Johann Hari: The religious excuse for barbarity

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:




Johann Hari: The religious excuse for barbarity
Why are we sitting silently while our treatment of many of our animals regresses to the standard of the sixth century?

Friday, 19 November 2010


If you are engaged in an act of cruelty, there is an easy, effective way to silence your critics and snatch some space to carry on. Tell us all that your religion requires you to do it, and you are "offended" by any critical response. Erect an electric wire fence around your nastiest actions and call it "respect".

There's a good example of this religious modus operandi playing out on a dinner table near you – and this week, we found out it is becoming more and more common. In Britain, it is a crime to kill a conscious cow or sheep or chicken for meat by slashing its throat without numbing it first. The reasons are obvious. If you don't numb an animal, it screams as you hack through its skin, muscle, trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and major nerve trunks, and then it remains conscious as it slowly drowns in its own blood – a process that can take up to six minutes. So we insist that an animal is stunned before its throat is slashed, to ensure it is deeply unconscious. There isn't much humanity in our factory farming system, but this is – at least – a tiny sliver of it, at the end.

But there is a loophole in the law. You are allowed to skip all this and slash the throats of un-numbed, screaming animals if you say God told you to. If you are Muslim, you call it "halal", and if you are Jewish you call it "kosher". Back in the Bronze Age, or the deserts of sixth-century Arabia, it was sensible to act this way. You needed to know your meat was fresh and the animal was not sick, so you made sure it was alive and alert when you killed it. As Woody Allen once said, it wasn't so much a commandment as "advice on how to eat out safely in Jerusalem". But we have much better ways of making sure meat is fresh and healthy now. Yet for many religious people it has hardened into a dogma, to be followed simply because it was laid down in their "holy" texts long ago by "God".

Of course, they claim that this practice isn't cruel at all. Henry Grunwald, chairman of the main body overseeing the certification of kosher meat, Shechita UK, says that when you slash an animal's throat "there is an instant drop in blood pressure in the brain. The animal is dead." Similarly, Raghib Ali, of the Oxford Islam and Muslim Awareness Project, says: "It's not cruel, it is better for the animal." ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-religious-excuse-for-barbarity-2137927.html

[riderinthestorm]

1. Ah yes, the uber religious want a pass for animal cruelty

cuz, you know... it religious!

There was an OP even in GD where the religious didn't want to go through the TSA security because... you guessed it, they are uber-religious! Forget that is just may be a general rights issue that applies to EVERYONE! Nope, they're focused on getting a damn waiver for themselves only, screw the rest of us.

Exemptions are always demanded for the uber-religious doncha know? They could never be cruel to animals, or be terrorists, or have concerns for American civil liberties or ... (insert your pet cause here).

[Crunchy Frog]

2. This really should be posted in the R/T forum.

There would probably be a higher caliber of discussion there.

[burnsei sensei]

3. The superior morality of vegetarianism

has never been more clearly demonstrated than in opposition to kosher and halal slaughter.
Where is PETA?

[ZombieHorde]

4. Vick should have said God wanted him to torture animals to death.

How can animal torture be wrong if it is part of God's will?

edit to add: this is sarcasm