ANIMAL SUFFERING DISPROVES GOD
Animals can feel pain.
Human persons assume there is a God just because they were lucky enough to have a fairly good and human life. This is arrogance in the extreme for it ignores the fact that there is more suffering and degradation and evil in the world than life and goodness when you take into account the endless evils that happen to animals. It is the, "I am relatively okay in life and that shows me there is a loving God and I take comfort from that and I refuse to see that the suffering of animals and other people proves me wrong." There is callousness in such an attitude. It is the same as, "my lover is kind to me and therefore he is a brilliant person who deserves the best out of life even though he is slaughtering babies every day of the week." It is really trying to get enjoyment while ignoring and refusing to emphasise properly with the suffering of other people and animals. It is admitting that if you suffered enough or saw enough evil it would prove to you that there is no God. But just because you are fine there is a God. That is really looking upon yourself as the most important thing in the universe. It is putting your own comfort first. Believers say that God allows suffering because of free will despite babies and animals suffering though they don't, according to the religions, have free will so they callously ignore this to believe in God. If evil doesn't disprove God then it follows that if I were the only grown-up in the universe and there were billions of babies suffering beyond belief all around me I may and perhaps should believe. If God exists and is good I am bad if I don't believe. The God belief is pure vile hypocrisy.
Few say that it does not matter what animals feel for they are not conscious beings but just robots made of flesh that act like they are suffering but which are not. No scripture supports their view. There is something very perverse in saying that it does not matter how we treat animals for they are robots when this cannot be proved. Evidence is what shows something to be likely to be true. When animals scream in pain and seek happiness it means that it is most likely that they are conscious beings. They really can feel pain. They really can be happy. They probably are conscious for they act it. Religionists who are for cruelty to animals on the grounds that it is not really cruelty are accusing their God of deception of having made animals act conscious when they are not. If their God deceives or does not deceive they should still take animals to be beings worthy of good treatment just in case.
The Church admits that it has no answer to the problem of a good God letting animals suffer (Question 17, Radio Replies, Vol 3). It has been said that we should be grateful that animals are animals for they are better off like that than being flowers (ibid, Question 17). That is a callous answer. Its like saying to a rape victim, “you should be glad that he could rape you for better to be able to be raped than to be a flower”. Would you say that to a rape victim? It is argued too that animals have stronger senses in many ways than us which means they have more pain. But they could have their stronger senses and be less affected by pain. They only need a certain amount of pain for their own good. But they can suffer horrendously. God believers usually deny this and say the general state of animals is a happy one with little pain for they don’t know what they are doing. As always, cruelty has to be whitewashed over for the sake of God. They know fine well that only a person who knows what it is like to be an animal should say that.
Jesus said, "Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father keeps feeding them. Are you not worth much more than they?" (Matthew 6:34. The error in this is that birds might not reap but they have to look for food just as we do. Birds not sowing and reaping and still getting food then does not prove what Jesus tried to use it to prove. (He is a God who makes mistakes then!) Also, even if we have to or prefer to regard human persons as more important than animals it does not follow that we should believe we are better. Jesus wants us to believe it. That is bad enough. But it is worse when he wants us to believe it as if he were a speaker for God and knows things others do not. He uses that for us to listen to him and obey him. Just because animals don't have the same bodies as us doesn't mean they are deprived of the knowledge that they exist and sense things just as well as we do. If abortion is killing unborn babies and if we feel we have to allow it or just prefer to allow it we only make things worse by encouraging or asking people to believe the babies are not people. See the point?
Adam
was offered animals as companions by God in the Book of Genesis. Robots would be no use for that. So the book teaches that animals are
conscious that is assuming that the book is not being foolish. In Genesis 9, we read that animals can sin:
“And surely for your lifeblood I will require an accounting; from every beast I
will require it; and from man [who spills another’s lifeblood] I will require a
reckoning” (v5).
John
Hick wrote of the lower species that we cannot “even prove demonstratively that
they have consciousness. There is,
however, sufficient evidence for the presence of some degree of consciousness,
and some kind of experience of pain, at least through the vertebrate kingdom,
to prohibit us from denying that there is any problem of animal suffering” (Evil
and the God of Love, page 346-7). He
presented some evidence. He declared
that evolution means that human awareness is just different in degree from
animal awareness. The nervous structure
of the non-human vertebrates is similar to ours meaning that they can
suffer. The higher vertebrates can be
trained to avoid pain and go for pleasure.
God
is so evil that he makes animals prey on one another. So many do it and it is terrible. John Stuart Mill, thinking of nature or God’s
design, wrote that God made animals impelled by their instincts to kill and
torment each other and made them unable to survive any other way. God forces them to be cruel so God is
definitely cruel.
Religion
blames human misuse of free will not God for human suffering in the world. It thinks God allows no suffering to be
wasted. God uses it in his complicated
plan to make us better people. Most
animal suffering is unknown to us who are here to do good
with our free will so when we don’t know it is wasted suffering. When bird is killed by a cat in the forest nobody
ever finds out about it. When a dog has
terrible stomach cramps in the middle of the night nobody knows. When a slug goes on to a patch of salt next a
bin it dies in torture and nobody knows.
And most animal suffering that is seen is not even thought about again
after a few minutes so it might as well not have happened at all. What about the suffering that took place
before human beings walked the earth? If
suffering happens so that free beings might be good then nobody can say then
that animal suffering is for a purpose for we know nothing about much of
it. God could have made animals as
unconscious robots and should have. If
we grow spiritually through helping animals is that growth worth the animal
suffering? That growth is essentially
made of caring feeling and a better attitude but what about the feelings of the
animal? The suffering would tip the
scales more than the growth. The animal
will not live on after death like us. It
is worse to hurt a being with a short life than one with a longer one. If you appreciate the suffering for making
you grow then that is callous and the only growing you have done spiritually is
growing in hypocrisy.
All
the animal suffering that happened before we evolved cannot be explained and is
proof that there is no God. Those who
say that animals have no moral rights but are to be treated kindly because God
made them and no artist likes his work mocked (eg Question 51, Radio Replies
3) are telling those who have little or no belief in God that they may
abuse animals if they want for that is not a reason. And when God lets animals rip one another up
how could he care as long as we don’t abuse too many of them and drive them to
extinction? Is it genuinely caring to
use the God belief to protect animals?
What does it say about us that we can’t just see that animal suffering
is an evil to be prevented and averted instead of looking for a belief to tell
us that its wrong?
It
would be answered that if secret suffering never happens then we could stop God
causing or allowing suffering simply by refusing to know. It would be a sin for us to help them if God
should hurt animals. And we would not
know for sure if it really succeeded.
The answer does not work.
Augustine
said that animals have to suffer for God needs to make different grades of
being as if that would be an answer! He
blamed animals suffering on the sin of Adam and Eve. If God made nature red in tooth and claw
because of them then it was just an excuse.
Religion says that it was people who sinned not
animals. We know from science that
animals were suffering and dying long before man appeared on earth.
Some
argue that animals may be abused because they don’t deserve good
treatment. They mean that since the
animals don’t have the free will necessary to merit rewards or punishments then
we have to treat them as we please. That
is very wrong. You do not abuse a being
that can suffer. Freedom does not come
into it.
If
God abuses animals cruelly then we should do the same if he is good. We should approve of it then. So we should not believe in God. Better to do
that than to risk praising a being for doing evil and gratuitously causing suffering. Your heart is deceptive above all things
according to the Bible prophet Jeremiah.
So you could be secretly glad to see the cruelty. You might not be aware of this or the degree
of your approval yourself. Clearly, any doctrine
that risks you condoning evil should be rejected. Religionists say that God is the centre of
their lives and actions. And then they refuse
to imitate because they fear society’s mores and taboos more than him. They are not so godly after all.
Different
kinds of animals are at different levels of intelligence and awareness. The evil Bible says that God has given us all
animals as food. The Lord told the Hebrews
to kill goats and sheep in sacrifice and eat them in the book of
Leviticus. It should tell us to eat the
lower animals and not the higher ones when they are available but it does not. God could have made it unnecessary for us to
eat the higher animals by making their flesh as tough as old boots and make the
edible lower ones more common. That is,
only if one assumes that we should have meat to eat which is wrong for God
could have made plants that suffice to give us all the nutrition and pleasure we
need.
Animal
suffering disproves the love and therefore the existence of God. Those who call it a mystery are offending
against the law that we should have as few mysteries as possible. It would be better to believe in an
all-powerful spirit robot that does not give a toss than in a spirit God of
love.
Human free will isn’t
worth the suffering of even one animal.
Nothing can be more innocent than an animal.
The religious are really just refusing to admit the truth. Their mystery is silly and is mere stubbornness.
Believers often say that when a person tortures an animal the worst damage is probably done to the tormentor and not the animal (page 214, The Enigma of Evil) the implication being that it is not such a big deal that the animal is hurt. In other words, the tormentor ruins his own soul by enjoying such evil and corrupts himself. But if the tormentor repents quickly this will not happen. The Christian cannot condemn the animal tormentor for hurting the animal as much as for his damaging himself spiritually. But if he can prevent damage by repenting then it is not damaging that is wrong and immoral but not repenting. Christians are making the torment of animals out to be a tolerable and minor wrong in which case it is impossible to see how anybody maltreating animals could damage themselves in any important way. It is contradictory to say that that you ruin yourself by hurting an animal and what you do to yourself is the main wrong. If the animal isn't important, if its suffering isn't important, then how can you do yourself much damage by torturing it?
Presumably the
closeted heretic only damages himself too.
But religion still says that heresy is a dreadful sin on its own apart
from not repenting of heresy. So if you
are a heretic for ten harmless seconds it is still a major offence. I am tired of the nonsense that Christians
foist on the unsuspecting world.
If you are an animal lover, do not give money to a faith that demeans the rights of animals.