PostSecret, abortion, factory farming

I think that many of us have a hard some living a consistent and coherent philosophy of life. First, many of us haven't been trained or self-trained to think logically. And frankly-it is difficult to put in to practice some things in a society which screams an amoral consumerism in our ears all day, every day. Thus, we can sometimes see the horror of abortion and oppose it, while we are not strong enough (or are too desensitised) to oppose what we perceive as lessor cruelties. In the final analysis (I am also not equating abortion with cruelty to animals) the latter does also dehumanize us-just indirectly.

Sounds right to me. Every time I'm enjoying a cheeseburger or BLT, part of my brain is telling the other part: "La, la, la! I can't hear you!" Same thing (to a lesser extent) whenever I click-to-order some cute, affordable piece of clothing that almost certainly was made under conditions I would find appalling. As I said to my husband in a bleak moment: If we knew the story behind everything we bought, we'd be sick to our stomachs. (So, who wants tacos for dinner?) Martin Amis had a phrase for this seemingly inescapable condition of (post?)modern life: "All this cognitive diss."

No, there's no moral equivalence. But you don't have to raise factory farms to the moral level of the gulag archipelago to be deeply troubled by what factory farming does to animals, and what the Christian response to it should be. I am a carnivore, and believe that we have the God-given right to eat animal flesh. But that right is not absolute, unlimited.

Rod - Thank you for posting that. Your moral and intellectual courage - that makes you more willing than most (including me, probably) to examine the contradictions in your own thinking - make you special as a human being. The fact that you do this publicly makes you incredibly brave and valuable.

Ethical veganism is founded on an ethic of compassion. Even leaving out the gruesome and horrific factory farms out of it, if you don't have to kill a thinking, feeling, breathing animal to survive, why do it? How can that possibly be an ethical way to live (esp. when you add the factory farm stuff on top of it.)

So, vegans are people who try to avoid causing suffering to others merely for convenience. And many vegans reject speciesism - elevating one species (usually humans) over another based on arbitrarily chosen (and often incorrect) criteria. Vegans ask, for instance, why do we eat pigs and love dogs, when pigs are even more intelligent than dogs are.

Now, a few years ago I made a friend who was anti-choice - probably my first one. And because he wasn't a raving looney but someone I respected, I suppose his influence softened me to the idea of abortion. And then I got ahold of a photobook by Lennart Nilsson who took the celebrated pictures of developing human fetuses that were in Life magazine in the 1960s.

At that point I was no longer entirely pro-abortion. I still think it's okay for a few weeks or months, when the fetus apparently does not experience pain from the procedure. But after that??? If I don't believe in killing an animal (any animal, including tiny bugs) for convenience, how can I believe in killing a proto-human for that reason?

Anyhow, this is the first time I've written of this publicly - inspired by your example.

btw, I'm not the only animal rights activist who feels this way - there's a minority, but a strong and influential one, that also does.

Great slideshow of animals in the womb - I especially liked the elephant, no surprise given that another BBC story involving elephants, from 1999, is one of my desert-island animal stories:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/337356.stm

What amazing creatures they are: enough to make one want to become a pachydermatologist.

mm, my ppartner in ccat-and-mouse ppun(wo)manship - if I ever decide to fly a broad and try my played in the Pilliphines, you can Tagalog...

Funny, I was clearing out cookies from my browser a few moments ago, and saw one from some tracking outfit called mmismm.com, and half-wondered if my fillow commenter above had stuck me with a bit of spyware! Now if you'll excuse me, my PC and I are going to crash for a while back at my mmousepad...which favorite among my accessories, when I misplaced it recently after training my mmouse to roll over it, found the both of us mousebroken...

Forgot to sign the previous post. Apologies.

Also, is it really true that consequentialist reasoning is always wrong? I don't want to hurt animals, but I see no problem with slaughtering an animal (causing it pain in the process) if that would keep someone from starving, and there's nothing unchristian about it. When it comes to animals, I'm fine using consequentialist reasoning: is the suffering I'm causing the animal *worth * the gain. Sometimes it won't be. We christians tend to pooh-pooh consequentialist reasoning, but the truth is that unless you claim that every moral duty is an ontological absolute (i.e., thou shalt never cause pain to an animal), you end up doing consequentialist reasoning.

