Black cats and animal rights violence

Greetings.

Jewish date:  28 ’Elul 5769.

Today’s holidays:  Laylat Al-Qadr.

Worthy causes of the day:  “Help us hold the line:  All major advertisers have left Beck:  Help us keep them from returning” and “Send a Message to The New York Helmsley Hotel”.

Before discussing any topics today, I would like to note that the Days of Awe, Ro’sh hashShanah (one of the Jewish new years; we have four) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) will be here very soon.  One of the themes of these holidays is repentance.  In that spirit, I would like to apologize to anyone I have inadvertently offended.  I am human and have my own share of faults, and I make my fair share of stupid mistakes to try to avoid repeating in the coming year.  (YHWH help me, please!)  I also grant forgiveness to all of those who have inadvertently sinned against me, whether or not they apologize; there are enough problems in this world, and I do not want to make them any worse by bearing a grudge which will seem stupid and pointless in the long run.

Topic 1:  “Honey, call the exorcist.”:

Basement Cat, of course, is a joke.  But he is a joke with roots in the idea that black cats are connected to evil, as the familiars of witches or otherwise.  I have no idea where this notion comes from, and if anyone has any idea, please let me know.

Topic 2:  “Scientists targeted by opponents of animal research speak out”:  My problem is with the people who are opposed to animal research.  Firstly, unless these people are strict vegans, they seem to be inconsistent since they find it unacceptable to harm or kill an animal for the sake of helping humans yet acceptable to kill an animal for their own pleasure.  (Humans do not need to eat meat in order to live.)    I will presume that some of these people are strict vegans, but this leads to the second problem:  animals in the wild regularly do horrible, cruel things to each other, such as hunt down and eat each other.  Why are only humans subject to censure for cruelty to animals?  Why are these people not up in arms over predations of lions, tigers, and bears?  Humans are just as much animals as the rest of the animal kingdom.  Why are humans being held to a higher standard?  Thirdly, some animal rights activists commit acts of violence against or murder those who perform research on animals.  However, since, as mentioned, humans qualify as animals, attacking or murdering a human is attacking or murdering an animal—the very sort of behavior these people are supposed to be against.  Fourthly, these attacks and murders are done without any evidence of immediate danger or fair trial.  As such, there is no guarantee the victims are in any way guilty of the offenses they are accused of, and people who may have done nothing to hurt non-human animals may be harmed in the process.

Topic 3:  “Jewish New Year (1994)”.  Just a topical Dry Bones cartoon for Ro’sh hashShanah.

Have a minimally-stressful day.

Aaron

Inaugural post

Greetings.

Jewish date:  26 ’Elul 5769.

Today’s holiday:  Our Lady of Sorrows.

Worthy cause of the day:  “ColorOfChange.org:  Help us hold the line:  All major advertisers have left Beck:  Help us keep them from returning” and “Divided We Fail:  Real people, real stories”.  (I am a religious man, and it is commonly considered the duty of religious people to worry about people.)

Welcome to the inaugural post of Divine Misconceptions, the blog which looks at religious fallacies and misinformation and an aid to me writing a book on the subject.  Formerly such material had a home at my other blog, Weird thing of the day, but intuition insisted that that blog was spreading itself over too wide a range of topics.  Now on with today’s dose of religious fallacies and misconceptions from across the Internet.

Topic 1:  “Kids send Marcus the lamb to slaughter”:  Thus is it written:

A group of schoolchildren who reared a lamb from birth and named it Marcus has overridden objections by parents and rights activists and voted to send the animal to slaughter.

This is not strictly a religious issue, but it is a moral/ethical one, and morality and ethics frequently overlap with religion.  The children in question were studying farming, and as part of the project they raised a lamb (among other animals), and they decided to cull the lamb and use the proceeds to buy pigs.  And somehow this made a lot of people very mad, and yet there is a strange inconsistency to this anger.  Most of us eat meat and make use of leather, even though neither is strictly necessary for life; thus most of us in one way or another contribute to the killing of animals, including cute, furry animals like Murray the Lamb.  Most of this slaughter happens without anyone except vegans or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals noticing or even caring.  Most of us, therefore, did what these children did, and yet we complain when these children copy us.  The only difference is that the children did it deliberately, and the rest of us ordered hamburgers and let a company decide that a cow would die.  For the sake of consistency, all the protesters should consider setting a good example by becoming vegans.

Topic 2:  “Saving Anthony” and “Reading Nature and Reading Scripture”:  These are evangelical Christian articles warning against inflexible theology.  Obviously not everything in a revealed religion is up for grabs; there is material handed down all the way back to the beginning.  But the amount of information that is handed down is always finite, so rather than there being just a single, crystal-clear theology possible, there is always a sizable range of possibilities.  It therefore makes no sense to jump to the conclusion that one’s religion is wrong if one discovers that one’s favored theology is wrong, since there may be other possible theologies which are still viable.  Only when the data is inconsistent with all of a religion’s possible theologies can it be legitimately be considered disproved.  So if one discovers potential problems with one’s theologies, the first thing to do is DON’T PANIC!

Aaron