Distorted Truth: What Every Christian Needs to Know about the Battle for the Mind

pp. 80 - 81

God (vs. spiritualizing monists) has made creation with “manyness” and variety. One implication: you treat chickens better than rocks or mosquitoes. Contrary to the egalitarian religion of some biologists, chickens are higher creatures than rocks or mosquitoes. They aren’t just “noisy egg manufacturers, or feathery bundles of white and dark meat.” They are chickens after all and deserve to have space to parade and chase and brood. Cf. Vaclav Havel, in one of his Letters to Olga quoted by Jean Bethke Elshtain here Letters to Olga Havel laments the mad increase of consumerism—“where production and consumption reign supreme”–and where we lose our perspective on creation. “Not long ago, while watching a report on cows on the television news, I realized that the cow is no longer an animal: it is a machine that has an “input” (grain feeds) and an “output” (milk). It has its own production plans and its own operator whose job is the same as the job of the entire economy today: to increase output while decreasing input. The cow serves us quite efficiently, really, but at the cost of no longer being a cow. . . . “