Religion, Domination and Serial Killing - Western Culture and Murder

RELIGION, DOMINATION AND SERIAL KILLING: WESTERN CULTURE AND MURDER

Paul O’Brien

The Ten Commandments forbid killing, though taken in Biblical context the

commandment “Thou shalt not kill” 1 clearly admits of all kinds of exceptions,

for example the death penalty for worshipping false gods: “thou shalt stone him

with stones, that he die.” 2 So clearly “thou shalt not kill” means that we should

not kill human beings - with the exception of those we may kill (or indeed those

we must). The commandment means that we should not kill unlawfully, though

that is really another way of saying that we should not kill those whom we

should not kill: a kind of tautology. It also, in context, refers only to human

beings, since the Jews were enthusiastic meat eaters and in fact the slaughter of

animals was an essential part of worship in Old Testament times.3

Christianity abolished animal sacrifice but retained the notion of sacrifice itself,

substituting the figure of Christ for animals but retaining the image of animal

sacrifice, though only in figurative terms (Christ as the sacrificial lamb). The

New Testament author of the epistle to the Hebrews, contra traditional Jewish

practice, stated explicitly that animal sacrifice was spiritually inefficacious: “For

it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins.” 4

The Old Testament sacrifice of animals had to be renewed year by year, but the

sacrifice of Christ was a one-off.5

1 (Ex 20: 13). Quotations from the Bible are from the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). I am referencing the KJB partly because of its literary excellence, but mainly because of its influential status in the English-speaking world, which – for present purposes - outweighs issues of accuracy of translation that might otherwise arise when comparing it to more modern versions.

2 Deut 13: 10.

3 For example, Num 28: 11-31.

4 Heb 10: 4.

5 Heb 10: 1-14. This raises the question of why it has to be renewed by Christians in liturgical terms. (The notion of blood sacrifice is embedded in our culture and continues in recent politics, for example the imagery used to justify the insurrection of 1916 in Ireland, soon reaching its centenary.)

In regard to the treatment of animals however, Christianity in no sense offered an

overt defence of animals: the tendency within Hinduism and Buddhism to

vegetarianism was absent in Christianity. Indeed, St Peter has a significant dream

wherein a sheet is let down to the earth full of all kinds of animals, which he is

commanded to “kill and eat” 6 (thereby renouncing the Jewish prohibition on the

consumption of certain animals). The Christian teaching of reciprocity7 has not

traditionally been applied to the animal kingdom; though arguably, for the sake

of logical coherence, it ought to be.8

There was an essential continuity between the Jewish and the Christian world-

views, albeit the latter abolishes much of the prescriptive legalism of Jewish

practice with the “new covenant” ethics embodied in the Sermon on the Mount

(Matt 5-7). While Northern European cultures, which have retained Judeo-

Christian morality while marginalizing its theology, are sometimes regarded as

the most civilized on earth,9 the treatment of animals in farms, factories and

laboratories is (largely) ignored from such an anthropocentric perspective.

Humans and animals alike have paid a high price for the dualism of traditional

Christian morality: the notion of a battle between two powers (good and evil,

spirit and flesh) has led to pathic projection whereby evil is projected unto an

eternal enemy which must be created if it doesn’t exist, as was rapidly seen after

the fall of the Soviet Union with the “new” hate-figures of Saddam, Gaddafi,

Osama Bin Laden and (more recently) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.10

6 Acts 10: 9-16.

7 “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” Matt 7: 12.

8 The issue, then, in discussions of animal rights becomes the vexed question about a “hierarchy of rights”: do animals such as kittens and baby seals have more rights than rats or mosquitoes, and if so, why?

9 “Good countries” index (Ireland comes out on top, though the criteria are no doubt open to debate): see http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/the-top-ten-countries-in-the-good-country-index-9560427.html

10 This is no doubt the case in (versions of) Islam as well, with the image of the United States as the “Great Satan.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/the-top-ten-countries-in-the-good-country-index-9560427.html




The idea of eternal punishment for a finite offence sits uneasily with the teaching

of altruistic love that we are enjoined to display to one another. If our Creator is

morally superior to us, should He not be expected to behave in a morally superior

way, and not condemn his creation either for ignorance or a finite infraction?

