Flesh is not Flesh

                I was discussing the recent death of a patient with one of our doctors at work and to conclude she stated, “Flesh is flesh.  It really doesn’t matter if it’s road kill or a patient here in the end there is no difference.  Flesh is flesh.”  To which I responded, “Except its not.”  The doctor simply was expressing her atheistic worldview and it disturbed me for some time, this even though I would have stated something similar for the same purpose five short years ago.  Conversions change us deeply and that is why I am writing on this topic.

                  Flesh is not flesh.  There is a difference between human beings and animals.  The doctor is a vegetarian but her argument would justify cannibalism.  Why?  Because as much as she wants to elevate animals what she is actually doing and all she can do is dehumanize human beings. 

                Feminists stated they wanted to be like men, but they chose the worst men to want to be like.  Animal activists can only want humans to acknowledge they are animals but that news won’t cause animals to stop eating each other; animals can only be what they are- animals.  Feminists and animal rights activists believe in lazy virtue, they may call it natural virtue but there is nothing natural about virtue.

One cannot be freed of constraints sufficiently to simply create a virtuous individual.  Virtue is the product of sufficiently constraining oneself.  Human beings are the only creatures capable of such an unnatural feat and most of them are not even game for the effort.

People instead desire justification for their own misguided actions.  Bullies have no virtue and that is why they are bullies; but their victims are not conferred virtue by their victimhood.  Many victims themselves become bullies because they feel they have earned the privilege via their own awful experience.  My own experience could be cached in this niche, although my preferred method of revenge has been words bile not sweetness was the fuel.

We justify ourselves, we know too well our justifications.  We lose our empathy in those justifications and we dehumanize our victims.  Just as we make sexual objects we make straw men of every form and so animals seem an innocent receptacle for affection and they become greater than humans for many.  The truth is however they are not; nor are they less than living creatures, they are what they are- animals.

The answer is not projecting a perfect human nature upon animals but acknowledging our own tendencies toward selfish justification and regaining our empathy for other human beings.  For we and they are similar except in the fact that we excuse ourselves and demonize others.  The answer is mercy.

Mercy is the fuel of virtue.  One cannot turn the other cheek unless one realizes that the first strike is never justified and so the answer is not weakness but strength in highlighting that difference, to turn the other cheek.  We must do what is good and elevate the world rather than doing what is justifiable in our own misguided hearts and bringing the world down to a justifiable hell.    

Flesh is not flesh.  There is flesh which has the potential to be more than that and that is our human potential.  It would be unfair to chastise a cat for killing a mouse but it is always tragic when a dog kills a child.  The answer should be obvious but only to a human being.