Dominion: The Anthropocentric Entitlement of Christianity
I remained concerned with altruism after the voice of Jesus ceased to echo in my mind. I began to hold the opinion that altruism is innate and intrinsic and part of being human.
Taking agency of my own internal guide to virtue, discarding toxic ideas instilled by purity culture and original sin indoctrination, I had to figure out where my heart was. It was with my fellow humans, but extended beyond that.
Most major religions and philosophies of this world since the beginning of human language are very anthropocentric (humancentered).
Only pantheism, the ancient and mostly discarded belief that God is in all beings, seems to consider the animals and Earth at all.
To consider the other creatures breathing beside us on this spinning rock, and the rock itself, is sometimes known as moral extensionalism because it simply extends traditional ethics beyond humans.
The philosophy has even been named: biocentrism, as the name implies, expands moral consideration to animals; ecocentrism, to holistic entities like ecosystems or species.
I grew up thinking the world and everything in it was created for me, including the animals. The Bible gave humans divine privilege, telling us “every living thing” is here just for us. (Genesis 9:3)
My daughter didn’t grow up this way, but she DID grow up with animals on her dinner plate.
After seeing footage of suffering agricultural animals she refused to continue eating beef at 11, becoming a vegetarian at age 13. She had become aware of what her own conscience was telling her regarding morality.
Later my daughter resented being conditioned to eat meat and dairy, oblivious to animal suffering, and I realized I had not only violated her ethics but subjected her body to the vast health risks that come with such consumption decisions. If there were a Judgment Day perhaps one of the ethical violations for which I would be held accountable would be just that.
A multitude of literature now exists which attests to the widespread and shocking suffering of animals in the agricultural industry.
It’s so bad that gag laws have been passed to hide the abuse from the news media.
I became a vegetarian at age 37. I’m working on becoming a full vegan, because even the more humane parts of the contemporary dairy and egg industry rely on immoral practices I cannot justify contributing to.
My Christian guilt for victimless crimes of my youth is gone, replaced by an authentic conviction: accountability. I am not to blame for a first century execution of an innocent man, but I am to blame for animal suffering.
I’m not directly terrorizing an innocent animal when I order a burger, but consumption requires participation in the agriculture industry; supply follows demand.
Free to feel with my whole heart and to research and make my own decisions, I’m no longer a Christian . . . or a speciesist.
The arguments have been presented to me and I’ve evaluated the evidence.
Humans have caused mass extinction of almost countless species by destroying habitats with industrialization and pollution, overfishing and deforestation. The devastation of the vast majority of the world’s marine life is imminent. It’s true that collective and business efforts are necessary to make a big ecological impact, but there is ethical impact on the conscience that can urge us to sweep our part of the sidewalk.
Some of the species that manage to survive despite our selfish ways do so because we breed them for food, but their lives are typically marked with significant suffering.
American biologist and ethologist Mark Bekoff:
Many animals experience pain, anxiety and suffering, physically and psychologically, when they are held in captivity or subjected to starvation, social isolation, physical restraint, or painful situations from which they cannot escape. Even if it is not the same experience of pain, anxiety, or suffering undergone by humans- or even other animals, including members of the same species- an individual’s pain, suffering, and anxiety matter.”
Animals feel pain. They feel loss, loneliness and grief. They become withdrawn, depressed and even die when their families are broken and when subjected to captivity. They feel terror at the chopping block. I cannot fathom the pain of the mamas but as a mama, I imagine it.
I imagine my breasts full for my stolen child while I’m molested in a prison cell. And I don’t buy that cheese. I drink milk from soybeans and almonds because if it’s not my mom it’s not my milk.
Farm animals are drugged, deformed, diseased, stressed, subjected to perpetual rape and pregnancy and crammed together in pens in their own feces. They scream in agony when their children are taken away from them and when they are slaughtered alive.
The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity.
Lisa Kemmerer, academic who has written on animal ethics and environmental ethics and associate professor of philosophy and religion:
There is no other industry as cruel and oppressive as factory farming. With regard to numbers affected, extent and length of suffering, and numbers of premature deaths, no other industry can even approach factory farming. Billions of individuals are exploited from genetically engineered birth, through excruciating confinement, to conveyor belt dismemberment. Consequently, there is no industry more appropriate for social justice activists to boycott.
