I just love Tim Staples; he’s so engaging, he’s so much
FUN. His exuberant, apparently
inexhaustible energy combined with his obvious “fire for the Lord” are just
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I think
my Pentecostal friends would particularly love this exhortation to believe,
including arguments to draw the atheist, as well as reasons why this former
Protestant, “spirit-filled, fire and brimstone youth pastor” came home to the
Catholic church. Over and over during
this presentation, I just kept thinking, “He is SO Pentecostal!” That is, of course, one of the beauties of
the Catholic church—it is CATHOLIC, it is universal; “y’ALL come!” You don’t leave your identity behind when you
are received into Catholic communion; you find a home that will finally, fully
nurture you into all God gave you the potential to be.
Staples begins here with some good, concise arguments
for the existence of God, making joyfully apparent the foolishness of
atheism. He then leads the listener
right up the narrow path into Christianity (and ultimately, as he says, “to
Rome”).
As much as I love Tim (and love this presentation), I
do have one significant bone to pick: it
has to do with his assertions and conclusions about animals, and, related to
this, some confusing and unclear teachings about just what the Bible means by
the human “soul.”
Staples is adamant that animals do not have eternal
existence, and that they are here only for our use. He is missing the clear statements in the
Bible that say that animals DO have spirits—“the breath of life” that God
breathed into Adam as well (we see the picture of this happening to Adam in the
Bible, because it is written for people; we don’t see that happening with the
animals, but the Bible tells us it does in the Psalms—and, for those who insist
that “if the Bible doesn’t SHOW it happening for animals, it doesn’t apply to
them,” remember that the Bible doesn’t show us that happening for EVE,
either!). Because they do have spirits,
animals are thus capable of praising Him in their own way (have a relationship
with Him)—“all that has breath praise the Lord!”
Animals were also clearly a (large!) part of God’s
perfect plan in Eden, animals are shown to be both messengers for God (e.g., Balaam’s
ass) and caring servants to His people (e.g., the birds that brought food to
some prophets), and the glimpses of eternal Paradise that John has in his
Revelation also include animals. So to
conclude that they are merely temporary objects here for our earthly use is, at
the very least, to be missing some importance that is clearly in the Bible
(despite the fact that the Bible is obviously written for people, so it could
be assumed that it wouldn’t have much to say about animals). And to conclude that “your cat doesn’t love
you” (with clear implications that no other animal does, either—he says,
“ESPECIALLY your cat!” with obvious anti-cat sentiment) is to deny the myriad
examples of animals (most often dogs, but sometimes cats, other pets, and even
wild animals) that risk and even give their lives in the service of and for the
safety of humans. “Greater love hath no
man than that he lay down his life for his friend.” Sacrificing self for the good of the other is
the definition of true (godly) love.
Perhaps no cat has ever loved Tim Staples, but that doesn’t mean no cat
(or other animal) has ever loved.
A major source of the confusion is that Staples is
conflating the concepts of “soul” and “spirit,” which the Bible makes clear are
two different things. God created people
with “spirit, soul, and body”—“in His image” as a kind of “mini trinity,” and
the soul is not the same thing as the spirit (clearly, or the Bible wouldn’t
list them as separate). Animals have
spirit (the breath of life, the quality of living/being that comes directly from
God: “and when he withdraws His breath
from them [people or animals], they die”); what they do not seem to have is the
soul/WILL which is capable of choosing to be something other than what they
were created for. We can do that—choose
to reject God, and thus to reject the very purpose of our creation, to be in
relationship with God. Animals do not
(and, it seems, cannot) do this; they are what God made them to be, thus are
ever in right relationship to Him (what relationship God made for them, which
clearly and admittedly is different from the relationship He intends for us),
thus don’t need a Savior (as we do) to rescue them from rebellion. They suffer with us now, because our
rebellion breaks the whole world and thus makes things wrong in general (thus
wrong/bad for them as well as us), but their suffering comes from Man’s
rebellion, not their own.
Nevertheless, although cows (to use this Texan’s fond
example) may well be (certainly are) available for us to “use,” it behooves us
to respect them as bearers of the breath of life, and to give them the life God
intended for them, up to and including a respectful and humane death and
respectful and grateful (to God the Provider) use of the resources of their
bodies. The way animals are ABUSED
(literally, “wrong use”) in the current factory-type food industry harms
humans:
1) directly, for
those who participate in the industry (animal processing plants are among the
most dangerous places for people to work),
2) directly, for people who consume the meat (eating
the meat of animals that have been fed food that makes them chronically ill,
kept in conditions that do not allow them to develop as they were made to and
require them to be constantly mired in their own waste, and are steeped in
antibiotics, growth hormones, and STRESS hormones all their lives, will have
deleterious effects on your health), and
3) indirectly, for all people in a culture that allows
and even supports such an industry of horror, by degrading our respect for the
sacredness of life itself (“the breath of life” which is imparted by God to
“all that breathes”).
God’s very breath is in them, as in us. That alone should be reason for believers to
strenuously uphold respectful care of animals.
“The righteous man cares for the well-being of his animal.” (Proverbs 12:10)
So, I still love Tim, and love this presentation, but
I’ll pray for his continued growth in his understanding of the place of animals
in God’s plan for us all.
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