Declaration of misstep

Captive Bolt Pistol

Yesterday, when I published "New Declaration of Independence," I cast it as a revision of our Declaration of Independence. Doing that was to stumble out of the chute, like a slaughterhouse animal whose skull had only been grazed by the captive bolt.
    I've republished the article with a new title and a preamble explaining something of what seems to have gone wrong.

A Declaration of Animal Rights

Sunday. Yesterday, when I published the draft below of the opening for a statement of the rights of animals, I stupidly cast it as a revision of the historical document, our Declaration of Independence. I did so thinking wrongly that I would be imitating the way my New Ten Commandments attempted to bring the Mosaic original up-to-date and replace it with a more enlightened set of ethical principles. I thought I'd be imitating the way a rewrite of "Twas the Night before Christmas" would dissolve the saccharine fantasy of Clement Clarke Moore's original lyrics and reveal some of the sordid underbelly of real Christmas as it is "observed" by most Americans.
    Neither imitation applies. Yesterday's opening should have been presented simply as inspired by the Declaration's opening assumption of the rights of man. Then go on from there.
    I still think, though, that a useful parallel might be developed with the 1776 document's declaration of independence—even if, in the case of animal rights, independence is a more complex concept than political independence from England. For in the case of animal rights, from what would independence be declared? And for whom or what?
    It's not simply a question of animals' independence from something (cruel treatment at our hands, for one essential thing), but also of our independence—from a variety of things: our meat-eating tradition, the market power of the meat industry, perhaps even our inner demons (in contrast to the "better angels of our nature")? A serious obstacle to achieving our "independence" from those (and other) things is that most of them would require a giving-up of something most of us now value—even value so highly as to consider necessity.

I've given the article a new, more accurate title. Its original title is shown below. Despite its being misleading, I'm glad I made a start, however halting and tentative my first step.
 

New Declaration of Independence

A couple of years ago, I wrote an alternative version of the Ten Commandments¹. And the other day, I suggested that, on behalf of animal rights, the poem "Twas the Night before Christmas" needed updating to show that all was not peace upon Earth at that time of the year:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

    My impulse to revise the creeds by which we ought to live has been extending for days to our Declaration of Independence, which declared in writing the "unalienable rights of man."

Other animals, too, I do believe, have rights. And if "the rights of man" existed before they were championed by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and codified in the Declaration of Independence, then so, too, perhaps, did those more fundamental rights of animals. Or, if the rights of man didn't really always exist, but came to exist only by the essential act of a people's pretending that they did and proclaiming them in writing, then a similar pretense and proclamation could be made on behalf and for the sake of animals who cannot speak for themselves.
    It is from that understanding and in that spirit that I propose a New Declaration of Independence. It might open like this:

When, in the course of animal events, it becomes necessary for the animals with a voice to speak for those that have none, and to assume among the powers of the earth the station to which their place in cultural evolution calls them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to speak for the unspeaking.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all animals are created equal with respect to certain unalienable rights, that among these are life....

The recognition of human rights took time, and so will the recognition of animal rights. Conscience calls upon me to begin speaking for the unspeaking, now rather than later.
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1. My statement of the New Ten Commandments needs further revision, mainly to reduce their number so as to avoid redundancy. That was the motivation for the late George Carlin's radical reduction of their number to two.

No gata do it, no haeftu

Traditional Irish
Turnip Halloween Lantern

While fiddling around with an interesting if trivial idea for today's post—the question how the verb to have to (or have got to) came to be used to mean to be made or required to: Wikipedia's article on modal verbs suggests that have to and have got to developed in Hawaiian Creole English, in which "modality is typically indicated by the use of invariant pre-verbal auxiliaries...gata 'have got to,' haeftu 'have to,' baeta 'had better,' sapostu 'am/is/are supposed to'"—

While I was fiddling around with that, I realized that I hadn't paid enough (or any) critical attention to the reasons my friend gave who gently suggested it was because I had become a grumpy old man that I had dumped on Halloween. He had written to me:

This Halloween, I was reflecting on the fact that it's nice that our most celebrated Holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day) all revolve around giving gifts and appreciating the company of others. Rather than abstain, I think it better to put your own twist on the holiday, because God knows, they've been twisted plenty over the millennia for a million different reasons.

    I think I gave this a bye because it's so hopeful and positive-seeming, and my friend has two young daughters, on whose behalf he and his wife have to make difficult parental choices.
    But do these holidays really revolve around sweetness and light? I've already examined Halloween a bit, as well, actually, as Christmas and Thanksgiving. They don't come off well. Christmas and Thanksgiving, in particular, promote an orgy of animal slaughter.
    On Thanksgiving, people go about giving thanks—some of it, admittedly, to the animals they're about to eat, but more of it to their Heavenly Father for "providing" it. Thank you, God, for putting me atop the Great Food Chain of Being. Second only to him.
    During Christmas, people pray for peace on Earth (but not in the abattoirs) and love one another, while participating in the culture of violence toward other animals. Clement Clark Moore's poem needs updating:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the slaughterhouse....

