I have been noting this more recently and it seems to be a trend, at least with people I converse with on the regular. The really religious types aren’t animal people or downright dont like them. The more chill or agnostic types seem to be more apt to love animals.
I could go on my theory of this but I’m interested to see if anyone thinks this is a trend.
Depends if you’re a cow or a chicken
I don’t say this out of malice, but please, please, avoid using “religion” (and indirectly “belief in deities and other supernatural entities”) as a synonym for abrahamic religions because this ends up attacking countless religions and belief systems worldwide, some of which even lack a male capital-G God and/or are Goddess-centric.
The latter case is my case, I’m primarily a worshipper of Goddess Lilith, and I’ve been literally worshiping owls, especially because I believe owls are Her familiars, even Her zoomorphic manifestation (see Burney Relief) sometimes… not to mention how owls are majestic and amazing on their own, as beautifully cute yet fiercely powerful raptors possessing the most silent flight observable among avians… I mean, just look at any Bubo (my favorites, not necessarily in order of preference, are B. virginianus, B. ascalaphus, B. scandiacus, B. bubo, B. magellanicus and B. cinerascens), Megascops/Otus (M. kennicotti and O. bakkamoena) and Athene (especially A. noctua, A. lilith (yes, there’s literally an owl species named after Lilith, native to Middle East), A. brama and A. cunicularia) for long enough and you’ll hopefully understand how goddessome they are!
(And the fact that “I know my favorite Strigidae” by their taxonomic binomials may also tell ya something about how deep I got inside this
rabbitburrowing owl’s hole of Science’s ornithology primarily motivated by non-scientific reasons (and also by my neurodivergence’s “hyperfixation” and “special interests” traits)).There are also other religions and belief systems that are very animal-friendly (especially friendly to wildlife), including but not limited to Wicca, Druidism, Buddhism (“a monk must watch their steps lest they harm ants”) and (as far as I know) Hinduism/Shaktism (cows as sacred symbols of motherhood and abundance).
If its religious, it’s wrong. I don’t care if its an abrahamic religion, Islam, Hindi or whatever religion, it’s all imaginary and never for the betterment of the people, it’s always about control
it’s always about control
“Always about control”? Whom and how exactly am I trying to “control” through my practice of an extremely solitary, idiosyncratic practice, whose convoluted syncretism (borrowing concepts across Sumerian, Egyptian, Thelema, Wicca, Gnosticism, Luciferianism, Goetia, Quimbanda and many other religions) alienates me from practically all religions from which my syncretism derives because I don’t exclusively follow any of those?
It’s all imaginary
Yes, I know!, and? So many things are imaginary around you right now, too. For example, as you’re reading this text, you’re seeing before you a mesh made of millions of trios of red, green and blue tiny dots shining in a very specific intensity so to interact your (respectively) L, M and S cones all over your retina, fooling your occipital lobe to interpret a large portion of the visible spectrum, then your Inferior temporal gyrus interprets symbols (letters from the English alphabet your graphics card is rendering a large raster bitmap based on this text’s UTF-8 byte-stream), as well as pictographs (Lemmy mascot from both the community’s avatar as well as from your lemmy.ca instance with the shape and colors of the Canadian flag; the maple leaf from the Canadian flag therein; all those colors and shapes from the Anubis “making sure you’re not a bot” anime girl shown every time you access the lemmy.ca instance to interact with the Fediverse) out of the bigger picture once projected onto your retina. The orange color you’re seeing outlining the Lemmy mascot icon from this community, it isn’t orange because there’s no orange dot on digital displays. You can neither touch nor interact with Anubis anime girl, she’s not even closely real. You can neither touch nor interact with the Maple leaf symbol like you could with an actual physical Maple leaf.
So, are you sure you’re gonna play the “deities are imaginary” atheist card with me, a religious, pagan person whose ground is heavily covered in nihilism (as in, nothing fucking exists, not even myself, as everything is a gigantic ocean of baryons and leptons from which the illusion of order, together with this Pale Blue Dot and all the self-rearranging carbon-based structures therein, have been emerged out of cosmic chaos)? At least I’m using the belief on my “imaginary” owl-goddess (because, yes, I can only imagine Her, as my retina never exactly saw Her) to seek and learn actual, scientific (ornithological) knowledge, instead of denying Science like Abrahamic religions often do.
I don’t disagree with what you said, but Islam is an Abrahamic religion.
They all (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) worship a deity based on the Canaanite god of war and weather.
I think you found a weird outlier and your data set is small. Like, most of the world is religious in some way shape or form, your sample size is too small to make any realistic judgement call
Thats why I asked here
Touche’.
I was taught as a young conservative xtian that only humans have souls and that animals were put here for our use and amusement. I was taught that animal pain could not be real because they don’t have a soul. They are effectively just toys or food for humans, according to conservative christians.
Conservatism is a fkn disease that needs to be eradicated.
they are also likely to neglect them, and see them as commodities, as the current thing to have, once the honeymoon phase wears off they neglect them, anecdotes of course. consider how religious people dont really adopt people for the right reasons and railing on abortion rights.
Speaking from experience, whether you are religious or not, being kind to animals are a separate thing. What I can say though, devout Muslims that I knew are either animal lovers, or animal avoiders because they are scared by furry things.
But being cruel to animals? I’m quite sure thats against our teaching though. Although we do slaughter animals for food, for example.
You know how the after church crowd is the meanest to service workers? They’re famous for it. This is like that.
