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Pigeon, chicken, the Bible: a natural progression

Blog Posted by kitt at 00:09 on 15 September 2005
I killed a bird today.

Quite by accident and terribly unexpected.

I was driving home along the sidestreet, actually driving the speed limit, as I was listening to something I wanted to be sure to hear all of (I actually think it was someone speaking at the Roberts confirmation hearing, someone being a moron with something like, "You agree Congress has the right to adjust the size of the Supreme Court, that's Congress, because you know that the Constitution gives Congress this power, and Congress has it." Or something annoying like that. Must have been a Congressman.).

As I passed the street three blocks over, I glanced down and to the left, just as a pigeon (stupid bird) started walking out of the path of the car.

This brilliant ("Brilliant!") bird decided to wait until the last possible moment to start moving, then move in the worst possible way: by waddling.

POOF!

I hit it.

I didn't hear the thump, but I did see the expanse of feathers behind my car, and the rolling body as it tumbled to the other side of the road.

Aw, geez. Bird! WTF!?!

Later that evening, I was thinking about that bird as I made dinner for the Communal Dinner of Wednesday Night™. We hadn't had communal dinner in several weeks, as various other events usurped our normal time. The Chateau's oven was out, so I cooked at home instead of trying to make chicken divan in a toaster over (though the recipe book did include microwave directions, oddly enough).

I was cutting up the chicken for the divan, and pondering: truly what was the difference between the pigeon which I had killed earlier in the day with my car, and the chicken which was killed by proxy for me to eat tonight?

Both were birds. Both were dead. One was providing nutrition, the other a starting point for a philosophical diversion that would probably end in some religious statement I'd regret in twenty years when I decide to run for office.

Point was, there really wasn't much difference. They were both dead.

And while I was pondering the chicken and the pigeon, I couldn't help but wonder what percentage of pro-life people are vegetarian. Because, if I understand the arguments properly, and pro-lifers believe sustainable life begins sometime after DNA merger, and removing a collection of cells that grow from said merger (a collection that cannot exist outside a particular organ of a woman's body) is amoral (regardless of the fact that the removal of any similarly sized collection of cells will result in the same cellular death), and they also believe that such removal of cells is the taking of a life, wouldn't they also believe that the killing of an animal is wrong, too?

And, if that is the case, wouldn't they all be vegetarian?

Which got me to thinking that they might just believe that book that says, in the first subbook, somewhere near the label "1:26"

And God said, Let Us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

which some interpret to be, "Yo, we can eat them." instead of "Hey, we have stewardship, we should take care of them." And they go about eating these animals.

Ah, the Word of God™.

And at this point, I was wondering why people use that particular collection of children's bedtime stories and collection of historical drival written by man and selected by man (there were many other Biblical writings that didn't make it into the "Official Bible") as a foundation for some belief system and fanatic cult.

And that's sure to rile up the last two members of my readership.

Or maybe they'll realize that I just don't get it. I don't understand why. I don't understand how. I don't get the God religions: Judism, Islam, Christianity (all with the same roots, people, did you forget that part?). There are parts that are, sure, a good blueprint for living well, but there are parts that make zero (negative!) sense.

So, my dead bird lead me to yet another, "I don't get it" moment in the kitchen, pondering the inexplicable moments of life.

Comments

Submitted by bluesboy on Fri, 2005-09-16 10:47

but, I agree.

Why was it that most wars in the history of mankind were due to religious differences?

And, why do people say "mankind" and not "womankind"?

Why do nut-jobs like Tom Cruise make millions of dollars, while people volunteering for the Red Cross and saving lives, make squat!

I'm through now. :)

Submitted by Pan on Fri, 2005-09-23 21:18

What does it take to make a feather? Some would say that it takes merely an act of will by God. A spoken Word, and suddenly, feathers. The Spirit moving over the newly created waters of chaos and suddenly calm. Order. Predictability. Light. Life.

For others, it takes a lot. Trial and error. Failures and successes. Procreation botched and perfected. Cellular dances with uncertain outcomes. An alchemy of chance and luck and odds across a distance of time almost meaninglessly large, leading back to an expansion and contraction of matter - though do those terms make sense in that envisioned beginning of Everything?

I maintain that both points of view require faith. Both require leaping chasms of uncertainty, of logical and evidential lacking. Both require a willingness to say that what we don't understand now, we will understand someday. Both point to an eternal process that we have no way of measuring or understanding. Both faiths are kept by men. Man's words attempt to encompass both - and ultimately fail because our words were not meant for such tasks.

Is this a reasonable place to start? That we can look at each other across the digital tabletop and say, 'I believe this to be true. I have faith that this is true, and not that.'? Can you begin there?

Submitted by Pan on Tue, 2005-09-27 13:46

I guess the place to start understanding would be the role of faith.

You can have faith in a God that created the chicken - and the pigeon, and you. This faith says that we don't know everything about this God (there is no way for a creation to fully know the mind of the creator). But we believe that this God created everything. The pigeon, the chicken, you, me, koala bears. He created them for a reason and a purpose, both in relation to Himself and to each other. Living outside of those purposes makes life miserable.

Or, you can have faith in no God. You can have faith in randomness, chance, luck, and whatever else you want to call the theory known as evolution. It seems to boil down to those things. Throw impossibly large timeframes behind a process of hit and miss, and inevitably, you will end up with something similar to a koala bear, or a pigeon, or a Kitt. There's no rhyme or reason to it. There is no purpose. We're a collection of chemicals that come into being, live, and die.

Both viewpoints require faith. Both require the willingness to simply say 'I don't understand how this works, but I believe it does' regarding key elements of the belief system. Both are intricately bound up in explaining man and his purpose. Man is the conveyer of both, but man is not the creator of both theories. Again, this is a matter of faith, just as much as believing in an eternal cycle of universal expansions and contractions.

Does this make sense as a starting place? That faith is not peculiar to Christianity or monotheism or theism in general? That faith is something everyone has - it's merely a matter of where it's placed and how aware they are of it?