When we’re poor in spirit, we can sense God telling us it’s wrong to kill animals and cause them to suffer. Steven Best explicitly described his conversion to animal-rights consciousness in religious terms. 'I experienced something sacred within the bowels of the profane. I was in Chicago, driving about 2 am, half-drunk and Goddamn hungry. I pulled into a White Castle fast food restaurant and ordered a double cheeseburger. There was something about it that seemed so excessive, gross, and steeped in violence. I spit the vile flesh out of my mouth in utter revulsion. I stumbled around in a dietary no-man’s-land for two months, not knowing what to eat, not wanting this consciousness but unable to shake it'. For the first time in his life, Best made the connection between the food in his hands and the body of a living animal.
JON HOCHSCHARTNER: In the first beatitude, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” The analogous blessing from the Sermon on the Plain, in the Gospel of Luke, is more straightforward. Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” The text from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew is a little ambiguous.
Commentators frequently interpret ‘poor in spirit’ to mean those who have a humble attitude toward God. It implies an openness to the divine will and presence. Only by working to empty ourselves of selfish desires do we leave room for God to fill the space. Similarly, this emptying allows us to recognize the divine presence in others. When we’re poor in spirit, we can sense God telling us it’s wrong to kill animals and cause them to suffer. When we’re poor in spirit, we can see the divine presence in all, including other creatures, no matter how different they look on the outside. Finally, when we’re poor in spirit, God gives us the energy to pursue animal liberation…
Steven Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies and the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. His work frequently provides justification for the Animal Liberation Front and seeks to link the nonhuman movement with the broader left. He is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Best explicitly described his conversion to animal-rights consciousness in religious terms. “I experienced something sacred within the bowels of the profane,” he wrote on his blog. “I was in Chicago, driving about 2 am, half-drunk and goddamn hungry. I pulled into a White Castle fast food restaurant and ordered a double cheeseburger.”
Best was usually content with a single cheeseburger. There was something about the two cheese slices and two meat patties that seemed so excessive, gross, and steeped in violence that he felt nauseated. For the first time in his life, Best made the connection between the food in his hands and the body of a living animal.
“I spit the vile flesh out of my mouth in utter revulsion,” he said. “I stumbled around in a dietary no-man’s-land for two months, not knowing what to eat, not wanting this consciousness but unable to shake it.” Thankfully, Best met some vegetarians who reassured him and steered the future animal-rights scholar in the right direction…
Ronnie Lee is the founder of the Animal Liberation Front, who, in recent years, has changed his focus to vegan education and electoral work. The Green Party of England and Wales has been Lee’s vehicle in politics. He hosts an online news show, called Slash the Banner, with his wife, Louise Ryan.
Having spent many hours interviewing Lee, I know he’d never describe his transition to vegetarianism as spirituality inspired. However, it can be interpreted that way with a broad definition of God. The divine isn’t an old man in the sky. That’s a metaphor which can serve a practical purpose, but is also limiting.
Lee’s sister was dating a vegetarian, who opposed killing animals. This simple rationale was a profound challenge to Lee. As he said in one of our conversations: “I spent about three nights staying awake thinking about this, and it playing on my mind, and me trying to find some excuse to carry on eating meat.” Ultimately, he listened to God…
Andrew Linzey is an Anglican priest and theologian. He is the author of many books making a Christian case for nonhuman rights. These include Animal Theology. Linzey is the founder and director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the editor of the Journal for Animal Ethics.
While I have to translate the motivations of most of the activists and scholars I write about here into spiritual language, he is very clear about the religious motivations of his concern for nonhumans. From Linzey’s description, it sounded as if his Christian identity came first.
“When I was in my teens I had a series of intensely religious experiences,” he told Satya magazine. “They deepened my sense of God as the creator of all things. And they also deepened my sensitivity towards creation itself so that concern for God’s creatures and animal rights followed from that”…
Karen Davis was the founder of United Poultry Concerns, a group which seeks to address the treatment of domestic fowl. As part of her work, she ran a chicken sanctuary in Virginia. Davis was also the author of several books, including The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tail: A Case for Comparing Atrocities.
“I grew up in a meat-eating household in Pennsylvania,” she told the Eugene Veg Education Network. “Although I have always loved animals and hated animal cruelty, I ate animal products so unthinkingly that, while arguing at the dinner table with my father about hunting, it would be over a plate of dead animals.”
Ultimately, her inspiration for giving up meat came from a religious source. Davis read a famous essay by Leo Tolstoy called The First Step, in which the Christian pacifist recounted his visits to Moscow slaughterhouses and argued for vegetarianism. The article was originally a preface to someone else’s book…
Alex Hershaft is a Holocaust survivor and the co-founder of Farm Animal Rights Movement. He organized national non-human liberation conferences, World Day for Farmed Animals and other initiatives. Hershaft served on the boards of a number of organizations, including Jewish Veg and the American Humanist Association.
Perhaps he would use different language to describe the experience, but I believe, from a religious perspective, Hershaft came to see God was present in other beings, like God was present in humans. This realization, which came after a visit to a slaughterhouse in the 1970s, completely reordered his life.
“I suddenly came across piles of hearts, lungs, heads, hooves, and discarded body parts,” he said in a FARM interview. “Very quickly, I made the association with the piles of body parts I saw in Auschwitz, the use of cattle cars to transport people to the gas chambers, [and] the crowding in wood containers of the victims”…
Jo-Anne McCarthur is a photojournalist and animal-liberation activist. She was the subject of a documentary, called The Ghosts in Our Machine. Her photographs documenting the treatment of nonhumans have been collected in a number of books, including We Animals. McCarthur runs a media agency that shares the same name.
She became vegan while interning at Farm Sanctuary. “I found myself in a pasture brushing my new friend Arbuckle,” McCarthur wrote in a Medium post, reminiscing about an elderly steer. “The only non-vegan thing I had with me at the sanctuary was a pair of boots. Leather boots. And I was wearing them that day.”
The photographer realized she didn’t want to wear clothes made of creatures like Arbuckle. McCarthur decided to abstain from animal products going forward. She recounted feeling at peace, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally and ethically. One might add spiritually, which is roughly synonymous with those terms. SOURCE…
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