Dear Gillian
It is interesting to consider what the Established Church decides to emphasise and to withhold through its teaching, and how you can work-out which era a person lived in from what they were taught by the Church. With the inception of the sheer brutality and horror of Industrialised Farming (which Marx discusses in Das Kapital Vol. 1), the Church plays-down all these ‘animal-friendly’ narratives because the last thing a capitalist society wants is a State Religion (such as in the UK) or a Trans-National (as in the Catholic Church), generating a groundswell of Christian opposition to a) capitalist farming methods, and b) the cruelty associated with capitalist farming methods. I would say that this era is the time of the Church emphasising that ‘animals have no souls’. The logic seems to be ‘no souls’, ‘no pain’ – but obviously the ‘no pain’ bit is far-fetched and callous, as well as contradicting modern academic findings. Not only this, but I often contemplate the ‘damage’ it does to individuals who work in 24-hour slaughter factories that exist all around us – all the time! Industrialised Farming is cruelty for profit and society is currently ‘trapped’ in a cycle of dependency for cheap meat. The animals are treated so bad both physically and psychologically that neither I (nor my family) will touch any meat products.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 