A Bethlehem Request
	Contents: In Accompaniment The Divine Breath also Streams through Nature and Animals Tradition does not justify cruelty Materialism is drawing to an end Animals Need a Habitat The emergence of a modern “cultivated landscape” Peaceable Cultivation The unity of life Humans and animals again become friends The Laws of the Eternal Creator are Against the Arbitrary Hunt and Chase of Animals The Kingdom of Peace Becomes Visible How can you help?
	Further literature and links
	Download brochures and flyers
	Collecting signatures for animal protection and against hunting
	Contacts, Ordering Information
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	Impressum

Tradition, which lies behind our monstrous treatment of the animal world, may seem to us to still be very much securely established, but in the prevailing history of mankind that has lasted hundreds of thousands of years, it is only a passing, however particularly cruel, epoch, which has survived as many others – as in the time when animals were burned on altars, as in the time of human sacrifices, the time of cannibalism and the time of slavery. These last ones were, in the end, overcome by bloody revolts. The animal epidemics of our days are the revolt of enslaved creatures. The relationship between humans and animals has reached new dimensions. It is no longer deadly for the animals alone, but has also become life-threatening for humans. A new evolutionary step lies before us, similar to the victory over the eating of humans, the slave trade or the repression of women. Consistently, it was tradition that justified the respective barbarity; but only as long as the people accepted the ethical blinders associated with it.

In terms of the barbarity towards the animals, the blinders can above all be traced back to the Bible and ecclesiastical teachings. On the first pages of the Old Testament, it still sounds as if humans probably lived as vegetarians in the earliest times. God recommended to them not the meat of their fellow creatures but plants and fruits as food. (Gen. 1:29) But a little later, this same Bible announced an unholy and terrible message: “The fear and dread of you shall rest on very animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, … into your hands they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.” (Gen. 9:2) God allegedly was supposed to have said that, but meanwhile, we know how the Bible was put together: in a centuries-long process where priests and court officials wrote down traditions and their own concepts. Later a selection of these scripts were “canonized” and declared the “holy scriptures.” The tradition of the priests considered it correct to present to the people an angry and bloody God, who demanded at every imaginable opportunity quantities of animal sacrifices “of pleasing odor to the Lord” (Lev. 1:9) – and for the physical pleasure of the priests, who performed this bloody business and lived from it.

The New Testament replaced cruel animal sacrifices with the “sacrificial lamb Christ,” of whose “blood sacrifice” Paul so glowingly wrote about. At the same time he issued the motto: “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience.” (1 Cor. 10:25) Before this background, there no longer was a place in this Bible for the words of Jesus that were in favor of the animals. And yet, it is hardly imaginable, that the great teacher of peaceableness said nothing about peaceableness toward animals.

But even the four Gospels did not emerge overnight through divine inspiration; instead, they emerged through the writings of unknown authors who hid behind the names of the evangelists. They, too, drew from what they had heard, in turn, from others, and brought their own ideas into it. Of the differing and contradictory texts, disputes went on for centuries over what belonged and did not belong in the “holy scriptures.” When given the task by the pope, Hieronymus began to compile the first complete edition in Latin of the New Testament, and the countless contradictions, incomplete writings and different possibilities of interpretation of the biblical material brought him to despair. He wrote the pope who gave him this task that the world later would condemn him as a “Bible falsifier,” because he had to choose and decide, each time according to his own judgment, what he considered correct or false, incomplete and in need of amplification. He “added some things and changed some things.” And what remained totally outside of consideration are the so-called apocryphal scripts, that were not accepted into official Biblical texts. In part, they were destroyed, but in part, they remained missing over thousands of years and have only recently been found again.

All in all, the Bible proves itself as incomplete. Much of what Jesus of Nazareth said and did is not contained in it; and not everything that is “reported” there can be taken literally. This is also true of the question on how Jesus and His disciples acted regarding the eating of meat, and regarding the question of whether the Nazarene really did not say more about the treatment of animals than that the good Shepherd goes after every sheep and may do this also on the Sabbath. Meanwhile, in the apocryphal texts, it has been found that He warned people about eating carcasses so that they, too, would not be eaten as carcasses. We also know that James, the brother of Jesus, lived as a vegetarian. And writers of the second century report that many apostles also lived in this way.
But the developing official churches kept to the low opinion of animals by way of the official biblical texts, thus sealing the fate of the animals for the next 2000 years. Following Roman law, they were treated as commodities, as beings without souls, as a means for human purposes, helpless before every human violence. The enjoyment of meat became, in effect, a dogma and vegetarianism was judged as characteristic of heretics, for example, the Cathars who were burned by the thousands during the 13th century because as Christians they lived differently than the churches wanted.

No help came from the side of philosophy, which for centuries was felt to be the “handmaid of theology.” Quite to the contrary. During the 17th century, the philosopher Descartes became fatal to the history of great minds in Europe, for his world view made man the center of all things, bringing it all to a head with his famous sentence: “cogito ergo sum” – “I think, therefore, I am.” This sentence became a powerfully effective program. It reduced the spirit to the brain of humans. The rest of the world is dead matter, an animal nothing more than a heap of cells that Descartes compared to a clockwork made of wheels and springs, and whose pain for him was nothing more than the squeaking of a machine.

This disdain of animals continued until today in the Catechism of the Roman-Catholic churches. The Catechism emphasizes the merciless claim of humans to domination over their fellow creatures, delivers animals without restriction for the production of food and clothing, allows animal experimentation and condemns the suffering of the animals only insofar as it “contradicts the dignity of humans” (Cat. No. 2417) Accordingly, nowhere can one find a papal encyclical against the horrible

treatment of the animals in the laboratories, in the cages of animal factory farming, on animal transports and in slaughterhouses. Instead of this, high ecclesiastical dignitaries are passionately enthusiastic about bloody bullfights and defend the cruel games that take place with animals on church holidays. At these, goats are thrown from church steeples and doves are tied down and covered with firecrackers and misused as living oracles, as is done every year on Pentecost in Orvieto, Spain. And at Christmastime slaughtering reaches a record high everywhere in order to appropriately celebrate the “feast of love.”

	Everything that a human being does to animals falls back on him. (Pythagoras)

 

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