Re: suffering, animals, faith
Posted by kit on 2026-September-1 05:19:12, TuesdayIn reply to Re: suffering, animals, faith posted by samuel77 on 2026-August-31 13:47:42, Monday
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I assure you, no serious Christian has ever treated the Bible as a "guidebook." This is one of the peculiar illusions non-Christians often seem to have. The Bible is not a set of instructions to follow like an assembly guide for an IKEA trundle bed. Science may give us wonderful new images of what animal suffering looks like, but it gives us no reason whatsoever why we shouldn't be cruel to animals. On the contrary - it could be argued that scientific research is the pretext for some of the most profligate and outrageous mistreatment of animals, all perfectly justifiable on utilitarian terms. Nor do I think our age is especially kind to animals compared to the remote past. In the Middle Ages, meat was (for most people) a relatively rare luxury, and for large parts of the year it was forbidden. Today it is a staple of even the poorest diets in 'Western' societies. The price of this is outrageous cruelty, which for most of us is conveniently out of sight. The horrors of industrial pig-farming alone do honour to Islam and Orthodox Judaism. Your delusions about meat production are touchingly naive. There is no way to mass-produce meat that does not entail grotesque cruelty, and all meat-eaters (myself included) have to accept their willing complicity in this. |
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