As a vegan, the most annoying people are religious people (specially abrahamic believers) and their unbreakable logic: ‘If God didn’t want us to eat meat, why did he give them to us’ Imo that reflects their attitude towards animals: they don’t see them as a living beings, but rather as things to be used.
In good faith I am asking why vegans don’t consider vegetables to be living things.
They are living organism, but don’t have a nervous system or barain like animals have and there is no evidence they have a conciosness like animals have.
They are living, not sentient tho.
you can’t prove they are not sentient
Neither can you prove they are, while you can easily prove that animals are.
I’m not the one making an unprovable claim
Or that animals are
Do you have a pet or have ever been close to an animal? If so you’d know.
Here an example of some cows if you can see that and say animals are not sentient than I have nothing else to say to say to you as it would just be a waste of time.
You’re right, I confused sentience for sapience, my bad! Of course that means plants are absolutely sentient, as we know for sure they can feel and hear. So we’re back to the beginning question, why does veganism care about the sentience of Animalia but not the sentience of Plantae or Fungi?
I think it’s more to do with religious people coming from rural backgrounds.
Eating meat was a celebratory thing when I was still living in rural Turkey, so at first vegetarianism seemed like “a spoiled western thing”
In my mind it was grouped next to those ragebait videos of 14 year olds yelling at their mom for getting the wrong iphone model.
Animal cruelty argument didn’t work great either because, “I only eat halal certified anyway.”
Content warning : Religion. Don't tap if you don't want to learn what "halal food" is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_dietary_lawsNote: It sounds decent, especially for early 7th century Arabia standards, but no multi-billion industry is following regulations that make them less profit to 100%.
What DID convince me near instantly was someone showing how the meat industry is all exploitative and corrupt.
They waste workers, water, and animal lives on purpose because it’s more profitable than proper logistics. Fucking cruel looking into it, crazy they aren’t being universally boycotted already.
No.
It’s not that they don’t like animals. It’s that they don’t view animals as equal to humans. They believe that god made them superior to animals, so what happens to animals doesn’t really matter.
They also think animals don’t have souls
I’m 90% sure that modern Christianity is not actually correct Christianity because if you read about jesus, everything about him is coded in eastern spiritualism, as if he learned it from someone else and explained it to the other people that wrote about Jesus and didn’t understand the symbolism and allowed it to evolve into ego inducing assholery.
They don’t even see minorities as humans
That’s only part of it. You’ve described Dominionists, the other end are are the Stewards, Stewards believe its our duty to tend the Earth and its creatures as it is God’s dominion, not ours.
What I said also applies to stewardship, though. They both still abuse animals and then say “But Jesus ate fish.”
I basically came here to say this. Especially these days basically all good pet owners think of them as their children or at least living beings with rights. And abrahamic religions (I know less about others) view humans as being god’s special creatures who have dominion over all others. Same reason there’s often more child abuse in religious homes.
I guess I could have phrased this exact question with “the environment” and probably got the same answers. (Bad) religious people think it’s all “theirs” so they can do whatever they want and pollute all they want as “god” will take care of the earth no matter what.
You might want to note that while this probably applies to major religions, it’s not all religions
Also this is probably a good representation from the bible
Genesis 1:28 (KJV): “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
I don’t think an animal’s life is of equal value to a human’s. I don’t think that’s a strictly religious view point either. Should they have shot harambe to save that kid, or was that action equivalent to murder?
Typical creature that values it’s own species over all others. I really despise this mentality. Anyway have a great day.
Should they have shot harambe or let it rip the kid in half? Is it your position that all organisms are of equal value?
Congratulations on the false dichotomies.
What are the other options ? This is a binary discussion. A human life is of more impact and relevance than an animal’s. Therefore it’s value is higher. I have a ton of animals, farm and pet, I LOVE my animals. I’d put my girl’s life above all of them in a second.
For your first question: there is no certainty that Harambe would have “ripped the kid in half”.
For your second, you could value some species more than your own and others less, there’s no reason all species must be equally valuable (let alone individuals) Although the idea of thinking about things that way at all is a little gross to me.
Is it genuinely your belief that the kid would have been fine? Or even any 100% safe solution outside of what happened? What was done ensured the safety of the human child, as it should have. You’re misusing false dichotomy. The user I was responding to stated
“Typical creature that values it’s own species over all others.”
The all or nothing aspect I gave is a direct response to the one they gave. The implication being the user does not value human life over all other life. I do, which is why this started and is ending as a binary conversation. Secondary to that, whats better than what in a tier list is completely irrelevant to the conversation.
You’re using too much logic for an emotional thread, lol.
The people who are “animals over humans!!!” or equate them don’t love nor care for anybody besides themselves in earnest. They’ll stay in their little corner with their pets, shaking in fear just thinking about deep human connections until the day they die. 🤷♂️
My VERY religious stepdaughter somehow sends out a ‘bite me now’ signal to cats.
She was also just going to essentially dump her cat on the street when she left the country a couple years.
So yeah, she sucks.
EDIT: to clarify, I took in that cat who is a bit of a butthead, but doesn’t deserve to die for it.
My maga relatives only care about their horses so I dunno about this
Really? That seems to track pretty well to me. They’re maga you said. So of course they care about their horses. Emphasis on ‘their.’ Thats how maga works.
Good point. They have no issues with shooting a bighorn sheep and mounting the head in their living room
Yeah actually. I think I’ve observed this as well. It’s not surprising, religions are super anthropocentric. Humans are god’s chosen creatures etc. So much for love
Not in my experience
Edit: Meant to reply to a comment, accidentally replied to post instead. Don’t mind.
