A minimal investment of time would convince anybody willing to be convinced that at the very least there are many doctrinal authorities on record in every large strain of western monotheism against cruelty to animals, and that these authorities adduce evidence from ancient holy texts to support their pronouncements. Feel free to disagree with Aquinas, eastern patriarchs, a large body of hadiths, and many rabbinical rulings about the faiths they represent. There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I’m not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don’t seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.
I grant zero weight to the well-being of clothes, but that doesn’t mean I go around destroying my clothes
Clothes aren’t a threat to ambush you, and aren’t eating tapirs you could eat. I assume you would burn them if you feared ambush or starvation.
doesn’t make something else worse that you do care about (such as risking death to your own tribesmen in war)
Total war doesn’t mean you can’t be tactical in your approach, obviously. Dissembling and biding time are smart.
What I mean about the tribes being in constant total war is that since, as was pointed out, they are in competition for resources with neighboring tribes, they would kill neighbors whenever they thought they could get away with it if they attached zero utility to these people’s survival. And we see that’s not the case, not at all. Hunter-gatherers trade, they intermarry, they feast together, they form friendships and alliances between tribes, they do a bunch of things that would be socially impossible if there were not any empathy at all. Sometimes they betray and murder. But by no means all the time. Napoleon Chagnon’s accounts of the Yanomamo, where most of this stuff about violent stone-agers comes from recently, are quite clear that elders intervene to stop axe fights some times, and that the Yanomamo are mostly just terrified by the violence around them.
What we know from the psych side is that empathy appears to be basic in humans. Our researchers would have to be pretty consistently wrong about something very large if Stone Age people, just because they were Stone Age, were incapable of empathy with people outside their immediate kin group.
I wonder how many of the cultures who pray to the spirit of the animal also pray to the spirit of the plants, rocks, the sun, or other things that even vegetarians don’t think have any rights.
Yeah, this is pretty interesting to me, too. I suspect, though, that a lot of people into deep ecology and Christian environmentalism and similar forms of environmentalism have...analogous?...attitudes toward the parts of nature that lack nervous systems. Not inside the rationalist/hedonic calculus/Peter Singer/utilitarian communities, probably, because there’s so much emphasis on pleasure and pain there. But it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the “expanding circle of concern” eventually encompassed or re-encompassed things like trees and rivers.
there are many doctrinal authorities on record in every large strain of western monotheism against cruelty to animals
Which means that many doctrinal authorities are capable of making stuff up.
While most religions’ tenets require some interpretation of their holy books, there are degrees of this. Some claims made by religions come from their holy books in a fairly direct and straightforward way. Others are claimed to come from their holy books but in fact are the result of contrived interpretation. Religious animal cruelty laws fall in the second category. The holy books do not support laws about animal cruelty in the same way that they support “thou shalt not commit adultery”.
Furthermore, even those contrived laws don’t generally claim it’s cruel to eat animals. Bringing up the fact that religions oppose animal cruelty is like pointing out that every religion and culture has rules about sexual immorality, and therefore we should oppose some particular type of sexual immorality that you don’t like.
they are in competition for resources with neighboring tribes, they would kill neighbors whenever they thought they could get away with it if they attached zero utility to these people’s survival.
During much of history, most cultures that knew Jews attached zero or negative utility to them, but pogroms only happened every so often. They didn’t just kill all the Jews until the Nazi era.
What we know from the psych side is that empathy appears to be basic in humans.
Anthromorphizing is also pretty basic to humans; that’s why the Eliza program convinces people.
But it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the “expanding circle of concern” eventually encompassed or re-encompassed things like trees and rivers.
But you’re not following the implications of this. The idea that primitive cultures respect the spirit of animals was brought up to show that taking the well-being of animals into account is normal. If the same primitive people respect the spirit of things whose well-being we clearly should not take into account, such as vegetables, it doesn’t support the point you brought it up to support.
Which means that many doctrinal authorities are capable of making stuff up.
Friend, I’m assuming you believe all/most of religion is made up anyway, right? I mean, you might think some of it was made up sincerely and some was made up cynically. But you know with an extraordinarily high degree of certainty it’s all made up. Right? So who cares who made it up. It’s there. Some people take it seriously.
