October 17th, 2008

[Here is something I recently wrote in my Mensa forum:]

Sorry this reply has taken so long, but I got to thinking about two things here:

  1. Hunting for food vs. hunting for sport, and

  2. Definition/discussion of God.

Well, more accurately, they got me thinking about Pantheism again. (It's funny how I've gone in religious circles in my life: Grew up Protestant, threw it all away in university for a generic Pantheist-like simple spirituality, became radically non-religious after university, and am now leaning back towards Pantheism ... I wonder if this means I'll die a Baptist or something.)

One can think of Pantheism as God being the collection of all Nature, including living things and non-living things (e.g., Wordsworth talked about the "great mind" of the mountain and he sorta meant it literally, too). Note that Pantheism does not distinguish between flora and fauna, or even mineral; all is part of the living whole. Right, and if we go with that definition, we can further say that each of us is a small component of God. That is, without each of us, God would be lesser. It also means that no matter how we may feel about our individuality, we are still all a part of a greater whole, whether we want to be or not.

I want to extend that even further for a moment: If God is all of us together, and God is a living entity, then each of us forms a part of God's body, his existence, if you will. We all comprise the body of God.

Now think of a body (a corporeal one, that is): Inside itself it stores energy in the blood, in the muscle tissue and, if there's leftovers, in the fat tissue. And when it requires that energy the body removes it from the blood and muscle and, in severe cases, from the stored fat. In effect, we feed off of ourselves. In a metaphorical sense, we can extend that to describe how a Pantheist God feeds himself: He takes parts of himself and consumes them. To do otherwise would be to die. This is all perfectly "natural" (though I acknowledge the circularity of that thought).

Remember how Pantheism does not distinguish between the animate but static, animate and mobile, or inanimate parts of Nature, which means that eating a fellow human or a dolphin; eating a handful of corn, wheat, or grapes; or even trying to eat a handful of pebbles or dirt is all the same. Moose, man, mildew, marble, or mollusc ... it's all the same. Pantheism makes no distinction between eating any part of itself, and the only true abomination is the destruction of any of its parts for selfish reasons (that is, for reasons that are non self-fortifying) . By feeding yourself you are feeding all of us, in the form of God. Ironically, killing to feed yourself is at least as selfless as it is self-interested; by keeping yourself alive you are keeping a part of God alive. True, you have to sacrifice another part of God to do that, but there is no "net loss."

Killing for selfish reasons, however, constitutes a loss to God and therefore a loss to us all.

One can use this definition of eating to say that hunting down and killing a rabbit, woolly mammoth, stalk of wheat, or snake is just fine because it is a part of the Natural process of living. By Pantheism, in fact, it is what keeps God alive.

But picking off an animal with your high-power scoped assault rifle just so you can hang its antlers in your living room (above the bear skin rug acquired for the same selfish reasons) or lopping off the elephant's leg to make an attractive garbage can is the true sacrilege.

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