Sometimes the day’s news is so bizarre and so manifestly insane that one is left wondering whether laughter, crying or hari-kari is the most appropriate response. What I have just stumbled upon online is one of those perfect examples.
Some of you might have seen an item on the evening news broadcasts about President Obama swatting a fly during an interview. And ol’ eagle-eye got ‘im. Given his many shortcomings, I guess we can put fly-killing down as one of his strengths.
Of course I thought nothing further of it, until my eye caught a news item on the Web moments ago. It seems some greenies are spitting chips about this incident. Really! Our friends at PETA are especially incensed. Here is how one news report covers the story:
“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is upset with Barack Obama killing a fly during a televised interview – and are sending him a parcel to prove it. PETA is sending President Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher, a device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it outside. ‘We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals,’ PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said Wednesday. ‘We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals’.”
Well there you have it. Of all the injustices in the world, of all the cases of evil and suffering in life, here we have PETA going on a bender about a dead fly. While I am no fan of Obama, this is clearly one case where I side with the guy. If a fly bugs me (no pun intended) I will certainly give it the ol’ heave ho as well, even if that means sending it to fly heaven.
But sadly of course we have come to expect such lunacy from PETA. Let me remind you of some other recent PETA zingers. Recall that they recently wrote to a popular ice cream manufacturer, urging them not to use cow’s milk, but human milk, for their ice cream cones.
Then we had PETA campaigner Heather Mills, ex-wife of Paul McCartney, arguing that cows’ burps are heating up the world and we should use milk from other animals: “Why don’t we try drinking rats’ milk and dogs’ milk?” she apparently asked with a straight face.
And don’t forget the story about PETA activist Toni Vernelli, who said she killed her unborn child because of its potential emissions: “It would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world.” Not only that, but she sterilised herself for Gaia: “Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.”
Finally, consider PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk. She has an intriguing webpage called “Ingrid Newkirk’s Unique Will”. This is part of what she wants done with her body, as stated in her official public will:
“a. That the ‘meat’ of my body, or a portion thereof, be used for a human barbecue, to remind the world that the meat of a corpse is all flesh, regardless of whether it comes from a human being or another animal, and that flesh foods are not needed;
“b. That my skin, or a portion thereof, be removed and made into leather products, such as purses, to remind the world that human skin and the skin of other animals is the same and that neither is ‘fabric’ nor needed, and that some skin be tacked up outside the Indian Leather Fair each year to serve as a reminder of the government’s need to abate the suffering of Indian bullocks who, after a life of extreme and involuntary servitude, as I have seen firsthand, are exported all over the world in this form.”
I am not making this up folks. Check out the website for yourself. These are the sorts of people we are dealing with here. And this is the sort of twisted logic and mangled morality we are dealing with as well.
According to the PETA code of conduct, killing unborn babies for the sake of the planet is heroic. But swatting pesky flies is the height of barbarism. Go figure.
PETA’s philosophy:
Animal life is greater than human life
The more defenseless an animal is, the more it needs protected. To a certain degree, they are right. I believe a human baby is about as defenseless as they come. Since this human baby has the potential to destroy, it must be destroyed first. PETA’s view, not mine.
My view is this defenseless baby also has the potential to create, save, and free mankind, it must be protected. How many Einsteins, Beethovens, Buddhas, or plain dirt farmers have we killed in the last twenty years without them reaching even part of their potential? Yet we call ourselves ‘Civilized’.
Jeff Miskin
If this isn’t a case of gaia worship and self-sacrifice then I don’t know what is.
Welcome to the new green religion!
Damien Spillane
Just like Peter Signer, these guys are consistent evolutionists. The world is coherently worldly; that’s dangerous, especially when you teach bioethics at Princeton.
As a maths teacher I used to stumble across the occasional person who got the answer right but for the wrong reasons. If I could, I gave them marks.
I think Toni Vernelli has got the answer right, she is a burden on the world. But I think she’s off planet with her reasons. I can’t approve of her abortion. I guess I’m OK with sterilisation, (if not with her reasons). A second generation of ecoterrorists growing up without any of the remnants of civilisation that ameliorate these nutters would be truly terrifying.
I think, however, that if these people were truly serious they should really be considering a mass suicide. While the flippant or frustrated may cheer at that, it would be murder, a killing God has not authorised, and wrong. (As I understand, my own life is not mine to take). The thought saddens me, because it is a very real possibility.