The moral ambivalence that this teaching involves may help to explain much of

the violence and destruction perpetrated by the Christian world from its

inception, from the auto-da-fé of the Inquisition to Dresden and Hiroshima in

more recent times. (Fire-starting - together with animal abuse - is one of the key

indicators of serial killers,11 and we might consider how this could be applied at a

macro level as well.) With reference to the concept Horkheimer and Adorno

applied to the Enlightenment itself, in a sense there is a kind of “dialectic of

Christianity”: the positive elements of the gospel of love are paralleled by a

destructiveness emanating from the teaching of an eternity of torture for the

unrepentant or the unsaved, as well as the (philosophically problematic) concept

of the co-existence of the power of evil with that of omnipotent goodness.

A single text from Proverbs (“He that spareth his rod hateth his son” 12) attributed

to King Solomon13 has been the justification of centuries of child abuse: flogging

was, until recent times, routine as a form of punishment, from upper-class

schools in England on the one hand, to Nazi concentration camps on the other.14

Physical abuse in childhood is a frequent feature of serial killers, in a range of

cases including, for example, the Texas serial killer Henry Lee Lucas and the

German serial killer Juergen Bartsch.15 However, Christianity did admittedly lead

to the diminution of domination in human-to-human terms with its ideology of

11 J.M. Macdonald, “The Threat to Kill,” American Journal of Psychiatry 120 (1963): 125–130.

12 Prov 13: 24.

13 Though as Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11: 3) it might have been expected that some discipline problems would arise with the kids.

14 The uncanny echoes of the Warsaw Ghetto which the recent situation in Gaza evokes, evince the familiar psychological structure: the abused child grows up to be an abuser.

15 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 257.

human egalitarianism (an ideology that Nietzsche deplored)16 albeit it also

spawned forms of religious anti-Semitism. The great modern revolt against the

Judeo-Christian (egalitarian) world-view was the rise of National Socialism in

the twentieth century, which paradoxically plugged into Christian (both Catholic

and Lutheran) anti-Semitism17 and at the same time offered the joyous

opportunity for a neo-pagan renaissance and the (implicit or overt) rejection of

the Ten Commandments18 themselves. For the first time since the imposition of

Judeo-Christian values on Europe, it became OK to lie, to steal, to murder, to

idolize (the figure of Hitler), to covet (and take) the property of the Jews (though,

again paradoxically, the Nazis appropriated the processions and hymn-singing

hitherto associated with religion – even the swastika may be seen as a

deformation of the Christian cross, and the SS bore an uncanny resemblance to

the Jesuit Order).

At the same time as the rights of humans were undermined, a curious tender-

heartedness pervaded the Nazi mentality in regard to animals: Hitler was a

vegetarian and dog lover; legislative attempts were made to regulate hunting and

animal experimentation in the interests of animal welfare.19 However, the

16 Douglas Kellner, “Modernity and its Discontents: Nietzsche’s Critique,” http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/modernityanditsdiscontents.pdf; see also Jonathan Ree, “What the Christians Did for Us,” New Humanist, Monday 27 October 2014: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4765/what-the-christians-did-for-us; John Gray, “What Scares the New Atheists,” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-scares-the-new-atheists?CMP=ema_565

17 The term “anti-Semitism” is of course deeply problematic. Many Semites (including Palestinians) are not Jews, and many Jews are not Semites. Leftist opponents of the repressive policies of Israel are, despite the claims of defenders of Israeli policies, not usually “anti-Semitic,” even in the (problematic) terms in which sympathizers with Israel define that term.

18 As Arnold Zweig, a prominent Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany wrote: “It is the enforcement of this non-pagan and unnatural faith [Christianity] which the peoples of Central Europe cannot forgive the Jews [….] A yearning for the old native gods is inextinguishable in the group-mind of the Germans.” Arnold Zweig, Insulted and Exiled: The Truth about the German Jews (London: John Miles, 1937), 223.