Maybe most Americans exclude animals from the moral code because their religion never indicated otherwise, while obsessing over morality. Certainly the anthropocentric Christian view doesn’t involve a moral duty to other animals.
The Bible authors believed animals were for eating, sacrificing to gods, and trading for wives. Nowhere in its pages are humans instructed to kill only what we can eat.
We decided our dominion means eating them, exploiting them in zoos and experimenting on them. Most Americans are as indifferent to animals lives and as wasteful as the ancient Hebrews with their sacrifices.
Human beings are a part of the animal kingdom — not apart from it. The separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ creates a false picture and is responsible for much suffering.
My morals now revolve around whether or not an action causes suffering. The Bible’s laws are not often about avoiding causing one another pain, much less about avoiding causing pain to another species.
One of my favorite American writers, Alice Walker, wrote:
“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women created for men.”
With no Bible verses telling me the animals are here for human use I can see that they’re not.
One can eat meat without directly or indirectly causing suffering but most humans who consume meat don’t simply hunt what they can eat and kill painlessly.
Humans may have been hunting and raising animals for food for thousands of years, but today’s industry is a far cry from huntergatherer cultures and early farming, and just because our species has done something for a long time doesn’t make it right or relevant today.
At no point in our species’ evolution was meat a requirement. We evolved from tree-dwelling frugivores. We may have benefitted from eating small animals for iron needed for our brains to evolve, but we know how to get what we need from plants now. Humans share 99% of our DNA with our primarily vegetarian chimp cousins.
An anthropological, physiological, and anatomical look at humans and our bodies reveals that we may be best suited to consuming a plant-based whole food diet. Our jaw structure, teeth, short intestine, the chemicals in our guts, and how our bodies deal with protein all suggest humans aren’t supposed to be meat eaters.
The words of Greek philosopher Plutarch (45–120 CE) high priest of Isis, are worth quoting at length here:
“A human body in no way resembles those that were born for ravenousness; it hath no hawk’s bill, no sharp talon, no roughness of teeth, no such strength of stomach or heat of digestion, as can be sufficient to convert or alter such heavy and fleshy fare. But if you will contend that you were born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat.
But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet or axe, as wolves, bears, and lions do, who kill and eat at once. Rend an ox with thy teeth, worry a hog with thy mouth, tear a lamb or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive as they do. But if thou had rather stay until what thou eat is to become dead, and if thou art loath to force a soul out of its body, why then dost thou against nature eat an animate thing?
There is nobody that is willing to eat even a lifeless and a dead thing even as it is; so they boil it, and roast it, and alter it by fire and medicines, as it were, changing and quenching the slaughtered gore with thousands of sweet sauces, that the palate being thereby deceived may admit of such uncouth fare.”
At some points, in some regions (the Steppe nomads of Mongolia who ate mostly meat and dairy and the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and Chukotka of the Russian Arctic who lived on marine animals) it may be argued that consuming animals has been a necessary evil but we’re past that point in most societies.
21st Century Americans at least, are not dependent on meat and dairy to survive. We can’t justify participating in the industry.
My morals changed in the light of discovering information that was new to me. I’m late to the game, in part because I was indoctrinated with one set of morals and left severely traumatized and not sure of anything.
The Bible’s morality is bloodthirsty, ignorant and arbitrary. Of course it is; it is the literature of savages. And like Thomas Edison once said,
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
All belief systems are not so anthropocentric as Christianity. Even Jewish dietary law stresses avoidance of cruelty to animals, whether in the production of food or as beasts of burden. India has more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together.
Plant-based eating is deeply rooted in three of the big belief systems of India.
Followers of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism believe in the concept of Ahimsa- kindness and non-violence towards all living things. Some vegetarian traditions of India date back thousands of years to the health-care system of ayurveda, the “science of long life” which utilizes food both as medicine and sustenance.
