Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Animal Sacrifice And Factory Farming

I'm reading David Clough's On Animals, and this line reminds me that I was once taught that animal sacrifice is barbaric.  It may be so, but I don't think that makes it worse than what we do today.  If anything, sacrificing an animal might be much better, since it regards the animal as a fit gift for the divine rather than as a raw material to be fed into the machinery of slaughterhouses:

“In the period of the history of the Christian Church, we have traveled from a time in which the killing of animals was only permitted within religious rituals to a time in which 60 billion animals per year are killed for human consumption, the majority of which are raised, slaughtered and processed in factory conditions far removed from the sight or concern of their consumers.”
David L. Clough, On Animals: Volume I, Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012) (xiii)

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