Friday 30 November 2012

It's only natural...

The following is a recent post of mine on CP&S, to a friend on there called Kathleen. Self-explanatory, I hope.



“He (God) destined all material creatures for the good of the human race. “… says the Catechism.

As you know Kathleen, I’m normally and aimiably tolerant of the vagaries of religious thinking (What! You cry!!!) but in this case, after more reflection, I must hark back to your comment where you said:

“I must say that, believe it or not, every living creature has its place in nature, even mosquitoes! And certainly tigers do; grazing animals would increase too much and end up starving to death if there were no natural predators to keep their numbers down and eliminate the weak and sickly ones.
According to the Bible this beautiful and magnificent world was created by God and given into man’s hands to look after and care for.”


The Catechism quote above says nothing about man’s place in nature, as yours rightly and properly does.
The Catechism says “nature,” if you like, is there solely for our “good,” for our benefit.
That strikes me as disgusting and absurd, but we will let that go.

(I still can’t see what “good” dinosaurs ever did for the human race. Can we even assert that without dinosaurs there would have been no humans?
Not with any confidence, I suggest – but we will let that go, as well.)

The real question here is how, given that life has teemed on this planet for around two billion years, and human life as we know it for maybe 150,000 years – a minute scintilla of the timescale – how can anyone seriously assert that man’s function is, “…to look after and care for,” the other living creatures?
Living creatures were doing perfectly well before man finally got here.
On a time scale It’s like saying God put man in charge of the pet shop, which had been open since 9 am, one and a half seconds before the doors shut at 7 pm.

(How would you “look after” a cockroach, anyway? We’ll let that go, too.)

It’s also worth considering that tigers would go on happily culling grazing species regardless of whether man existed or not, as they did for countless aeons before “Homo Sapiens,” who is, we are told, “made in God’s image” evolved sufficiently to start polluting and fouling up the place.

It’s fair to say that without mankind, life on Earth would have been a whole lot less unpleasant.
In short, humanity has been a total disaster for this planet in many ways.


...Christ and St. Francis of Assisi and Rin Tin Tin (that's him) notwithstanding.

1 comment:

FrereRabit said...

Interesting. As the Pope goes on Twitter, some animals of mine provide their own comments.

http://brotherlapin.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/pope-benedict-xvi-goes-on-twitter/