It doesn’t threaten non-theism at all to concede that religions define their own interpretations and belief systems. This concession is actually the bread and butter of non-theism. Really the only person who gets to contest that is the theist with an alternate interpretation, because he can appeal to a higher authority.
Even though I said I didn’t want to sling scripture, and I really don’t: why don’t you muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain? Why were the fifth and sixth days of creation declared good? Why was man created on the same day as the beasts of the field? Why was man originally given plants to eat, not flesh? Why was man specifically forbidden to eat “the life” of the animal? Why did you have to rest beasts of burden on the Sabbath? Why couldn’t you disturb mother birds on their eggs? Why did fallen beasts of burden have to be helped up? Why were the animals saved with Noah during the flood? Why doesn’t God forget sparrows? Why does God feed the birds of the air? Why is it that animals only become carnivorous after the exit from Eden? What does it mean that the lion will lie down with the lamb and that a little child shall lead them? Why are humans constantly portrayed as animals in scriptural metaphor?
Now, I totally believe you have answers for all these questions that acknowledge the scriptural references but manage to discredit their supposed connection to any sort of authorial concern for animal welfare or the environment. The problem is, that’s not enough. You have to show that your answers were the one that audiences have understood and adopted over centuries. That will be difficult. It certainly appears that St. Francis and St. Augustine and St. Aquinas and Cardinal Manning and Tolkien and John Paul II disagree with you, and I’m inclined to say that their readings carry more popular weight than yours.
But you’re not following the implications of this.
Oh, no, I get it. Respect for nature != concern for the pain of creatures with nervous systems. Spiritual environmentalism is nothing like utilitarian environmentalism. I just don’t care about that very much. I am much more interested in whether some secular environmentalists will eventually develop secular justifications for assigning “rights” or something very like that to aspects of the environment that lack nervous systems. Probably not worth chasing that rabbit, tho.
Even though I said I didn’t want to sling scripture, and I really don’t: why...
That’s a cheat that is commonly used by creationists who come up with lists of 100 and 200 arguments for creationism. The trick? Make a list containing a lot of very low quality arguments in the knowledge that it’s long enough that no one person will have the patience (or sometimes the knowledge) to properly refute every single one. Then latch on to whichever ones got the least thorough response.
It’s not hard to point out the flaws in your examples. For instance, Noah did save the animals, but he’s saving them as resources—because if he doesn’t, there won’t be any animals—not as an anti-cruelty rule. If God also commanded that he take some seeds, would you then have claimed that he was concerned about cruelty to seeds? And notice that he takes seven pairs of clean animals so that he can make animal sacrifices.
But no matter which example I refute, you’d just point to another I haven’t refuted. And I’m not going to do every single one.
Like I said, I really am sure you can refute these! That is beside the point. I doubt very much you can show that your refutations are what people actually believe about the texts.
I am not arguing the text is true. I am not even arguing that a certain interpretation of the text is correct. I am pointing out that people believe certain interpretations of the text.
This is not like arguing with William Lane Craig about creationism. This is like trying to tell William Lane Craig that nobody believes in creationism.
We may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Arguments are soldiers. Mine need a vacation. Enjoy your day.
I doubt very much you can show that your refutations are what people actually believe about the texts.
I would be very surprised if any major religion claims that Noah had to take the animals on the ark because not taking them would be cruelty to animals. In other words, yes, my refutation is what people believe about the texts. Except I’m not going to bother going through 13 refutations.
Furthermore, even those contrived laws don’t generally claim it’s cruel to eat animals. Bringing up the fact that religions oppose animal cruelty is like pointing out that every religion and culture has rules about sexual immorality, and therefore we should oppose some particular type of sexual immorality that you don’t like.
Actually, he’s responding to PG, who claimed that no major religion is against cruelty to animals … presumably implying that this is a modern aberration? Or something? Regardless, it was he who claimed (in your analogy) that since no religion is against “sexual immorality”, then clearly modern dislike of rape is not a part of basic human ethics.
During much of history, most cultures that knew Jews attached zero or negative utility to them, but pogroms only happened every so often. They didn’t just kill all the Jews until the Nazi era.
They demonized them. That is not the same as attaching “zero or negative utility” except in the most dire of cases (which, admittedly, crop up with some regularity.)
There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I’m not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don’t seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.
To be fair to this idea, it can be useful to approach things from a fresh perspective. Scholars have had longer to develop the more … complex misinterpretations.
