Dominion over all living things

the author Christopher Hitchens is often challenged to defend the subtitle "How Religion Poisons Everything" to his excellent bestseller "God Is Not Great". One questioner, during the Q&A following a speech by Hitchens, clearly enjoying his moment in the spotlight pushed the point to the extreme, "Religion poison's everything? Everything? Even chess?"

Now there is nothing particularly surprising about this extrusion of a serious point to the ridiculous as (notwithstanding the King and Queen advancing to battle flanked by a pair of bishops) but this got me thinking.

One of the most insidious poisonings of religion is mans' attitude towards our fellow inhabitants of planet earth. We as a species ride roughshod over other life. Habitats are destroyed, forests are clearcut and animals are 'produced' in factory farms like a commodity for profit. Some disgusting nations think it is OK to catch sharks, cut off their fins and throw them back to bleed to death, and for what? Bogus, superstition. Some think it OK to fish indiscriminately and keep only a small percentage of the catch for food, the unprofitable majority of the catch thrown back, dead. Some continue the despicable practice of whaling, killing these magnificent, intelligent and social mammals to make cosmetics and other essentials. Chickens are raised in the most shameful conditions, pigs are raised in massive metal sheds, a half million at a time and killed after a few months of miserable life without ever seeing the sun.

Whatever gave us the idea that it is OK to do these things?

Until we realize that we are just a part of the ecology of our planet and start to respect all life (including one another) we cannot begin to call ourselves civilized. We are not made in the image of a god, indeed it is the gods that we made in our image.

The poisoning begins almost on page one.

Genisis 1:26
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."


Psalm 8:6-8
6 You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
7 all flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.

2 Samuel 8:4
4 David captured a thousand of his chariots, seven thousand charioteers and twenty thousand foot soldiers. He hamstrung all but a hundred of the chariot horses.