights of stairs to comfort a sick boy caused me to reflect about whether we should get a family dog.  We have had three dogs and for various reasons gave them up which reflects on what poor dog owners we were.

Mr. Webb is a vegetarian which seems to be typical for people who care about animal rights.  The trend of vegetarianism seems to be growing, even within Christian circles.  This is a trend I can no longer ignore even if I do enjoy so much the taste of meat.

Mr. Webb’s book’s goal seems to be to explore the relationship between people and their pets and to expand that.  However I did not really get very far in that exploration but instead read the beginnings of understanding how God cares for not just humans but all of his creation.

The Genesis account of creation provocatively portrays a vegetarian world (“Then God said, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.’”  Genesis 1:29) in which the humans exercise authority over the animals but do not use or kill them.  Indeed, land animals are made on the same day as humans, showing their similarity to humanity, but they are also made before humans and pronounced good independently of humans, showing that they too are created out of love…  The use of the phrase “all flesh” in Genesis joins together the human and the animal in a basic kinship of creatureliness under the shared providence of a merciful God (Genesis 6:12, 13, Genesis 9:11, 17).

Meat eating is later permitted but Mr. Webb argues it was far from the ideal.

In Deuteronomy 12:20 God seems to allow meat eating due to the uncontrollable cravings of the Israelites…  When Deuteronomy 8:7-10 describes the ideal land and diet for the Hebrews … meat is excluded (also see similar descriptions in Jeremiah 29:5; Amos 9:14; and Hosea 2:22).

I don’t think any of the above verses are particularly persuasive for arguing that vegetarianism is Biblical but no one could disagree that until after the flood God did not permit meat eating which seems to point to a vegetarian diet being at least Edenic.

Eating and animals are thus more than symbols; food becomes part of the daily struggle of obeying God.  The Book of Daniel … Daniels and his friends … ate only vegetables, and at “the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food” Daniel 1:15.

Mr. Webb goes through the Bible pointing out various places where the rights of an animal and creation itself were to be considered.  The most interesting to me was Hosea 4:1-3 which pictures a time of immorality evidenced by the land mourning.  The “beast of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”  This sounds remarkably like current times.  Many of the other verses Mr. Webb highlights I think are not necessarily as much about animal rights as about being practical, for example including animals in the Sabbath (Exodus 20:10).

Interestingly Mr. Webb says Jesus was often described as “a lover of animals.”

… Jesus declares his Father’s love for the sparrows (Luke 12:6, Matthew 10:29), portrays God as a feeder of birds (Luke 12:24; Matthew 6:26), and compares himself to a hen gathering together her brood under her wings (Matthew 23:37) ….

However Mr. Webb would not say the same thing about Paul.

Most Christians follow Paul in showing little concern for the world of animals, although with Paul, too, the evidence is ambiguous…  Paul established the very influential idea for Christianity that vegetarianism must be a form of superstition and that Christian freedom must mean the complete secularization (and thus indifference) of food preparation and consumption (see, for examples from the Pauline tradition, 1 Timothy 4:4 and Colossians 2:16-17)…  Paul’s influence continues today, when many North Americans look at the mass production of animal flesh in factory fams as one of the chief signs of our country’s freedom, prosperity, and equality.

Mr. Webb concludes that the Bible is favorable to animal issues and compares it to how the Bible implicitly opposes slavery.

Clearly, it is possible to interpret the Bible (especially the Hebrew scriptures) favorably on the issue of animals but not without a struggle with the dominant theological tradition.  After all, animals are used, eaten, and traded in the Bible, and humans are clearly the main focus of the biblical narratives…  Gary Comstock has stated: “I have come to interpret the Bible’s views on the killing of animals in the way I interpret its views on the owning of slaves.  Even though each practice is implicitly, if not explicitly condoned, the practice is still shown to be wrong by the larger story of salvation in Jesus Christ…”  Jonah 4:11 is a most revealing scripture.  Here God reprimands the recalcitrant Jonah, saying, “Should I not be concerned about Ninevah,” a great city with thousands of people and “also many animals?”

Mr. Webb then talks about the Christian tradition and how some “equated gluttony and flesh eating.”  There were vegetarians like St. Benedict, James, the brother of Jesus (according to some traditions), John Wesley, etc.  But most of the time these Christians and their groups were considered on the fringe or even heretical.

At this point I stopped reading the book and picked up Dominion which was much easier to read.  I appreciate though what I learned from Mr. Webb within the first thirty-seven pages of his book.

Tags: bible,creation care,vegetarian
Categories: Christianity, Food, Society
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Slavery is depressing enough but when it happens in the United States and with an every day product like tomatoes it is even more terrible but at least we can do something about it.

This article, Price of Tomatoes, recommends buying local tomatoes but one could also try growing your own tomatoes.  We started growing tomatoes last year not because of social concerns but because Dylan like tomatoes on his hamburgers and so my parents planted tomato plants at our house.

One recommendation that I know would be entirely unpopular with the general populace but I believe fervently in is returning to how the United States used to treat immigration, allow anyone into the country.  Most of these slaves find themselves in these situations because they are so scared of being deported.

Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida…  According to Douglas Molloy, the chief assistant U.S. attorney based in Fort Myers, Immokalee has another claim to fame: It is “ground zero for modern slavery.”

If Lucas became ill or was too exhausted to work, he was kicked in the head, beaten, and locked in the back of the truck. Other members of Navarrete’s dozen-man crew were slashed with knives, tied to posts, and shackled in chains. On November 18, 2007, Lucas was again locked inside the truck. As dawn broke, he noticed a faint light shining through a hole in the roof. Jumping up, he secured a hand hold and punched himself through. He was free.

Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com.

Categories: Society
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I read an interesting short article today about social capital.

Sociologist Robert Putnam believes the following are indicators of social capital:

• How many of your neighbor’s first names do you know?
• How often do you attend parades or festivals?
• Do you volunteer at your kid’s school? Or help out senior citizens?
• Do you trust your local police?
• Do you know who your U.S. senators are?
• Do you attend religious services? Or go to the theater?
• Do you sign petitions? Or attend neighborhood meetings?
• Do you think the people running your community care about you?
• Can you make a difference?
• How often do you visit with friends or family?

Measuring Prosperity: What Is Social Capital? » My Money Blog

For me personally I would answer in the following way.

• I know a few of my neighbor’s first names but not enough.
• I have never attended parades or festivals but I am now reconsidering my ambivalence towards them.
• I volunteer at an after school program at the local public elementary school but that is part of my church.  Since we home school I don’t feel compelled to volunteer at the school.  I don’t help out senior citizens but I have been thinking about how that could be something good that the whole family could do.
• I trust my local police enough to call them in an emergency event but I don’t completely trust them.  That might be an immigrant thing.
• I know my U.S.  senators and my local representative, Boxer, Feinstein, Eshoo.  However beyond their names I feel like I know verry little about them, especially Boxer.
• I attend church regularly.  We don’t go to the theater though that would be nice to do once the kids are older.
• At the farmer’s market they often have petitions so I do enjoy signing the ones I support.  I have not attended any neighborhood meetings but we are on a neighborhood email list.
• I don’t know anything about the people running my neighborhood but I don’t believe that they necessarily care about me though sometimes my needs and theirs are common.
• I think I can make a difference.  I am not sure if I have made much yet.
• We visit with friends a lot which we really enjoy.  We don’t have family in the immediate area but my mom is here for two months.

Categories: Society
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Many of Obama’s recent choices concerning abortion have led me to somewhat regret my support for him.  I feel somewhat ignorant and foolish for not having further investigated his pro-choice stance, which I knew was far left.   Maybe I should have read something like this page, Barack Obama on Abortion.

Some of the choices President Obama has made.

1. “Struck down the Bush administration‘s ban on giving federal money to international groups that perform abortions or provide abortion information — an inflammatory policy that has bounced in and out of law for the past quarter-century.” – Obama reverses Bush abortion-funds policy
2. Plan to lift the “the restrictions imposed by President Bush on federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells.”  – Obama policy a lift for stem cell researchers

To be fair there has been debate about what impact the first decision made.  Some people argued that unfairly punished poor countries in need of these services.  And McCain would have also lifted restriction on federal funding for human embryonic stem cells.

What really bothers is Obama’s push for the Freedom of Choice Act.

When South Dakota passed a law banning all abortions in a direct effort to have Roe overruled, I was the only candidate for President to raise money to help the citizens of South Dakota repeal that law. When anti-choice protesters blocked the opening of an Illinois Planned Parenthood clinic in a community where affordable health care is in short supply, I was the only candidate for President who spoke out against it. And I will continue to defend this right by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president.

Obama Statement on 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Decision

When I first heard about this I was disappointed because I felt that this went again Obama’s campaign promise to reduce abortions. But upon further consideration I recognize that in Obama’s thinking this does not necessarily conflict with trying to reduce abortion. Obama wants the numbers of abortions to be reduced but he obviously believes the right for a woman to choose is sacrosanct. I personally believe that the states should be allowed to choose and that passing the Freedom of Choice Act would be tragic.

One positive news on this front is President Obama expanding the faith-based office and laying out specific priorities for the office including reducing the number of abortions.  He also created a new advisory council that included the president of World Vision and other evangelicals.

Tags: obama
Categories: Society
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One of my closest friends in college who was African-American often told me about the one drop rule, though he did not use those exact words.

Categories: Society
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It is sad that the Supreme Court is saying that for the sake of free speech the government should not restrict pornography on the web and that parents should install filters to protect children.

I think this is both inconsistent at best and terribly damaging to society at worst.

1. I thought that pornography did not come under the category of protected speech.  For example if I remember correctly New York City strip joints sued for greater freedom in what their strippers could show and lost.  New York City adult stores were denied licenses and kicked out of various areas.  Yet for some reason the internet is not regulated?
2. There are many regulations on what can be shown in adult magazines, where adult magazines can be displayed, how they can be displayed, etc.  But on the internet you can show anything and not have to verify a person’s age?
3. I thought that software filters are not effective.  In the past there was discussion about having adult content web sites use their own domain suffix which would making filtering much easier.  There is no real reason for an industry as shady as the pornography industry to want to comply with any software filters.
4. This is just a theory but the proliferation of online pornography seems to have coincided with the rise in sexual predation on children.  I think people are far too naive about the harm pornography has on society.

I believe we should move to a much more regulated internet in terms of pornographic and violent content.  And we should make the internet providers culpable with well-framed guidelines.

I can go on with my ideas but this post is getting long and considering the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, my ideas would be just hot air.  The only chance to change things is to prove that pornography is harmful to society but that’s not going to happen soon, in fact the trend is moving towards pornography being an enjoyable entertainment product for all people.

A long legal drive to shield children from sexually explicit material on the Web ended in failure Wednesday when the Supreme Court let a 10-year-old anti-pornography law die quietly.

In striking down the law on free-speech grounds, the justices said parents could protect their children by installing software filters on their computers.

Supreme Court lets Internet porn law die – Los Angeles Times.

Categories: Society
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