LOVE BUILDS UP:

1 Corinthians 8

Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that “We all possess knowledge.” But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.

                                                                                    1 Cor 8:1

            Last time, I considered the harm that working in high speed slaughterhouses and factory farms causes to humans in light of 1 Corinthian 8, in which Paul admonishes us always to act in love, being careful not to cause others to fall into sin.  With this post, I want to take a closer look at that passage from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth to see what it might have to tell us about loving our neighbors – with two feet and four – and about proclaiming the gospel. 

In 1 Corinthians 8 Paul begins his response to a question from the Corinthian church regarding whether it is permissible to eat food sacrificed to idols.  Paul’s full response is lengthy and carefully structured, comprising 8:1 - 11:1, but in Chapter 8 he lays the foundation for his argument with a central Pauline theme: in discerning appropriate behavior, the Corinthians are to consider what will build up the community and draw people to Christ.  Although today we tend to dismiss this passage as irrelevant in a culture that does not sacrifice meat or other food in the temples of the Greco-Roman pantheon, the lesson of this passage is as relevant today as it ever was.  

Ancient Corinth, photo by Ploync, cc via Wikicommons

BACK TO WORK

           I began my "summer hours" with Memorial Day weekend, and I will end them with Labor Day weekend.  Tomorrow I will post my September entry on this blog, which follows on from the August post.  After that, I will post a new essay every other week.  I am hopeful that will give me enough time to write some things worth reading.  On other weeks, I will try to post an interesting link or quote or other other tidbit.  Thanks for sticking with me this summer.  I hope yours was full of God's love and blessings - and was spent in the company of someone with fur.  

ON PTSD AND BACON

Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, 
so that I may not cause one of them to fail.
                                                                      - 1 Corinthians 8:13 

        I recently saw a link to a February 2014 article in Texas Observer, titled, "PTSD In The Slaughterhouse."  (I posted a link to it on the Dominion In The Image Of God Facebook page, so you may have seen it there.)  This came shortly after I attended the Humane Society of the United States' annual conference, Taking Action For Animals (TAFA), and the two incidents together gave me much food for thought.  The article is a short piece, and well worth clicking through to read, but here is what particularly caught my eye - and my heart:

Slaughterhouse employees are not only exposed to a battery of physical dangers on the cut floor, but the psychological weight of their work erodes their well being. As one former abattoir employee attests in the book Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry:

“The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where hogs are killed] for any period of time—that let’s [sic] you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around in the blood pit with you and think, ‘God, that really isn’t a bad looking animal.’ You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them. … I can’t care.”

It will come as no surprise that the consequences of such emotional dissonance include domestic violence, social withdrawal, drug and alcohol abuse, and severe anxiety. As slaughterhouse workers are increasingly being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, researchers are finally starting to systematically explore the results of killing sentient animals for a living.

      I've written before about the link between violence to animals and violence to humans.  I've also written about how we are all connected, and there will be no peace, no shalom, for humans until there is shalom for the animals; that is, humans will never know peace until we recognize that we are called by God to care for the animals, not to exploit them.