Unfortunately, I’m not even game to point out that they are all hypocrites and really need to end their own lives to be consistent with their beliefs. I think they’re nutty enough that someone might take it up and start teaching it as an offical PETA program.
By the way, Bill, I think “twisted logic and mangled morality” is the wrong way to describe these folk.
Their logic is painfully straightforward, and they are actually very moral, but it is their assumptions and axiomatic beliefs that send them off into such sad directions. If you do believe that the human is no different from any other animal, what they say and how they live is logical and moral.
It’s just wrong and foolish because it’s built on wrong and foolish beliefs.
Michael Hutton, Ariah Park
Perhaps you should reconsider Ewan, as their stance is anti-Christian and anti-human. Yes we are to prevent animal cruelty look at Wiberforce who fought slavery and then also founded the RSPCA and anti-child cruelty campaigns. The evangelical Plain Quakers website states that they are against all forms of cruelty to people and animals, but they put it in perspective using Scripture.
Wayne Pelling
IIRC PETA also complained to Hamas for using a Mule in a bombing attack. These people are completely insane.
Although given the wacko in charges ideas for what to be done with her body after death, I wonder if we could get a few wallets made from the leather and sell them on ebay. Bet they would be worth some good $$$ that we can put towards a steak BBQ 🙂
Jason Rennie
Your right Bill, go figure! I can’t but not laugh at their stupidity. My mind went straight to one of Rolf Harris’ song;
“So they tand her hide when she died Clide, and that’s it hanging in the shed”.
Ewan, can I join your group?
Rohan Needs
The most disturbing thing I found about the interview was how friendly and nice he was. This is not a bad trait but the guy is a monster, just a friendly smiling one.
Jason Rennie
There’s a scene in the movie The Shawshank Redemption where an old prisoner who has a bird for a pet asks the main character for a worm that has been put in his meal. In the commentary track of the DVD, the director mentions how the American Humane Association (or whatever their name is) representative would not give them permission to use a live worm to feed the bird, and also wanted assurance that the worm they did use died humanely. That movie was made in 1994, so this kind of idiotic thinking has been around for awhile.
But I agree with Michael Hutton, these guys are simply being consistent to what evolution teaches, that we are the same as animals. Add PETA to the Nazis believing in ‘survival of the fittest’, and it’s scary to think where this idea leads you to.
The other dumb reaction to this has been the mainstream media swooning over Obama’s swatting abilities.
I have read about these PETA people before. We should of course refute their falsehoods rather than merely denounce them as barmy. The correct response is political opposition and police vigilance.
No doubt about it. In secular post-Christendom all sorts of weirdos are coming out of the woodwork with potty and dangerous ideas. And our Enlightenment heritage of rationality does not stem the flow. It’s almost Freudian. Our collective Superego (that’s the moral bit) is so weakened it cannot stem the bilge from the Id.
John Snowden
I have just read your article “Reflections on Peter Singer” which puts him in a nut shell (and he IS a nut). Years ago I wrote an article in a Humanist journal that took a swipe at Singer, a Humanist. I was surprised to see a Humanist leader agree with me. It seems even amongst the ranks of atheists there are some not happy with him. But the objection may well have been a political one of public image as Singer’s public utterances would be an embarrassment to any group trying to look decent.
There is a theory that there are moral truths that human beings cannot help but know in their hearts, no matter how much rationalisation and waffle they come up with to dodge the truth. Singer looked after his ailing mum because his moral sense told him to. His psychopathic thought habits tarted up as philosophy failed to stop him. The contradiction does not seem to have stumped him. Insensitivity to self-contradiction is odd in a philosopher.
Singer is a nut but a highly intelligent and often scholarly one. If he had below average IQ and was dumb enough to practise his strange ideas, he would be either in jail or a mental institution. So why is he employed? You do not have to be mentally healthy with a head full of truth to be employed as a secular philosopher. And, unlike a moral theologian seeking employment, you don’t need to be morally exemplary either.
John Snowden
Please excuse my philosophy, but between the universals and particulars, the nonchristian/autonomous quest for universals has been abandoned, and along with it not just the coherence of particulars, but the differentiation of them. The result, particularism, erases all categories/distinctions of species and gender. Humankind (or personhood) is a lost identity. Maleness evaporates. Male/female complementarity vanishes. The only distinctions to be made are physical/spatial and thus arbitrary, leading to the absurdity of an unborn baby being considered a person based on its location in or outside the woom.