    And do you need reminding that the man whose birthday is associated with Christmas was put on Earth by a "loving" God, according to the pagan myth that came to ennoble it¹, in order to be cruelly tortured and executed? But we get to celebrate that on another holiday.

I think that these second thoughts on grumpiness were sparked by a recent interchange with Motomynd. We were talking about the grand-opening video shown on the Crystal Bridges website for its collection of American art. Among the images the video features are two eighteen-wheelers (like the rigs my Bentonville brother-in-law used to drive for WalMart); one sports a photograph of cooked cow on its side, and the other heralds the logo of one of the world's biggest factory animal farms.
    Motomynd commented:

Did you notice how the camera lens lingered noticeably on each of the logos on the trucks? It struck me as odd to be watching a video I assumed was in some way going to celebrate the grand opening of a wonderful new art museum, but in reality turned out to be mainly a commercial for WalMart and some of its favored vendors. Given the nature of the video, one has to wonder what is in store for visitors to the museum.

    The values embodied in the video clip seem to me to contradict art's essential role in challenging tradition, however useful the WalMart money may have been for the acquisition of Alice Walton's collection and the construction of a museum to show it to a public all too reluctant to be challenged.

I have one of those decorative calendars that comes with a frame in which, month-to-month, you switch to a new placard. The placard for this month features the image of a turkey. I display November with the same spiritual sorrow I feel when I eat "meat" because I'm served it by a host whom I choose not to offend or conflict with.
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1. Another related myth is cited in a letter Thomas Paine wrote to President Thomas Jefferson on Christmas Day 1802: "I congratulate you on the birthday of the New Sun, now called Christmas-Day, and I make you a present of a thought on Louisiana.²"
   
   –Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography, by Christopher Hitchens, 2006, p. 138
2. Paine had in the preceding paragraph suggested that Jefferson, to help France out of her financial straits, purchase the Louisiana Territory, which Spain had just ceded to France. Jefferson did so the following year, for four or ten cents an acre, depending on the source.

Nary a one

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

After recovering sufficiently from a ten-day vacation [on which I took along a copy of Christopher Hitchens's 2006 book, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)], I checked all of the editions of the Durham Herald-Sun that a neighbor had piled on our dining table, to see whether there were any more letters to respond to on the subject of the Bible's having been written by God.
    Nary a one!
    I think I detect some disappointment in myself that there wasn't one, but I'm mostly elated.

This way, I can imagine that Gordon Hansen & Co. have all gone back and re-read their Bibles with newly opened eyes and been able to discover for themselves what Thomas Paine could have told them:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. [–The Age of Reason]
    The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. [ibid]
    What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith. [ibid]

    Paine wrote that "The Bible...has been read more, and examined less, than any [other] book that ever existed" [as quoted by Joseph Lewis in Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine].

Hmm, if there had been another letter to respond to, I'm sure I could have found a way to quote Paine.

A proof for the existence of God

At lunch today I visited a physicist friend on the UNC campus. He's using magnetic resonance imaging to study the properties of metallic glass. For no particular interest (other than curiosity), I asked him point blank whether he believed in God. (I later explained to him that most of my posts here lately have been about religion.)

Being less direct than I am, and rather than simply answering my question with a "yes" or a "no" or an "I don't know," he started talking about how a friend of his, a biologist, had answered the same question. The biologist first said, "No, I don't." But some time later he changed his mind, even "became a Christian." It was all because of a proof he had discovered for the existence of God.

I got all excited. "Is the proof written down? Can you show me a copy?"

It was written down, and my friend had read it, but he didn't have a copy.

I asked him if he thought the proof was valid.

"Yes, it seemed valid." He said it was "a calculation" about something in evolution theory. His friend had started by thinking about the hypothesis, "If God doesn't exist..." and come up with it.

"So, if you thought it was valid...."

"I rejected it anyway. I didn't liked its conclusion."

"You mean, that God exists?"

"Right. For the moment anyway, I don't believe it."

His reaction seemed so familiar to me! I was reminded of my interchange with Tom Sheepandgoats. He tells me that there are passages in the Bible (I believe that's where, and I'm paraphrasing, so I may not have it just right) that clearly establish that man was meant by God to "live forever." I'm willing to read these passages (if I can find them or have them pointed out to me), but I know that I'm still going to have the "so what" demurral about it. So what if the Bible says that? The old "hearsay" problem would intervene. I wrote about the hearsay problem weeks ago and discovered that Thomas Paine had already written about it in 1793 or thereabouts—I had read his very writing fifty years ago (The Age of Reason, a highly instructive book for any young or old rebel). Parts of the Bible might have been a revelation from God to some of the people who wrote it, but to us today it is no better than hearsay. It was not revealed to us. (I haven't thought about this lately, but I think it's still cogent.)

