Special Report
The Discovery Attacker: A True Green Believer
The Silver Spring gunman’s misanthropy didn’t come out of nowhere.
News Wednesday afternoon that an armed gunman had entered the cable TV headquarters of Discovery Communications in Silver Spring, Maryland and begun taking hostages alarmed people throughout the Washington, D.C. area and around the country. As law enforcement officials negotiated with the suspect, posts on social media outlets inevitably began arguing over the ideological motivations of the hostage-taker, James J. Lee. Conservatives were quick to point out the suspect’s radical environmentalist manifesto, while left-leaning sources disclaimed any connection. News a few hours later that the suspect had been shot and killed by police spawned a round of smug black humor, concluding that he had been successful in accomplishing one of his chief demands, a smaller world population.
The immediate verdict from the online world seems to be that Lee was simply insane, even as differently motivated voices tried to pin the source of his insanity on each other. If we take a step back, though, we can look at the demands he made — which law enforcement officials said “mirrored” those in his online manifesto — and see the wider context of Lee’s beliefs.
His focus on population control is clear from the beginning. Lee demands that the Discovery Channel and its affiliates must “Focus…on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution.” On the topic of immigration, he recommends that we “find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that” and in order to safeguard the future of wildlife, he writes that doing so “means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”
While his rhetoric is crude and offensive, that doesn’t mean his ideas don’t have wider currency. From the time of Paul Ehrlich’s infamous 1968 manifesto The Population Bomb to the work of groups like Zero Population Growth (first re-branded as simply “ZPG” and currently known as “Population Connection”), the specter of unsupportable population growth has been one of the environmental movement’s greatest scare stories. It’s the kind of all-encompassing disaster that was supposed to be hard to ignore — even if you didn’t care about the environment, the pitch goes, you have to be worried about overpopulation! You don’t want millions of people to starve to death or see wars spawned by a fight over food and scarce natural resources, do you?
But how does a concern over famines and resources depletion translate into the vicious anti-human ideology of a James Lee? The answer is clear — combine one old theory about the inherent limitations of mankind with one new theory about the alienation of human beings from the rest of the natural world. Lee provides us with all of the leads we need when he demands that the Discovery Channel “develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences.”
The Rev. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) is the godfather of all population scaremongers. Malthus was an Anglican clergyman and political philosopher whose ideas have influenced a wide range of scientists and thinkers through the centuries. His central insight, however, comes from his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” where he posits that times of prosperity encourage greater population growth, and that a larger population will inevitably resulting in less food and fewer resources for all, thus leading to widespread poverty and misery. Malthus’s anti-utopian outlook was based on deep skepticism of the ability of human beings to rise above their biological constraints and solve the problems posed by limited resources and an expanding population. It was Malthus’s fatalistic view of the world that would, unfortunately, inspire generations of scholars and eventually help give birth to the modern environmental movement itself.
Prior to the first Earth Day in 1970, Friends of the Earth and Ballantine Books co-published The Environmental Handbook: Prepared for the First National Environmental Teach-In, featuring essays from such acclaimed environmental thinkers as population alarmist Paul Ehrlich (three chapters) and the staff of the Berkeley Ecology Center, which advised that the most important environmental goal was to reduce world population by half. These secular saints from the dawn of environmentalism were also startlingly honest about how to accomplish this goal. Garrett Hardin, who at the time was a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave one of his chapter sections the bracing title “Freedom to Breed is Intolerable.” In fact, the original Environmental Handbook is riddled with melodramatic claims about the evils of overpopulation and authoritarian recommendations for countering it.
Given this gold-star pedigree, it’s not difficult to imagine why a man with an unhealthy fixation on environmental propaganda would become obsessed with population control, even to the point of looking at a newborn baby and seeing nothing but the threat of future pollution. Which brings us to the final piece of the puzzle — the inherently anti-human nature of environmental philosophy.
Lee, like many modern environmentalists, goes beyond the warnings of the founding generation of green thinkers when it comes to overpopulation. Many of the early activists merely made practical arguments about the kind of Malthusian misery that would be inflicted on the poor of the world if resources were stretched too thin by too many people. Since then, however, environmental awareness has been raised much higher, by writers who have argued that the planet itself is a living entity, an idea generally credited to ecologist James Lovelock and referred to as the “Gaia theory.” In this view of the world, all other species contribute to the creation of a harmonious, unified whole, with only the unsustainable burden of human civilization causing trouble.
These acolytes like to refer to human beings as a “plague” or a “disease” infecting the planet. For them, and by their own internal logic, no number of human beings is small enough. Saving the earth isn’t about providing clean air and water to our grandchildren, it’s about restoring an Eden-like state of earthly paradise. Only this time, human beings are both the Serpent and the original sinners.
No doubt environmental activist groups will deny any connection between the violent action of James J. Lee and their own work. And on the surface, that may appear to be so. But the flawed theories and anti-human prejudices of modern environmentalism’s founders cast a long shadow — and the unflinching misanthropy of the movement’s modern radicals continue to attract disaffected individuals looking for something to believe in. Lee’s willingness to endanger the lives of others is thankfully rare, but his conviction that “the planet does not need humans” is anything but.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (124) | Leave a comment
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Appleby| 9.2.10 @ 7:10AM
I have heard that the entire population of the Earth could be moved to Australia and the density would be just like that of Japan. That would leave the rest of the earth to the farmers. What problem?
Clearly this man had a problem with children; if anybody investigates, it might be found that he was being pressed for child support from more than one direction -- or possibly have to listen daily to screaming, uncontrolled toddlers in the park and on the train. There are days this could make me snap, too -- but then I remember the beautiful little boys and girls at Sunday School, the courteous five year old who offered me his seat on the subway in a gentlemanly and cheerful way -- shaming the high school boys who resolutely pretended to be asleep -- and the father with his child outside the church on Sunday pointing out quietly but firmly that every other child was sitting quietly and the only one misbehaving was Junior, and insisting that Junior too could sit still and be quiet.
Children should be seen and not heard, but certainly they should be born. I hope this gunman repented with his dying breath and was carried to Heaven where he could learn.
Alan Brooks| 9.2.10 @ 6:32PM
Sounds like another Ted the Unabomber-type. Just today it was announced we've left the Holocene, and have entered the anthrocene, or something.
If only Lee had waited one day, he might have spent some time on the ramifications of change; and how he is-- was-- nothing but a speck whose death signified nothing. An act of hopeless exhibitionism, no better than Dave Berkowitz's
Alan Brooks| 9.2.10 @ 6:44PM
Unabomber
Manson
And now this Lee character trying to make A Bold Statement in a blaze of glory. The Mansn killing of the LaBiancas had something to with trees in California; perhaps redwoods, or merely conifers, joshua trees-- who knows?
But though I agree with Vasu Murti that animals shouldn't be harmed, killing the LaBiancas and sticking a fork in Leno's stomach didn't help the cause of old growth trees. Gosh thee was enough paper used in the Manson Trial and in books about him to have required an entire forest in California.
To say the very very least.
Adam A. Wanderer| 9.8.10 @ 11:33AM
Even stopped clocks are right twice a day. The poor guy didn't realize all he had to do was wait, and Mother Nature would deal with the problem. She's already taken some of the first steps.
Jereon J| 11.14.10 @ 1:09AM
oooo just what are those steps. Will zombies be implicated?
Adam A. Wanderer| 9.8.10 @ 11:27AM
Australia is a common myth. The people in Australia today don't have enough fresh water to use thanks to the high mountains that blocks rainfall. You couldn't move the food in enough volume to Australia to feed a fraction of the population, food has to be produced within a reasonable range of the people to be fed and enough transportation has to exist. And, trust me, you don't want to live in an area with Japan's population density, it's the most expensive place on earth to live. There's often more than one body to a grave site in Japan, does that appeal to you? But, give it time, Mother Nature will eventually correct our over breeding follies.
Jereon J| 11.14.10 @ 1:08AM
Rubbish.
Japan is only crowded in its major urban centers. outside of those cities, the densities are on par with the EU.
Adellered| 9.2.10 @ 7:33AM
When I was in college we'd joke and explain someone's abherent behavior as the result of too early toilet trainng. I suspect that this may partially explain our killer's underlying pathology. Nevertheless: the whole "green" movement is profoundly opposed to humanity.
Vasu Murti | 9.2.10 @ 1:52PM
Adellered concludes:
"...the whole 'green' movement is profoundly opposed to humanity."
I beg to differ.
Jonathan Safran Foer's recent book, Eating Animals, has opened eyes to the cruelty of killing animals for food. One of the many books which brought me into the cause of animal rights was written a generation earlier.
A vegetarian since 1982, I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985, as anti-apartheid demonstrations rocked the UC San Diego campus. I first became interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.
Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:
"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...
"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...
"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.
"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."
Author John Robbins provides these points and facts in his Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987):
Half the water consumed in the U.S. irrigates land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times as concentrated as raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause thrice as much water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes thrice as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.
Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a 1,000 lb. steer could float a destroyer. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!
Subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.
Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been one acre every five seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.
One-third of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes thrice as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."
"All Things Are Connected," the concluding chapter to John Robbins' Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America(1987), begins with a quote from (reincarnationist) Christian mystic Edgar Cayce:
"Destiny, or karma, depends upon what the soul has done about what it has become aware of."
John Robbins writes:
"At the present time, when most of us sit down to eat, we aren't very aware of how our food choices affect the world. We don't realize that in every Big Mac there is a piece of the tropical rainforests, and with every billion burgers sold another hundred species become extinct. We don't realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health. We don't hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don't see the toxic poisons (pesticides) accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come.
"But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget. Of course, we can push it all to the back of our minds, and we may need to do this, at times, to endure the enormity of what is involved.
"But the earth itself will remind us, as will our children, and the animals and the forests and the sky and the rivers, that we are part of this earth, and it is part of us. All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth.
"Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful--what's best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend."
When I first read Diet for a New America, I thought it could have the same kind of impact on mainstream secular American society that Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet had in the '70s.
In writing his expose on the livestock industry, John Robbins has been compared to Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and other whistleblowers. I had the opportunity to meet John Robbins in September 1988. It was one of the most inspirational moments of my life!
He was heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. He renounced it at a young age. He traveled to India, opened a yoga ashram in Canada, etc. He spoke of Gandhi and nonviolence. His son Ocean Robbins founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) and is also dedicated to promoting veganism.
(yes, even on the Left, there are "family values"!)
I asked John if he would try and get the American Left to support animal rights. He told me that he had sent a copy of his book to Mother Jones, a left-liberal periodical published in San Francisco.
Many on the Left are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. Joanna Macy spoke at the San Francisco Green Festival, in November 2005. In his 1990 updated and revised edition of Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes that many of the political parties leaning towards the "Green" end of the political spectrum in Europe were beginning to oppose animal experimentation.
