How Long before Political Correctness Brings Animal Rights Fighters to Start Questioning the Bible?

The fine balance between protecting animal rights and attacking humans.

People whom we would now call activists have existed in all times. They are known to us for defending certain rights and asserting certain views, which we may or may not consider justifiable, but at least they used to be human-centered. Now we are witnessing a new kind of activism, aimed at defending the rights of anyone or anything but human. In fact, sometimes it is anti-human.

This is my impression of the recent initiatives launched by the modern environmentalists and animal rights fighters.

Recently, one rather active animal protection organization made a lot of noise demanding to stop using the names of animals as insults. They argued that, calling someone an animal’s name is an insult that reinforces the “myth of human superiority over other animals.” Without any doubt, insulting anyone is not a very pious thing to do. However, what we see here is not so much a manifestation of concern for animals (whose nature is alien to the very concept of insult), as anti-human ideology, which directly confronts the Christian understanding of man and the world.

According to Christian teachings, man is the main creation of God; therefore, reducing him to an animal and calling his God-given status of the Lord of Creation a “myth” is an obvious blasphemy.

Let us also note that the very notion of “insults using the names of animals” can be interpreted quite loosely and embrace the whole world culture, including the Holy Scriptures where we often find the sometimes very impartial comparison between man and animal. The first thing that comes to mind is the division of humanity into “sheep and goats”, which is mentioned in the Gospel. A large part of biblical symbolism is built on the comparison of human qualities with those of animals.

Some may object saying that no such organizations or their statements should be considered to begin with.  Perhaps these are just radicals who love high-profile actions. But the problem is that their ideas are already beginning to be put into practice. For example, some animal rights activists demand to abandon the use of woollen products, since sheep are used in their manufacture, which is funny, because in this case the animals are not killed and have been bred specifically for shearing wool. However, last month the Israeli press reported that, under pressure from vegans, the army was abandoning woollen sweaters for soldiers and was holding a tender for the supply of synthetics.

As you can see, the step between a seemingly ridiculous statement and its practical implementation is sometimes quite short.

How much time do we have before political correctness brings animal rights fighters to start questioning our Holy Scripture, which has long been an eyesore for all kinds of minorities?

Translated by The Catalogue of Good Deeds
Source: https://pravlife.org/ru/content/mitropolit-antoniy-pakanich-skoro-li-borcy-za-prava-zhivotnyh-vo-imya-politkorrektnosti

Avatar photo

About the author


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Know everything about Orthodoxy? We can tell you a bit more!

Subscribe for our weekly newsletter not to miss the most interesting articles on our blog.

Spelling error report

The following text will be sent to our editors: