Darwinism and Radical PETA - inhumanity goes ape!!! But people make music!!!
Above is Cindy Cruse Ratcliff now and below the album cover of one of her first albums.
I remember one song done by Cindy Cruse before she became a church music leader in which she declared how aghast she was that someone would be wearing a shirt asking to "Save the Whales" while promoting abortion, which is the murder of a human being!!! The album Small Town Girl is still available. Now she is Cindy Cruse Ratcliff and while she is a praise and worship leader she also rocks out from time to time. One of the guys I worked with named Tim loved my Christian rock music that I played and borrowed Small Town Girl and then went up to Chicago, heard the Rez Band play (Glenn Kaiser's famous group) and accepted Christ and made sure to find me that Monday to tell me he was now a Christian. That was pretty cool! I worked at that factory for about 15 years and saw five people accept Christ either in part because I talked about God and read my Bible at work and tried to live it out or in some cases they simply prayed with me to receive Jesus. One guy prayed with me while we were both working on an assembly line while we were making the parts! One young lady prayed with me on the steps leading out of a side entrance after she was fired. She prayed to become a Christian and then we prayed together that she would get her job back and sure enough they let her come back to work the next week!
Anyway, I saw this article by Lita Costner and thought about Cindy Cruse and the album (which I still have) and Tim and realized I have not seen him for many years now. But once you are actually a Christian it is forever so I will see him in Heaven! As to the article below, unsurprising that Nazis who were heartlessly killing off Jews had mercy for animals...Maybe there really is nothing new under the Sun?
Going ape about human rights
Are monkeys people, too?
9 July 2008Photo stock.xchng
On another front, Paula Stibbe appealed to an Austrian court to declare ‘Matthew’, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, a person so that he could have a guardian to look after his interests in case the animal sanctuary where he lives is forced to close due to bankruptcy. The Austrian court ruled against Stibbe without commenting on whether primates could be declared persons. Stibbe is appealing the case to the European Court of Human Rights. Stibbe insists that she is not trying to have Matthew declared a human, but a person, apparently on the grounds that, ‘Everybody who knows him personally will see him as a person.’ Personification of animals that one is fond of is nothing new; but it’s hardly a legal or rational argument.
Evolutionary basis
Photo stock.xpert
The argument of the animal rights proponents is that apes are our closest evolutionary relations; the differences between us and them are only differences of degree, not kind. After all, a few million years ago, we may have had the same ancestor. If apes are our cousins a few thousand times removed, then don’t they have just as many rights as we do?
Some animal rights organizations go even farther. Ingrid Newkirk of PETA (the misnamed ‘People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’) made the infamous statement “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” and said that “it is only human supremacy, which is as racism and sexism, that makes us afraid of being more inclusive.” Singer agrees, provocatively labeling as ‘speciesism’ the idea that humans have innate differences from animals, giving us rights they don’t have. But why did Newkirk stop at rats and pigs and dogs, and why does the Great Ape Project only lobby for the rights of apes? Why is it not, ‘an amoeba is a flea is a cockroach is a rat ’? After all, if we are all related by evolution, and that relationship entitles them to the same rights as us, then we would be evil for denying rights to some animals just because they repulse us. Indeed, being repulsed by a cockroach, or even thinking that humans are more valuable than a colony of bacteria wiped out by antibiotics, might be the ultimate example of ‘speciesism’.
Photo by David Shankbone Wikipedia.com
Ingrid Newkirk
The interesting thing about the animal rights’ activists is that they appeal to evolutionary arguments to say we should treat apes kindly, but they have no evolutionary basis to say so. If natural selection declares humans the more fit, what reason is there under their belief system to preserve a less fit life form?
Animal rights v animal welfare
Animal welfare is about treating animals humanely. The animal rights lobby goes much further, in wanting to give animals the same rights as humans. But many animal rights groups deceive donors into thinking that they merely support animal welfare.
But this was an example of animal welfare, which is about treating animals humanely. The animal rights lobby goes much further, in wanting to give animals the same rights as humans. But many animal rights groups deceive donors into thinking that they merely support animal welfare.
In practice, people who want to put humans and animals on the same plane do so by degrading humans, not by exalting animals. The result is people like Singer who deem apes deserving of some human rights that they would deny to unborn (and even humans after birth). In a strangely Orwellian paradox, in their mind, some animals are people, but some humans aren’t. So it is not surprising that Singer supports infanticide and euthanasia.
The fascist predecessors of the animal rights movement
The Nazi movement was also based on evolution, as thoroughly documented by Richard Weikart in his 2004 book From Darwin to Hitler (see review). So it is not surprising that there is a chilling similarity between some of their ideas and those of modern evolutionists today (see also Dawkins and Eugenics). This is not to say that animal rights activists were inspired by Nazis; rather, when people are inspired by the same philosophy, it should not be surprising that they come up with similar ideas.In practice, people who want to put humans and animals on the same plane do so by degrading humans, not by exalting animals. The result is people like Singer who deem apes deserving of some human rights that they would deny to human babies and old people.
Closer to our day, PETA has compared eating chickens with participating in the Nazi Holocaust (which was evolution-inspired). And Newkirk protested to Yasser Arafat because a terrorist attack used a donkey strapped with explosives—but she said it was not her business to protest against the innocent human lives lost in suicide bombings, just to ‘leave the animals out of this conflict’. So once again, elevating animals really amounts to trivializing atrocities against humans.
Dominion mandate
Photo iStockphoto
The Biblical teaching about animal rights is clear: we should care for animals and treat them humanely by having responsible dominion over them. We are permitted to use them for our own purposes, but we are not to be cruel to them. The difference between humans and animals is not only of degree, but of kind, and ignoring or downplaying those differences leads to devaluing human life instead of greater respect for animals. Lack of understanding of the Dominion Mandate is responsible for the secular world’s obscuring the difference between animals rights and animal welfare.
Related articles
- Making a man out of a chimp
- Chapter 6: Humans: images of God or advanced apes?
- Darwin’s impact—the bloodstained legacy of evolution
- Darwin’s ‘yard apes’
- It’s just not cricket
- Animal cruelty and vegetarianism
- Earth Day: Is Christianity to blame for environment problems?
- Creation, preservation and dominion, parts 1, 2, and 3
- Animal cruelty and vegetarianism
Further reading
Recommended Resources
Dr Batten deals with the claimed apeman fossils in the evolutionary tree promoted by the Smithsonian and shows how the stories do not add up. The fossil patterns fit a post-Flood dispersal of apes and a somewhat later post-Babel dispersal of humans. Shows how detailed illustrations have been imaginatively created from fragmentary fossils!
References
- Cited in: Goldberg, J. Liberal Fascism, p. 386. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Return to text.