John Robbins elaborated further on the economic waste of raising animals for food in May All Be Fed, which my brother gave me for Christmas in 1992.
Oxfam, the international charity, reports that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats!
Meat consumption in Taiwan increased 600 percent between 1950 and 1990. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used.
Twenty-five years ago, Syria was a barley exporter. But in the intervening years, livestock have consumed increasing amounts of the country's grain. Now, despite a phenomenal 1000 percent increase in the land area devoted to producing barley, Syria must import the cereal.
John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.
When I met with Miyun Park of Compassion Over Killing in the fall of 2004 (she was visiting from out of state; attending an animal rights conference at UC Berkeley), I told her John Robbins' Diet for a New America was the book that did it for me...it made me want to go public with the vegan message.
A 2007 pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today. According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined. Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.
"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."
---Union Nations' Food and Agriculture Association
70% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. (Audubon Society)
Over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. (Greenpeace)
It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef. (Mother Jones)
Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water.
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.
I had the opportunity to hear John Robbins speak at a Unitarian church here in Oakland, CA in 2001. The church was PACKED! John writes in The Food Revolution (2001):
"The revolution sweeping our relationship to our food and our world, I believe, is part of an historical imperative. This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent."
jayde| 9.2.10 @ 2:17PM
hey, i'm a member of PETA....
People Eating Tasty Animals!
The Big E| 9.2.10 @ 2:20PM
With apologies to the immortal Jerry Clower, you sir, are obviously educated far beyond your intelligence.
Bill| 9.2.10 @ 2:32PM
mmm, I like bacon, bacon is gooood!
from Pulp Fiction
The Big E| 9.2.10 @ 2:37PM
With apologies to the immortal Anthony Bourdain, it just ain't a party till someone kills a pig.
jayde| 9.2.10 @ 2:59PM
yes, bacon is good but beef is better, particularly a t-bone steak. but buffalo meat is the best.
RDN in Houston| 9.2.10 @ 2:44PM
There is a problem with your notion that we should not eat animal flesh. As a Christian, I believe what the Bible teaches on this subject. After the flood, we have the following account in Genesis 9: 1-3:
1 So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. 3 Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.
Since there are no updates in the New Testament of the Bible on eating meats and vegetables (except to widen the meats to include certain animals that were unclean under the Law of Moses), I am assured that God meant for us to use the things he has provided to support life. I believe God's commandmends over those of man the created.
Also, God intended for man to multiply and inherit the earth. Man might not be able to completely understand this but be assured, God does.
Vasu Murti | 9.3.10 @ 9:52PM
RDN in Houston...Please consider the following seven points:
1. I would like to see organized religion take up the struggle for animal rights. Religion has been wrong before. It has been said that on issues such as women's rights and human slavery, religion has impeded social and moral progress. It was a Spanish Catholic priest, Bartolome de las Casas, who first proposed enslaving black Africans in place of the Native Americans who were dying off in great numbers.
The church of the past never considered human slavery to be a moral evil. The Protestant churches of Virginia, South Carolina, and other southern states actually passed resolutions in favor of the human slave traffic.
Human slavery was called "by Divine Appointment," "a Divine institution," "a moral relation," "God's institution," "not immoral," but "founded in right." The slave trade was called "legal," "licit," "in accordance with humane principles" and "the laws of revealed religion."
New Testament verses calling for obedience and subservience on the part of slaves (Titus 2:9-10; Ephesians 6:5-9; Colossians 3:22-25; I Peter 2:18-25) and respect for the master (I Timothy 6:1-2; Ephesians 6:5-9) were often cited in order to justify human slavery. Some of Jesus' parables refer to human slaves. Paul's epistle to Philemon concerns a runaway slave returned to his master.
The Quakers were one of the earliest religious denominations to condemn human slavery. "Paul's outright endorsement of slavery should be an undying embarrassment to Christianity as long as they hold the entire New Testament to be the word of God," says contemporary Quaker physician Dr. Charles P. Vaclavik. "Without a doubt, the American slaveholders quoted Paul again and again to substantiate their right to hold slaves.
"The moralist movement to abolish slavery had to go to non-Biblical sources to demonstrate the immoral nature of slavery. The abolitionists could not turn to Christian sources to condemn slavery, for Christianity had become the bastion of the evil practice through its endorsement by the Apostle Paul. Only the Old Testament gave the abolitionist any Biblical support in his efforts to free the slaves. 'You shall not surrender to his master a slave who has taken refuge with you.' (Deuteronomy 23:15) What a pittance of material opposing slavery from a book supposedly representing the word of God."
In 1852, Josiah Priest wrote Bible Defense of Slavery. Others claimed blacks were subhuman. Buckner H. Payne, calling himself "Ariel," wrote in 1867: "the tempter in the Garden of Eden...was a beast, a talking beast...thenegro." Ariel argued that since the negro was not part of Noah's family, he must have been a beast. Eight souls were saved on the ark, therefore, the negro must be a beast, and "consequently, he has no soul to be saved."
The status of animals in contemporary human society is like that of human slaves in centuries past. Quoting Luke 4:18, Colossians 3:11, Galatians 3:28 or any other biblical passages in favor of liberty, equality and an end to human slavery in the 18th or 19th century would have been met with the same kind of response animal rights activists receive today if they quote Bible verses in favor of ethical vegetarianism and compassion towards animals.
2. Some of the worst crimes in history have also been committed in the name of religion. There's a great song along these lines from 1992 by Rage Against the Machine, entitled "Killing in the Name Of".
In a 1989 interview with the Animals' Agenda, Reverend Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest and author of Christianity and the Rights of Animals, insisted, "...my primary loyalty is to God, and not to the church. You see, I don’t think the claims of the church and the claims of God are identical...The church is a very human institution, a frail human institution, and it often gets things wrong. Indeed, it’s worse than that. It’s often a stumbling block and often a scandal."
Linzey expressed optimism from a study of history: "Let’s take your issue of slavery. If you go back in history, say 200 years, you’ll find intelligent, conscientious, loving Christians defending slavery, because they hardly gave it two thoughts. If they were pressed, they might have said, ‘Slavery is part of progress, part of the Christianization of the dark races.’
"A hundred or perhaps as little as 50 years later, what you suddenly find is that the very same Christian community that provided one of the major ideological defenses of slavery had begun to change its mind...here is a classic example of where the Christian tradition has been a force for slavery and a force for liberation.
"Now, just think of the difficulties that those early Christian abolitionists had to face. scripture defended slavery. For instance, in Leviticus 25, you’re commanded to take the child of a stranger as a slave...St. Paul simply said that those who were Christian slaves should be better Christians. Almost unanimously, apart from St. Gregory, the church fathers defended slavery, and for almost 1800 years, Christians defended and supported slavery. So, in other words, the change that took place within the Christian community on slavery is not just significant, it is historically astounding.
"Now, I give that example because I believe the case of animals is in many ways entirely analogous. We treat animals today precisely as we treated slaves, and the theological arguments are often entirely the same or have the same root. I believe the movement for animal rights is the most significant movement in Christianity, morally, since the emancipation of the slaves. And it provides just as many difficulties for the institutional church..."
Why do some Christians regard not harming or not killing the unborn as a Christian duty, whereas not harming or not killing animals are dismissed as "good works?
Differing interpretations of Scripture means Christians have found themselves unable to agree upon many pressing moral issues—including abortion.
Exodus 21:22-24 says if two men are fighting and one injures a pregnant woman and the child is killed, he shall repay her according to the degree of injury inflicted upon her, and not the fetus. On the other hand, the Didache (Apostolic Church teaching) forbade abortion.
"There has to be a frank recognition that the Christian church is divided on every moral issue under the sun: nuclear weapons, divorce, homosexuality, capital punishment, animals, etc.," says Reverend Linzey. "I don’t think it’s desirable or possible for Christians to agree upon every moral issue. And, therefore, I think within the church we have no alternative but to work within diversity."
3. A 1980 United Nations report states that women constitute half the world’s population, perform nearly two-thirds of its work hours, yet receive one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-hundredth of the world’s property.
The impact of the women’s movement upon the church is being heralded as a Second Reformation. Women are now being ordained as priests, pastors and ministers, while patriarchal references to the Almighty as "Father" are replaced with the gender-neutral "Parent." Jesus Christ is designated the "Child of God."
The words of Scripture—perhaps, more accurately, the words of the apostle Paul—on this subject are seen today not as a divine revelation, but rather as an embarrassment from centuries past:
"Let the women keep silent in the churches, for they are not allowed to speak. Instead, they must, as the Law says, be in subordination. If they wish to learn something, let them inquire of their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church...let a woman learn quietly with complete submission. I do not allow a woman to teach, neither to domineer over a man; instead she is to keep still. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, since she was deceived, experienced the transgression. She will, however, be kept safe through the child-bearing, if with self-control she continues in faith and love and consecration."
(I Corinthians 14:34-35; I Timothy 2:11-15)
Many churches now claim these instructions were merely temporary frameworks used to build churches in the first century pagan world—they are not to be taken as universal absolutes for all eternity. If churches, Scripture and Christianity can adapt and be redefined or reinterpreted in a changing world to end injustices towards women, they can certainly do likewise towards animals.
4. Professor Henry Bigelow observed: "There will come a time when the world will look back to modern vivisection in the name of science as they do now to burning at the stake in the name of religion."
Animal rights, as a secular, moral philosophy, may appear to be at odds with traditional religious thinking (e.g., human "dominion" over other animals), but this is equally true of democracy and representative government in place of the divine right of kings, the separation of church and state, the abolition of human slavery, the emancipation of women, birth control, the sexual revolution, LGBT rights, and all social progress since the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment.
5.Some of the greatest figures in human history have been in favor of ethical vegetarianism and animal rights. These include: Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Alice Walker, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Browning, Percy Shelley, Voltaire, Thomas Hardy, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pythagoras, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Schweitzer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, Frederick Douglass, Francis Bacon, William Wordsworth, the Buddha, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau.
6. Abraham Lincoln once said: "I care not for a man’s religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it." Some of the most distinguished figures in the history of Christianity were vegetarian as well.
A partial list includes:
St. James, St. Matthew, Clemens Prudentius, Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, St. Jerome, Aegidius, St. Benedict, Boniface, St. Richard of Wyche, St. Filippo Neri, St. Columba, John Wray, Thomas Tryon, John Wesley, Joshua Evans, William Metcalfe, General William Booth, Ellen White, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, and Reverend V.A. Holmes-Gore.
7. The International Network for Religion and Animals (INRA) was founded in 1985 by Virginia Bouraquardez. Its educational and religious programs are meant to "bring religious principles to bear upon humanity’s attitude towards the treatment of our animal kin...and, through leadership, materials, and programs, to successfully interact with clergy and laity from many religious traditions."
