Animal sacrifices; Sep of church and state

[HydrogenBond]

The sacrifice of animals has been a part of religious rituals since the beginning of religion. These are still practiced today by some forms of witchcraft and some Satanic cults. Another place where animal sacrificing is still practiced is in the medical industry. Since animal sacrifice has played and still plays a central role in many religions, does this imply that medical animal sacrifices is in direct violation of the separation of church and state?

 

If you look at animal sacrifices, with respect to religion, these were performed to appease the anger of the gods, to prevents possible disasters like sickness, war, famine, pestilence. The sacrfice, if done well, would not only appease these fears, but it would also bring a favorable affect from the gods, peace, health, prosperity, fertility. Nowadays, they still do animal sacrifices to appease fears due to sickness and pestulence. If the sacrifice is favorable, it can bring health and prosperity.

 

Back in the old days the priest would wear ceremonial robes. The animal's death was usally merciful, they might cut the jugular, let the animal bleed out, before throwing them in the fire. Nowadays, the priests and priestess wear lab robes. The animals death is rarely quick and merciful. Often death occurs via a long and slow process. They still use fire to complete the sacrifice (dispose of the bodies).

 

In this culture of petty applications of the separation of church and state doesn't animal sacrifice define a violation of church and state, since this practice is central to so many religions, throughout history?

 

For example, if mayor of a town was an aetheist but decided to allow a nativity scene for a few weeks before Christmas, because it would bring a nice ambience to his town, this would be a violation of the separation of chirch and state, since even the trimming of any religion is a violation, even if there is no direct agender by the mayor. He is not promoting a religion just trying to do something good and seasonal. The rituals of medical animal sacrifices are sort of similar. Noone is promoting any of the religions that sacrifice animals, but by allowing this practice, they are favoring the central substance of particular religions.

 

All you animal activists out there. The arguments of animals rights and feelings will never carry enough weight to amount to anything. It is too easy to dodge. What you need to do instead is use the separation of church and state to promote your cause. There is already enough petty precident in the system. You can use the same arguments to achieve your objectives. The govenment has no right to endorse the central tennant of any form of religon, even animal sacrifices.

 

I am not trying to be a bonehead. Call it tough love. The life sciences assume they are modern science. It we get rid of animal sacrifices, it should not make any difference. What does modern science need with the ancient animal sacrifice rituals, anyway.

[Buffy]

Its worse. Waffers are given out as part of the sacrament in Catholic mass, therefore providing cheese sandwiches in the cafeteria constitutes forcing children to worship at lunch.

 

And Spanish is a Latinate language which is still used by conservative Catholics.

 

And numbers are used to organize the verses of the Bible, so mathematics is a religious practice too.

 

All these things are exactly like making Buddhist kids recite the Lord's prayer or making Christian kids recite the Baghavad Gita, so the solution is obvious...

 

More Krishnas and Scientologists in the classroom,

Buffy

[infamous]

Sarcasm is such an effective tool when trying to make a delicate point in debate..........................................Infy

[HydrogenBond]

I personally believe that separation of church and state meant preventing a theocracy from setting social policy. But it has degenerated into a few whiny cry babies being coddled at everyone's elses expense.

 

With animal sacrifices it is not based on a singular parallel. One can list a least a half dozen parallels to a wide range of ancient and modern religions based on animal sacrifices. If one took a nativity scene and placed a dog and cat in the scene, that would alter it from tradition, but it would still be seen as a violation of the separation of church and state. So modern animal sacrificing have tweeked the presentation, but it is still technically animal sacrifices, since animals are sacrificed to appease fear and uncertainty and to create health and prosperity.

[Boerseun]

Valiant attempt, HB - but this specific ship ain't gonna float.

 

Medical science kills animals, sure - but there's a world of difference between killing an animal to gain a statistical insight into the workings of diseases and medication and the intentional killing of an animal to appease some invisible deity, the existence of which cannot be proven nor probed.

 

It's not comparable. Not by a long shot. Good try, nonetheless.

[HydrogenBond]

The invisible diety is connected to statistics. Statisitcs is sort of the god or goddess of empirical science. Statistics has this nebulous side that can not be seen, which can cause "Murphy's Law" to come into play if one does not give a sacrifice. Murphy's law is outside the realm of physical reality yet comes into play with statistics. In other words, statistics is preoccupied with appeasing or satisfying something that it can't see with the eyes, using animal sacrifices for appeasement. Sounds like religon to me.

