fruitful faith » stewardship

animal

Dale — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:32:30 +0000

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, humans are more than animals, but not less.

I used to (like too many Christians) be ‘nervous’ about comparing humans to animals, or being told about (for example) chimps that can count, etc (whether they are actually ‘counting’ [comprehending a numbered sequence] or not [responding as trained to images on screen with no concept of a numbered sequence] is an interesting question). I now see this as odd, as if animal superiority in a particular area (speed, strength, size?) makes humans any less able (as Jews/Muslims/Christians hold) to be God’s unique image-bearing creatures.¹

Interestingly, the Judaeo-Christian tradition is quite animal-friendly. Animals and humans are sometimes called by biblical scholars ‘the community of the sixth day’, and it is noted that in the creation story of Genesis 1, God ‘blesses’ the animals in addition to the humans, and gives them as well the command to ‘multiply’.

Though of course animals are eaten and sacrificed, this is to be done in the wider framework of human responsibility to wisely ‘govern’ all of creation, including animals. A fundamental and basic component of the human vocation is to be ‘zookeepers’, as it were. Our “modwestern” (modern + western) insistence upon eating as much meat as we want, whenever we want, and whatever the consequences (ecological, environmental or otherwise) runs against this zoo-keeping vocation (and I say this as a lover of meat of many kinds).

Also interestingly, animals serve as examples for humans: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.” (Proverbs 26:11) and “Go to the ant, sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.” (Proverbs 6:6)

Spiders weave much better webs than I; otters much better dams [well, certainly more eco-system friendly!?]; a chimp may well have faster hand-eye coordination; most birds can fly better than I, cheetah’s run faster, sharks have more teeth, eagles better vision, dogs better smell, etc., etc. – but none of these have ever rationally measured their abilities against other animals!

owned

Dale — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:41:17 +0000

Have you ever thought about what it means to say that you own something?

(a house) A: “Are you a home owner?” B: “Not totally – the bank owns most of it.”
(a rock) A: “Hey give me my rock back!” B: “I saw it first, it’s mine!”
(land) A: “Hey, American Indigenous tribes! Welcome to your new home – we like to call them ‘reservations’!” B: “New home? What’s wrong with our current home?”
(etc.)

In one very real sense, humans simply see things and claim them for their own. Whoever gets to the bit of land first ‘claims’ it – the kid who sees the rock first can say it’s ‘mine’ – etc. We snatch up bits of stuff (trees, iron, land, water, air, animals, other humans, etc.) and declare them to be ‘mine’/'ours’/etc.

Without some concept of ownership/possession, things such as ‘trading’, ‘sharing’, ‘buying/selling’, ‘stealing’ and ‘borrowing’ have no meaning at all. But still, everyone I’ve ever known lives their life as though the concept of ownership is actually meaningful. We get insurance, car alarms and watch dogs for our houses, cars and veggie gardens (or if you’re protecting ‘your’ nation, you probably get a military with bullets, explosives, tanks, ships and planes, etc.). We all take ownership seriously.

Philosophically, ownership is based on a distinction between our (subject) ‘self’ and at least one (object) ‘other’. I have a friend/acquaintance who believes that there is no real ‘other’ to reality – that all reality is ‘self’ (if we’d only just develop/cultivate our collective self-awareness, etc.). Not only is the concept of any kind of relation-ship (which is always between a ‘self’ and an ‘other’) made impossible, it also negates any meaningful notion of owner-ship.

The only sense of ownership which can even possibly/partially be retained on this view would be a sense of a collective, universal ‘self’ which ‘self-owns’ everything… or should we rather say ‘self-owns itself’?? Any division of reality into ‘this’ or ‘that’ part(s) which then comprise a whole(s) is necessarily a division into which the self/other distinction instantly leaps. As you can (hopefully) see, even if some people find it fashionable to speak/write like this, I’ve not yet met anyone who finds it possible to live like this. Actually, one can’t even go very long speaking/writing like that without contradicting themselves – probably sooner than later.

Not surprisingly, I find the Judaeo-Christian tradition/philosophy/worldview to be far more useful, reasonable and intuitive. It takes personal and corporate human ownership seriously, but places them both within the context of ultimate or divine ownership. The stuff we ‘have’, we are really only ‘looking after’. Our universe, our planet, our rocks, our trees, our skies, our seas, our beasts, our beauties, our race and races, our brains, our bodies… our entire world belongs ultimately to the Creator God, who entrusts it all to us as stewards to look after it.

The charge to the primal human pair in the Garden of Eden story reflects humanity being given its job description or vocation: ”Tend and keep the garden.” We are given the task and responsibility to do everything from astronomy and economics to biology and electronics; from sociology and psychology to ecology and geology. God’s world of space and time, of matter and meaning, of black holes and bonobos, of planets and people, of sex and supernovae, of courtrooms and cancer wards, of playgrounds and prisons, of bluebirds and babies is to be cared about and cared for.

tree planting

Dale — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:41:14 +0000

I don’t have time to look into it at the moment, but I’d love to see a treatment of what led Protestant Reformer Martin Luther to say,

“If I knew Jesus would return tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.”

stinking stimulus

Dale — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:09:54 +0000

Anyone who has a knee jerk (i.e. less than critical) reaction to political events in general and the recent U.S. stimulus package in particular, should shut up and think before ranting.

That said, I just don’t like the thought (much less the passing) of the new stimulus package (and I’m not at all anti-Obama – to be crystal clear). $US838 BILLION – on what I can’t help but see as a kind of massively over-sized whallop to a horse that is eventually going to die. Yes, I’m aware of the complexity to all this, and No, I don’t think there are any quick fixes. But I still cannot understand or begin to support spending nearly a trillion dollars on trying to preserve the “American Way of Life” ™.

What kind of precedent are we setting for future generations? What are we saying to the rest of the world – much of which is living in some mild or severe form of poverty; a different kind of poverty indeed to the ‘poverty’ some are facing in ‘developed’ nations around the world.

Some may think, “Oh, but financial prosperity for the ‘rich west’ will enable them to be generous to the ‘poor rest’…” That kind of capitalistic mentality (a.k.a. ‘the rising tide will lift many small boats’) is utter Bull. Greed does not engender generosity.

Instead of our bank account levels needing to go ‘up’, we need our standard of living to go ‘down’ to a realistic and sustainable place. And as long as ‘going out and spending money to stimulate the economy’ is part of doing your ‘patriotic duty’, then I think I want to be unpatriotic.

buying rubbish

Dale — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:23:51 +0000

It’s ‘inorganic rubbish collection’ time in Northcote, Auckland, New Zealand.

Northcote street-sides are loaded down with previously-wanted, cheaply-made, briefly-enjoyed and hastily-discarded stuff.

Interestingly, a rather large percentage of the items you’ll see piled outside homes in the area can be seen in pre-broken, pre-rusted or pre-outdated condition in store advertising fliers like the “Outdoor Living ’08” catalogue from the Warehouse (the near-exact New Zealand equivalent of ‘Wal-Mart’ – that corporation-of-all-corporations emanating from the U.S.).

Yes, the American disease of paying far-too-little for far-too-much is migrating shopping mall by shopping mall to New Zealand.

(I note in passing the ‘hard to resist’ wording chosen for the message overlayed the picture of ‘Sylvia Park’ shopping centre – which I watched suck the life out of what used to be the Panmure business district. Really, we did need another shopping mall, didn’t we? Seriously, someone had to do something for those poor, confused Auckland women wandering the streets not knowing where they could obtain their 54th pair of shoes… but I digress…)

But the cause for the amount of rubbish on Northcote streets (which seems – subjectively – more than last year?) has not only to do with the demand (which is met with abundant supply) for cheap goods… It also has to do with our disposable culture.

The chair (or table, or BBQ, or microwave, or printer, or computer, or lounge suite, or washing machine, or computer desk, etc.) is broken. I could fix it. But – really – who can be bothered when I can buy a cheap replacement?

My good friend Derek Lind told me once about a small village he visited in a less-fortunate (or less cursed?) country. He observed one ‘family business’ which collected all sizes and shapes of broken bits of brake-light reflectors from cars – and glued them carefully back together to sell.

These good people would find the streets of Northcote a literal gold-mine of (relatively) easily fixed goods to fix, use and/or sell.

What an interesting world we live, buy, use, sell, demand, shop, waste and dispose in.

(For a quite telling summary of how all this works, I can’t reccomend strongly enough ‘The Story of Stuff‘ – watch it right this moment.)

(p.s. – I wonder if fender-bender car crashes are more frequent during these times? There seem to be a lot of people ‘shopping’ for use-able stuff on the side of the road – and paying a bit less attention to cars in front of them?)

wineskins at laidlaw

Dale — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:42:30 +0000

Monday nights, 1, 8, 15, 22 September 2008

7:00 – 9:30pm, Laidlaw College – Auckland Campus,

80 Central Park Drive, Henderson, Waitakere

Heaven and Earth: Where are we going? Does it matter?

We are excited by the opportunity we have to introduce you to some of the new faces at College. This group includes Dr Martin Sutherland (Vice Principal Academic) and the Heads of School Dr David Williams (Counselling), Dr Rod Thompson (Theology), and Dr Meredith Wheeler (Mission and Ministry). They will all be taking part in the series alongside Mark Strom.

Hopefully, there will be discussion over the talks over at http://wineskinreview.blogspot.com

psalm 8 remixed

Dale — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 01:11:14 +0000

A targum of Psalm 8:

Yahweh our Master!
Your Name is priceless throughout the universe!
Your glory is unsearchable and inscrutable
and utterly beyond our capability to measure.
Even the smallest and inexperienced ones; yes – babies
they praise you – just as you wanted
all this is like ignorant and inane babbling to those who hate you,
yet this incoherent baby-noise completely silences sinners and evil-doers.
When I ponder the chaotic-order of the cosmos,
the mechanics of your workshop,
whether multiple distant galaxies or single stars,
knowing you plan and place them all,
I wonder why you bother thinking of mere humans,
or why you concern yourself with homosapiens?
But – no other thing you’ve created comes as close to your divine greatness,
potential and power, reason and rhyme; you gave it – we have it.
Everything that you’ve created, we are now responsible for;
under God and over creation:
…over the lions and llamas,
and every land-dwelling animal,
…over every single thing that flies in the air,
and every thing in fresh-water or salt-water,
indeed – every kind of ocean-floor crawling and swimming thing.
Yahweh our Master!
Your Name is priceless throughout the universe!

the story of stuff

Dale — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:27:44 +0000

watch it here (worth all 20 minutes of your time).

Note: The scope of this thing is so huge, please don’t fault it for making sweeping statements – to cover what it does in 20 minutes, it has to make its statements as general as possible.

immoral eating?

Dale — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:50:53 +0000

I saw some footage tonight from a hot-dog eating contest…

Disgusting…

Utterly disgusting…

Yet somewhat amusing…

But later I thought…

“Hey, isn’t that shocking? All these people cramming down (and I don’t know how long they stayed ‘down’…) dozens of hot-dogs each, while food is scarce for most/many in the world!!??”

Is this utterly immoral?

Am I too idealistic?

Now, I do think that we are capable of growing plenty of food for all to have enough to eat – heck even enough for us to have a bit of fun with our food. But these kinds of clashing realities (or to use a phrase from NZ Baptist Assembly last year – ‘colliding worlds’) just seem to jump out at me more and more…

what we don’t want to know

Dale — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 19:50:00 +0000

You really must go and see the movie that my wife and I (and others) saw recently.

It’s called ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ It chronicles Al Gore’s message about global warming that he’s been sharing for more than a decade. To say it is a must see would be a grave under-statement. The theatrical trailer can be viewed at http://www.climatecrisis.net

Now, many of you may be thinking, “Oh yeah. Global warming. Yeah, some scientists say that this is a problem, others don’t. I’ll wait till it’s really an obvious problem before I get too worried…”

I used to think this way.

I don’t now.

Gore has done his homework. And more importantly, he has talked to a lot of people that have done their homework. This is his life passion. But even this isn’t the reason that you should go see the movie.

You should go see the movie because you need to see what Western culture and life-style does to the planet. God’s planet. The Creator’s planet. The planet God has left in our hands. This is not a side-issue in God’s economy. There are no side-issues.

I am from a region in the United States (which – as many of us know – contributes the most towards the demise of the Earth) called the ‘buckle of the Bible belt.’ Christianity has been so established in this area, that these Christians enjoy many privileges that other Christians have never known and probably never will (and probably won’t be any worse off…). I know what it’s like to live a comfortable ‘Christian life’. You don’t have to go into a normal bookstore to get your favourite Christian books, because you can go to a Christian bookstore and avoid having to be exposed to books that don’t align with your world-view. Heck, in some places, you can go to a Christian bookstore that aligns more comfortably with your denomination. What’s more, many Christians see this as a demonstration of God’s favour on them.

In addition to enjoying the benefits of the established nature of Christianity in the U.S., American Christians (mostly) live identical lifestyles of comfort, convenience, busy-ness and everything else stero-typical of what it means to be an American. Most Christians would assume that the American Dream is fully harmonious with God’s Dream. While I cannot – and will not – include all American Christians in this description, it fits the strong majority quite well.

Why the rant about American Christians?’ Well, I used to be one, and as a participant of such a culture (or sub-culture, actually…), I cared less about the world around me and mostly about my safe, comfortable Christian-hood. A warning about global-warming wouldn’t have phased me much, and I probably would have just shrugged and said, ‘Well, Jesus is about to come back, so what does it matter?’ After all, Al Gore is a Democrat (which 98% of American Christians consider to be obviously not God’s political party), and so therefore he obviously can’t be a Christian and why would we care what he has to say? I know, it’s a little cynical, but it’s not far from the truth…

My point? Care of the earth is an issue at which Christians should be at the fore-front. No, I’m not saying abandon issues such as abortion, family values or other ones. I’m just suggesting that we need not treat this as if it were something that is un-important.

Nuff said…

Go see the movie.

(Note: I just want to add that I’ve now seen and heard too much from either sides of the debate to fully commit to either position. But having said that, even if we aren’t causing global warming as much as some think we are, there are still plenty of reasons to live differently and be eco-friendly, etc.)