| Popis: |
On a cursory reading, the Bible seems anything but a vegetarian manifesto. From its outset, human beings enjoy a status that animals lack, as God creates us, but not them, in his image and grants us “dominion” (Genesis 1:28) over them. Later, after the Great Flood, God reaffirms our privileged position, and expressly permits meat-eating, telling Noah and his sons, “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything” (Genesis 9:2-3). To be sure, in due course, God qualifies the permission to eat meat, distinguishing clean from unclean animals and commanding his chosen people to abstain from the latter (Leviticus 11). Yet he declines to enforce a vegetarian diet. Again and again, biblical characters raise and eat animals, without incurring God’s wrath. |
