It may also help to remember that mainline (non-fundamentalist) Christianity probably includes far more people who entertain a healthy skepticism and “live the questions” than it does those whose minds are made up, precise and antispetic, like hospital beds.

Perfectly understandable. Piety and dogma are repellent to me as well. But you can have fun with the pious souls rather than getting mad: ask them why God rebuked Job’s friends, for example, or why God tried to kill Moses on his way back into Egypt after the fateful encounter with the burning bush.

Forgive me, I was ranting. I have such a complicated relationship with the bible. You’re quite right about the passages extolling both the wilderness and the pastoral. There’s ravishing beauty in it when you know where to look. (Well, in the King James version at any rate.)

I’m doing so much work at the moment based on bible texts that I should be more balanced. It catches me out from time to time when someone throws a piece of dogma my way, as happens a bit too often. (It comes with the territory when you paint Annunciations!) Then I get all mean and nasty and go for the jugular. I shouldn’t get bogged down in the bad stuff. I should take more care.

“That single notion within Christian and Judaic cultures has underwritten every wretched cruelty and act of violence visited upon the fauna of our planet.” Would that it were that simple. Unfortunately, I think anthropocentrism is neither unique to Western monotheism nor a necessary precondition for cruelty and violence against animals. Domestication was the original sin, and it took place long before the Bible was written, in many different parts of the world. To me, the Bible evinces more appreciation for the wild (and the pastoral) than most other sacred texts, and for every damaging statement one can find — the vision in Isaiah about the wolf lying down with the lamb is my least-faviorite passage, for example — one can find another passage extolling the virtues of untrammelled nature. Wilderness played a pivotal role in the Exodus story, let’s remember, as well as in the lives of such pivotal figures as David, Elijah, and Jesus. Contrast that with the wholly anthropocentric, world-denigrating scriptures of, say, Theravadin Buddhism.

(This from a man who was in torment because he had to shut in the Shetland pony all day while the fencers re-configured the paddocks!)

I would like to hunt down the people who put that turtle in a box, and then do something fairly unspeakable to them. Except of course I couldn’t, because I don’t have that kind of cruelty in me. Or maybe it’s not that I don’t have the cruelty… I am after all human and capable of anything… but more because I have a highly (some might say overly) developed sense of empathy. Empathy stays the hand. Encourage empathy in your children. They’ll be better human beings for it.

A turtle in a box. It makes me weep.

Well, I think biologists are moving farily rapdily away from that old terror of being found guilty of anthropomorphizing. The evidence is just too overwhelming for emotion, cognition, and that big bugbear, consciousness, in other animals. It would be exceedingly strange if we were the only species to possess these things.

Such a sad story. I hate seeing wild animals in cages. Thanks for the comment, though.

Spotting a wild turtle was a delightful rarity. Now it’s dreadfully rare. I hope they don’t feel grief.

Wonderful rendering of the life we never get to see (for “we” being “almost everyone”).