Prologue Disclosure: I am NOT a fundamentalist about this, or anything for that matter.
I’m neither an absolute pacifist nor a warrior for God. Not at all like the Hindus such as a Hindu priest in LA in 1966 who told me I should go to Vietnam and kill because, after all, humans kill insects regularly!
And at that crisis time, almost all Christian leaders, when I asked about whether I should apply for conscientious objector status against all war, told me that God calls all Christians to kill our enemies. Only one Mennonite family and a retired missionary encouraged me to oppose war as a follower of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Nor am I of the passive sort who wouldn’t try to stop an Islamic jihadist from killing civilians or one who is a strident, total vegan.
However, why is it that the vast majority of humans--a somewhat smart species--continue to justify slaughter of other humans in the name of their God, their nation, their religion?
How can such a species as ours justify the intentional slaughter of other intelligent, conscious species such as the pig?
1. Let’s face it, the natural world is many ways “tooth and claw.”
Whether its our cat, Smoke, bringing us a small bird he killed as a present
or the violent deaths of many thousands of animals every year on their massive migration on the plains of southern Africa, the natural world isn’t one of moral truth, but of harsh survival and death.
-- Having said all of that, I do think it is morally and spiritually true that all intelligent, conscious, moral species ought to refuse to kill, to harm, to destroy. We ought to seek to care for all of the biosphere.
To be continued--
In the Light
Dan Wilcox
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