Thursday, October 20, 2005

Animal rights

Animal rights only seem to apply to some animals, i.e. the good ones. Are there good and evil animals?

No matter what basis your standard for judging good and evil is, it will ultimately begin from an arbitrary point. Whether God, Man, Nature or Super-aliens creates meaning which comes to define good and evil, it will ultimately trace back to a self-evident sort of absolute truth.

I suppose the Christian view is that there are indeed good and evil animals, as Jesus uses some categories of animals as metaphors for evil. Christian values are typically assumed by PETA types, just like Christian values are typically assumed by progressives in general, if only in order to condemn Western civilization and often Christianity itself as well. The Darwinian worldview that modern progressives base their philosophy on does not offer room for condemning Imperialism, nor did the subpagans of the past think, "You know guys, maybe we shouldn't just go in to exploit, and rape and pillage another nation." It's worth questioning the way that progressives and animal rights types assume various Christian values to try to condemn Christianity by them. For why should we value other species...and why do we generally assume that we should?

Note that the views typical to progressives on "animal rights" are not historically accurate, as usual:

...characteristic of Puritan sentiment is [a] sixteenth-century condemnation of bear-baiting which, remarkably...makes a test of genuine Christian confession:

What Christian heart can take pleasure to see one poor beast to rent, tear and kill another, and all for his foolish pleasure? And although they be bloody beasts to mankind, and seek his destruction, yet we are not to abuse them, for his sake who made them, and whose creatures they are. For notwithstanding that they be evil to us, and thirst after our blood, yet they are good creatures in their own nature and kind, and made to set forth the glory and magnificence of the great God and for our use; and therefore for his sake not to be abused... we are not in any wise to spoil or hurt. Is he a Christian man, or rather a pseudo-Christian, that delights in blood?'
From the 1640s the English Puritans had some opportunity to legislate against cruelty. Bearbaiting had been attacked as a full ugly sight as early as 1550, and Parliament ordered its suppression in 1642. Cockfighting was attacked by Perkins among others and finally prohibited by Cromwell in 1654. [...] Opposition to animal cruelty resumed with the Methodists and evangelicals of the eighteenth century who inherited a strong Protestant sentiment opposed cruelty and were again able to bring their theology to bear upon public policy. Horace Walpole is said to have remarked in 1760 that a certain man was known to be turning Methodist; for, in the middle of conversation, he rose, and opened the window to let out a moth. [...]
As the eighteenth-century Christian Humphry Primatt wrote: If I know that a man is cruel to his beast, I ask no more questions about him. He may be a noble man, or a rich man. . . or a church man, or anything else, it matters not; this I know, on the sacred word of a wise king, that, being cruel to his beast, he is a wicked man.
(Six Modern Myths About
Christianity & Western Civilization
By Philip J. Sampson :84-85)

That seems to be an eighteenth-century scholar doing in theological language what would in modern language would be an attempt at clinically examining the "psychological dynamics" typical to "serial killers."

At any rate, good:

And evil:


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