19 See Arnold Arluke, Clinton Sanders, Regarding Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 132. The Freudian term “reaction formation” comes to mind, as when one covers up an impulse to murder A, with an excess of sentimentality towards B (the misanthrope Nietzsche’s reputed embrace of a horse, at the point of his final descent into madness, illustrates the point). And of course, with a ready supply of human victims in the concentration camps, there was hardly any need for the use of vivisection on animals.

http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/modernityanditsdiscontents.pdf




https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4765/what-the-christians-did-for-us




industrial processing of human beings for slaughter in the death camps seems

uncannily reminiscent of the practices of large-scale factory farming; while

animal abuse in the laboratory preceded – and perhaps in some ways led to - the

abuse of humans, including vivisection, in the concentration camps.20 In the

same way, animal abuse often precedes the abuse of humans by individual

psychopaths, including serial killers.21 Our routine cultural abuse of animals at a

macro level is mirrored in their abuse at a micro level, abuse which – just as at

the macro level - may feed into the abuse of humans as well. As Mark Seltzer

points out, contemporary commentators situated the “murder factory” of the

notorious 19th century serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett (aka H.H. Holmes)

in the context of the mass, mechanized slaughter in the Chicago meat-packing

plants.22

The Holocaust, as well as feeding off German Romantic nationalism, including

Wagner’s virulent anti-Semitism,23 was also the result of centuries of Christian

anti-Semitism, from the medieval pogroms to Luther’s notorious text “On the

Jews and their Lies.”24 There are (ironic and contentious) resonances between

the term “Holocaust,” on the one hand, and the practice of burnt offerings in the

20 However, comparisons of our (still routine) contemporary (mis)treatment of animals and the historical treatment of the Jews are controversial, to say the least. See, for example: http://archive.adl.org/anti_semitism/holocaust_imagery_ar.html; http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/mar/03/advertising.marketingandpr

21 See, for example, H. Gavin, Criminological and Forensic Psychology (Sage, 2013), 120; J.Wright, C. Hensley, "From animal cruelty to serial murder: Applying the graduation hypothesis," International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 47, no.1 (2003): 71–88. On the other hand, serial killer Denis Nilson seems to have been a genuine animal lover – his dog, with the curious name Bleep, was a witness to some of his crimes. See Brian Master, Killing for Company: The Case of Denis Nilson, London, Arrow Books, 1995.

22 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 203-204.

23 See http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda.htm

24See http://jdstone.org/cr/pages/sss_mluther.html

http://archive.adl.org/anti_semitism/holocaust_imagery_ar.html




http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/mar/03/advertising.marketingandpr




http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda.htm

http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda.htm

http://jdstone.org/cr/pages/sss_mluther.html

http://jdstone.org/cr/pages/sss_mluther.html

Old Testament.25 Everyone, or everyone that matters, condemns the Holocaust as

practiced against the Jews; few bother to note the similarities between the mass

murder of human beings and the slaughter and cruelty perpetrated against

animals throughout history, and continuing in the present day. In the context of

an extended critique of the contemporary (mis) treatment of animals through

regimentalization, genetic experimentation, industrialization and so on, Derrida

writes:

One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor consider it explained away. For it gets more complicated here: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation or experimentation by gas or by fire. In the same abattoirs [….] In response to the irresistible but unacknowledged unleashing and the organized disavowal of this torture, voices are raised – minority, weak, marginal voices, little assured of their discourse, of their right to discourse and of the enactment of their discourse within the law, as a declaration of rights – in order to protest, in order to appeal [….] to what is still presented in such a problematic way as animal rights, in order to awaken us to our responsibilities and our obligations with respect to the living in general, and precisely to this fundamental compassion that, were we to take it seriously, would have to change even the very basis [….] of the philosophical problematic of the animal.26

The issue of the abuse of animals and the abuse of humans is intimately

connected. Historically, animal issues helped to define the differences between

25 For example, the welcome accorded by Jewish commentators to the removal from the Catholic version of the Bible of the term “holocaust,” to translate the Hebrew words otherwise translated as “burnt offering” (the term “holocaust” does not appear in the King James version): http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142241#.VLJsg1bBDLQ . See also: http://taylormarshall.com/2009/01/biblical-meaning-of-holocaust.html The Hebrew word “burnt” (olah or owlah) is translated as “holocaust” in James Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of The Bible, Iowa Falls, Iowa, World Bible Publishers, n.d.

