God's Love For Animals

image by 123*chris*

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?

Yet not one of them will fall to the ground

outside your Father's care."

~Matthew 10:29

Many times I support the things I say in this blog on the basis of evidence in the Bible. I am not going to do that much here because the evidence could be taken in so many ways. And honestly I believe the evidence of the Spirit of God upon me is much stronger evidence than any other evidence could be. So I am just going to tell you what I know.

Not what I believe, what I know. And you can choose to believe me or not. For most people, they won't believe me because the hearts of this people are hard. They will not listen to anything good or holy, they are selfish and self-absorbed. What I know is that to kill a living animal for any reason other than true need or self-defense is impure and offensive to God. In other words, if you CAN avoid killing animals, you MUST avoid killing animals. This also means that if you CAN avoid buying meat, you MUST avoid buying meat. If you CAN avoid hunting, you MUST avoid hunting. If you CAN avoid fishing, you MUST avoid fishing. If on the other hand you must buy or hunt or fish meat or otherwise go hungry, then it is permissible. There are people like this even in the modern world, but not many.

It will be difficult for the hard-hearted to understand this, but imagine you are a person who was raised in the country and killed chickens and other animals as a matter of course. Or maybe you went fishing with your dad and cleaned and gutted fish. If this really was you, did you kill your first animal as a child? I want you to think back on what that was like, what you felt. I can tell you what it was like for me, I felt a sense of terrible transgression. I had transgressed, I had sinned, because I had killed without true need. I was going to eat anyway, it's not like I would be going hungry if my fishing had been unsuccessful. If I WERE going hungry otherwise, then it would not be a transgression.

Back in the days of the Exodus when the system of Jewish animal sacrifice was originally instituted, why was it instituted? God wanted people to correct their behavior, to live in the right way, and so there had to be punishments for failing to do so and a means of setting the guilty back on the right track. Really, our own penal institutions ought to take example from it in the sense that it gave not only a method of punishment but a means to re-integrate into society.

Anyway, back to animal sacrifice. Back then the Israelites lived in tents and were constantly on the move, and the only things they really had of value were their flocks. And people were money grubbing and materialistic then just as they are today, except to them their flocks WERE their money. They had no wealth to speak of besides that. So when people transgressed, how do you hit them where it hurts? Take away from their flocks. And so when people sinned, they had to sacrifice from their livestock to atone for it.

Complicating matters further was the fact that most Israelites were obligate pastoralists. They lived in the desert, you can't grow vegetables or grain in the desert. You raise sheep. That means that the only things you can eat are milk and milk products, and meat. That's pretty much it. Theoretically, as some African tribesmen do, you could also drink blood without killing the animal but Jewish law prohibits that. Even if you sell the sheep to buy grain, the sheep is probably going to be eaten anyway, particularly rams. What are you going to do with the male lambs? You can't milk them. I am in no way saying that you can't eat meat if your circumstances do require it. How many people is that true of today? Very few.

However, in their favor, these ancient Jews raised their flocks in a natural way which means that until the slaughter came the animals lived naturally and under better conditions really than they would know in the wild. They lived in the open, but protected by their keepers. Compare that with animal raising today: it is a hell. It is a Dachau for animals, who live and die in boxes and warehouses without a touch of grace or happiness ever entering their lives. They are packed in cages, packed on trucks, treated like they aren't even alive. They are alive and their lives matter.

Humans are special in a way, but in another way they are not special. They are just like any other animal except for their heightened intellects and tool-using capacities and their capacity for spiritual realization. Other than that, they are not different. God cares for animals. But any animal MAY kill if they won't survive any other way. Cats for instance are obligate carnivores, they must kill to live. I don't feed my cat vegetables because that is not what cats eat, they eat meat. And I care about my cat continuing to be alive.

How did Jesus feel about the sacrifices which were constant in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem? Well, first lets look at John the Baptist. Jewish ritual had prescribed water washing for all kinds of things, many Jews practiced ritual immersion, so John the Baptist was not innovative about that. This washing was to remove ritual impurity, not sin. For instance, when a pious Jew touched a dead body, he had to wash himself. He had not actually sinned in touching that dead body or in having the shadow of a leper fall on him or whatever it was, what he was was ritually unclean. In other words, he was not supposed to enter the Temple or the company of other pious Jews until he cleaned himself and removed the "taint of decay" that was upon him. This was because nothing physically impure could stand in the presence of God. The Essenes, who may have been connected to John and Jesus (though the evidence is circumstantial,) washed themselves daily or even more often.

John's baptism was not like that. John's baptism was not for the removal of ritual impurity, it was a symbol of the repentance of moral impurity. This means that John was overtly challenging the animal sacrifice in the Temple, which was also for the repentance of moral impurity. Animal sacrifice was the ONLY means traditionally of atoning for sin. John was saying that the Temple sacrifices were invalid, which the Essenes also believed. This means that John was far more of a rebel than he is commonly conceived of being today. These days people might think, "poor scruffy little dude in the desert wasn't hurting anyone, why did Herod Antipas kill him?" Well, that scruffy little dude in the desert was challenging the entire Temple system and the existence of the Temple itself. He was pointing a loaded gun at all the fat cats in the Temple system and its source of money which was the sale of animals for sacrifice, and he was winning. So for John, the murder of animals in the Temple was not required, not desirable, and possibly not even moral.