But nothing is too absurd in a particularistic universe because all particulars collapse into a monistic whole: each ultimately merges relativistically into the same continuum. Sex with a marigold? That’s fine. Decapitating a daisy? How dare you make a qualitative distinction?!!! All is matter, all is Brahman.
As is often noted, Singer and Newkirk are drawing consistent conclusions. Ingrid Newkirk’s infamous “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” encapsulates in the realm of species what Francis Schaeffer indicated in the realm of morality with his formula “cruelty=noncruelty.” It is the great equivocation of good and evil, the denial of created distinction and purpose, and thus of identity.
This is the logical inevitability of rejecting the Creator/creature distinction. With no Creator, we worship only created things, which are deemed natural and therefore ultimately of the same essence or “stuff.” The poverty and irony of this view is that you could worship stone and wood, while trampling the Image of God in man. You could exchange male-female relations for same sex, or interspecies, but in so doing you are denying yourself as a self with any distinction and dignity.
What sounds like an absurdity to most people is actually a logical consequence of atheism. Christians can do better in exploiting this fact in our apologetic method.
Peter Grice, Think Christianity
What a complete misrepresentation of the truth. PETA did not react or get angry or attack or anything. They were asked to make a comment and they did. Who are the idiots here? People are making way too big of a deal our of this.
Chris Richardson, USA
Thanks Chris. Whether they were asked or not is not the issue. The real point is, any group which can issue press statements about flies, while being quite happy with the killing of unborn babies is a group which has got some real problems. The moral priorities of PETA are out of line big time.
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
I first saw this gag in a Dilbert cartoon twenty years ago.
Dibert swats a fly, and Dogbert asks “Why is it OK to kill flies while it’s not OK to kill dolphins?” http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1989-10-30/
PETA, it was just a joke! You weren’t meant to take it seriously!!!
Kevin Mullen, Perth, Western Australia
I guess they’re even more wacko than we thought!
Nathan Schellinger
Thanks Nathan
Yes, very revealing stuff there!
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
PETA are the same bunch of idiots who want Australian wool growers to stop mulesing their sheep. The absurd thing is that the industry body Australia Wool Innovation has pursued a policy of appeasement with PETA and have agreed to a phase out of mulesing by 2010. But PETA are philosophically opposed to the farming of animals so appeasement won’t work with them. If mulesing is stopped, PETA will just move on to the next “objectionable” practice of docking lambs tails for example.
Ewan McDonald.
I have to admit your opening comments of ‘laugh, cry, or commit huri-curi’ I can seriously relate to. What amazes me is how the grossly sinful and for lack of a better term ‘braindamaged’ can openly and boldly take a stand for these things proudly?!? When many Christians are ashamed of criticism’s thus compromising Biblical Christianity and seek to have the world’s approval?!!? If PETA can stand by such absurd comments without flinching as if everyone in opposition is wrong why cant more Christians take a bold stand for our faith? Shocking!
Dorian Ballard
“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is upset with Barack Obama killing a fly during a televised interview – and are sending him a parcel to prove it. PETA is sending President Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher, a device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it outside. ‘We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals,’ PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said Wednesday. ‘We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals’.”
I recently joined PETA – People Eating Tasty Animals.
http://mtd.com/tasty/
Ewan McDonald.
PETA’s philosophy:
Animal life is greater than human life
The more defenseless an animal is, the more it needs protected. To a certain degree, they are right. I believe a human baby is about as defenseless as they come. Since this human baby has the potential to destroy, it must be destroyed first. PETA’s view, not mine.
My view is this defenseless baby also has the potential to create, save, and free mankind, it must be protected. How many Einsteins, Beethovens, Buddhas, or plain dirt farmers have we killed in the last twenty years without them reaching even part of their potential? Yet we call ourselves ‘Civilized’.
Jeff Miskin
If this isn’t a case of gaia worship and self-sacrifice then I don’t know what is.
Welcome to the new green religion!
Damien Spillane
Just like Peter Signer, these guys are consistent evolutionists. The world is coherently worldly; that’s dangerous, especially when you teach bioethics at Princeton.
To know more about Peter Signer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer
Pascal Denault
re Toni Vernelli.
As a maths teacher I used to stumble across the occasional person who got the answer right but for the wrong reasons. If I could, I gave them marks.