According to INRA:
"Religion counsels the powerful to be merciful and kind to those weaker than themselves, and most of humankind is at least nominally religious. But there is a ghastly paradox. Far from showing mercy, humanity uses its dominion over other animal species to pen them in cruel close confinement; to trap, club, and harpoon them; to poison, mutilate, and shock them in the name of science; to kill them by the billions; and even to blind them in excruciating pain to test cosmetics.
"Some of these abuses are due to mistaken understandings of religious principles; others, to a failure to apply those principles. Scriptures need to be fully researched concerning the relationship of humans to nonhuman animals, and to the entire ecological structure of Nature. Misinterpretations of scripture taken out of context, or based upon questionable theological assumptions need to be re-examined."
In the winter of 1990, INRA’s Executive Director, the Reverend Dr. Marc A. Wessels wrote: "As a Christian clergyman who speaks of having compassion for other creatures and who actively declares the need for humans to develop an ethic that gives reverence for all of life, I hope that others will open their eyes, hearts and minds to the responsibility of loving care for God’s creatures."
In a pamphlet entitled The Spiritual Link Between Humans and Animals, Reverend Wessels writes: "We recognize that many animal rights activists and ecologists are highly critical of Christians because of our relative failure thus far adequately to defend animals and to preserve the natural environment. Yet there are positive signs of a growing movement of Christian activists and theologians who are committed to the process of ecological stewardship and animal liberation.
"Individual Christians and groups on a variety of levels, including denominational, ecumenical, national and international, have begun the delayed process of seriously considering and practically addressing the question of Christian responsibility for animals. Because of the debate surrounding the ‘rights’ of animals, some Christians are considering the tenets of their faith in search for an appropriate ethical response."
According to Reverend Wessels:
"The most important teaching which Jesus shared was the need for people to love God with their whole self and to love their neighbor as they loved themselves. Jesus expanded the concept of neighbor to include those who were normally excluded, and it is therefore not too farfetched for us to consider the animals as our neighbors.
"To think about animals as our brothers and sisters is not a new or radical idea. By extending the idea of neighbor, the love of neighbor includes love of, compassion for, and advocacy of animals. There are many historical examples of Christians who thought along those lines, besides the familiar illustration of St. Francis. An abbreviated listing of some of those individuals worthy of study and emulation includes Saint Blaise, Saint Comgall, Saint Cuthbert, Saint Gerasimus, Saint Giles, and Saint Jerome, to name but a few."
Reverend Wessels notes: "In the Bible, which we understand as the divine revelation of God, there is ample evidence of the vastness and goodness of God toward animals. The Scriptures announce God as the creator of all life, the One responsible for calling life into being and placing it in an ordered fashion which reflects God’s glory. Humans and animals are a part of this arrangement. Humanity has a special relationship with particular duties to God’s created order, a connection to the animals by which they are morally bound by God’s covenant with them.
"According to the Scriptures, Christians are called to respect the life of animals and to be ethically engaged in protecting the life and liberty of all sentient creatures. As that is the case, human needs and rights do not usurp an animal’s intrinsic rights, nor should they deny the basic liberty of either individual animals or specific species. If the Christian call can be understood as being a command to be righteous, then Christians must have a higher regard for the lives of animals.
"Jesus’ life was one of compassion and liberation;" concludes Reverend Wessels, "his ministry was one which understood and expressed the needs of the oppressed. Especially in the past decade, Christians have been reminded that their faith requires them to take seriously the cries of the oppressed.
"Theologians such as Gutierrez, Miranda, and Hinkelammert have defined the Christian message as one which liberates lives and transforms social patterns of oppression. That concept of Christianity which sees God as the creator of the universe and the One who seeks justice is not exclusive; immunity from cruelty and injustice is not only a human desire or need—the animal kingdom also needs liberation."
A growing number of Christian theologians, clergy and activists are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. In a pamphlet entitled Christian Considerations on Laboratory Animals, Reverend Marc Wessels notes that in laboratories animals cease to be persons and become "tools of research." He cites William French of Loyala University as having made an identical observation at a gathering of Christian ethicists at Duke University—a conference entitled "Good News for Animals?"
In a speech delivered on Earth Day, 1990, Reverend Wessels acknowledged:
"It is a fact that no significant social reform has yet taken place in this country without the voice of the religious community being heard. The endeavors of the abolition of slavery; the women’s suffrage movement; the emergence of the pacifist tradition during World War I; the struggles to support civil rights, labor unions, and migrant farm workers; and the anti-nuclear and peace movements have all succeeded in part because of the power and support of organized religion. Such authority and energy is required by individual Christians and the institutional church today if the liberation of animals is to become a reality."
Kpar| 9.2.10 @ 2:59PM
Don't I recall reading that Vegans have a lower life expectancy by 7 years?
Interesting that that is close to the lowered life expectancy of tobacco smokers...
Vasu Murti | 9.3.10 @ 1:54PM
Kpar asks:
"Don't I recall reading that Vegans have a lower life expectancy by 7 years?
Not at all.
The following points and facts are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by the mother-daughter writing team of Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
---Albert Einstein
"Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly 9 billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals just for the enjoyment of consumers. Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals. Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a 'magic pill' that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases."
---Alex Hershaft, PhD, president, Farm Animal Reform Movement
When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.
Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.
One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.
A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.
Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.
"The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses. If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be universally practiced."
---Dr. Benjamin Spock, author, child expert
"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
---Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease
Stroke is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Vegetarians have a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of having a stroke. Stroke, like heart disease, is associated with diets high in saturated fats, and the vegetarian diet is naturally low in these fats.
The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.
Studies have shown that decreasing a woman's animal fat intake can reduce the chances that she will die from breast cancer. A large-scale, long-term study in the Netherlands found a powerful connection between the amount of animal fat consumed and the rate of prostate cancer. A review of a dozen studies found dietary fat strongly correlated with prostate cancer.
Ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers have all been shown to be strongly correlated to the amount of animal fat in one's diet, and vegetarian women have significantly lower rates of these cancers.
"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."
---Dr. Neal Barnard, Executive Director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."
---William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study
"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings..."
---Dr. William Roberts, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Cardiology
Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10 percent per year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed 60 million people.
bluecollarbytes| 9.2.10 @ 8:08PM
Meat, put here by God for man's consumption, is tasty, and part of a healthy diet in moderation. You can reject the belief, but you can never force your 'anti-whatever you feel like' on others. If it floats your boat, making you feel superior, have fun with that.
tonypal| 9.3.10 @ 2:26AM
I think the late, great General Anthony McAuliffe said it best: NUTS.
Carl| 9.3.10 @ 11:06AM
While your love for animals is commendable, your science is seriously out-0f-date. The emerging problem in the West today is depopulation and population growth in the rest of the world is slowing. In the future, the problem will not be overpopulation; it will be trying to maintain existing economies and social welfare systems with shrinking populations. In fact, the problem is already obvious in Russia, parts of Europe and Japan.
John Tyler| 9.3.10 @ 12:54PM
To me, the answer to that problem is reducing, streamlining, or eliminating those social welfare systems, rather than encouraging people to have more kids.
As for Ehrlich and others who predicted famines and food shortages, their mistake was assuming that the levels of food production per acre would remain static. However, new farming practices have made every acre more productive and has kept their predictions from becoming reality.
All that said, I would like to see the global population level out or decline not because I fear famines or food shortages, but simply because like Teddy Roosevelt I enjoy vast wild spaces.
Thorvald| 9.7.10 @ 11:18AM
Vegetarians should intend their earthly remains be transformed into tasty Soylent Green Pet Treats for their surviving companion animals (or whatever the P.C. term is today).
Hey Vasu! You have four cuspid teeth, don't you? The theory of Evolution has reached apotheosis for you, hasn't it? Q.E.D.
Deuce| 9.7.10 @ 2:17PM
It is clear by your attempt to "rationalize" vegetarianism that turned into a 3000 copy/paste of unsubstantiated "factoid" talking points from environmental extremist organizations, that your capacity for critical thinking is infantile at best. This is precisely why these "factoid" talking points from environmental extremist organizations have become the mottos for your life. Based solely on that, a therapist would be in for a good 3-5 years with you.
Do you realize that all that you have really told us is that a bunch of animal activists are animal activists, then peppered us with unsubstantiated claims?
The FACT is that 50 years after Procter and Gamble got their friends in the government to sell their veggie-centric "Virtuous Diet" to boost sales of Crisco as an alternative to animal lard, the health of US citizens is, not surprisingly at a 50 year low. The food pyramid, including the "vegetable and grain groups" and their higher serving requirements than meat are the direct fabrication of a Procter and Gamble ad campaign. This is a 100% verifiable fact unlike your grey literature "factoids". The use of trans-fats as an alternative to animal derived products for nearly 50 years was perhaps the greatest act of torture and genocide ever committed upon human beings. And the few people who were lucky enough to escape heart attacks, heart disease, obesity and diabetes, salvation came in the form of the Atkins diet, and other high fat and grain free diets. Has it ever occurred to you that animal centric diets are antithetical to diabetes, insulin resistance, and the numerous other prominent health problems currently on the rise today.
Everything you have stated is the product of indoctrination literature and corporate medicine. Medicine/healthcare is the single greatest cost to this nation and our government. The medical establishment that reaps their profits from these costs, have heavy influence in the government and what it portrays as truth. If you think that they really just want to get the word out about what's healthy so that they can stop making all that easy money, you are an incomprehensible fool. All of your propaganda groups like Greenpeace and Mother Jones have ties to political allies, who have ties to folks in big medicine. Again, you are living in a world of denial if you doubt this or have missed this clear and well-established truth. We pay farmers NOT to grow crops. If you don't think that food production is a huge political battleground you are a fool yet again. And in the middle of a political battlefield like this, a person with such limited critical thinking skills as you is a mark for everyone with a vested interest. Quite predictably you come here trumpeting the propaganda of numerous such interests, without a single shred of anything thrown in that could be recognized as your own conscious conclusions.
I can at least see why you would be against people eating one animal, SHEEP. Otherwise you'd be what's for dinner...
CO| 9.11.10 @ 1:02PM
For every animal you don't eat. I'm going to eat 3.
Adam A. Wanderer| 9.8.10 @ 11:34AM
No, Mother Nature is profoundly opposed to humanity. Sit back, and observe her at work "pruning".
AMENBRO| 9.2.10 @ 7:42AM
Malthusian BS riddles every single social science class. Be it Poli Sci, Geo, Anthro, Socio or believe it or not ENGLISH I took a grad Geography class in Pop Demo. Population Reference Bureau pamphlets were the text books. Each night a pair of students had to teach the class based upon a good portion of the selected Pamphlet. It was a killer class. Education on Pop Replacement Fertility, Fecundity, migration, immigration, age pyramids, etc.