26 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am, “ Critical Inquiry 28: 2 (Winter, 2002), 394-395.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142241




http://taylormarshall.com/2009/01/biblical-meaning-of-holocaust.html




the Germans and the Jews: the Jews eschewed the pig; the Germans

enthusiastically consumed it. The Nazis compared the Jews to rats in a notorious

propaganda film, and consequently helped to project onto the Jews the common

feeling of contempt for an (allegedly) useless and disgusting animal. The same

attitude to certain animals persists today, in our approach to creatures such as

laboratory rats and mice that are deficient in “cuteness” (as distinct, eg, from

baby seals and kittens). Osama bin Laden enjoined his followers to kill their

(human) victims along the same lines as the victims of animal sacrifice.27 Just as

people who burn books may end up burning people, so a society that treats

animals with contempt may end up treating humans in a similar fashion. This

applies at both the macro level of political persecution, and the micro level of

serial murder. Serial killer Edmund Kemper, for example, tormented cats as a

child, including burying one alive.28

The relationship between humans and (the rest of) nature has never been more

problematic than it is today, particularly with the issue of global warming and its

challenge to the growth-imperative of capitalism itself. The human treatment of

animals is an important sub-set of this,29 particularly in the context of animal

experimentation and the meat industry (itself a key contributor to global

warming). Sidney Gendin estimates the figure of 500 million animals killed in

the context of scientific research every year,30 sometimes in experiments whose

cruelty is equaled only by their futility:

First, the eyes of young Macaque monkeys were removed prior to the 19th day of life. The young monkeys were then separated from their mothers, who were placed in separate cages. Upon the mothers’ uttering calls of

27 http://www.animalpeoplenews.org/01/10/editorial1001.html

28 http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/kemper/edmund_1.html

29 A caveat is needed here: the well-being of animals and that of the biosphere do not necessarily coincide, as when animals (occasionally and allegedly) need culling to protect the environment as a whole. See E. Katz, “Is there a Place for Animals in the Moral Consideration of Nature?” in A. Light and H. Rolston III (eds.) Environmental Ethics: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 86.

30 Sidney Gendin, “The Use of Animals in Science,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.), Animal Rights and Human Obligations (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), 197.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/kemper/edmund_1.html

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/kemper/edmund_1.html

alarm, the time required for the monkeys to contact their mothers’ cages was measured. These interactions were compared with those of young monkeys who were not blinded. The researchers concluded that all the usual facial expressions of sighted monkeys were also observed in blinded ones.31

Singer describes the conditions at a poultry farm in the US, “where four [live]

hens are squeezed into cages 12 inches by 12 inches.” 32 If “meat is murder,” the

question arises as to how such murder differs from its human counterpart. If

suffering is the key issue to be condemned rather than metaphysical concerns

about the uniqueness of human beings, the question can be posed as to whether

there is any essential difference between Nazi experimentation on humans (Jews

and others) on the one hand, and the animal experimentation that still goes on in

laboratories today. What, if any, is the essential difference between treating

nature as a resource to be exploited, and treating humans in concentration camps

in the same way?

By and large, our culture believes it has a right to dominate animals, to use them

for its own ends and for the (alleged) good of humanity. According to Lynn

White, our habits are dominated by the belief in progress, which was unknown to

antiquity - a belief that, in his view, is grounded in Judeo-Christian teleology, and

only defensible in terms of the latter. In regard to the relation between humans

and the environment, White references the story of creation inherited by

Christianity from Judaism. The naming of the animals in Genesis established

31 Sidney Gendin, “The Use of Animals in Science,” 200. Gendin references Jeff Diner, Physical and Mental Suffering of Experimental Animals (Washington DC: Animal Welfare Institute, 1979), 6.

32 Peter Singer, “Down on the Factory Farm,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 164.

human dominance over them.33 “God planned all of this explicitly for man’s

benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve

man’s purposes.” 34 White believes that: “Especially in its Western form,

Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has

seen….Christianity…not only established a dualism of man and nature, but also

insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”35 In

antiquity every tree, spring, stream or hill had its own guardian spirit, but by

abolishing animism Christianity made the exploitation of nature possible. The

spirits in natural objects disappeared, and with them the inhibitions to the

exploitation of nature. White notes the difference between Western and Eastern

Christianity. For the East, salvation was to be found in clear thinking; for the

West, in right conduct: the Western atmosphere was more conducive to the

emergence of the Christian-influenced mind-set of the conquest of nature.36 He

notes:

