Why I Am Nowhere Near As Big A Fan Of Barbara Ehrenreich As I Was In The Age Of Ink On Paper

I DID READ that article in The Guardian by Barbara Ehrenreich when it was published last month.  I can't say it did much to revive the respect I once held for her in the age of print on paper.   But, with fact checking and critical analysis of the kind I did the other day, something which has been made so much easier, faster and even possible by the internet, that respect for her work didn't last.  I'll go through a passage of it, since I'm asked to comment.

Our species has not always been so conceited. If we go back 200,000 years, we would find the earliest Homo sapiens acting more like rabbits than lions – shivering at the sound of rustling in the tall grass and huddling at the sight of a pack of hyenas. How much of our existence as a species was spent battling and dodging more dangerous animals we do not know, but the (usually) men who conquered the marauding beasts were often memorialised in myth.

Granted I no longer try to keep up with the latest fads on the little to entirely unevidenced pre-history of hominids, what was my understanding that still seems to have some support is that our ancestors started hunting about a million years ago.   Unless Ehrenreich thinks there have been organized, tool making, weapons using, perhaps extinction driving bunnies around, I don't know what she based this on.  I think it's bollocks.    

Things like the extinctions of mega-fauna with the advance of the human population, including some rather formidable animals, she's pretty much just making it up. I've looked at some articles that note that in the period before human kind (in which I'd include our earlier ancestors) left Africa there is evidence that its original mega-fauna had, in many cases, been driven into extinction.  I'd bet that organized hunting by your pre-homo sapiens ancestors is a likely candidate for why.

Humans did not rise from their beleaguered status to anything resembling global dominance in a single leap. For many centuries, “civilised” or urban states embraced religions in which humans and non-human animals appeared to be more or less equals. At least in myth, they could speak to and understand each other, mate and quarrel with each other and, most clearly in the case of the Roman and Greek gods, behave like the lead stars in a reality show. Only with the arrival of monotheism, roughly between 1200BC and AD700, did the unique gods of each polity acquire names and something like personalities – Jaweh, Jesus and Allah.

To start with 1200BC to AD700 is quite a long period to make baseless assertions about.  No doubt that time period pulled out of the past so as to include the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, so the better to slam them in 18th century style.  The three names she includes to make that clear ignores quite a large number of verses in Scripture common to all three, starting with Genesis in which as God creates the universe, including all plants and animals, the environment in which they live, God is continually said to find that the Creation is good. 

1:3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good;

1:10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11 Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.

1:16 God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

1:24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

And after creating People, this finding things good is summed up rather comprehensively.

1:31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.

And that is only the start of a myriad of scriptures that praises the goodness of Creation and that God loves and even makes covenants with all animals

Genesis 9:16 When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.”

Whatever else you might say about the monotheistic tradition of God the Creator, God's declaration on the goodness of Creation could certainly be said to rather win over any later opinions made by human beings about that.  Any Jewish or Christian or Islamic theologian or commentator would have to ignore such Scriptures to come to the conclusion that she claims is the fault of monotheism.   Unfortunately, as I've shown, the scholarly and academic tendency to pick and choose and ignore the basis of what they claim to work from is ubiquitous.   See my many posts dealing with Darwin and Darwinism for literally scores of examples of that in the current common received, academically mandated articles of secular faith.

And that's only the start of such verses of both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures that certainly don't hold that the world is evil.  For that you really have to go to some quite pagan influenced later theology that certainly didn't reflect what the Scriptures they claimed to be founded on claimed.  

It is ironic, considering Ehrenreich's scientistic, atheist materialist ideological position that there is probably nothing much in Jewish or Christian or Islamic guilt that demotes the status of animals and plants and the environment more than the materialistic science starting with Descartes and Francis Bacon, in which they declared all animals to be nothing but machines made with flesh, removing from them any soul and any notion of sacredness.  Which also had a malignant influence on, especially, Baroque and later Catholic theology in that regard and not an inconsiderable amount of Protestantism under the sway of the "enlightenment" culture.   

I will not go into details over the cruel disregard of animals suffering, tends and hundreds of millions sacrificed in the name of science such as Descartes practiced and which has become one of the major industries of biological science - though much of the assumed basis of its relevance to human physiology has only recently come under serious scientific scrutiny.  

