Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Mahatma Gandhi
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
John Kenneth Galbraith The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
On our long list of things to be mad about in the world, out of nowhere came a different kind of story that momentarily took our minds off of police shootings or unarmed black teenagers, figuring out who is responsible for creating Isis, and why we had to lose Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the same miserable year. For several days, the world had a new person to hate, the previously fairly obscure Minneapolis, dentist, Walter Palmer.
Palmer actually had enjoyed a certain celebrity among big game hunters but last month he mistakenly killed one of the oldest, most rare, and most beloved lions in the world, Zimbabwe's rare black manned lion, Cecil. And though Palmer has since apologized and said that he did not know that Cecil had been lured off of a game preserve and was wearing a tracking collar, after they wounded and two days later finished killing Cecil, Palmer saw the tracking collar, cut it off and hid it in a tree. He was then so horrified by what he had done that he, reportedly, turned to his native guides and asked if he could kill a really big elephant the next day.
It is not that anyone thought that killing Cecil was more important than recent human tragedies; it was that it just made no sense at all. There is no friction in Minneapolis between the dentist community and the lion community.
He had to go half way across the globe, spend a ton of money, and then lure a harmless lion out into the open to shoot it. It was an obscene act to satisfy a nearly incomprehensible and arguably mentally perverted need to kill a rare, indeed, an endangered, beautiful, beloved and majestic animal.
It is an obscenity of excess. There is a market for rare meats around the world. I don't know how tired you have to become of beef, chicken, and fish to feel like you need to eat a bear, or a lion, or a rhino, I know that I have not felt any such appetite.
There are of course those who see little difference between killing a cow and killing a lion and though I am sympathetic with people who are vegetarians by reason of conscience, I do think there is a matter of self-preservation involved.
For all of the fear and hype about sharks, or Ebola, or even Isis, in the past year, only one American has died from a shark attack, one from Ebola, and only one from Isis, but cows killed 22 Americans .... I'm just sayin.... Do the math. I'm just doing my part to keep Americans safe.
But there is a serious moral issue here and one that is not always easy to define or to understand.
Spiritual people of every world religion have gone through phases of emphasizing the value of self-denial, of living an ascetic life, without possessions and in an embrace of poverty. Others have seen the accumulation of wealth as a sign of God's blessings.
The Buddha taught that the middle way is more sane, more balanced, more distinctly human. You know me, I'm never one to praise moderation when it comes to our passions for justice and our commitment to radical compassion, but when it comes to our appetites, the middle way is clearly the lane we are looking for.
Capitalism often seems to teach that there are no boundaries. There is an element in our society that seems to believe that more is what we are to always strive for. Our appetites for food, sex, money, land, things, power, can run over us and turn decent people into moral monsters.
Like a lot of my peers, I have struggled with my weight for most of my adult life. I don't feel like I am a bad person but I know when I try to fit my hips between the old theater seats at the Gilioz or at the Landers that whether I'm a bad person or not, I am a big person and I would be more healthy and more comfortable if I could be smaller.
And not to make this too personal and certainly not to invite unsolicited diet advice (which is considered justifiable cause for homicide), but I have to concentrate on the difference between wanting to eat because I am hungry and wanting to eat for the sheer entertainment or pleasure of eating. Foods that taste good are a form of entertainment, regardless of whether my body actually needs food.
For a lot of us in the middle class, we can afford to buy virtually anything that we want to eat and so we have to make a conscious decision to eat smarter and not simply to consume because we can.
One of the most helpful continuing education events we held at the university when I sometimes teach was when we invited the poverty specialist, Ruby Payne, to come do a seminar for us. She described the different ways in which our economic classes approach their family dinner this way, she said, after dinner:
A poor father will ask his children, "Did you get enough?"
A middle class father will ask his children, "Did you like it? Did it taste good?"
And a wealthy father will ask his children, "Did you enjoy the experience?"
For those whose lives are often marked with food insecurity, just making sure that your children are fed is a source of real anxiety. For those who are not especially afraid of hunger are concerned with making sure that their children as having a good life and not just getting the bare necessities but are, in fact, enjoying their meals. The wealthy might not really enjoy even good food if it is not served in an environment that is also esthetically pleasing.
All of these things have to do with how we have trained our appetites. I eat beef and chicken but I would take no pleasure in going onto a farm and personally killing the animals that would end up in the skillet on my stove. I don't understand the pleasure people get out of hunting but I recognize it as being a part of how humans function in the food chain and I do not judge someone who hunts for food.... Though hunting endangered species or even entirely impractical sources of meat is an extreme of appetite that we should not be afraid to label as being evil, sinful, extreme to the point of mental illness.
The Desert Fathers, the ascetic monks who lived in the Alexandrian desert in the early centuries of the Christian movement, sought to challenge the power of their appetites so that they could devote themselves to spiritual causes. They taught that if you will not even satisfy your thirst for water, that you will never long for wine, and that if you never take your fill of bread, you will not crave to eat meat.
Many of our appetites do not have a natural stopping place. We have to decide that we are going to be in charge of ourselves. The Apostle Paul spoke critically, in the 3rd chapter of Philippians, of those "whose god is their belly." People who have lost all impulse control, who never willingly say "no" to any of their appetites..... a spiritual weakness facilitated in modern times by credit cards and Payday loans that allow people to indulge themselves in the present moment what they ultimately cannot afford to have.
Our society rarely questions our appetites and in fact encourages indulgence, excess, hoarding, and greed. The liquor industry runs ads telling people to drink responsibly but they know that alcoholics purchase four out of five drinks consumed in America. If it were not for the addicts, most beer and liquor companies would go bankrupt. Casinos post signs encouraging people who have a problem with gambling to seek help and yet, they know exactly who is in the building, how long they have been there and how much they have lost.... If they were concerned about gambling addicts, they could easily turn them away at the door of the casino but, in fact, their bottom line is entirely dependent on addicts.
I am no prude and I am opposed to censorship in almost all forms, but I know that very many people find that they quickly move from being occasional viewers of porn to being fired for watching porn at work. WebMD estimates that there are nearly 450 million pornography websites now which is about one for every six people who have access to the internet. Clearly, this is not just couples trying to spice up their love life.... This is a social addiction that can hardly be seen as anything short of a malignancy.
We have advertisements beamed at us night and day through every form of media. We are encouraged to buy, consume, indulge and to never think of the consequences to the earth, or how our excesses cause scarcity for others, or even how indulging our appetites can create an obscene and abusive industry on the other side of our consumption in which there are victims without number.
We have to be smarter than the marketplace. We have to be more decisive than the alcohol industry, the gambling industry, the sex industry, and even the automobile and clothing industry. We have to decide to live sane lives, balanced between necessity and obscenity.
As Gandhi said, in matters of conscience, you cannot depend on majority opinions. There is no substitute for critical thinking, for self-examination, and for choosing to live a sober, and meaningful life that does not exploit the poor or the earth nor even the animals that share our earth with us.
Somewhere between only eating salads and indulging in an appetite for killing endanger species there is a sane place where we can all live.