To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole

concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and the ethos of the

West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping

down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in

nature.37

33 White, p. 37.The key text is Gen 1: 26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over all the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’” The term “dominion” is a translation of the Hebrew term “radah” whose meanings include to tread down, to subjugate, to have dominion, to prevail against, to reign or to rule. James Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of The Bible. For an extended discussion of this area, see Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills, “The Animal that Therefore I Am, “ 369-418, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276. See also André-Louis Paré, “One Must Eat Well,” http://www.kimwaldron.com/content/pdf/espace_en.pdf

34 White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” 37.




http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276




In the Latin West by the early thirteenth century, natural theology was becoming

the attempt to understand the mind of God by discovering how His creation

operates. From that time up to Leibniz and Newton, all major scientists explained

their motivations in religious terms. 38 For White, “modern Western science was

cast in a matrix of Christian theology. The dynamism of religious devotion,

shaped by the Judeo-Christian dogma of creation, gave it impetus.” 39 The

conclusion he draws is that (contrary to the contemporary militant atheism of

Richard Dawkins et al) science and religion are not in a state of contradiction -

science and technology are to be explained in terms of the Christian context in

which they arose.40 (In Nietzsche’s terms, “even we knowing ones of today, the

godless and antimetaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by

a belief millennia old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato,

that God is truth, that the truth is divine.”)41

To stress the historical connection between science and technology on the one

hand and religion on the other is, however, to impart a mixed compliment to

religion. White argues that, to judge by the ecological consequences, the powers

we have obtained through science and technology are out of control, and

Christianity thus bears a huge burden of guilt.42 From this perspective, it can be

argued that science and religion are not opposites: rather, science arose within a

religious context, and religion is in a sense to blame for the concomitant

dominance of anthropocentric “progressivism.”

White (himself a Christian) argues for a rethink of Christian theology in terms of

the pro-nature attitudes of St. Francis, in terms of humility and pan-species



40 White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,,” 40.

41 Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Thomas Common, Joyful Wisdom, (New York : 1973), 209, quoted in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 90.


democracy, as an alternative to traditional theology with its anthropocentric

mind-set:

The land around Gubbio in the Appenines was being ravaged by a fierce

wolf. Saint Francis, says the legend, talked to the wolf and persuaded him

of the error of his ways. The wolf repented, died in the odour of sanctity,

and was buried in consecrated ground.43

From this perspective, St. Francis’ view of nature and of man, which acted in

opposition to the Western medieval world against which Francis was a rebel and

that was the matrix of the destructive dynamic of science and technology, “rested

on a unique form of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed

for the glorification of their transcendent Creator.” 44 The argument may be

somewhat simplistic, since the ideals of Francis later became integrated into the

institutional forms of Christianity.45 There is now, of course, a Pope Francis, a

nomenclature conveniently guaranteed to plug into the “this changes everything”

dominance of ecological thought in contemporary culture.46 The notion of sin

has been extended to sins against the ecology, while at the same time

(presumably) the traditional Judeo-Christian dualism of humanity and nature has

been retained.

Animal rights have no place in traditional Catholic theology. A Catholic

Dictionary of some decades ago notes that:

If that term be used correctly, animals have no “rights,” for these can belong only to persons, endowed with reason and responsibility. Cruelty to



45 Ewert Cousins, “Introduction” Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God; The Tree of Life; The Life of St. Francis, trans. Cousins (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978), 1.

46 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). See also Rob Dixon, review of This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, New York Times, November 6, 2014: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/naomi-klein-this-changes-everything-review.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/naomi-klein-this-changes-everything-review.html




animals is certainly wrong: not because it outrages animal “rights” which are non-existent, but because cruelty in a human being is an unworthy and wicked disposition and, objectively, because ill-treatment of animals is an abuse and perversion of God’s design. Man has been given dominion over the animal kingdom, and it is to be exercised in conformity with human reason and God’s Will.47

The logical conclusion of this argument would seem to be that infants have no

rights either, since they are conspicuously lacking in reason and responsibility.

According to the medieval Catholic theologian St Thomas Aquinas, charity does

not extend to irrational creatures, since it is a form of friendship: a feeling which,

he believes, we cannot have for animals since they lack free will and therefore

cannot possess good, and because they can have no fellowship in human life, the

latter being controlled by reason. Furthermore, Aquinas (in contradiction of St

Paul, who wrote that “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage

of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” 48) argues that

animals cannot attain the fellowship of eternal happiness, therefore they do not

merit charity which is based on such fellowship.49 To kill someone else’s ox,

according to Aquinas, is not murder but theft or robbery (ie the problem is that it

injures human property, not that it takes away the animal’s right to life).50

But the ideology of the appropriateness of the domination of animals is rooted in

“secular” theorizing as well, from Bacon to Descartes, who regarded animals as

machines, evincing an indignant attack from Voltaire:

47 Extract from A Catholic Dictionary (Thomas Nelson and Sons Limited, 1962), 97-98, in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), 133.

