Life seems to be full of circumstances where you must ask this question: Do I die on this hill, or do I relax about this? I hear this often said about
- Predestination
- Total depravity
- The use of money
- Social justice
- Hell
Whether or not I agree with this with regard to any of those issues listed, I think there is an important point I'd like to emphasise:
Partaking in sin is always sinful.
It's a tautology, I know, but sometimes I think we forget this when engaging with particular issues. The two issues I have in mind, are ones which were raised on this blog in recent months
- Abominable employment/economic/environmental practices overseas are the reason why we can get stuff so cheap. A corollary to this: We get cheap stuff because others pay what is lacking in the price with their health and well-being.
- The systematic torture of animals is the means by which we get cheap meat.
You may disagree that they are sinful systems, and that is a different argument. I'm raising these particular issues because I think they are sinful and they came up recently.
A counter argument I've heard is: 'There are lots of sinful systems, why single out this one'. This is a fallacy. The Christian life involves the eradication of all sins that we are aware of, and the continued awakening to even more sinfulness. We stand on a spectrum of sinfulness and we can only see so far. The call of the Bible, I'm convinced, is to move along that line, leaving sinfulness behind and all the while becoming aware of ever more sinfulness. I am not aware of a single concept in the Bible which promotes the idea that because of the magnitude and multitude of sins I am capable of and continually committing, judgment is withheld from some. This is nonsense.
Now 1. is very hard to eradicate from your life. In some ways I think you need to minimise it for a time as a sort of retrieval ethic. This requires more thought, so that's all I'll say about it for now. 2. is extremely easy: either pay more for meat that you know came from an ethical source, or stop eating meat. This means a chook will cost $25. It's impossible to raise a happy healthy chook for (much) less.
Anyway, I think our separation from, and intellectualising of some issues clouds our thinking about basic sin. If something is clearly sinful, then our partaking of it is as well.
This makes life very complicated. Before large scale transport and industrialisation happened, you sort of knew where everything came from and could, to a much greater extent, control it. Now it's really really hard, but it's about sin, not preferences and optional conviction, plain old sin.
Right?
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Point 1 sounds like a no-brainer. But sometimes the situation is not so clear cut. Take Apple, for example. You know that I am not an Apple advocate. I don't use their products. But from what I have read they have been very active in trying to improve the conditions of the Chinese workers who produce much of the stuff that goes into Macs and iPads.
ReplyDeleteAt what stage do we declare that they have done enough and now it is OK to buy their products.
And my understanding is that they do not use Chinese workers for economic reasons as much as for logistical reasons. Are Chinese workers in factories subcontracting to Apple being exploited financially? Compared to us, they probably are. Compared to how they were doing before they got those jobs, most likely not. So how do we help these workers? Probably by buying more iPads. But I really don't know. I think it is a difficult question with a very complex answer.
Good post Tony!
ReplyDeleteI feel really strongly about grains! Actually I'm basically anti-grains because of the connections with disease (gluten the protein in wheat in particular is connected to 55 major diseases including diabetes, crohn's disease, MS, autism). So strongly in fact that I wear T-shirts promoting an anti-grain position. But I don't think it is a sin issue, more an ignorance issue!
And I do buy my meat from an ethical source and pay 4 times the 'standard' amount for my bacon. It tastes at least 4 times better!! But I have trouble getting it because not many other people are buying it.
I wont even get started on statins and the vaccination schedule!!
I think it's true that sometimes the situation isn't very clear. Apple is a good example. What have they really done? What are the factory conditions really like? What is actually required of the workers? Perhaps if what Apple demanded of their factories is that they allow spot checks by the media at any time we could know those things. The eyes of the world are on China and I think that factory workers' conditions are improving in companies like FoxConn, but there are still lots of problems. There are basic bench marks that organisations are trying to get these companies to meet. Like no forced overtime, a fair wage to be able to live on in that society and safe working conditions. They're pretty basic. I also don't think that we improve conditions by buying more iPads, I think we improve conditions by speaking out about injustice when we see it. Apple hasn't demanded that their factories clean up their act because more people are buying their product, they've done it because they're afraid the bad media coverage will motivate people not to buy more.
ReplyDeleteI think that we have to remember Romans 14 where Paul says that if you don't know if something is wrong or not and you do it anyway then you've sinned. If we say that we don't know whether it's ok to have this or that thing or to eat this or that meat, then we do it anyway, then we're acknowledging that it might be displeasing to God and we're willing to take the risk. This displeases God in itself and so we sin. Deliberately and intentionally, after thinking about whether or not it's sinful. I think this is an especially insulting form of sin to God.
I think that where I live it's ok to eat fish and beef for sure. I don't think that fishing is a form of torture. I know that Australian chickens are not fed hormones and the like and I didn't think that chicken farming practices here were that bad. I'm willing to pay a little more for free range chicken meat if the raising of chickens is bad here like it is in the US.
I like this post, Tony, I think it's really important for us to think about these things.
Thanks for the comments. I agree that it's tricky, and I agree that Apple is a good example of how it's tricky. This is why I avoided saying too much!
ReplyDeleteI think beef and lamb in Australia is probably ok. I don't like artificial insemination, and I don't like how closed abattoirs are. I'm positive that forms of torture are regularly practised in abattoirs, but broadly speaking Australia has fairly transparent practices.
As for fishing, I think if you insist on eating fish, you mustn't eat farmed fish, for humanitarian reasons. Fish farms are disgusting places full of diseased fish living in a dense liquid of faeces, where they bleed out their eyes, cannibilise one another, and who knows what else. If you disagree with the humanitarian arguments against commercial fishing, the sustainability issues are pretty major. John Saffran-Foer thinks if you eat commercially fished fish, you should have to eat the 26X more that is caught to get you that bit of fish as well. Provocative idea I think.
My mate from Norway has eaten whale. It is fished 'sustainably' in Norway, so it's not terribly widely available, but you can get it. I believe it is sustainably done, I don't mean to be cynical with the quote marks, I'm just literally quoting him. Norwegians are quite nervous about their fish actually. When the food shortages start, it's not at all impossible that their fisheries will be intruded upon and who knows what will happen next.
I digress.
Jonathan - my bad
ReplyDelete