You might want to read this pro-Darwin article from Scientific American on the topic I will warn you the description of scientific dissection of animals in it is gruesome and cruel.  Note the scientist torturing the dog in the name of science virtually quotes Descartes dismissing the obvious agony of the animal they're torturing as "insensible."   It reminds me of nothing so much as the outraged reaction of contemporary scientists when a dozen of their colleagues asserted that animals have consciousness WHICH EHRENREICH CITES IN HER ARTICLE.   The reason that was ever an issue it is because of the ideological and professional interests of the scientists who came up with those denials.

If her use of "monotheists" treating and regarding animals badly is justified by some Jewish or Christian or Islamic theologians or clergy I would like to know what Barbara Ehrenreich would have to say about it from her viewpoint of hostility towards religion.  She, like most scientistic, atheist materialists speaks out of both sides of her mouth on virtually everything when it comes to religion and science.   I can say she is one of those who the more I fact check what she's written the less respect I have for her writing.

I would point out to her that the patron Saint of Animals, St. Francis is a popular saint among Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, not least of which is because of his views on animals and nature.  Though most of Orthodoxy doesn't consider him a saint and some Orthodox seem to have a rather peculiar hostility for him, due to him having been a Western Saint from the period after the Great Schism.  No doubt, also due to his appeal.   Some Orthodox hold Saint Modestos of Jerusalem to be the patron saint of Animals because of a legend of his spirit talking to someone in their sleep about how to heal her sick oxen.  Catholics also accept his Sainthood, since there was unity in the 7th century when he lived but compared to St. Francis, it's pretty thin. 

You might have missed the little trick of Ehrenreich couching her  opportunistic 18th-19th century romantic presentation of European polytheism to fit her needs, "at least in myth."   It's always interesting how when it suits people like her we are to take the "myths" at a face value which the polytheists didn't seem much to practice in known practice.  I would point out that in all of those cultures slavery was rampant, infanticide was widely practiced - especially the killing or "exposure" of female infants - women were generally the chattels of men, etc.   Animal sacrifice was ubiquitious as was the killing of animals for food and sport.  At no time did any known society treat animals as equals to humans, even as they might worship material gods in the form of animals, for example, the Egyptians had no qualms about killing them to send them into the afterlife with the servants of various Pharaohs.  Though perhaps that's the kind of equality that Ehrenreich wants to use in her argument.   Even in many countries where the most animal friendly religion predominates, such as Buddhism, keeping and using and killing animals is common place.  I would like a list of laws passed in such places to outlaw cruelty to animals as compared to the too gradual, too late and too little laws protecting them in Europe and North America.   In the United States one of the greatest forces to prevent such laws being adopted, other than the meat, milk and egg industries has been scientists.

As these monotheistic super-gods grew and incorporated the attributes once spread among the many gods of polytheistic religions, they became more abstract and removed from the material world – to the point where that material world began to seem inferior and even disgusting, as illustrated by a bishop who educated his congregation by pulling out every feather, one by one, from a sparrow to punish it for being a “devil”, ie a non-human, a bird. 

Her claims about God as seen by monotheism is bizarre and unsupported.  It's especially ridiculous in the religion I suspect the hates on the most, Christianity due to the fact that an intrinsic part of that view of God includes the incarnation of God in the very real flesh and blood of the very Jesus she makes slight reference to earlier in this passage.  There is nothing "abstract and removed from the material world about the incarnation of Jesus, his life, his ministry, his teachings, his death and his resurrection IN A BODY THAT WAS MATERIAL, but not merely material in a materialistic understanding of that.   The great annual liturgical cycle that starts in Lent is the major event in most Christian churches' year.   That claim is absolutely false and baseless.

As for the bird story, I am unfamiliar with that bishop or that story and would like to know where it comes from.  I don't know if it's true or if it's one of the many such tales told by atheists without any foundation, to be repeated by others.  If it's true why should that one sadistic creep be used to stereotype all of monotheism anymore than any secular sadistic creep be used to stereotype secularists?    I would not imagine that he's as well regarded by Christians as St. Francis who preached to the birds and befriended animals.

Hinduism was far more tolerant, making no spiritual distinction between human beings and other life forms.

You really want to get into a discussion of the caste system and the position of Women under Hinduism?   I wouldn't treat an animal as badly as Women and those low down in the Caste system  under Hinduism - though there are reform movements under Hinduism as there are under all of the monotheistic religions in that regard, as there are all of the monotheistic religions. 

Barbara Ehrenreich should back up what she says with citations so we can check her facts.