48 Romans 8: 21.

49 Extract from St. Thomas Aquinas, “On Killing Living Things and the Duty to Love Irrational Creatures,” Part II, Question 25, Article 3, Summa Theologica, trans. the English Dominican Fathers (Chicago: Benziger Brothers, 1918), in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 1989, 12. See also: http://sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum280.htm

50 Extract from St. Thomas Aquinas, “On Killing Living Things and the Duty to Love Irrational Creatures,” Question 64, Article 1, Summa Theologica, trans. the English Dominican Fathers (Chicago: Benziger Brothers, 1918), in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 1989, 11. See also http://sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum320.htm

http://sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/sum280.htm






Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature.51

Later, in the terms of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the argument

against cruelty to animals would be put in terms of the capacity of animals not to

reason or talk, but to suffer.52

However, to see the abuse of animals as a consequence of the dominance of

secular science (exemplified by figures such as Bacon and Descartes) is to ignore

the crucial role of the Judeo-Christian context in which modern science

developed. Carolyn Merchant, in an influential study of the historical

replacement of the organic by the mechanistic metaphor of nature,53 critiques the

philosophy of Bacon with its analogy of scientific investigation to torture, citing

the relationship between the domination of nature and that of women,

specifically the torture of women in the witch trials.54 In Bacon’s terms, due to

the Fall from Eden the human race lost its “dominion over creation.” The lost

dominion needed to be recovered through scientific exploration. 55 As Merchant

puts it, “Although a female’s inquisitiveness may have caused man’s fall from his

God-given dominion, the relentless interrogation of another female, nature, could

be used to regain it.” 56 In Bacon’s “utopian” New Atlantis, “We have also parks

51 Extract from Voltaire, “Animals,” Philosophical Dictionary, in Tom Regan Regan and Peter Singer (eds.) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, p. 21. See also http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volanima.html

52 Quoted from Jeremy Bentham, “Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” ch. XVII, in Peter Singer, “Equal Consideration for Animals,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 78. For a powerful discussion of this issue, see Derrida, 395 ff.

53 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983).

54 Merchant, The Death of Nature, 168.



http://history.hanover.edu/texts/voltaire/volanima.html




and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds, which we use […] for dissections

and trials […] We also try all poisons and other medicines upon them as well of

chirurgery as physic.” 57

Singer argues that the suffering we inflict on animals derives from speciesism:

“animals are treated like machines that convert fodder into flesh.” 58 The same

argument applies against vivisection: if the experimenter would not be prepared

to use an orphaned human infant, then his/her use of animals is based on

speciesism: “since adult apes, cats, mice, and other mammals are more aware of

what is happening to them, more self-directing and, so far as we can tell, at least

as sensitive to pain, as any human infant.” 59

For Tom Regan, the animal rights movement is part of the human rights

movement:60 inherent value “belongs equally to those who are the experiencing

subjects of a life.” 61 If humans have ultimately no more value than animals, and

if vivisection on animals is to be allowed, then – short of positing religious-based

concepts applicable to humans but not animals - it is not clear why vivisection on

humans should not also be allowed.62

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the domination of nature is an outcome of

instrumental rationality arising from Enlightenment. “The ‘happy match’

between human understanding and the nature of things that he [Bacon] envisaged

57 Bacon, The New Atlantis, Works, Volume III, 159, quoted in Merchant, The Death of Nature, 184. See also: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/bacon/atlantis.pdf.

58 Peter Singer, “All Animals are Equal,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 79.

59 Peter Singer, “All Animals are Equal,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.) Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 80.

60 Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 113.

61 Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 112.