So along comes Jesus. On the surface Jesus appears to be the poster boy for nomming on dead fish and getting drunk on wine, because the Gospels depict both activities. However the Gospels must be understood in the light of what happened immediately after Jesus' death, which was an insurrection in Christianity. People who never met Jesus and weren't even Jews were defining what Christianity was. Very often this was directly in contradiction to what Jewish Christians who actually knew Jesus or received teaching from those who knew Jesus believed. This Gentile Christianity exploded like a virus, spreading wildly, while Jewish Christians were killed or scattered by the Roman-Jewish war and the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 ad. The oldest Gospel we have, the Gospel of Mark, was written in Greek by a Gentile Christian. The Jewish Christians were so disrupted that when they finally got around to writing a Gospel, which eventually got absorbed into the Gospel of Matthew, they had to mostly go by Mark which was written by a Gentile. Paul, who never met the living Jesus, wound up writing the future of Christianity, and to all evidence one of Paul's favorite activities was fighting with Jewish Christians. He even at one point takes a left-handed swipe at vegetarianism. Why? Likely because people like James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem, were advocating it.

Whenever you read the Gospels, you must understand them through the lens of a Gentile Christianity which was very eager to denounce everything Jewish about what Jesus taught. They were against circumcision, they were against dietary laws, and they were against vegetarianism. Why? Because such restrictions limited their ability to recruit new believers. And you can kind of understand why Paul did this, I am not saying that Paul was an evil man. Here was a whole Gentile world that didn't know anything about the One God. He was not willing that any obstacle should stand in their way on that. And without Paul we probably wouldn't know anything about Jesus at all, so completely was the Jewish Church destroyed. So in this sense we must thank him, but in so doing he grossly distorted real Christianity and so today we only see the real Jesus and the real Christianity as if through a dark lens, in Paul's own words.

When you read the Gospels, read every part of this through the understanding that the Gentiles who wrote them were against circumcision, against dietary laws, against vegetarianism, against alcohol abstinence, against every part of Jewish tradition that would represent an obstacle to Gentile conversion. The Christianity that was handed down to us was in truth Paulianity, not necessarily what Jesus taught.

Getting back to Jesus, how did Jesus show himself to be continuing the actions of John the Baptist? By the "Cleansing of the Temple." Nowadays this event is interpreted as a rebellion against money grubbing and materialism in the temple, with the focus being on the money changers. Why were the money changers there at all though? So people could buy sacrificial animals in the approved currency, shekels. You couldn't buy sacrificial animals with Roman money. So it was actually the whole commerce in animals that Jesus was protesting, as the Gospel of John makes clear:

In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves,

and the money changers seated at their tables.

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple,
both the sheep and the cattle.
He also poured out the coins of the money changers
and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves,
“Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

~John 2:14-16 (emphasis mine.)

He didn't rob the money changers of their money, he just dumped their cash boxes over. The money was still there in the Temple, on the floor. What did he drive out? The animals.  And so Jesus continued John the Baptist's revolt against the Jewish system of animal sacrifice.

In Mark it says he didn't allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple. This is the same man who supposedly told people to carry their mats on the Sabbath, so it wasn't for any Mosaic ritual reasons that he prevented it. What were they carrying? Their lambs, to be killed. You have to understand that the Temple was actually a slaughterhouse on an epic scale, with animals being butchered and sacrificed continually. It was not some sort of serene holy place with quiet monks silently praying. It was an abattoir, with the screams of the slaughtered constantly in the air, the smell of blood and burning fat. The chief priests of the Temple got filthy rich off the system of animal sacrifice, not to mention the monetary requirements to tithe. Who got control of all that money? You guessed it, the chief priests who ran the Temple system.

Why did Jesus rebel against the Temple system aside from the fact that it made a few people rich at the expense of the many? Remember, this was a system established by Moses supposedly at the command of God. What standing did Jesus have to challenge or change it? A good Jew does not go about questioning Moses, but Jesus did and not only on this. Any sensitive soul attuned to the will of God would have been revolted by the scene at the Temple and know that this was no part of what God wanted.

Complete understanding of Jesus' life is impossible at this point, so it is not possible to know whether Jesus was himself a vegetarian. But just as Jesus would have immediately understood that the slaughterhouse of the Temple would have been an abomination, and as he didn't require Moses or anyone else to tell him this but only God's spirit in him alone, in exactly the same way I know that killing animals apart from true need is sinful. The way we treat animals as an industrial product is shameful and disgusting, and there will be a reckoning. I don't need to quote the Bible on that, I have God's spirit on me. I know it's wrong, as much as I know I am drawing breath and typing on a computer keyboard. How about you justify to ME how such a horror should be allowed to exist?

You cannot. It's inexcusable. I don't have to quote the Bible on it, I tell you directly: it is evil.