 

For example, if one was doing research and said prayers publically to seek guidance to appease the fear of sending a possible poison to market, this would not be acceptable. But if they sacrifice a bunch of animals to the gods of statistics, this is different?

 

If a nature worshipper was having problems with their crops due to an unknown reason and sacrificed a few animals to appease their fears due to the uncertainty, would this be considered science? The god they are trying to appease has a nebulous unknown side also.

[Fatstep]

So, we should basically stop doing everything to gain insight in science due to its connections with God?

[Freddy]

Someone I know with a PhD in chemistry and works for a major pharmaceutical company is in charge of the human trials stage that will hopefully lead to a drug treatment for Type 2 diabetes. Animal testing was a necessary part of the development of this drug. He told me that this bothered him, but in order to help millions it had to be done. He is a practicing Catholic. Somehow I doubt the science of chemistry is his god and the deaths of test animals was a sacrifice to that god. They were a sacrifice to us, humans, their god that needs them to survive. Native Americans saw the sacrifice of the buffalo for their survival and gave thanks to the animal for sustaining their lives. In each case the animals are killed because they help human health. This is an empirical fact. Sacrificing animals because they mistakenly believe it will appease angry gods is not the same because it has no basis in empirical fact. Every time they had a poor harvest they knew their animal sacrifices did not work, but they would disregard the evidence and explain it away with some other nonsense, like the gods did not accept the sacrifice because of some impurity with the animal.

[HydrogenBond]

If we go back into ancient history, society was run by theocracies. There was an implicit separation of state of church, with the church in the top dog position. Animal sacrifices were theocratic procedural; a specific way needed to appease the gods. There were also progressive priests who wanted to extend the killing/butchering procedures to learn more about animal anatomy, i.e., earliest medical experimentation. This was taboo because it violated the separation of state and church. Nowadays the reverse is the case. State sponsored animal sacrifices are considered an exceptable form of worship. While old fashion procedural animal sacrifices are given the label of taboo, i.e., denominational payback.

[ughaibu]

Testing of drugs on animals is no more sacrifice than is eating animals, it's the utilisation of animals.

[HydrogenBond]

I realize that testing on animals does a lot of good and has played a role in most of the breakthroughs in medicine. The thinking is the ends justifies the means, i.e., lifes saved. The question is, who calibrates the scales with respect to animal sacrifice versus benefit. What is an acceptable number of animal deaths/life human saved. Is there a formula that will appease the gods of uncertanity?

 

During WWII, some of the axis countries used human sacrifices to conduct medical experiments. I don't condone this by any means, but from a practical point of view, it does cut out the animal middleman, allowing medical benefit to occur at a much faster rate. If the ends justify the means... Obviously the scales of cost-benefit fall on the wrong side even if the sacrifice/save life ratio is less than one. A human is given more weight on the scales, such that even one sacrifice is not acceptable even if it saves thousands.

 

What about pets. One person's pet is another person's mangy mutt that no better than a lab animal. Someone with no pet-owner connection to animal won't give the animal as much weight on the cost-benefit scales. Even with 200M to 1, low weight to high weight, the state still does not commandeer pets for medical research. Pets are given extra subjective value, so they weigh more on the scales of medical cost/benefit than non pets, maybe by a factor of 1000. Even if only one person to speak on behalf of an animal, and calls it "pet" it becomes very heavy on the scales of medical cost-benefit.

 

Does that mean if someone loves animals and works in a lab with animals, lab animals get the weight of a pet on the cost-benefit scales of medical animal sacrifices? In other words, if the caretaker of lab animals builds up a relationship with the animals, are they given the weight of pets, since their relationship could get closer than many careless "pet owners? Or does fine print of pet laws, require ownership before an animal is given the status of pet?

 

For example, a man buys a dog. So he technically owns the dog. The man's daughter loves the dog and treats it as her pet, but she is too young to own anything. The father doesn't see a pet but a lab animal. If abusing the dog brings him medical benefits (makes him feel better), he has the right to do as he pleases, since it is not a pet to him, but a lab animal? As a lab animal it does not carry much weight, allowing the flexible laws of medical cost/benefit to apply?