The trouble springs up when you don’t check the, y’know, facts. Like the original text your copy was translated from, say. Or the culture it was written in. Or logic.
(Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers “really” believe.)
A minimal investment of time would convince anybody willing to be convinced that at the very least there are many doctrinal authorities on record in every large strain of western monotheism against cruelty to animals, and that these authorities adduce evidence from ancient holy texts to support their pronouncements. Feel free to disagree with Aquinas, eastern patriarchs, a large body of hadiths, and many rabbinical rulings about the faiths they represent. There is a hermeneutical constellation of belief systems that posits texts speaking for themselves without any interpretation and announces that meanings are clear to the newcomer, or outsider, or even the barely literate, in ways they were never clear to bodies of scholars who gave their lives to the study of the same texts. I’m not sure you want to be in that constellation. That is Constellation Fundamentalism, though to be fair to the actual fundamentalists, they don’t seem to be amenable to animal bloodsports at all.
Clothes aren’t a threat to ambush you, and aren’t eating tapirs you could eat. I assume you would burn them if you feared ambush or starvation.
Total war doesn’t mean you can’t be tactical in your approach, obviously. Dissembling and biding time are smart.
What I mean about the tribes being in constant total war is that since, as was pointed out, they are in competition for resources with neighboring tribes, they would kill neighbors whenever they thought they could get away with it if they attached zero utility to these people’s survival. And we see that’s not the case, not at all. Hunter-gatherers trade, they intermarry, they feast together, they form friendships and alliances between tribes, they do a bunch of things that would be socially impossible if there were not any empathy at all. Sometimes they betray and murder. But by no means all the time. Napoleon Chagnon’s accounts of the Yanomamo, where most of this stuff about violent stone-agers comes from recently, are quite clear that elders intervene to stop axe fights some times, and that the Yanomamo are mostly just terrified by the violence around them.
What we know from the psych side is that empathy appears to be basic in humans. Our researchers would have to be pretty consistently wrong about something very large if Stone Age people, just because they were Stone Age, were incapable of empathy with people outside their immediate kin group.
Yeah, this is pretty interesting to me, too. I suspect, though, that a lot of people into deep ecology and Christian environmentalism and similar forms of environmentalism have...analogous?...attitudes toward the parts of nature that lack nervous systems. Not inside the rationalist/hedonic calculus/Peter Singer/utilitarian communities, probably, because there’s so much emphasis on pleasure and pain there. But it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if the “expanding circle of concern” eventually encompassed or re-encompassed things like trees and rivers.
Which means that many doctrinal authorities are capable of making stuff up.
While most religions’ tenets require some interpretation of their holy books, there are degrees of this. Some claims made by religions come from their holy books in a fairly direct and straightforward way. Others are claimed to come from their holy books but in fact are the result of contrived interpretation. Religious animal cruelty laws fall in the second category. The holy books do not support laws about animal cruelty in the same way that they support “thou shalt not commit adultery”.
Furthermore, even those contrived laws don’t generally claim it’s cruel to eat animals. Bringing up the fact that religions oppose animal cruelty is like pointing out that every religion and culture has rules about sexual immorality, and therefore we should oppose some particular type of sexual immorality that you don’t like.
During much of history, most cultures that knew Jews attached zero or negative utility to them, but pogroms only happened every so often. They didn’t just kill all the Jews until the Nazi era.
Anthromorphizing is also pretty basic to humans; that’s why the Eliza program convinces people.
But you’re not following the implications of this. The idea that primitive cultures respect the spirit of animals was brought up to show that taking the well-being of animals into account is normal. If the same primitive people respect the spirit of things whose well-being we clearly should not take into account, such as vegetables, it doesn’t support the point you brought it up to support.
IIRC, the requirements for humane slaughter are spelled out in great detail in the mishnah.
Friend, I’m assuming you believe all/most of religion is made up anyway, right? I mean, you might think some of it was made up sincerely and some was made up cynically. But you know with an extraordinarily high degree of certainty it’s all made up. Right? So who cares who made it up. It’s there. Some people take it seriously.
It doesn’t threaten non-theism at all to concede that religions define their own interpretations and belief systems. This concession is actually the bread and butter of non-theism. Really the only person who gets to contest that is the theist with an alternate interpretation, because he can appeal to a higher authority.