One night the selected Student, whose partner dropped the class failed to show. The Prof had a Gov background prior to academia. The good doc taught the class.
Scant attention was paid to the pamphlet assigned. The 3 hour class we dedicated to his parade of 4 books writtten by the prof & Ehrlich's books . Each was cogenated by the Prof's pessimism for the future of Humanity. It was hard to bear watching an extremely intelligent man bitterly depict his work knowing it was ignored when written and no matter how hard he pitched his drip , irrelevant now as when it was committed to paper.
Point of this aimless post is the Prof's praise for Jimmy Carter. Carter of all Presidents came up with an Authoritarian Population Plan. According to the good Doc. had Ronald Reagan not been elected the USA would have a responsible Population control policy. Now the Academician Raised Whole Cloth Straw Man OBAMA. Our country needs to reform Education/Academia just as DEEPLY as we do Washington DC. Flamethrowers anyone???
Appleby| 9.2.10 @ 10:31AM
I remember Mr. Carter promised the USA would be metric by, like, 1978.
How's that coming along?
Robert Pinkerton| 9.2.10 @ 2:16PM
So far I have succeeded in teaching myself to think in meters and centimeters, kilograms and grams -- but only as an alternate program in the greyware, needing to be called up especially. Default program is still traditional. BTW, I could never get my mind around the practicality of Celsius temperature measurement, and metric energetics escape me completely. However, I am only a "liberal arts" graduate.
Adam A. Wanderer| 9.8.10 @ 11:38AM
It won't matter, nature has its own population control plans. But, I don't think you'll like them.
Mark| 9.2.10 @ 8:17AM
Generally speaking, I have never had an issue with a new born, or a toddler, or most children. The problems I encounter stem from self-centered, self-serving adults, like Al Gore.
Regarding Malthus, he has been proven demonstrably wrong. The American farmer can feed the entire world if adult governments would allow the American farmer to transport his goods to those in need. Adult governments are the source of famine. That the ecotheologists continue to embrace Malthusian thinking is proof of their bankruptcy.
All that this tragic Lee did was act on the rhetoric so characteristic of Al Gore and the ecological movement. God save his soul and thank God that no innocents were killed. Interesting that Mr. Lee who hated humanity so vehemently couldn't kill others. Perhaps, there was something good left. I hope so.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 9.2.10 @ 8:20AM
This didn't bum me out at all.
There's one less global warming advocate in the world.
Lullabys, Legends and Lies| 9.2.10 @ 8:35AM
In the timeline of the extensive history of the Earth, humans beings are just a pimple on its ass, the World will barely remember us in the end (unlike those friggin huge Dinosaurs!!). Although we may think we've been around for a long, long time, we really haven't been in Earth's timeline. We only flourished between the last ice age, and our undoing will probably be brought about by the next one (it turns out, we don't really like the cold). We're kind of like the "hot" Rock Bands we've seen come and go over the years. They only had a couple of albums in them, to make it to the top, party like there's no tomorrow, and then they're gone. The Earth won't remember us in the end, because it's not alive to begin with (it was just a result of gravity), but if it was alive, it still wouldn't remember us, because we're just a pimple on its ass (personally I hope it doesn't pop just yet).
There is one good piece of news though, that came out of this situation yesterday, if anybody's looking for an apartment in the D.C. area, I hear that a nice one just became available.
Booger | 9.2.10 @ 8:40AM
Well, at least he got capped and traded.
Steve A| 9.2.10 @ 9:02AM
Booger, that's funny dude. He may also be experiencing some extreme climate change right now.
Tim*| 9.2.10 @ 9:11AM
Talk about A Death Panel . Dude Got SWATED .
Steve A| 9.2.10 @ 9:53AM
Good thing The Discovery Channel had the Military Channel on speed dial to deal with this visitor.
Petronius| 9.2.10 @ 9:59AM
Yeah. We've got him in a holding cell right now. It has the usual comforts of super max plus a flat screen. The only shows he gets are reruns of Father Knows Best and The Brady Bunch.
Are We Bad?
Arnastyphon
Membership Committee, Hell
Gibbsongirl| 9.2.10 @ 2:29PM
What, he doesn't have to watch "The View?" Now THAT would be eternal hell!
The Big E| 9.2.10 @ 8:41AM
I wouldn't be so sure this guy was insane. According to the Washington Post, he had been arrested in 2008 for causing a disturbance in front of the same building for a protest in which, among other things, he threw thousands of dollars in the air for people to chase (hate I missed that one). The Court at that time ordered him to have a mental evaluation, which apparently, he passed. When convicted, he was put on supervised probation for 6 months and ordered not to be within 500 feet of the Discovery Channel building. According to the Washington Post, he successfully completed his probation on Monday. I don't believe a man with an irrational fixation on the Discovery Channel could not have successfully completed that probation.
This man was not insane, he was simply acting in accord with his beliefs. What's insane, irrational, and down right Evil, are the beliefs he was acting in accord with. Beliefs which, by the way, he generally shares with the Evil One occupying the White House.
Nate W.| 9.2.10 @ 11:54PM
I agree. How is Lee's living out his "religious" beliefs any different from an extremist Muslim acting upon his beliefs?
Petronius| 9.3.10 @ 12:06AM
6 dozen of 1 or 6 dozen of the other; Virgins or Vegans?
After the last Brady Bunch episode, he gets CBN, 24/7.
Adam A. Wanderer| 9.8.10 @ 11:43AM
Persons of the Islamic faith are opposed to population control in any form.
Solo| 9.2.10 @ 8:47AM
I seem to recall that when Timothy McVeigh performed an act of violence at the FBI building in Oklahoma City, none less than the President Of The United States took the occasion to lay blame on "Talk Radio" (leftist code for 'Conservative") as having incited the violence.
I wonder if a similar accusation will be forthcoming for Al Gore's "Global Warming" hucksterism given that this Lee fellow specifically mentioned AlGore's Crock-u-mentary as a source of inspiration?
Stop spreading the hate, Al!
Timothy L. Pennell| 9.2.10 @ 9:04AM
Can you IMAGINE if he had a book by GLENN BECK?
The fact that this guy was a LEFTIST, should come as no surprise to anyone. The Domestic Terrorists, in this country, have ALWAYS been from the LEFT. Barack Hussein Obamas' buddies - Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. The Black Panthers in the 60's. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The Puerto Rican Separatists whom BILL CLINTON Pardoned.
The UNABOMBER. A.L.F. and E.L.F. In fact, if you dug deep enough, I can almost guarantee that you'd find one or two more of these SCUM, in this Administration right now.
"But what about McVeigh?" ONE guy from the right.
Nick| 9.2.10 @ 10:01AM
Mr. Pennell,
You forgot commie lefty Lee Harvey Oswald and lefty Arab nationalist Sirhan Sirhan.
They killed two saints to the left, which forced them to invent a vast right-wing conspiracy to explain these tragic assassinations.
They left can't abide fellow lefties killing in their name, so they ignore it, or make fantastical stories to explain it away.
ferengi| 9.2.10 @ 11:13AM
Nick
The only problem is that Oswald did not kill JFK. Maybe thats another discussion for another place though.......
NavyBrat | 9.2.10 @ 11:57AM
Uh, yeah he did. At the behest of the KGB, who tried to walk him back, but to no avail.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1906248/posts
Knowitall Martian| 9.2.10 @ 12:42PM
Now, you guys all know it was us space aliens that whackes JFK for his advocacy of the space program. This is clearly demonstrated by that laughably faked moon landing.
GW| 9.2.10 @ 6:05PM
It's all starting to come together!!!! Thank you!!!
tonypal| 9.3.10 @ 2:27AM
Actually it was George Bush.
JKS| 9.2.10 @ 1:36PM
McVeigh wasn't from the right. He was an anti-government anarchist that hated the FBI. I have read, but can't find coroberation that he was financed by people from the middle east. Has anyone else heard that?
The one you could mention that is from the right would be the guy who shot the abortion doctor tiller in Kansas, but your point is spot on. There are far more nut jobs from the left than there are from the right.
GW| 9.2.10 @ 6:06PM
One caveat, however. No serious person on the right, as far as I know, advocates the killing of abortion "doctors". However, many environmentalists advocate population reduction. Something to think about.
The Big E| 9.2.10 @ 2:27PM
TWO - Eric Rudolf. Though in fairness, Timothy McVeigh would likely have more in common politically with Cindy Sheehan.
Kpar| 9.2.10 @ 3:10PM
I seem to remember hearing about eyewitnesses who identified McVeigh exiting the truck and getting into a car containing (driven by?) a dark complected "Middle Eastern" type.
These same witnesses identified that man from a selection of photographs- he was (or resembled) a member of Iraqi intelligence.
The FBI seemed uninterested in pursuing this line of inquiry. Do they know more than us, or less?
therapist| 9.2.10 @ 9:25AM
He probably hated children and "breeding" because he couldn't get layed.
Paul D| 9.2.10 @ 9:26AM
When Karl Marx wrote Das Capital and his other works on Communism he believed the Communist utopia he envisioned would eventually come to pass over time, through natural historical processes.
His disciples, the true believers who actually read his stuff, said to themselves "why wait?"
So "men-of-action", as Lenin, Trotsky and countless others called themselves, decided to bring about that utopia in the here and now, by force.
I suspect James Lee considered himself one of those men-of- action. He read the works of Al Gore and decided history was not moving fast enough. Something had to be done - NOW!
How many more of these men-of-action are out there waiting to pick up the torch?
Siegfried X| 9.2.10 @ 10:02AM
There are lots of environmental wackos. Lots of stories of greenies shivering in their cold, dark house because they think using less energy will fight gl0bal warming.
And every year a bunch of them sit in the dark for an hour, "Earth Hour". In the dark is a perfect picture of them.
Dustoff| 9.2.10 @ 10:06AM
Let's see, who read Al Gores book. The unabomber.
JP| 9.2.10 @ 10:09AM
I think it is a bad habit to attribute the actions of an entire movement with that of a person obviously insane. The Left does this all the time with the Right. Every abortion arsonist is a Republican. And to this day, Timothy McVeigh and his group are associated with the Right.
Siegfried X| 9.2.10 @ 11:06AM
It goes back to the Goldilocks theory of politics:
Democrats tend to be too hot, while
Conservatives tend to be too cold
Seeing Republican vs. Democratic politicians is often like cub scouts vs. a motorcycle gang
Spyder308| 9.2.10 @ 11:12AM
All the abortion clinic arsonists and the Oklahoma City bombers were republicans, but they are also crazy people. That in no way means that the Right is full of crazy people. I have never seen any Left leaning commentator claim that the Right is full of crazy people. I have seen warnings that extreme Right wing rhetoric from people like Beck and Rush has the potential to turn on the crazy people, and we should be careful about this.