By the way, my physicist friend is Chinese and a citizen of the People's Republic of China. His wife is a Muslim.

"Agnosticism"

Sam Harris, I think, thinks he can know. He is a scientist. He even "knows" that God doesn't exist. That is, he is literally an atheist.

I have labeled myself an agnostic with respect to God. Or an "agnostic Christian," if my answers to my own "religion survey" are to be believed.

But it occurs to me now that I am maybe an agnostic in a wider sense. I don't think that we can know everything. I'm an agnostic, that is, with respect to science, too.

And I don't mind being a lone, wide-ranging, "Thomas Painean" free-thinker. It's the way I've come now, a good deal more than midway through my life, to respond to this "human condition."

It's the economy, stupid?

There is a class of Christian businessman
Whose myth that Mary was God's courtesan
    They're yearly given to exploit,
    And even though they're maladroit,
They do it now again because they can.

It's more than a month before December 25, but the question, "Why Keep Christ in Christmas?" is being asked already by a paying advertiser in our local newspaper¹. I suppose, if the question weren't the title of a full-page ad, but were appearing on the comics page, one might retort something like, "But without 'Christ,' 'Christmas' would be more [Spanish 'mas']."

But it's an ad, and the page goes on:

Why is the Greeting
"Merry Christmas"
so important to the Christian
buying public at Christmas Time?

(Ah, the buying public!)

Because WE CAN NEVER forget
THE PERSON, THE MESSAGE,
and THE MISSION of
-JESUS CHRIST-
"THE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD"
"And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name
JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."

-Matthew 1:21

From "the buying public's" sin of putting too much on their credit cards during shopping sprees? Was Christ's mission, then, to improve "the buying public's" finances?

Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason (1794), wrote that

It is not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born at a time when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing, at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion.

Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or Mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it.

...It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology...The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue...

Aha, revenue!

MANY OF YOU CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS BY PURCHASING
GIFTS TO GIVE TO OTHERS. PLEASE PATRONIZE
BUSINESSES THAT INCLUDE THE GREETING
"MERRY CHRISTMAS"

---

Without CHRIST
there would be no
CHRISTmas.

Tom Paine's final clause, following a semicolon;

...and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious² fraud.

And remains,

Too, perhaps, to ridicule with limericks,
To prick in verse with pointed rhymer's tricks,
    And, by means of jokes
    And of jibes and pokes,
To sting sharply with mocking laughter kicks?

_________________

1. The paid advertising was

   Sponsored By: Upper Room Church of God in Christ • Superintendent Patrick L. Wooden, Sr., Pastor • www.plwooden.org • Called2action.org
   96% of American consumers celebrate Christmas and 5% celebrate Hanukkah, & 2% celebrate Kwanzaa
   (FoxNews.com "Majority OK With Public Nativity Scenes" by Dana Blanton, June 18, 2004)

   "FoxNews"? Didn't you just know that the Busheviks' propaganda organ might be involved in this somehow?
    
2. "Amphibious"? I suppose Paine must have had in mind the word's sense of "combining two characteristics," not necessarily "able to live both on land and in water," but the myth that Jesus was "both god and man."

Thomas Paine on revelation

Wow! Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason is good stuff! I can see how it must have thrilled me to read it as a teenager. In a footnote to a post on October 29, I even used the same word to characterize works of religious revelation that Paine used in 1794:

...Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication¹, if He pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

In the October 29 footnote, I had written:

...I don't count the existence of holy books as evidence that God is. They're just hearsay evidence that someone else may have had such a feeling [as I described in my post²]....

I remember that I felt pretty good about labeling the Bible, the Koran, and other works purporting to be the Inspired Word of God as "hearsay." I even thought I was probably being original!

Paine goes on:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication—after this it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him. When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernational intervention.³

...A thing which everybody is required to believe requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act [the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ] was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part [Jesus's immaculate conception], the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.

____________________

1. One won't, that is, if he believes along with Paine that "the Almighty" does exist and has such a power.
2. "That feeling, that surpassing feeling...."
3. Thomas Paine's footnote: "It is, however, necessary to except the declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children; it is contrary to every principle of moral justice. —Author."

Thomas Paine on religion

We tend to remember Thomas Paine for his writings on Common Sense, but he also wrote what might be considered a precursor to Sam Harris's The End of Faith. I refer to Paine's The Age of Reason, which I've begun to re-read (roughly fifty years after I read it as a teenager). Here's the opening of Paine's book:

To My Fellow-Citizens of the United States of America

I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion upon religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to answer this right, makes a slave of himself in his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. [emphasis mine] The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. Your affectionate friend and fellow-citizen,

Thomas Paine