Even though I said I didn’t want to sling scripture, and I really don’t: why don’t you muzzle the ox that treadeth out the grain? Why were the fifth and sixth days of creation declared good? Why was man created on the same day as the beasts of the field? Why was man originally given plants to eat, not flesh? Why was man specifically forbidden to eat “the life” of the animal? Why did you have to rest beasts of burden on the Sabbath? Why couldn’t you disturb mother birds on their eggs? Why did fallen beasts of burden have to be helped up? Why were the animals saved with Noah during the flood? Why doesn’t God forget sparrows? Why does God feed the birds of the air? Why is it that animals only become carnivorous after the exit from Eden? What does it mean that the lion will lie down with the lamb and that a little child shall lead them? Why are humans constantly portrayed as animals in scriptural metaphor?
Now, I totally believe you have answers for all these questions that acknowledge the scriptural references but manage to discredit their supposed connection to any sort of authorial concern for animal welfare or the environment. The problem is, that’s not enough. You have to show that your answers were the one that audiences have understood and adopted over centuries. That will be difficult. It certainly appears that St. Francis and St. Augustine and St. Aquinas and Cardinal Manning and Tolkien and John Paul II disagree with you, and I’m inclined to say that their readings carry more popular weight than yours.
Oh, no, I get it. Respect for nature != concern for the pain of creatures with nervous systems. Spiritual environmentalism is nothing like utilitarian environmentalism. I just don’t care about that very much. I am much more interested in whether some secular environmentalists will eventually develop secular justifications for assigning “rights” or something very like that to aspects of the environment that lack nervous systems. Probably not worth chasing that rabbit, tho.
That’s a cheat that is commonly used by creationists who come up with lists of 100 and 200 arguments for creationism. The trick? Make a list containing a lot of very low quality arguments in the knowledge that it’s long enough that no one person will have the patience (or sometimes the knowledge) to properly refute every single one. Then latch on to whichever ones got the least thorough response.
It’s not hard to point out the flaws in your examples. For instance, Noah did save the animals, but he’s saving them as resources—because if he doesn’t, there won’t be any animals—not as an anti-cruelty rule. If God also commanded that he take some seeds, would you then have claimed that he was concerned about cruelty to seeds? And notice that he takes seven pairs of clean animals so that he can make animal sacrifices.
But no matter which example I refute, you’d just point to another I haven’t refuted. And I’m not going to do every single one.
Like I said, I really am sure you can refute these! That is beside the point. I doubt very much you can show that your refutations are what people actually believe about the texts.
I am not arguing the text is true. I am not even arguing that a certain interpretation of the text is correct. I am pointing out that people believe certain interpretations of the text.
This is not like arguing with William Lane Craig about creationism. This is like trying to tell William Lane Craig that nobody believes in creationism.
We may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Arguments are soldiers. Mine need a vacation. Enjoy your day.
I would be very surprised if any major religion claims that Noah had to take the animals on the ark because not taking them would be cruelty to animals. In other words, yes, my refutation is what people believe about the texts. Except I’m not going to bother going through 13 refutations.
How about, say, three? I could probably do three myself, but they would suck because I’m biased. And I’d be genuinely interested to hear it.
(This is completely beside the point, at this stage, so I can understand why you may not want to bother.)
Mmmm. Clicked the wrong reply button. Sorry.…
It’s not that clear to Swiss politicians.
“The dignity of plants”.
That was written by one of the committee that produced this official Swiss government publication. (PDF)
Actually, he’s responding to PG, who claimed that no major religion is against cruelty to animals … presumably implying that this is a modern aberration? Or something? Regardless, it was he who claimed (in your analogy) that since no religion is against “sexual immorality”, then clearly modern dislike of rape is not a part of basic human ethics.
They demonized them. That is not the same as attaching “zero or negative utility” except in the most dire of cases (which, admittedly, crop up with some regularity.)
To be fair to this idea, it can be useful to approach things from a fresh perspective. Scholars have had longer to develop the more … complex misinterpretations.
The trouble springs up when you don’t check the, y’know, facts. Like the original text your copy was translated from, say. Or the culture it was written in. Or logic.
(Or, in the opposite case, declaring that your once-over the text has revealed what believers “really” believe.)
So very much this.