Weekly Newsletter from Christian Vegetarian Association CVA - January 30, 2019
From Christian Vegetarian Association (CVA)

  1. Activist feedback
  2. Original Sin, Part 62: Animal Abuse Threatens Humanity
  3. All-Creatures.Org Ministry

1. Activist feedback

Rick Hershey writes:

Chris and I handed out 1,250 CVA booklets at Winter Jam at the Sprint Center in Kansas City.This was Chris’ first experience leafleting.

Mare, Kyle and his brother and parents, Tyler, Chris, and I handed out 3000 CVA booklets at Enterprise Center in St. Louis for Winter Jam.

Leafleting and tabling are effective, enjoyable ways to show our brothers and sisters in Christ that a plant-based diet is good for God’s Creation. When you volunteer for the CVA, the CVA now donates $16/hr. for tabling and $25/hr. for up to 3 hours for leafleting to the veg. or animal protection group of your choice. Contact Lorena at lorenavalenziveg@gmail.com if you can help.

To find out about leafleting opportunities, particularly the excellent opportunities offered by Winter Jam events, see last week’s e-newsletter (January 23), or contact Lorena.

2. Original Sin, Part 62: Animal Abuse Threatens Humanity

The vast majority of people, believing that they benefit from animal exploitation and abuse, participate directly or indirectly in horrific treatment of animals. At the same time, they want human rights respected, in part because failure to respect human rights puts all humans at greater risk. I don’t think we can have it both ways.

Human rights require universal principles of justice. These principles are profoundly undermined when there are provisions for massively violating the principles. People often try to make an exception in their ethics and defend animal mistreatment by claiming that humans are special creations, but it hard to deny the obvious similarities in our feelings and those of other animals are very similar.

Segregation illustrates well of how widespread injustice undermines and corrupts all ethical systems. The arbitrary exclusion of rights to people of African descent (I should probably say more recent African descent, since archeologists tell us that all humans came from Africa) was on its face unjust. I think the injustice spread beyond more darkly-pigmented people and included poor whites, derided as “white trash.” Similarly, arbitrary hierarchies have helped prop up misogyny and the denial of women’s rights, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholic policies, and a long list of other injustices. It is hard to imagine a society that protects animal rights for egalitarian reasons that simultaneous denies rights to some marginalized humans.

Behind every injustice are lies about the characteristics of the victims, what they want, or what they believe. Truth is an antidote to injustice. It is somewhat paradoxical, then, that the forbidden fruit was from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I will turn to this next.

Stephen R. Kaufman, M.D.

3. All-Creatures.Org Ministry

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