By Joel A. Hess –

After the recent Supreme Court ruling knocking down Texas’ sanitary requirements for abortion clinics that are probably weaker than those used in poultry farms, we witnessed yet again the manifestations of a society that believes humans are really only animals.

That is the question of the age: is man an animal or something more?  Of course, public Schools have been indoctrinating kids for at least 3 generations that man is just an animal. Why are we surprised to see kids actually acting as if it’s true? Columbine killings, drowning newborns in toilets at prom, sexual assaults, etc.

If you are an animal, then your instincts can not be judged. You cannot help your desires. In fact, they are probably useful for survival, which in the end is what the game is all about, right? Well, we also need your progeny in order to continue the species, though we are slowly forgetting why.

If you are an animal, then it is a no brainer when it comes to choosing who to save in a fire: a twelve-year-old child you don’t know or your pet cat fluffy. Fluffy, right? Yes, this sort of ethics is taught in big-ten medical schools. If we are all animals, then selling a weaker animal’s liver to someone who needs it more is equally not difficult. China is way ahead of the game on this. They do it to prisoners; we do it to children.

Are humans simply animals? This is the question of our age. We have been taught that we are animals quite publicly since Darwin’s Origin of Species. But the logical extension of that claim has not really sunk in to our collective conscience until this century, though Nietzsche went mad trying to get the intelligentsia to realize this 150 years ago. At last, however, we are seeing what the world looks like when the majority of people and leaders believe ultimately that people are just animals.

Ironically, those who tell us we are animals also tell us we have a responsibility to the environment. Animals don’t have responsibilities! If we are just animals, then my instinct to throw trash on the highway (or to make a highway, for that matter) must be good for me and my environment. It’s only natural. What is more unnatural than to impose any curb to my desires? Is it not the path of evolution for weaker species to go extinct? Oh, I’m sorry. I’m using logic and reason. Americans secretly hate science, by the way.

The world is increasingly treating people like animals. Oh, it comes across as accepting and loving to tell others to follow their instincts—to say “I don’t care what you do” or “Do what you want.” Ironically, the “new” science of psychology is finding less patients, because it’s insulting to tell anyone, even the most dangerous psychopaths, they are sick.

Yet, while the West tells you it loves you, it will kill you and sell your body parts if it deems you unnecessary. The world is an animal that can turn on you. Sin makes us into animals.

At one point in Jesus’ ministry, He had crossed the sea of Galilee and was met by a man who was naked and possessed by a demon in a tombstone. Luke tells us that his community tried to lock him up, but every night, he broke his chains, tore off his clothes, and ran to the graveyard outside of town like a wild dog. That’s what Satan does. He reduces you to an animal. That’s what the blindness of sin does, as well.

Christ cured the man, put him in his right mind, and gently and lovingly put clothes on him. He has come to do that for all, having His clothes stripped, beaten, and hung on a crude wooden pole like an animal. He beat Satan at his own game.

Unlike Satan or the world, Jesus does not treat us like animals, even the very worst of us. He kneels down and scrubs our feet, for goodness’ sake! He takes us from the tombstones—from death and blind superstition. He covers us with His own clothing in the waters of baptism! He forgives us even when our repentance is half out of our lips and half in our heart! He restores our soul.

In Christ, we don’t become something other than truly human as we were meant to be: Children of God.

You, whoever you are, no matter what you have done, are not an animal.