I think Toni Vernelli has got the answer right, she is a burden on the world. But I think she’s off planet with her reasons. I can’t approve of her abortion. I guess I’m OK with sterilisation, (if not with her reasons). A second generation of ecoterrorists growing up without any of the remnants of civilisation that ameliorate these nutters would be truly terrifying.
I think, however, that if these people were truly serious they should really be considering a mass suicide. While the flippant or frustrated may cheer at that, it would be murder, a killing God has not authorised, and wrong. (As I understand, my own life is not mine to take). The thought saddens me, because it is a very real possibility.
Unfortunately, I’m not even game to point out that they are all hypocrites and really need to end their own lives to be consistent with their beliefs. I think they’re nutty enough that someone might take it up and start teaching it as an offical PETA program.
By the way, Bill, I think “twisted logic and mangled morality” is the wrong way to describe these folk.
Their logic is painfully straightforward, and they are actually very moral, but it is their assumptions and axiomatic beliefs that send them off into such sad directions. If you do believe that the human is no different from any other animal, what they say and how they live is logical and moral.
It’s just wrong and foolish because it’s built on wrong and foolish beliefs.
Michael Hutton, Ariah Park
Perhaps you should reconsider Ewan, as their stance is anti-Christian and anti-human. Yes we are to prevent animal cruelty look at Wiberforce who fought slavery and then also founded the RSPCA and anti-child cruelty campaigns. The evangelical Plain Quakers website states that they are against all forms of cruelty to people and animals, but they put it in perspective using Scripture.
Wayne Pelling
IIRC PETA also complained to Hamas for using a Mule in a bombing attack. These people are completely insane.
Although given the wacko in charges ideas for what to be done with her body after death, I wonder if we could get a few wallets made from the leather and sell them on ebay. Bet they would be worth some good $$$ that we can put towards a steak BBQ 🙂
Jason Rennie
Your right Bill, go figure! I can’t but not laugh at their stupidity. My mind went straight to one of Rolf Harris’ song;
“So they tand her hide when she died Clide, and that’s it hanging in the shed”.
Ewan, can I join your group?
Rohan Needs
Thanks Pascal
Yes, Singer is a classic example of this madness. I have written a number of articles on him, including:
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2008/06/23/two-views-of-humanity/
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2002/12/03/reflections-on-peter-singer/
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2003/07/07/eugenics-and-the-culture-of-death/
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
I did an interview a while ago for the podcast I used to host (The Sci Phi Show) with Peter Singer. You can find it at
http://www.archive.org/download/tspsoc44/tspsoc44.mp3
The most disturbing thing I found about the interview was how friendly and nice he was. This is not a bad trait but the guy is a monster, just a friendly smiling one.
Jason Rennie
There’s a scene in the movie The Shawshank Redemption where an old prisoner who has a bird for a pet asks the main character for a worm that has been put in his meal. In the commentary track of the DVD, the director mentions how the American Humane Association (or whatever their name is) representative would not give them permission to use a live worm to feed the bird, and also wanted assurance that the worm they did use died humanely. That movie was made in 1994, so this kind of idiotic thinking has been around for awhile.
But I agree with Michael Hutton, these guys are simply being consistent to what evolution teaches, that we are the same as animals. Add PETA to the Nazis believing in ‘survival of the fittest’, and it’s scary to think where this idea leads you to.
The other dumb reaction to this has been the mainstream media swooning over Obama’s swatting abilities.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-dickens/2009/06/17/morning-show-anchors-marvel-obamas-fly-swat
Mark Rabich
I have read about these PETA people before. We should of course refute their falsehoods rather than merely denounce them as barmy. The correct response is political opposition and police vigilance.
No doubt about it. In secular post-Christendom all sorts of weirdos are coming out of the woodwork with potty and dangerous ideas. And our Enlightenment heritage of rationality does not stem the flow. It’s almost Freudian. Our collective Superego (that’s the moral bit) is so weakened it cannot stem the bilge from the Id.
John Snowden
I have just read your article “Reflections on Peter Singer” which puts him in a nut shell (and he IS a nut). Years ago I wrote an article in a Humanist journal that took a swipe at Singer, a Humanist. I was surprised to see a Humanist leader agree with me. It seems even amongst the ranks of atheists there are some not happy with him. But the objection may well have been a political one of public image as Singer’s public utterances would be an embarrassment to any group trying to look decent.
