There is no question that factory farming treats animals inhumanely. Yet Johann Hari points out that in Britain at least, there is one redeeming feature in that system in that the animals are required to be stunned before they are slaughtered, thus making them numb and presumably sparing them considerable pain as they are killed.
Yet there is an exemption for even this minimal requirement, granted for (surprise!) religion:
You are allowed to skip all this and slash the throats of un-numbed, screaming animals if you say God told you to. If you are Muslim, you call it “halal”, and if you are Jewish you call it “kosher”.
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Atheists who criticise religion are constantly being told we have missed the point and religion is really about compassion and kindness. It is only a handful of extremists and fundamentalists who “misunderstand” faith and use it for cruel ends, we are told with a wagging finger. But here’s an example where most members of a religion choose to do something pointlessly cruel, and even the moderates demand “respect” for their “views”. Their faith makes them prioritise pleasing an invisible supernatural being over the screaming of actual living creatures. Doesn’t this suggest that faith itself – the choice to believe something in the total absence of evidence – is a danger that can lead you up needlessly nasty paths?
As has been said by many people many times, it takes religion to make otherwise good and reasonable people do bad things.
I grew up in the Jewish tradition, and keeping kosher was considered the norm. Fortunately for me, I was able to compartmentalize “keeping kosher” in the same category as all the other truly ridiculous things that Jewish tradition requires. It’s a really long list of embarrassing craziness, but I’ll only list a few that I remember from personal experience:
1. “Washing” hands from a specially-designed bucket with cold water (no soap) by rinsing each hand exactly twice prior to all meals.
2. Keeping cheese and meat in separate refrigerators.
3. Designing special contraptions to automatically turn electrical equipment on/off during the Sabbath.
4. Not driving (or even riding in) cars, even in cases where it clearly makes more sense.
5. Bouncing and swaying during prayer (is it more effective if you sway)?
Thanks for the reminder!
Mano:
I’m with you 100% in denouncing religious hypocrisy, but this may not be the best choice of vehicle.
Anyone who consumes animal products in this country supports agricultural practices that are grotesquely cruel on a massive scale. The requirement to “humanely euthanize” animals by such means as a captive-bolt gun often goes wrong -- leading to slow, painful deaths by other means -- and is poorly policed by regulators. And even if the coup de grace were administered swiftly in every case, the conditions in which American farm animals live are horrifying. The manner of death is just the final insult in a constant stream of abuse from conception on, in which living things are mere production units in an industrial, profit-driven machine.
Every year in the United States, approximately 16 billion animals are killed to serve the purposes of their human “masters.” Every day is literally a holocaust for the innocent. If only supermarket shoppers could be required to watch videos of where their food comes from, prominently displayed next to all the neat little packages in the clean, cheerfully-lit aisles. The blind eye we turn to these practices is the greatest cognitive dissonance of our time.
We are a million miles away from learning Gandhi’s lesson that the evolution of a society may be judged by the way it treats its fellow creatures. Spend a few minutes on PETA’s website -- especially the timely feature on Butterball’s House of Horrors -- then weep.
The charge we should really be leveling at religion’s feet is to decry its responsibility for propounding a belief that animals were put on earth by God for us to use as we please. This elevation of man into some kind of chosen, nay, master race, lies at the heart of our brutality towards the rest of nature. St. Francis of Assisi and the Seventh Day Adventists notwithstanding, this is the sort of battering ram that needs to be smashed against every church door.