When we think of Catholicism, the idea of guilt tends to commonly follow. Confessing your sins helps to guide you on the path to forgiveness and get that awful feeling out of your gut. Although religion is so vastly different throughout the world, guilt is commonly addressed in a specific way in each religion. Whether we must pray for forgiveness, wash our sins away or confess to what we have done, we are commonly searching for a way to feel better. Despite our wrong doings, we search for a way to make whatever it is that we did sit right in our gut. The irony is that much of this guilt could have been avoided if we listened to that little voice inside of head that told us not to do what we knew we shouldn't have done in the first place that has led us to this queasy feeling. We are consistently searching for forgiveness that we would have never needed had we done what we knew was right at the current time. Too often, as a society, we look for rationalizations for what we have done. We push blame onto others, avoiding accepting any responsibility for our own actions. We look for forgiveness instead of asking for permission. We turn to anyone and everyone to search for the person that's going to tell us "it's okay". We search up and down for any rhyme or reason to evade acknowledging that what we did was wrong.
This is so pertinent in the following article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340207/I-didnt-think-Iraqis-humans-says-U-S-soldier-raped-14-year-old-girl-killing-her-family.html I couldn't 6 separate excuses this soldier listed when explaining why he raped and killed this 14 yr old girl and her family. He blamed being in a war zone, the "lack of leadership in the army", being emotionally distraught from seeing 2 others in his platoon die in front of him, an "altered state of mind", drugs and alcohol and that he "didn't think of Iraqi's as humans". Not once did he say, " I was wrong" or confess that he knew better; that rape was wrong. I feel as though the most interesting justification that he made was dehumanizing Iraqis. It's as if he thought raping and killing a species that's not human is perfectly okay. By dehumanizing he believes that he's lessening their value to point where he can treat them any way he feels and its perfectly okay. Unfortunately, this is an extremely common view for so many people, regardless or military status, race, culture or religious faith. This proves that this misconstrued view of humanism is cross cultural. It's not only Americans to blame this time. This video illustrates Palestinian leader, Hamas, trying to convince people to "destroy the Jews" by comparing them to animals. He makes this comparison to lesson the value of the Jewish People. By saying this he also is making the point that animals are lesser than people and therefor have less worth. even though he couldn't be from a more different country and religious faith than the American soldier, is he still not trying to justify a wrong? He is rationalizing destroying an entire religious group simply by lessening their value as a whole. I will never be able to understand the religious wars people are consistently battling over. How is it that someone can feel so strongly about their own religion and then demean and try to overcome someone for having that same feeling of pride? I find it extremely Ironic that we are the ones who are labeling animals as the lesser species when we are the only species that kills its own. We destroy our own habitat to create things that we know we can live without, as our history has proved that we've done it before. We make our greatest concerns making life easier and better, instead enjoying the quality of what we have. We make the same mistakes and expect different outcomes. We continue to choose the easier wrong, instead of the harder right, regardless of the effects. Although we are the ones that make the mistakes, we search for justification so that we can overlook it and make what we know is wrong, okay. Animals, although they look different from us, have the same emotions and have to figure out a way to make it through life as we do, however they are able to do so without destroying the life around them. Despite this fact, we still like to label them as the lesser species. This next video is extremely hard to watch, but illustrates a lot of so called "greater species" feels is justified. Our country specifically has outlawed "cruel and unusual punishment", but if this isn't cruel and unusual I'm not sure what is. We look the other way in this circumstance because the victims are animals and they don't have rights. These definition ally violent acts are okay not because morally they're right, but because we want them to be; because it's more profitable for this to be okay, its better for us that this happens, it makes food for us less expensive so we everyone can afford it, its easier for us to be able to to farm this way, they're just animals. These many, many justifications for why we must do this are simply ways to evade the guilt that we feel because we know this is wrong. Corporations can't deny that they know this fact as they hide behind private property signs and close off their factories to public eyes. If this really was okay they wouldn't have to hide it. They shield our eyes to protect us from the guilt unless we're unable to come to their same rationalizations that make factory farming okay. We dehumanize these animals simply to avoid the guilt we know we should be feeling. We have this grave sense of privilege that we should be able to make whatever choices we want without having to accept the consequences. This behavior of endless rationalizations has developed into a form of intersectionality between many of our greatest problems as the human race. The oppression this time, is not racism or sexism, but evasion of guilt and responsibility. We dehumanize not only animals but our entire earth. We put animals and nature at the bottom of our hierarchy so we believe that they deserve less than we humans do, as we sit at the very top. But as with any great pyramid even the strongest structure will fall without a base. We need to realize the importance of what we are putting beneath us and know that they are supporting us. We cannot survive without a world to live on, we cannot nourish ourselves sustainably as a whole without meat. When so much of our own lives depends on the ground we walk on, the air we breathe and the food we eat, we must reconsider the place of all these things. We have to quit looking at animals and nature as lesser and start viewing them as equal. To begin this extreme transformation we need to stop factory farming and continue farming on small family farms. We need to think about the humanity of how we are treating these animals when the reality is we need them. This switch will mean that we have to eat less meat as a society, because Small farms cannot support the vast amount of meat we are currently consuming. By lowering our meat consumption on an individual basis, it gives us the ability to do what is morally right. We then can save our energy that was being used making excuse after excuse to evade the guilt we felt about our wrong doings, to do what we know is right in the first place. We can make responsible decisions based on morality so we don't have to constantly be seeking forgiveness.
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