 

I am confused? If one wishes to abuse animals, all one has to do is own them, deny they are a pet, and keep accurate records of the abuse? And being willing to share the abuse with other members of the community (minus proprietary abuse)?

 

I suppose being a religious practive with centuries of precident, it is really isn't abuse, but the will of the gods, so noone is responsible. In fact the gods would be mad if one didn't perform the abuse. Maybe only the priests and priestess are allowed, such that private abuse is blasphemy.

[ronthepon]

You'd test on something if you don't care about it's well being, it's as simple as that. And your feelings probably don't come in numerical values, and they can't be expressed as ratios, because they change quite a lot from time to time, and depend on your general mood anyway.

 

A pet would be an animal you value. If the animal is going to be tested upon, or be eaten, then you probably can do your best to keep it alive. If that is not in your hands, it's going to be case similar to random environmental death of the animal.

 

If you wanna abuse an animal, declare. If you think that you can go ahead with the abuse process, go ahead as long as you can get away with it. But if you 'feel' against it, then feel free not to.

 

When humans were tested upon, then obviously there was no value for the victims, atleast in the opinions of the ones performing the testing process.

[ughaibu]

The reason that religious sacrifices of animals are/were sacrifices is that the food value was discarded, the animals weren't eaten as part of the sacrifice, they were burned and ruined for consumption. Medical research uses animals, it doesn't discard them, there is no parallel with religious sacrifice.

[sanctus]

But I had once a long discussion with a strongly believing medcine student, she said that humans are higher than animals (god gave the world to humans....) and so it's not wrong to use (or sacrifice, same meaning only different connotations) animals for science research, even with a ratio animal deaths/ human life tending to infinity. She did not say it is good to make animals suffer for no reason, but it's ok if it is to save human lives. I do agree that to some extent animal testing can be useful, but I don' believe we humans are so much better that we can make the ratio become to big or even make experiments on animals if the results are not very likely to be the wanted ones.

So that much, to say that the use of animals in medical research can still be seen by believers as a sacrifice, but not to god, just to the human lifeforms...

[ughaibu]

In early rural societies, in which animals were sacrificed during religious rituals, such animals had specific value as, 1) food, 2) property, 3) wealth, the voluntary loss of a valuable commodity is what defined the sacrifice. The death of the animal is not intrinsically necessitated by the concept of sacrifice, but it's a convenient and certain method of avoiding cheating by pseudo-sacrifice. The only thing I can see in common between drug testing and ritual sacrifice, is the death of the animal, otherwise, who is sacrificing an animal? Drug companies dont advertise in their canteens for volunteers to sacrifice their pets, they buy purpose bred animals from a supplier.

Instead of religion and drug companies, take two other objects, hospitals and car crashes, in both of these people sometimes die, but it's quite obvious that there is little in common between the two otherwise, the connection being attempted between religion and drug testing is equally tenuous, arguably more so as people in car crashes sometimes go to hospital.

A more realistic parallel of animal sacrifice for a modern urban society would be a person turning, say, 10% of their wealth into cash, piling it up and lighting a match. Modern religious ideas are pretty far removed from sacrifice.

[HydrogenBond]

I think the orginal point was separation of church and state. This aspect of the constititution not only prevents direct expression of one religion, via state sponsor, but also any direct or indirect traces stemming from a religion. For example, the navity scene occupies less than 1% of the New Testament or the Christian book of religion. So a 1% correspondence is the magic number. I think I showed at least 30% correspondence, which exceeds the magic number.

 

One other thing that was alluded to, was that religious animal sacrifice is not considered cruelty since it is ordained by a higher power. Since medical animal sacrifices are not considered cruelty, than it too must be ordained by a higher power. Who is this higher power, who decides the sacrifice of animals is helping the evolution of humanity? It is a philosophical concept, which is something one can not touch with their hands or see with their eyes. It is not of physical reality. Sounds like religion to me. It projects a utopian dreamworld that numbs people to the pain of the animal helping them sacrifice in good conscience.

[InfiniteNow]

Let's just be clear:

 

The Bill of Rights

The Conventions of a number of the States having, at the time of adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added, and as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution;

 

Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two-thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States; all or any of which articles, when ratified by three-fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the said Constitution, namely:

 

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

 

There is no passage saying there will be a separation of church and state, only that congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibing the free exercise thereof.