Scott Lahti said:

Great slideshow of animals in the womb - I especially liked the elephant, no surprise given that another BBC story involving elephants, from 1999, is one of my desert-island animal stories:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/337356.stm

What amazing creatures they are: enough to make one want to become a pachydermatologist.
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Scott: I posted this in another thread, but it fits much better here in light of your comment.

I love the way he/she retraces some of the lines to make them darker:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk

I post very little here; but I've been thinking about green Xtianity for a while, and reading a lot; here goes:

A good guide for those who come from a Christian perspective might come from the Orthodox Christian view of matter as implicitly sacramental. The strongest expression of this I've seen is in Abp. Anthony Bloom's essay "Body and Matter in Spiritual Life," which was published in 1969 by SPCK in the UK. He basically suggests that in integral Christianity, there's no such thing as "inert matter." This idea is, IIRC, the result only of matter in a postlapsarian world. This essay is somewhere online if you look under Bloom's name for it.

To put it another way, a Christian view (and I would go further and argue a true view, one that's in many different religions) is, stated colloquially, there's no such thing as a mere "thing." From a Christian perspective, the incarnation is a statement about matter. For a more philosophical discussion of this, someone I've just recently discovered is Erazim Kohak, whose 1984 book, "The Embers and the Stars" I highly recommend.

While this statement is about matter, it is a fortiori more true of living matter, meaning trees (it would be bad to go around chopping them with an axe for no reason); and even more the case for living, sentient matter, meaning animal life.

When I was a child growing up in New Delhi, my family had two Tibetan women, twins, as maids. They used to catch houseflies that had gotten inside and release them, alive, outside. There's something beautiful about this, at least to me.

Thanks, Peter Moore, for the Metropolitan Anthony suggestion.

Here's the essay: http://www.metropolit-anthony.orc.ru/eng/eng_02.htm

Lynn's link from last night to the video of the painting elephant is among the best things I've seen at YouTube, which is saying something. The comments debating the background to the trunk lines within are marginal: I'm not concerned whether the work was achieved via training by humans, so much as amazed the elephant did it at all.

Establishing a proper and humble harmony with the nonhuman worlds will prove a necessary corollary to our turn toward a proper discovery of ourselves - not so much a final frontier, as a discovery of the obscured first.

Those exploring above assorted Orthodox leads in such matters do well to look into the works of the late English poet, translator, and theologian Philip Sherrard, part of the larger Temenos/Resurgence/Schumacher galaxies within the English-organic orbit, who was friend and mentor to Wendell Berry and the English Blakean/Indophile poet-scholar Kathleen Raine, co-translator/editor with Palmer and Ware of the grand 1999 edition of the Philokalia, and author of such works of reclamation as Human Image: World Image - The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology, The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science, and The Sacred In Life and Art.

Those so inclined should run, not walk, to the grand PDF catalog and web site of Eight Day Books, at eighthdaybooks.com

When I was a child growing up in New Delhi, my family had two Tibetan women, twins, as maids. They used to catch houseflies that had gotten inside and release them, alive, outside. There's something beautiful about this, at least to me.

and it's beautiful to hear about even secondhand. and, paraphrasing MLK, "compassion anywhere leads to compassion everywhere."

to the 11:37 a.m. poster:

your points re vegetable farming are valid. Two practices that address them are:

veganic farming, which uses no insecticides, minimal ploughing, etc., and
freeganism, www.freeganism.org

"Obviously, Inuit can't eat local vegetables, but even Scots and Scandinavians can't eat all that many." - Anon, 11:37 (KJV)

Those Arctic cats who eat their locavore apple pie à l'Esquimaude, might beg to differ; one thing I know, is never try to outuit an Inuit ("'ats a choke, 'at is - I'nuit?" "Dunno; Alaska!" - Cockney Halfuit.)

As for us above the 45th parallel, we'd eat more homegrown greens ourselves, if only we could get the seeds planted in the fifth month to sprout through the ice of the twelfth - but it's a long, long time, from May to December...up here, we don't need to lift weights: just shoveling our great Stakhanovite banks after each week's blizzard is enough to give us brawn after Longfellow's immortal smithy -

UNDER a whistling blizzard blast
The Yooper shovel'r stands;
In Yooper, a mighty man is cast,
Bred from logging and mining lands;
And his crust of remembranc'd pasty repast
Is white as Superior sands.

- and surely, Sherman, you've heard of "ice-ometric" exercise [falls back in cartoon dustcloud]...