The Big E| 9.2.10 @ 3:22PM
If you haven't seen any Left leaning commentators claim that the Right is full of crazy people then you haven't been paying attention. In 2006 Jack Glaser, a professor of public policy at Berkley (that bastion of academic open mindedness) produced a study in which he claimed that had proven that conservatism was a mental illness. All you have to do is Google "conservative insanity" and you will find a log litany of commentators and "intellectuals" who are making the claim that conservatives - i.e. - anyone who disagrees with their views - are either mentally ill or mentally deficient.
Nick| 9.2.10 @ 10:13AM
Here's the headline from NNS*: LEFTY KOOK ECO-TERRORIST ARMED WITH PIPE-BOMBS TAKES HOSTAGES AT DISCOVERY CHANNEL HQ, JUSTLY KILLED BY HEROIC POLICE
*(NNS stands for the Nick News Service.)
Steve A| 9.2.10 @ 10:58AM
Subtitle should read: " Al Gore has no comment, gets massage."
spyder308| 9.2.10 @ 11:02AM
The Discovery Building attacker was a crazy man, just like the white Christian bombers of the Federal Building in Oklahome City were crazy men.
Steve A| 9.2.10 @ 11:22AM
Yes Spyder, you are correct. The difference is that the President is not going to come out & blame the Enviromentalist Movement, Al Gore etc. for the acts of this freak like Clinton did after Oklahoma City. You guys are a joke (the left) , that is the point.
TR| 9.2.10 @ 11:37AM
Uh, sorry to have to deal in facts spyder, but the OKC bomber was vehemently NOT a Christian. He declared so repeatedly. He hated religion, govt, etc.
And Clinton did, in fact, accuse conservative radio as a motivator for McVeigh.
You will hear no such accusation to Algore, and this story will fade quickly just like the story a few months ago when the left-wingnut slammed his airplane into the IRS buiolding. That was quickly assumed to be a right-wing attack, but when he was discovered to be a "progressive" the story died a quick death. Left-stream media LIARS.
Kpar| 9.2.10 @ 3:22PM
Sorry, TR,
I will make that accusation against Algore, just as he was inspiration to the Unabomber.
Oh- you mean by the Fourth Estate, defenders of the Constitution.
Nevermind...
Richard| 9.2.10 @ 11:12AM
To see the human hating effects of environmentalism, one needs only to look at the third world where the outlawing of DDT has killed millions and where economic delevopment projects are routinely stopped by western enviros.
Vasu Murti | 9.2.10 @ 2:09PM
Richard writes:
"To see the human hating effects of environmentalism, one needs only to look at the third world where the outlawing of DDT has killed millions and where economic delevopment projects are routinely stopped by western enviros."
I disagree with your assertion that refraining from unnecessarily killing animals and insects is "human hating"; rather than life-affirming.
Author Keith Akers, in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983), notes that by arguing against the killing of plants, the meat-eater "seeks to reduce vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing plants and insects as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it can’t be wrong to kill animals.
"Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants. This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.
"Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though, is not particularly difficult. Plants have no evolutionary need to feel pain, and completely lack a central nervous system. Nature does not create pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive. Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants would not."
In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer in Animal Liberation suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most."
Keith Akers states further, "Even if one does not want to become a fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than if we merely ate the plants directly."
(Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!)
"What about insects?" asks Akers, "While there may be reason to kill insects, there is no reason to kill them for food. One distinguishes between the way meat animals are killed for food and the way insects are killed.
"Insects are killed only when they intrude upon human territory, posing a threat to the comfort, health, or well-being of humans. There is a huge difference between ridding oneself of intruders and going out of one's way to find and kill something which would otherwise be harmless."
According to Akers:
"These questions may have a certain fascination for philosophers, but most vegetarians are not bothered by them. For any vegetarian who is not a biological pacifist, there would not seem to be any particular difficulty in distinguishing ethically between insects and plants on the one hand, and animals and humans on the other."
Organic farming is a direct response to the moral question of unnecessarily killing insects!
Anna Lappe, daughter of bestselling author Frances Moore Lappe (Diet for a Small Planet, 1971), says:
"Organic farming is also proving to dramatically reduce on-farm emissions as well as related emissions associated with producing food. Cut out synthetic fertilizer and on-farm petroleum-based chemicals and you're cutting back on significant greenhouse gases."
I'd like to see a return to organic farming! In 1989, concern over the use of the pesticide Alar on apples caused many Americans to consider organic produce.
John Robbins writes in his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Diet for a New America (1987):
"We produce pesticides at a rate more than 13,000 times faster than we did only 35 years ago. Our environment and food chains are being inundated by a virtual avalanche of pesticides. What three decades ago took us six years to produce, we now produce every couple of hours."
"It is hard for us to imagine how destructive these substances are. Pesticides are extraordinarily concentrated and powerful chemicals which have been intentionally developed to kill living creatures. In fact, some of them were originally developed to kill human beings. Phosgene, used today to produce chemical herbicides and insecticides, was originally developed for use in chemical warfare, and as, in fact, the agent of almost all deaths due to poison gas in World War I. Zykon-B, another modern pesticide, is the substance which the Nazis used to produce deadly hydrogen cyanide gas, used to kill millions upon millions at Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps.
"Many of today's most widely used pesticides--including malathion and parathion--are members of the nerve gas family. So lethal is parathion that a chemist who swallowed an infinitesimal dose, amounting to 0.00424 of an ounce, was instantaneously paralyzed and died before he could take an antidote he prepared in advance and had at hand.
"Pesticides are not the kind of substances you'd want to have hanging around in your environment. But hang around many of them do. In fact, the chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides--DDT, aldrin, kepone, dieldrin, chlordane, heptachlor, endrin, mirex, PCB's, toxaphene, lindane, etc.--are extremely stable compounds. Ominously, they do not break down for decades, and in some cases, centuries."
Poisons used to kill insects accumulate on crops, in the soil and in greater concentration in the tissues of living creatures higher on the food chain. The Environmental Protection Agency's Pesticide Monitoring Journal reports that "Foods of animal origin (are) the major source of...pesticide residues in the diet."
John Robbins writes: "Recent studies indicate that of all the toxic chemical residues in the American diet, almost all, 95% to 99%, comes from meat, fish, dairy products and eggs. If you want to include pesticides in your diet, these are the foods to eat. Fortunately, you can overwhelmingly reduce your intake of these poisons by eating lower on the food chain, and not choosing foods of animal origin...
"While DDT has gotten most of the publicity, there are unfortunately many other toxic chemicals that are equally widespread in the environment, and actually more poisonous. The pesticide dieldrin, for example, is five times more poisonous than DDT when swallowed, and forty times more so when absorbed by the skin. Yet by the time dieldrin was finally banned in 1974, the FDA found it in 96 percent of all the meat, fish and poultry in the country, in 85% of all dairy products, and in the flesh of 99.5% of the American people! Sadly, dieldrin will remain with us for a long time; it is one of the most biologically stable of all pesticides, taking many decades to break down."
In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, How to Survive in America the Poisoned, pesticide authority Lewis Regenstein writes: "Meat contains approximately 14 times more pesticides than do plant foods; dairy products 5 1/2 times more. Thus, by eating foods of animal origin, one ingests greatly concentrated amounts of hazardous chemicals. Analysis of various foods by the FDA shows that meat, poultry, fish, cheese and other dairy products contain levels of these pesticides more often and in greater amount than in other foods."
As far back as 1966, it was admitted in Congressional hearings that:
"No milk available on the market, today, in any part of the United States, is free of pesticide residues."
In 1975, the Council on Environmental Quality concluded dairy and meat products account for over 95% of the population's intake of DDT. The same is true of other pesticides.
A 1976 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found the breast milk of mothers who consume animal products to be 50 to 100 times more contaminated by pesticide residues than the milk of vegetarian or vegan mothers.
John Robbins writes: "Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, used to say that before the United States could consider organic farming, it would have to decide which 50 or 60 million Americans were going to be allowed to starve. His attitude exemplified the stance that government and agribusiness have taken in the past: that organic farming is a luxury we can ill-afford, and we need these chemicals to feed ourselves. The chemical companies...have spent millions to reinforce this way of thinking.
"But it could hardly be less true."
Organic farming and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are getting more attention today. These utilize natural insect controls, such as predatory insects, weather, crop rotation, pest-resistant varieties, soil tillage, and other environmentally safe practices.
A 1979 Department of Agriculture task force of scientists and economists came to "...positive conclusions on the importance of organic farming and its potential contributions to agriculture and society." Until the end of the Second World War, American farmers produced bountiful harvests without relying on pesticides. There is no reason why America cannot do so again.
The Big E| 9.2.10 @ 2:30PM
The sheer vacuousness of your intellect is truly dizzying.
Convet| 9.2.10 @ 2:39PM
More claptrap from a moron. Your references are all bogus, jerk!
DeadCowCarcassLover| 9.2.10 @ 3:02PM
Hey Vasu:
I'll make this post quick--unlike the claptrap you've been spreading on this blog ad naseum. Methinks the lack of meat in your diet has caused your brain to shrink. After all, you seem only able to quote from other discredited veggie- and enviro-quacks rather than think and put write something by yourself.
As for me and millions of other red, white and blue Americans, there's nothing like the sizzle of a heavily-marbled 12 ounce Ribeye on a charcoal grill--along with a few grilled veggies on the side to add color-- to make my mouth water, my stomach juices flow, and my mind get giddy with anticipation of being able to slice into and then savor the taste of the now dead cow that gave its life so I could eat its flesh! Guess I better get in my Ford Expedition and head down to my local butcher to buy 7 of those 12 ounce babies to feed my wife and 5--count 'em, 5--kids!
"Earth First. . .we'll mine the rest of the planets later!!
jayde| 9.2.10 @ 3:08PM
a ford expedition, heavily marbled ribeyes, a wife and 5 kid!! you have a giant bullseye target on your back, but to quote sean hannity, you are a Great American!!
DeadCowCarcassLover| 9.2.10 @ 3:16PM
Jayde: Thank you. And so are you! OBTW, my Expedition is a V-8 gas guzzler.
jayde| 9.2.10 @ 3:03PM
interesting word, "fruitarian".... the first syllable says it all.
John II| 9.2.10 @ 6:14PM
"As for the man who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not for disputes over opinions. One believes he may eat anything, while the weak man eats only vegetables. Let not him who eats despise him who abstains . . ." (Rom 14:1-3)
Whew! Now I finally understand what St. Paul was saying. You really have to be well-nigh saintly to put up with vegan gasbags!
Christianity sure is a tough religion.
Vasu Murti | 9.2.10 @ 8:12PM
John II writes:
"Christianity sure is a tough religion."