Jains believe in abstaining from meat and honey and avoiding harming any living creatures, even insects. Jainism has remained faithful in its commitment to nonviolence and vegetarianism for 2,600 years.
Hindu dharma generally recommends vegetarianism. The cow is particularly sacred, not worshipped but respected; Cows have also been associated with multiple goddesses because of their maternal attributes.
Meanwhile in the U.S. cows are shot in the head with a captive-bolt gun meant to stun them before dismembering them alive. Dairy cows’ babies are stolen and their milk is stolen while they spend their entire lives inside concrete-floored enclosures.
In addition to not mentioning ethics for animals, nowhere in the Bible are we told to conserve the planet’s resources, which all species rely on for life.
Should humans hold no moral duty to the planet that sustains all life?
There’s even self-interest involved in taking care of the planet, or at least interest in the survival of our species. Still the majority of Americans drive cars every day, don’t recycle, and eat over 200 pounds of meat per year. The planet itself suffers as we chop down trees to provide grazing land for our insatiable appetite for beef.
Putting an end to factory farming would both stop the suffering of animals in the industry and be a dramatic step away from global warming. The industry consumes fossil fuels with wild abandon, sucking up scarce water resources and hacking down forests, releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide; chemical fertilizers pour nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and cow poo adds methane, and then there’s the pollution involved in transporting it.
My daughter’s values about animals and also conservation of the Earth arose without much prompting; I showed her how much I loved nature and talked to her about recycling when she was little and we always had pets, but I didn’t boycott zoos for their exploitation of animals or refuse to use plastic or stop eating meat and dairy.
Would I have loved Mother Earth more, had I been able to see past Father God? Would I have considered the suffering of animals, if my religion and my culture both hadn’t left them out of the equation?
I had to wonder if I would have seen another moral perspective, had I not been so deep into the dogma and doctrine that told me what values to have.q
Hubert Reeves:
Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.
Christopher Hitchens:
“I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with ‘you’ in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.”
Kim Socha’s Animal Liberation and Atheism: Dismantling the Procrustean Bed, discusses how the very concept of religion is inherently antithetical to animal liberation. Socha suggests that it’s time we had “a system of ethics disengaged from anthropocentric and speciesist mythologies”.
I have come to believe humans need an expansion of our moral sphere to include all sentient beings. And it isn’t moral to cause pain and suffering. It isn’t moral to separate a mother from her young.
The question is not, “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but “Can they suffer?” said Jeremy Bentham (1748-1842), one of the founders of modern utilitarianism.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) knew that we as a species are not special, but actually disadvantaged among other creatures because our highly developed consciousness came at such a high cost to us emotionally.
He said humans are the devils of this world and the animals are the tormented souls.
If morality is indeed about the well-being of conscious creatures, like Humanists and Buddhists say, that renders veganism the only moral consumption choice.
Buddha said
“One is not called noble who harms living beings. By not harming living beings one is called noble.”
Native American teachings urge us to consider the planet that sustains us:
“There is a power in nature that man has ignored. And the result has been heartache and pain.”
(Berrett-Koehler, 2013)
Our decision to sacrifice the environment has cost the Earth so many species that we didn’t kill for food, but for our other comforts, like electricity, transportation, production, construction. The planet has been sacrificed to urbanization and industrialization.
Destroying the environment is intrinsic to our way of life. Extinction happens normally, but not at the rate humans are making species drop. In a negligible amount of time we’ve devastated entire ecosystems and hunted many species to extinction.
The agricultural and fishing industries not only cause indescribable suffering, but they also destroy the planet, a grave injustice to every living being, including our descendants, who won’t stand a chance on a dying planet.
American author Jonathan Safran Foer puts it this way:
“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?”
But Christians await Armageddon; they want to see it all burn
“We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand,” shrugged James Watt, Secretary of the Interior during the Reagan years.
My newfound morality insists other species have moral worth and we have reached a point in our civilization where it is both reasonable and right to end our exploitation of them.
One thing I did right was encourage my daughter to blaze her own trail, and now I’m headed with her down it because she picked a path that makes sense to me, and I’ve outgrown the one that never did.