Apologies for the title but I couldn’t resist…
Although being a person of no faith myself, I sometimes wonder why religions are not much more involved in the moral case for nature conservation and animal welfare. I guess they are probably more involved than I notice but there is no way that they could be described as major players – so an event like this has to be welcomed. I will try to at least drop in to parts of it, maybe you could too?
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He’s an ichtheist!
Only on Fridays.
In Vardo in North Norway there is a fish warehouse by the docks with the slogan “In Cod we Trust” in giant letters.
We were there to see the Stellers and King eiders….
The question is whether bears are catholic and similar questions…
There is lwccn.com as a major initiative, and ‘A Rocha’ both UK and in various countries in the world. And they have been around for a long while, but you’re right, the established churches have been far too focused on human needs relative to the non-human world.
Hint. He took the name Francis, after St Francis of Assisi.
His famous encyclical on the environment is here http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
Genesis 1 v 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’.
Religion has played a large part in fostering the attitude that nature is something to be dominated and exploited. I daresay that lots of people of faith nowadays are committed to conservation of wildlife but I think the view encapsulated in Genesis still holds sway amongst many religious people. For example, Karl Barth, who was an influential Swiss theologian of the 20th century, apparently argued that because God chose human form for his incarnation, this showed that humans are more important than other animals. It is possible to combine such a view with a notion of custodial responsibility, I suppose, but often it simply reinforces an attitude that wildlife is there for us to take or to push out of the way whenever it inconveniences us.