62 See the interesting debate between R.G. Frey and Sir William Paton, “Vivisection, Morals and Medicine: An Exchange,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 223-236.

is a patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over

disenchanted nature.” 63 For Bacon, the concern of knowledge is not satisfaction

but operation.64 Enlightenment is totalitarian.65 For Horkheimer and Adorno,

smashing an atom is part of the same mind-set as subjecting a rabbit to torment

in the laboratory.66 Everything that is not commensurable is cut away. 67 With

Enlightenment, “[t]hought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping

the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the

machine.” 68 “The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns

the world to be its own measure.”69 The modern totalitarian order, with its canon

of brutal efficiency, has “granted unlimited rights to calculating thought.” 70 The

element of reason is coordination: it calculates and plans, and takes no account of

ends.71 In the context of Enlightenment, pity stands in disrepute. 72 With fascism

and its rejection of pity, “[k]indness and good deeds become a sin, domination

and suppression virtue.” 73 Women and Jews bear the mark of domination.74

In an excursus on Sade, Horkheimer and Adorno note the pact between pleasure

and cruelty: the means of sexual love is war, and at its root is the mortal hatred of

63 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2.


65 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4. For Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 5) the split between thought and nature is present in Greek myth as much as in the ideology of dominion in Genesis.










the sexes.75 Referring to the “dark” writers of the bourgeoisie (most prominently

Sade and Nietzsche) they write that “It is because they did not hush up the

impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argument against murder,

but proclaimed it from rooftops, that Sade and Nietzsche are still vilified, above

all by progressive thinkers.” 76 Their pitiless doctrines proclaim the identity of

power and reason. 77

It is notable that Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were students of

Sade.78 David Schmid points out how books from Brady’s personal library

(including Sade's novel Justine) were entered as evidence during the original

trial.79 Persaut observes that “Perhaps de Sade's central concept is that the

individual who transgresses society's rules is a rebel, in search of freedom and

pleasure -- a 'transcendence' -- which society, in its ignorance and repressiveness,

denies him.” 80 Persaut notes that (in the terms of Schmid) “a characteristic of

Sade's heroes shared by certain sadistic serial killers - awareness of repugnance

from others - is one of the sources of pleasure to be derived from their acts.” 81

Discussing a book written by Brady, Persaut notes that “Brady adopts his

[Sade’s] ideas at face value, and mixes them into a hotch-potch of theories from

nihilistic philosophers and right-wing extremists.” 82 In one way, Sade’s libertine

philosophizing is the antithesis of Christian altruism and the teaching of agape;

75 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: 88-89.



78 Richard Davenport-Hines, “Hindley, Myra (1942–2002)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, first published Jan 2006; online edn, Sept 2014, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/77394

79 David Schmid, “A Philosophy of Serial Killing: Sade, Nietzsche, and Brady at the Gates of Janus,” in Serial killers: Being and killing, ed. S. Waller (Wiley-Blackwell 2010), cited in Persaut, 2013.

80 Raj Persaut, “Inside the Mind of the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady,” The Huffington Post, 01/07/2013: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-persaud/ian-brady_b_3508747.html

81 Raj Persaut, 2013.

82 Raj Persaut, 2013. See also Ian Brady, 2001, foreword by Alen Keightley, afterword by Peter Sotos,The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and its Analysis, Los Angeles, Calif, Feral House; London, Turnaround.

on the other hand, it fits uncomfortably closely with the dominance of reason and

instrumental rationality that is inextricably linked to the development of science

and technology in the West – a development which arose in the context of the

Christian world view.

For Horkheimer and Adorno in their analysis of nationalist anti-Semitism, the

economic injustice of the whole capitalist class is attributed to the Jew.83 They

write: “The Jews as a whole are charged with practicing forbidden magic and

bloody rituals. Disguised as an accusation, the subliminal craving of the

indigenous population to revert to mimetic sacrificial practices is joyously

readmitted to their consciousness.” 84 Anti-Semitism is based on false projection,

which makes its surroundings resemble itself.85 “Those impelled by blind

murderous lust have always seen in the victim the pursuer who has driven them

to desperate self-defence, and the mightiest of the rich have experienced their

weakest neighbour as an intolerable threat before falling upon him.” 86

Horkheimer and Adorno note that the substance of pathic projection, according

to psychoanalytic theory, is the transferance of forbidden urges from the subject

to the object.87 Writing at the time of the dominance of Nazism in Europe, they

note that “[t]he anti-Semites are realizing their negative absolute through power,

by transforming the world into the hell they have always taken it to be.” 88

Far from freeing us from medieval superstition, it can be argued that the

Enlightenment mind-set, in its negative aspect with the triumph of instrumental

rationality over all other values, led directly to the slavery and annihilation of