Do you follow Jesus or Paul?
Jesus insisted upon the moral standards given by God in the beginning (Matthew 5:31-32, 19:3-9; Mark 10:2-12; Luke 16:18), and this did not go unnoticed by early church fathers such as St. Basil and St. Jerome.
St. Basil (AD 320-79) taught, "The steam of meat darkens the light of the spirit. One can hardly have virtue if one enjoys meat meals and feasts...In the earthly paradise, there was no wine, no one sacrificed animals, and no one ate meat. Wine was only invented after the Deluge...
"With simple living, well being increases in the household, animals are in safety, there is no shedding of blood, nor putting animals to death. The knife of the cook is needless, for the table is spread only with the fruits that nature gives, and with them they are content."
St. Jerome (AD 340-420) wrote to a monk in Milan who had abandoned vegetarianism:
"As to the argument that in God’s second blessing (Genesis 9:3) permission was given to eat flesh—a permission not given in the first blessing (Genesis 1:29)—let him know that just as permission to put away a wife was, according to the words of the Saviour, not given from the beginning, but was granted to the human race by Moses because of the hardness of our hearts (Matthew 19:1-12), so also in like manner the eating of flesh was unknown until the Flood, but after the Flood, just as quails were given to the people when they murmured in the desert, so have sinews and the offensiveness been given to our teeth.
"The Apostle, writing to the Ephesians, teaches us that God had purposed that in the fullness of time he would restore all things, and would draw to their beginning, even to Christ Jesus, all things that are in heaven or that are on earth. Whence also, the Saviour Himself in the Apocalypse of John says, ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.’ From the beginning of human nature, we neither fed upon flesh nor did we put away our wives, nor were our foreskins taken away from us for a sign. We kept on this course until we arrived at the Flood.
"But after the Flood, together with the giving of the Law, which no man could fulfill, the eating of flesh was brought in, and the putting away of wives was conceded to hardness of heart...But now that Christ has come in the end of time, and has turned back Omega to Alpha...neither is it permitted to us to put away our wives, nor are we circumcised, nor do we eat flesh."
St. Jerome was responsible for the Vulgate, or Latin version of the Bible, still in use today. He felt a vegetarian diet was best for those devoted to the pursuit of wisdom. He once wrote that he was not a follower of Pythagoras or Empodocles "who do not eat any living creature," but concluded, "And so I too say to you: if you wish to be perfect, it is good not to drink wine and eat flesh."
From history, too, we learn that the earliest Christians were vegetarians as well as pacifists. For example, Clemens Prudentius, the first Christian hymn writer, in one of his hymns exhorts his fellow Christians not to pollute their hands and hearts by the slaughter of innocent cows and sheep, and points to the variety of nourishing and pleasant foods obtainable without blood-shedding.
A stumbling block for some Christians is the apostle Paul's having referred to his vegetarian brethren as "weak." Paul taught that it is best to abstain from meat or from food offered to idols so as not to offend the "weaker" brethren. Paul repeatedly attacked idolatry. (Romans 1:23; I Corinthians 6:9-10; II Corinthians 6:16; Galatians 5:19-21) He recognized the immorality of accepting food offered to idols and pagan gods: "that which they sacrifice they are offering to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons." (I Corinthians 10:20) Yet Paul then proceeded to give his followers permission to eat food offered to pagan idols! "You may eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience: for the earth is the Lord's and everything in it." (I Corinthians 10:14-33)
Paul told his followers they need only abstain from such foods if it offends their "weaker" brethren. "For if someone sees you...sitting at the table in an idol temple, will not his conscience weak as it is, encourage him to eat food offered to idols?...If my eating causes my brother to stumble, I shall eat no meat forever, so that my brother will not be made to fall into sin." (I Corinthians 8:1-13)
Not only does this contradict the Apostles' decree concerning gentile converts to Christianity (Acts 15), it contradicts the teachings of Jesus himself. In Revelations 2:14-16,20, the resurrected Jesus specifically instructs John to write to two churches that they not eat food offered to idols.
Since Paul refers to Christians who abstain not just from meat, but from food offered to pagan idols as "weak," would his definition of "weak" not have included the resurrected Jesus (Revelations 2:14-16,20) as well? Paul's use of the word "weak" has been debated. According to Christian theologian Dr. Upton Clary Ewing, Paul used the word "weak" with a positive connotation. According to Paul, "God has chosen the weak things in the world to shame the strong." (I Corinthians 1:27)
Describing his tribulations for the cause of Christ, being caught up in the heavenly sphres, and a revelation from Jesus, Paul wrote:
"If I must boast, I shall boast of matters that show my weakness...I will boast, but not about myself--unless it be about my weakness...the Lord...he told me, 'my strength comes to perfection where there is weakness.' Therefore," Paul concluded, "I am happy to boast in my weaknesses...I delight, then, in weaknesses...for when I am weak, then I am strong." (II Corinthians 11:30, 12:1-10)
Paul wrote further that Jesus "was crucified out of weakness, yet he lives through divine power, and we, too, are weak in him, but we shall live with him for your benefit through the power of God...We are happy to be weak when you are strong." (II Corinthians 13:4,9)
Taken in this context, the word "weak" suggests complete dependence upon God.
Admittedly, even if Paul did use the word "weak" with a positive connotation, it would not necessarily mean that it's wrong to eat meat (Genesis 9:3), but just that it's better to be a vegetarian (Genesis 1:29; Isaiah 11:6-9)
The Reverend J. Todd Ferrier, founder of the Order of the Cross, an informal mystical Christian order, believing in reincarnation and abstaining from meat and wine, wrote in 1903:
"But Paul, great and noble man as he was, never was one of the recognized heads at Jerusalem. He had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees...He strove to be all things to all men that he might gain some. And we admire him for his strenuous endeavors to win the world for Christ. But no one could be all things to all men without running the great risks of most disastrous results...
"But here as a further thought in connection with the teaching of the great Apostle an important question is forced upon our attention, which one of these days must receive the due consideration from biblical scholars that it deserves. It is this:
"How is it that the gospel of Paul is more to many people than the gospel of those privileged souls who sat at the feet of Jesus and heard His secrets in the Upper Room?"
Christian theologian Dr. Upton Clary Ewing writes:
“With all due respect for the integrity of Paul, he was not one of the Twelve Apostles… Paul never knew Jesus in life. He never walked and prayed with Him as He went from place to place, teaching the word of God.”
The great theologian Soren Kirkegaard, writing in the Journals, echoes the above sentiment:
“In the teachings of Christ, religion is completely present tense: Jesus is the prototype and our task is to imitate him, become a disciple. But then through Paul came a basic alteration. Paul draws attention away from imitating Christ and fixes attention on the death of Christ, The Atoner. What Martin Luther, in his reformation, failed to realize is that even before Catholicism, Christianity had become degenerate at the hands of Paul. Paul made Christianity the religion of Paul, not of Christ. Paul threw the Christianity of Christ away, completely, turning it upside down, making it just the opposite of the original proclamation of Christ.”
The eminent theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur, in his Church History of the First Three Centuries, wrote:
“What kind of authority can there be for an ‘apostle’ who, unlike the other apostles, had never been prepared for the apostolic office in Jesus’ own school but had only later dared to claim the apostolic office on the basis on his own authority? The only question comes to be how the apostle Paul appears in his Epistles to be so indifferent to the historical facts of the life of Jesus…He bears himself but little like a disciple who has received the doctrines and the principles which he preaches from the Master whose name he bears.”
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, wrote in his Quest for the Historical Jesus and his Mysticism of Paul:
“Paul…did not desire to know Christ…Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded…What is the significance for our faith and for our religious life, the fact that the Gospel of Paul is different from the Gospel of Jesus?…The attitude which Paul himself takes up towards the Gospel of Jesus is that he does not repeat it in the words of Jesus, and does not appeal to its authority…The fateful thing is that the Greek, the Catholic, and the Protestant theologies all contain the Gospel of Paul in a form which does not continue the Gospel of Jesus, but displaces it.”
William Wrede, in his excellent book Paul, informs us:
“The obvious contradictions in the three accounts (given by Paul in regard to his conversion) are enough to arouse distrust…The moral majesty of Jesus, his purity and piety, his ministry among his people, his manner as a prophet, the whole concrete ethical-religious content of his earthly life, signifies for Paul’s Christology nothing whatever…The name ‘disciple of Jesus’ has little applicability to Paul…Jesus or Paul: this alternative characterizes, at least in part, the religious and theological warfare of the present day.”
Rudolf Bultman, one of the most respected theologians of the 20th century, wrote in his Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul:
“It is most obvious that Paul does not appeal to the words of the Lord in support of his… views. When the essential Pauline conceptions are considered, it is clear that Paul is not dependent on Jesus. Jesus’ teaching is—to all intents and purposes—irrelevant for Paul.”
Texas Chris| 9.7.10 @ 3:01PM
TL/DR
dancing flea| 9.7.10 @ 1:13PM
Hitler was a vegetarian.
Louis Jenkins| 9.2.10 @ 11:12AM
A lefty has gone off the cliff. What else is new? In my opinion all lefties are over the edge. It just takes the right kind of "push" for them to act. Al Gore was the man in the right place, at the right time. I'm surprised we don't have more of his ilk. (See above for a compiled list.)
dw| 9.2.10 @ 11:35AM
Yes he was a crazy man, but when another crazy man, namely Al Gore comes out with his book of lies it will push people like this guy over the edge.
The question does remain though is while this guy threatens a few people with his act, Gores production of lies threatens millions with adverse policies aimed at destroying capitalism, all while Gore pockets millions for himself.
Who is more dangerous?
Pete| 9.2.10 @ 11:43AM
I agree, Gore and his ilk in the ruling class should be tried and convicted. More than any tea-partier, they espouse a dangerous ideology that incites violence (you know this is what the media would be saying if they could pin this freak on the right). But like all of the rank and file true enviro believers, the joke is on them. They didn't get the secret memo outlining the real goals of the movement which are, of course, money and power.
James Pawlak | 9.2.10 @ 11:43AM
The police applied a form of "retroactive abortion" to this baby-hating monster. A citizen did the same to the like George (The baby-killer) Tiller.
Both cases were an application of Natural Law to the defense of innocents.
gearjammer| 9.2.10 @ 12:06PM
" Some " are having too many babies. Kid's they can't possible care for properly on their own. It is the demographic time bomb that will destroy the nation, forces sane people to pick out some territory for them selves and somehow survive. The Catholic Church is the biggest cheerleader advancing this horror. Nobody has the guts to take it on-least of all conservatives. mandatory birth control for these breeding idiots !
