Re: suffering, animals, faith
Posted by kit on 2026-August-31 05:01:44, MondayIn reply to suffering, animals, faith posted by diogenes on 2026-August-30 18:34:08, Sunday
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I am sorry if you do not think my post answered your query; I thought (and still think) that it very much does address exactly that point. I am not sure whether the fault lies in my own failure to explain what I mean adequately, or just the fact that we have radically different ideas of what an acceptable 'answer' ought to look like. Partly because I think love is something radically different from mere benevolence, I am fairly unimpressed by the tired old indictments of God from the existence of evil. (An ironical turn of phrase, of course, because evil is nothing if not non-existence.) But I am also fairly unimpressed by the hand-wringing modern theodicies of liberal theologians like John Hick and his ilk. The Book of Job, I think, is the masterly answer to all such comforters: God's infinite innocence is not answerable for sin. But I suspect that answer won't satisfy you at all either. So let me offer a straightfoward, hard-edged, sharply-defined answer that should be clearly intelligible by the raking light of reason. You ask: "Do you, for example, believe that Jesus, after having been clinically dead for a period of one and half days, was miraculously restored to life on the third day?" The answer is: yes, of course. In all honesty, I do find the question a little bit amusing. I can only assume that it is my own obvious unworthiness that makes it so hard for you to believe that I claim to be a Christian. The requisite disclaimer: please don't judge Christianity by my own obvious failings. We're not all as bad at this as I am. Yet - credo! Credamus! He was dead as earth. And then He wasn't. Not "allegorically" - I'm not at all sure how the resurrection can be allegorised - but as the Church has always believed it. (For good measure I also believe in the harrowing of Hell and the triumphal liberation of the souls in prison, in case you were wondering.) I absolutely take you at your word when you say you cannot believe any of those things. Fine. I don't mean to suggest that you should. But I do think that some of the things you seem to puzzle over might appear a bit less puzzling if you did. Or at least, the puzzle would be a different one altogether. And at any rate, the fact that the universe you live in has no place for miracles and angels and saints and prayer and the physical transformation of bread and wine - that's fine, of course, but that's certainly not the world I live in. When you think about it, it's really amazing that we agree on as many things as we do. But back to the disagreements. I suppose it is probably true that Christian societies have, historically, not valued animal life terribly much, or at least they have valued it less than human life (which may not always be saying much). Whether Christian societies have valued animal life more or less than non-Christian or non-"Abrahamic" societies is perhaps a moot question. Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism at least abolished animal sacrifice. But human misbehaviour is always fairly unsurprising to Christians, even when it is Christians doing the misbehaving. Only humanists seem bewildered by human evil. Paranthetically, I think that the Christian scriptures actually suggest a rather high valuation of non-human animals (e.g., Matt 10:29-31), and pre-modern Christianity does contain a certain sense of solidarity among all God's creatures. The Franciscan movement in late-medieval popular spirituality is one manifestation of this Christian sense of unity among created things. On a rather humbler level, whenever it is my task to rescue a spider with a drinking glass and the London Review of Books, I always assure my agnostic flatmates that the poor spider is one of God's creatures too; I seldom try to persuade them that we should feel a sense of solidarity with arachnids based on a mere 700 million years of evolutionary divergence. Not because they wouldn't be persuaded by that - I guess they might - but because it would mean nothing to me. (At time of press the spider's opinions were unknown.) Of course I do not wholly underestimate the pernicous influence of Aristotle on medieval Scholasticism. The Stagarite has an awful lot to answer for. But I personally think that it is modernity and Enlightenment - and of course that arch-villain, the Frenchman Descartes - who bears prime responsibility for our ruthlessly utilitarian exploitation of non-human animals. It is modernity that has led man to imagine himself a radically different kind of rational creature from the spider in the kitchen cupboard, and not merely a rung or two closer to the angels on the Great Chain of Being. So I disagree with you when you say that Christians are better now. The opposite is likely true. Christians are probably worse now than they were 500 or 1000 years ago, but not because of Christianity. But perhaps I would say all that. I have my own prejudices, of course, but they are rather different from yours. Returning by a circuitous path to our original topic of dicussion: I admit I have always had an absolute horror of Buddhism - in large part because of its rejection of desire and therefore its complete repudiation of love. There seems to me something unbearably inhuman, intolerably ungrateful, about the tranquil passivity of the Buddha: not cruel to animals or humans, but also utterly unmoved by the suffering of animals and people. I will go out on a limb and say that cruelty is better than indifference. Cruelty is at least a perverted kind of love, and so human (or even animal) in some twisted way; detachment is alignment with non-being. It is the worst crime of all. |
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