There is a theory that there are moral truths that human beings cannot help but know in their hearts, no matter how much rationalisation and waffle they come up with to dodge the truth. Singer looked after his ailing mum because his moral sense told him to. His psychopathic thought habits tarted up as philosophy failed to stop him. The contradiction does not seem to have stumped him. Insensitivity to self-contradiction is odd in a philosopher.
Singer is a nut but a highly intelligent and often scholarly one. If he had below average IQ and was dumb enough to practise his strange ideas, he would be either in jail or a mental institution. So why is he employed? You do not have to be mentally healthy with a head full of truth to be employed as a secular philosopher. And, unlike a moral theologian seeking employment, you don’t need to be morally exemplary either.
John Snowden
Please excuse my philosophy, but between the universals and particulars, the nonchristian/autonomous quest for universals has been abandoned, and along with it not just the coherence of particulars, but the differentiation of them. The result, particularism, erases all categories/distinctions of species and gender. Humankind (or personhood) is a lost identity. Maleness evaporates. Male/female complementarity vanishes. The only distinctions to be made are physical/spatial and thus arbitrary, leading to the absurdity of an unborn baby being considered a person based on its location in or outside the woom.
But nothing is too absurd in a particularistic universe because all particulars collapse into a monistic whole: each ultimately merges relativistically into the same continuum. Sex with a marigold? That’s fine. Decapitating a daisy? How dare you make a qualitative distinction?!!! All is matter, all is Brahman.
As is often noted, Singer and Newkirk are drawing consistent conclusions. Ingrid Newkirk’s infamous “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” encapsulates in the realm of species what Francis Schaeffer indicated in the realm of morality with his formula “cruelty=noncruelty.” It is the great equivocation of good and evil, the denial of created distinction and purpose, and thus of identity.
This is the logical inevitability of rejecting the Creator/creature distinction. With no Creator, we worship only created things, which are deemed natural and therefore ultimately of the same essence or “stuff.” The poverty and irony of this view is that you could worship stone and wood, while trampling the Image of God in man. You could exchange male-female relations for same sex, or interspecies, but in so doing you are denying yourself as a self with any distinction and dignity.
What sounds like an absurdity to most people is actually a logical consequence of atheism. Christians can do better in exploiting this fact in our apologetic method.
Peter Grice, Think Christianity
What a complete misrepresentation of the truth. PETA did not react or get angry or attack or anything. They were asked to make a comment and they did. Who are the idiots here? People are making way too big of a deal our of this.
Chris Richardson, USA
Thanks Chris. Whether they were asked or not is not the issue. The real point is, any group which can issue press statements about flies, while being quite happy with the killing of unborn babies is a group which has got some real problems. The moral priorities of PETA are out of line big time.
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
I first saw this gag in a Dilbert cartoon twenty years ago.
Dibert swats a fly, and Dogbert asks “Why is it OK to kill flies while it’s not OK to kill dolphins?”
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1989-10-30/
PETA, it was just a joke! You weren’t meant to take it seriously!!!
Kevin Mullen, Perth, Western Australia
Thanks guys
I was just sent this which is quite funny: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/06/widow-of-murdered-fly-seeks-white-house-apology-shit.html
Apologies for its use of the “s” word.
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
Iowahawk – always good for a laugh.
“It’s obvious he’s in the pocket of Big Manure.” LOL
Ewan McDonald.
Just found this very interesting info about PETA.
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/article_detail.cfm/article/134
I guess they’re even more wacko than we thought!
Nathan Schellinger
Thanks Nathan
Yes, very revealing stuff there!
Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch
PETA are the same bunch of idiots who want Australian wool growers to stop mulesing their sheep. The absurd thing is that the industry body Australia Wool Innovation has pursued a policy of appeasement with PETA and have agreed to a phase out of mulesing by 2010. But PETA are philosophically opposed to the farming of animals so appeasement won’t work with them. If mulesing is stopped, PETA will just move on to the next “objectionable” practice of docking lambs tails for example.
Ewan McDonald.
I have to admit your opening comments of ‘laugh, cry, or commit huri-curi’ I can seriously relate to. What amazes me is how the grossly sinful and for lack of a better term ‘braindamaged’ can openly and boldly take a stand for these things proudly?!? When many Christians are ashamed of criticism’s thus compromising Biblical Christianity and seek to have the world’s approval?!!? If PETA can stand by such absurd comments without flinching as if everyone in opposition is wrong why cant more Christians take a bold stand for our faith? Shocking!
Dorian Ballard