Steve A| 9.2.10 @ 1:01PM
gearjammer, Should have been mandatory birth control for Mr. & Mrs. gearjammer Sr me thinks.
dancing flea| 9.7.10 @ 1:16PM
The real "demographic time bomb" is low birth rates in developed countries, whether it's Italy, Japan, Germany or Korea. This country (USA) has not reached that point (yet) but fanatics like gearjammer can always hope . . .
JS| 9.2.10 @ 12:17PM
My college at Cambridge, Jesus College, apparently counts Malthus among its alumni. According to the last time I ate at its cafeteria, the food isn't running out.
Adam Selene| 9.2.10 @ 12:23PM
A little more thinking, please. I just went to a CVS...they've replaced all the cashiers with self-checkouts. Welcome to America in 2050 -- 450 million of us, and fewer jobs than today.
Patzer| 9.2.10 @ 12:54PM
If your highest aspiration is to ring up purchases at CVS, you have my deepest sympathy.
Steve A| 9.2.10 @ 1:06PM
Adam, Write CVS corporate a letter & tell them you were upset that you had to self-checkout your Extenze.
jrjr| 9.2.10 @ 4:56PM
Perhaps the ex-employees can now find that cutting grass and other terribly distasteful jobs "that Americans will not do" might be a way out of their dilemma. So far no one has come up with a process for cutting my neighbors' grass. Most of those cutters are Mehicans.
Bill| 9.2.10 @ 12:59PM
Leave it to the Net:
http://www.vhemt.org/
Seek| 9.2.10 @ 1:28PM
The late James Lee was a humorless Leftie creep, but he managed to make, though crudely, a genuine and necessary point. There most certainly should be a reduction, if not an outright moratorium, on immigration to the U.S. No, anchor babies aren't "scum." But I can't necessarily say the same thing for their overwhelmingly Mexican parents who come here illegally so as to virtually insulate themselves from deportation. That's called "gaming the system." The system, in other words, must change.
Thomas Malthus no more caused the Silver Spring hostage-taking yesterday any more than Thomas Jefferson caused the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (Timothy McVeigh, if one remembers, wore a T-shirt on the day of the bombing with a quote from Jefferson). There are any number of reputable organizations dedicated to population stabilization without nutjobs like the late Mr. Lee giving the cause a bad name.
The Big E| 9.2.10 @ 2:35PM
While there may be valid reasons for curtailing immigration, James Lee certainly did not base his actions on any of them.
gearjammer| 9.3.10 @ 7:27AM
Nut jobs like that Cardinal or Bishop from LA, a nice Irish Catholic boy who joined the clergy to destroy America-whats his name Q' Amnesty or something ? Can't be against multiplying anchor babies and pro life at the same time is the moral teaching these days. Cardinal Laura needs to get right with God on this little problem. Let's see Carly F is pro life but for tough immigration enforcement. The Arch Di will tilt to Boxer. Maybe them you'll get it. Atheist, pragmatic., patriotic people like me hold the key to this election. Better get that through your heads. Gonna go write that Castle or Kastle guy in Del a check. Send one to Mike Steele too-with a note reminding him the party is not just Limbaugh stooges.
Texas Chris| 9.7.10 @ 3:11PM
Immigration isn't the problem, "gaming the system" is the problem. As long as there is a system, people will use it, abuse it, and the rest of us will be taxed to support those "less fortunate" parasites.
Lee was against all humanity, and he did exactly what all human-haters should do: He got himself killed.
There, problem solved. One less nut in the nuthouse.
Nora| 9.2.10 @ 2:45PM
I'm confused -- if these nutjob "the earth is our mother" loons all feel human beings are parasites destrying the planet and all that blather, why don't they take their own advice, lead by example, and off themselves?
Dave | 9.2.10 @ 4:28PM
In the early '60s singer Eydie Gorme sang -"Blame It On The Bossa Nova." But I'm thinkin', with a more up-to-date title definition-remake it might be more accurately titled - "Blame It On The Mainstream Media."
Whaa ...?
OK, opinion/explaination to follow:
While watching some of the (alleged) complete media news coverage Wednesday night, no surprise to me that the left wing, David Letterman keister kissers like Brian Williams, "Katie the News Chipmunk" and the rest of their agenda pushing minions at the major broadcast outlets under-reported and/or barely sniffed that this crazed nut case was a card carrying "Greenie Gone Gonzo." Fact is, had this whacko's car been found to have an old Bush/Cheney bumper sticker stuck to the back window of his rig, take it to the bank that Morley Safer or one of the other left wing p.r. pinheads at CBS would be putting together a full 60 Minutes segment on "another crazed Limbaugh conservative" attempts to crush Obama's Fundamentally Screwing America Campaign, Gore's Global Toasting Scam and killing-off any surviving family members of Charlie Tuna and his Shamu lovin' relatives.
That was "last night", but will be by "today" - a dead news story as far as the well groomed Brandy and Brad's at 5:00 teleprompter readers are concerned. No follow-up, no investigative reports or segments, no ... nothin'. See, there was no conservative(s) or conservative(s) cause to attack, hack and expose.
Meanwhile, The Towels For Hats crowd at CAIR, the Muslim military radical who killed all those proud soldiers at Fort Hood and that latest Osama devote who attempted to "KA-BLOOEY" a passenger jet via Detroit continues to receive the "I KNOW NOTH-ING, NOTH-ING,NOTH-ING" treatment from America's collection of news reading Sgt. Schultz's on your T and V's.
But HEY, Chipmunks, November is closer than you think. When it's all over, Maybe Michele can find you a part-time gig lugging her and Barry's fully loaded Sampsonites around during their next elitist vacation on the taxpayer's dime. Look for that trip to take place within (ohhhh) the next month or so. Being a "progressive" president can be soooo taxing. And don't we all know THAT.
tick-tick-tick ... Is it November yet?
Dave, Ca.
Curious| 9.2.10 @ 5:07PM
Do any studies exist on a connection between dementia and vegetarianism? It would be interesting, but of course it is precluded by political correctness.
Still with some of the above examples, including the Discovery nut, one tends to wonder.
Occam's Tool| 9.2.10 @ 7:20PM
A vegetarian diet is a known cause of vitamin B12 deficiency. B12 deficiency, at its worst, is a cause of dementia. So, yes, that possibility exists. But, in truth, I haven't seen any cases of it, (although I have seen cases of depression related to B12 deficiency) and I've been practicing medicine (psychiatry) now for 22 years.
Occam's Tool| 9.2.10 @ 7:21PM
Sorry, medicine for 22, psychiatry for 21.
Vasu Murti | 9.3.10 @ 12:18PM
Regarding Vitamin B-12:
Humans are not strictly herbivorous. The human body can't break down cellulose, the principle component of plant foods (though it does serve a purpose as dietary fiber). This is the reason we can't graze or live on grass.
Anatomically, we resemble the other primates (frugivores), whose diet is mostly vegetarian. We're meant to live mostly, if not entirely, upon plant foods. Only vitamin B-12 cannot be obtained from plant foods.
Predators are found in nature, but so are cannibalism and rape. Killing other animals for food, in this sense, really is an ethical issue, not a "dietary" issue.
Keith Akers writes in A Vegetarian Sourcebook (1983): "There is no question that lacto-ovo-vegetarians easily obtain enough vitamin B-12; dairy products and eggs are generous suppliers of vitamin B-12. The controversy pertains only to those who live on plant foods and do not eat any animal foods at all--the 'total vegetarians' or 'vegans.'...The evidence shows, however, that there are numerous sources of vitamin B-12 other than animal foods, and that vitamin B-12 is not a particularly difficult vitamin to get. In short, the Great Vitamin B-12 Controversy, like the protein controversy, is largely generated by lack of information concerning already available research data.
"Only incredibly small quantities of vitamin B-12 are thought to be needed in the diet. According to the National Research Council, 3 micrograms daily will meet the body's requirements. but Victor Herbert, a noted authority on the subject, puts the requirement at 0.1 micrograms, making even the National Research Council's microscopic figure 30 times in excess of the actual need."
John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America (1987), says that vitamin B-12 is found naturally around us: on the dirt on a carrot pulled out of the ground, in rainwater, etc., but we live in a sanitized society, removed from nature.
Keith Akers similarly observes:
"Vitamin B-12 has been found in rainwater and in many plant foods. In small quantities, Vitamin B-12 has been found either in or on various foods such as the roots and stems of tomatoes, cabbage, celery, kale, broccoli, leeks, and the leaves of kohlrabi. An ounce of the roots of leeks, beets, and other vegetables will provide 0.1 to 0.3 micrograms of B-12, which is more than a day's requirement.
"There are other plant foods which provide 'massive' quantities of vitamin B-12--'massive,' that is, in relation to human requirements for the vitamin. These include nutritional yeast, tempeh, seaweed, algae, kelp, and fermented soy sauces. The human liver can store vitamin B-12 for years, so once it is ingested from one of these sources, one can go for long periods of time without having to worry about a source of B-12."
In his 1979 book, Vegetarianism: A Way of Life, Dudley Giehl writes that some ancient Egyptian priests were vegetarian to help them with their vows of celibacy and that they avoided eggs and milk, which they called "liquid flesh."
Giehl writes that Leonardo da Vinci was a vegan, out of ethical concern for animals:
In a letter from India dated 1515 from Andrea Corsali wrote: "...they do not feed on anything which has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci."
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks contain numerous references to the injustice of killing animals for food:
"Endless numbers of these animals shall have their little children taken from them, ripped open, and barbarously slaughtered."
(Of sheep, cows, goats, and the like)
"The time of Herod will come again when little innocent children will be taken from their mothers, to be put to death with terrible wounds, most cruelly inflicted."
(Of young lambs, slaughtered for meat)
"How cruel for one whose natural habitat is water to be made to die in boiling water."
(Of boiled fish)
"Oh, how many chicks will never come to birth!"
(Of eating eggs)
"Living as they do in communities, whole populations are destroyed so that we can have their honey. Thus will many great nations be destroyed...and multitudes deprived of their food and stores; and they will be most cruelly submerged, swept under, drowned by invading armies, out of their minds. Oh, Justice of God! Why dost Thou not awake and protect Thy misused creatures?"
(Of bees)
"The milk will be taken from the tiny children."
(Of beasts from whom cheese is made)
"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them," is a quote attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. "We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they look upon the murder of man."
In his 1923 book, The Natural Diet of Man, Adventist physician Dr. John Harvey Kellogg writes: "The Ladrone Islands were discovered by the Spaniards around 1620. There were no animals on the islands except birds, which the natives did not eat. The natives had never seen fire, and they lived entirely on plant foods--fruits and roots in their natural state. They were found to be vigorous, active, and of good longevity."
The Garden of Eden was vegan, but veganism as an actual historical trend is a fairly recent phenomenon. The Vegan Society was formed in England in 1944.