Auschwitz. But if Enlightenment, per Lynn White, is itself (paradoxically) an


84 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153


86 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:154. In contemporary terms, this might be seen as applicable to the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, though (of course) nothing compares in extent and intensity with the historical horror of the Holocaust itself.



outcome of Christianity, then Christianity - at least in its Western, mainstream

version - is also to be blamed for Auschwitz. This is not (just) in the usual sense

of traditional, religious anti-Semitism (exacerbated by Luther) which, together

with the “scientific,” racist version, fed into Nazi anti-semitism with its outcome

of the Holocaust; but also in the sense of the religious context of the power and

influence of science and technology themselves in the modern world, with the

downside of rational exterminism as applied to humans and animals, and

consumption and cruel instrumentality as applied to animals. And if Christianity

is historically and theologically inseparable from Judaism, one could reach the

paradoxical conclusion that Auschwitz is inherent in Genesis: the ideology of

domination led to the practice of extermination. Western culture is inextricably

entangled with murder.89

This is another aspect of the “dialectic of Christianity.” On the positive side, as

noted already, Christianity foregrounded the values of altruism, reciprocity and

mutual concern that inform the liberal values of the West (including, largely and

often unconsciously, the values of those atheists and humanists who ostensibly

reject it). On the negative side, it unleashes the fury of pathic projection with its

teaching of, on the one hand, evil/Satan as an opposing power to God and, on the

other hand, eternal punishment for offenders and unbelievers (as Islam does in a

very similar way, albeit the latter has not as yet been tempered by its own secular

Enlightenment). On the negative side also, Christianity – as White argues - must

bear a considerable burden of guilt for the modern dominance of science and

technology themselves. This may logically be extended to the dominance both of

the machine and the machine-metaphor that arise from the hegemony of the

scientific and technological perspective. Mark Seltzer argues that:

Serial killing is the form of public violence proper to a machine culture: the era of the Second Industrial Revolution that is also popularly called “the information society” or “digital culture” and might be called the

89 Nazism, a kind of witch’s brew, had – despite a few aspects relating to animal rights and the environment - the unique ability to distill the worst elements of a wide range of (apparently contradictory) sources - combining as it did the anti-Semitism, ritualism and power-hunger of Christianity, with “scientific” racism and the “survival of the fittest” ideology of Social Darwinism.

Discourse Network of 2000. In the Network, the unremitting flood of numbers, codes, and letters is popularly seen as replacing real bodies and real persons, threatening to make both obsolete. What it really makes obsolete is the difference between bodies and information.90

Seltzer notes that “[p]opular and professional accounts “ understand serial killing

“as a kind of machine work and even a pathologized work ethic.” 91 In early

modern society, he notes, “The clockwork mechanism or automaton provides the

model for an idealized self-presence, an idealized and autonomous self-

sufficiency. The mechanism that works all by itself thus appears as the model for

the human and as its replacement.” 92 It is hardly necessary to labour the issue of

the dominance of the work ethic as itself an outcome of (Protestant) Christianity

in Weber’s analysis.93 Seltzer notes that what one continually finds described in

accounts of the serial killer is the social ego “formed from the outside in: its

social substitute skin forming its insect-like exoskeleton.” 94 The serial killer is an

individual “whose interior has lost its meaning in its utter dependence on the

mechanical drills relentlessly binding him to external and social forms.” 95

In terms of our overall perspective, the serial killer may be seen as a product of

the pathological downside of Western Christian culture, an individual whose

identity is determined by his environment rather than by those values of altruism

and reciprocity that Christianity (in its most positive form) promulgated.

However, that environment – far from being antipathetic to Christianity itself –

may be seen as (largely) its result. The dialectic of Christianity, which is still

being worked out, is that it gave us not only those desirable personal and social

values that pervade even our most secular societies (in fact that are in some ways

particularly characteristic of them) but that it also helped to engender terror, at

90 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 17

91 Seltzer, 40.

92 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 219.

93 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/weber/protestant-ethic/

94 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 51

95 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 51.

both the macro-level of organized oppression, and the micro-level of serial

killing. This terror has come down to us through the centuries, since the

establishment of Christianity as the dominant mind-set of the West.

Religion, Domination and Serial Killing - Western Culture and Murder

Documents