The ethical, environmental, and nutritional arguments are compelling enough to encourage millions of Americans to reduce, if not eliminate entirely, their consumption of animal products.
Texas Chris| 9.7.10 @ 3:14PM
Are there Cliff's Notes for Vasu's posts?
Tony in Central PA| 9.2.10 @ 9:08PM
It has been said there's nothing new under the sun. In Medieval Europe, there were a group of people living mainly in southern France who called themselves the Cathari, which meant " pure ones ". They were also known as the Albigensians. Their belief system was something of an amalgamation of paganism, Christianity and Gnosticism. They regarded all materiality as evil, they reviled marriage and procreation and promoted suicide and abortion. Because they held these values, it was a belief system very heavily dependent upon converts to sustain itself. It didn't.
Sound familiar to the some of the nuttiness that has become so popular recently in Western societies ?
Vasu Murti | 9.3.10 @ 12:26PM
The Cathari believed in reincarnation, as did the early church father Origen (185-254 AD), whose influence on the early church was second only to Augustine.
In the 3rd century, Chalcidius taught, "Souls who have failed to unite themselves with God, are compelled by the law of destiny to begin a new kind of life, entirely different from their former, until they repent of their sins."
Arnobius (A.D. 290) said, "We die many times, and often do we rise from the dead." (Adversus Gentes) St. Gregory of Nyssa (257-332) taught, "It is absolutely necessary that the soul should be healed and purified, and if this does not take place during its life on earth it must be accomplished in future lives." (Great Catechism)
St. Jerome (340-420), wrote in Epistola ad Demetriadem, that "The doctrine of transmigration has been secretly taught from ancient times to small numbers of people, as a traditional truth which was not to be divulged." In his Confessions, St. Augustine (354-430) prayed, "Say, Lord to me...say, did my infancy succeed another age of mine that died before it? Was it that which I spent within my mother's womb?...and what before that life again, O God my joy, was I anywhere or in any body?"
Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais (370-430), wrote in his Treatise On Dreams, "Philosophy speaks of souls being prepared by a course of transmigrations... When first it comes down to earth, it (the soul) embarks on this animal spirit as on a boat, and through it is brought into contact with matter...The soul which did not quickly return to the heavenly region from which it was sent down to earth had to go through many lives of 'wandering.'"
Dr. Geddes MacGregor, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, and author of over twenty books, believes reincarnation is compatible with the Christian faith.
"The Bible does not explicitly teach reincarnationism," he admits. "That is to say, there is no pronouncement on the subject, either in the Old Testament or in the New, to which one could point and by means of it compel the acceptance of a person who felt bound to receive as divine revelation everything that is clearly and unequivocally affirmed in Holy scripture. No such biblical warrant for reincarnation exists.
"That, however, does not take us far, since much the same could be said of the doctrine of the Trinity, which is surely held to be a classic expression of orthodox Christian belief about God. Except for the text in the first letter of John (1 John 5:7), known by scholars to be a very late interpolation, no direct biblical warrant exists for the doctrine of the Trinity as formulated by the Church.
"That absence of direct biblical warrant for the doctrine of the Trinity does not mean, however, that the Trinitarian formula is antipathetic to the teaching of the New Testament writers. On the contrary, it was held to be, and within Christian orthodoxy it has continued to be accounted, a proper formulation of a great truth about God that is implicit in New Testament teaching. There is no reason at all why the doctrine of reincarnation might not be in a similar case.
"Might not an orthodox Christian see the samsara or chain of incarnations, of which we hear so much in Hindu lore, as the most satisfactory way in which to conceptualize the journey of the soul to the state that Christians traditionally call heaven or the Beatific Vision, in which the soul at last is so completely purified that it can stand in the right relation to God and, as the Old Scottish Catechism promises, 'enjoy Him for ever' ?
"At first sight, at any rate, it would now seem that Christians, far from resisting reincarnationism as an exotic, alien idea, should be ready to embrace it as one that might both enlighten their minds and add a new and exhilarating dimension to their faith."
Although belief in reincarnation was widespread in early Christianity, orthodoxy prevailed. The doctrine of reincarnation never really caught on, in part, because of the apocalyptic mood of the early Church. The Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead were thought to be imminent. During the fourth century, Origen became an easy target for ecclesiastical authorities seeking victory in power struggles with other theological factions within the Christian Church.
Under circumstances that to this day remain shrouded in mystery, the Byzantine emperor Justinian in A.D. 553 banned the teachings of pre-existence from what had by then become the Roman Catholic Church. During that era, numerous Church writings were destroyed. The doctrine of reincarnation was forced underground, but persistently appeared in sects such as the Cathari, the Paulicians, and the Bogomils.
The Cathari (who were also vegetarian) taught that the reason we are on earth in the first place is we are fallen souls forced to be repeatedly incarcerated in bodies, and must seek salvation from transmigrating from one body to another. The Cathari saw Christ as the means of divine redemption from the wheel of death and rebirth.
According to Dr. MacGregor: "Reincarnation is, of course, a kind of resurrection. Great importance was attached by Christian theologians, however, to the notion of the resurrection of the 'same body' that we now have, though in a glorified form. The so-called Athanasian Creed affirms that all men shall rise again with their bodies...and a council held at the Lateran...asserted that all shall rise again with their own bodies...
"St. Thomas Aquinas considered that the body that is resurrected must be in some sense the same as the one on earth; otherwise, he thought, one would have to talk, not of a resurrection, but of the assumption of a new body...such very Latin teaching about a carnis resurrectio does not seem to fit Paul's teaching in the New Testament, which is that the body is to be of a new order...not otherwise recognizable as the same body as the one on earth. The curious notion of the revivification of the material particles of the body does not arise in St. Paul."
Dr. MacGregor explains that conflicting theological and scriptural accounts of the afterlife have caused many, including regular churchgoers, not to concern themselves with such affairs. Many Christian theologians have discouraged "idle speculation" on the afterlife. Luther recognized the theological difficulties, while Calvin, in a commentary on I Corinthians 13:12, questioned his own doctrine of the eternality of the soul. According to Calvin, Paul intentionally gave no details on the subject, since details "could not help our piety."
Dr. MacGregor suggests, however, that just as we have ceased to take literally Archbishop Ussher's biblical concept of a 6,000 year old universe, so also might reincarnation be consistent with a more enlightened world view.
During the Renaissance, a new flowering of public interest in reincarnation emerged. One of the prominent figures in this revival was Italy's leading philosopher and poet Giordano Bruno. Bruno had entered the Dominican Order at the age of fifteen. As a scholar, Bruno upheld the Copernican world view, that the Sun--and not the earth--is the center of our cosmos, teaching that there are an infinity of worlds and that many are inhabited.
Galileo had announced other worlds and Giordano Bruno spoke of other life forms. Bruno believed there are no privileged reference frames for viewing the universe; the universe looks essentially the same from wherever one happens to view it. Bruno taught that at death the soul passes out of one body and enters into another.
Because of his teachings, Bruno was ultimately brought before the Inquisition. In his profession of faith before the Inquisition, Bruno acknowledged that, speaking as a Catholic, he must say that the soul at death goes directly to heaven, hell or purgatory. However, Bruno insisted that as a philosopher who had given much thought to the question, he found it reasonable that since the soul is different from the body, yet is never found apart from the body, it passes from one body to another, as Pythagoras had taught 2,000 years before.
In his final answers to the charges brought against him, Bruno defiantly responded that the soul "is not the body" and that "it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body." Giordano Bruno was eventually burned at the stake in Rome on February 17, 1600. His teachings influenced 17th century philosophers such as Leibniz and Spinoza.
Tony in Central PA| 9.3.10 @ 4:50PM
I didn't appreciate the reincarnational emphasis of the Cathari. It does jibe with their prohibitions against marriage and procreation because procreation would just create new bodies that would absorb human souls and prevent their attainment of heaven.
My real purpose in bringing it up is the similarities in values between a group from the 13th century and many people in Western democracies today.
Dagny| 9.2.10 @ 9:48PM
I ran across the novel by Felix Salten and read it several years ago. The name of the book was Bambi, A life In The Woods. Life in the woods is peaceful, innocent, glorious, and full of animals that talk to each other. The most dangerous animal is MAN. If I remember right, Whittaker Chambers translated it from German. ("Witness" is on my top ten list).
Mad Hatter| 9.2.10 @ 10:13PM
James Lee, aiming to save our planet,
Set up a protest, with just him to man it,
A siege he soon plotted,
But he was quickly S.W.A.T.ed,
His protest sign now a slab of granite.
Mad Hatter| 9.2.10 @ 10:16PM
A baby laying next to a diaper,
To James Lee, the baby is riper,
Each baby that's born,
To the planet, a thorn,
Good thing Lee was no Pied Piper.
Mad Hatter| 9.2.10 @ 10:36PM
To change Discovery Channel, he hankered,
Railing against babies who're anchored,
Among us no more,
Just a pile of Gore,
I wish as a kid he'd been spankered.
Mad Hatter| 9.2.10 @ 10:43PM
James Lee railed against all human birth,
Of good sense, he had quite a dearth,
No child lover, he
Made a Discovery,
How fast he could come down to the Earth.
Mad Hatter| 9.2.10 @ 11:14PM
To navigate the Channel of note
A washed-up manifesto he'd float,
The rambling that bores,
With no ifs, buts or oars,
He missed both the good berth rate and boat.
Petronius| 9.3.10 @ 12:43AM
"Because we have babies" Lee fumed,
Hence all other mammals are doomed,
But his criminal plot,
Got his sorry ass shot,
And room temperature he hath assumed.
old white guy| 9.3.10 @ 3:46PM
malthus was wrong. history has proven that as man becomes wealthy he has fewer children. the demographics of western societry prove that to be true today. check out europe. mark steyn wrote a book that would show malthus wrong in spades about the rich having more children. it is the poor and ignorant that have far more children than they can feed.
Jason| 9.3.10 @ 11:52PM
I enjoyed reading the comments to this article. Which is to say that I ignored the voluminous grunting rants of the retrograde leftists (pardon the redundancy) and enjoyed reading about the folks who enjoy eating various forms of animal flesh.
Texas Chris| 9.7.10 @ 3:17PM
Meat is murder.
Sweet, juicy, medium-rare murder with sauteed mushrooms and onions and a side of roasted potatoes...
Jay Dallas| 9.7.10 @ 11:52AM
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian. Look how he turned out.
Christian Louboutin | 6.23.11 @ 4:08AM
News Wednesday afternoon that an armed gunman had entered the cable TV headquarters of Discovery Communications in Silver Spring, Maryland and begun taking hostages alarmed people throughout the Washington, D.C. area and around the country. As law enforcement officials negotiated with the suspect, posts on social media outlets inevitably began arguing over the ideological motivations of the hostage-taker, James J. Lee.