Tag Archives: critical of humancentrism

Theriomythological Approach: Religious Animal Ethics

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Theriomythological Approach: Religious Animal Ethics

in German > https://simorgh.de/about/tiermythologischer-ansatz-religiose-tierethik/

[draft 05.01.25]

Yes—but what, exactly, is meant by religion here, and which history of religion is considered acceptable?

(also: spiritually instrumentalizing animal ethics; secular-religious meaning-production used to elevate religious claims to authority)

Definition

A discursive mode in which animals are not primarily regarded as autonomous subjects, but as carriers of moral, spiritual, or metaphysical meaning for humans. They receive recognition only insofar as they mirror human virtues; their own interests remain optional.

Description

  • Animals appear as moral mirrors, sources of meaning, or “cosmic teachers,” whether framed religiously or in language that sounds modern and natural-scientific.
  • Even in secular discourse, the classical logic often persists: animals symbolize human virtues, while their political autonomy and concrete lived realities remain invisible.
  • Authors openly or covertly demonstrate how animals serve human ethical self-assurance—without this being socially noticed. A true delight for feuilleton pages and publishing houses.

Religious Framing

Not every form of spiritual meaning-making is problematic. It becomes problematic when religion is hegemonically anthropocentric from the outset—this is a narrative and epistemic foundational problem. In such systems, animals remain projection surfaces for human morality.

To address animals in a genuinely respectful way, the concept of God would have to be thought non-humanly and radically freely, so that animals could appear as autonomous subjects rather than theological accessories.

Moral Attribution and Animal Mythology

  • In many cultures and mythologies, animals stood on an equal or even higher level than humans and functioned as agents of wisdom.
  • Fairy tales, fables, and animal mythologies depict animals as possessing their own perspectives, logics of action, and forms of knowledge—not merely as mirrors of human morality.
  • The major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have largely rendered this invisible, symbolically reducing animals and making them reflect primarily human order, virtue, and divine norms.
  • Even discourses legitimized through modern natural science often reproduce this reduction in disguise: animals remain dis-ensouled, turned into projection surfaces for human self-assurance.

Theoretical Context

Kim Socha emphasizes that even modern, secularly framed animal-rights discourses can reproduce concealed religious logics. Within this system, animals remain dis-ensouled, serving as projection surfaces for human constructions of meaning—even when the language sounds objective or scientific. (simorgh.de)

Core Elements

  • Concealed meaning-production: animals as projections of human self-elevation.
  • Instrumentalization: animals confirm human virtues rather than their own autonomy.
  • The secularism problem: modern discourse structurally adopts religious modes of thought—only more elegantly packaged.
  • Mythological alternative: in traditional animal mythologies, animals can be autonomous carriers of meaning and wisdom.

Short Thesis

Where animals are used as carriers of moral or spiritual meaning, they remain dis-ensouled—and once again become projection surfaces for human self-assurance. Still, one must admit: they appear very virtuous in the process.

Discursive Effect

  • Socially compatible, low-conflict, morally visible.
  • Empathy permitted; political consequence optional.
  • Reproduces anthropocentric power structures while simultaneously smelling faintly of modern feuilleton culture.

Delimitation

  • Not antispeciesist: animals are not treated as autonomous subjects with their own interests.
  • Not radically secular: animals are not consciously released from systems of meaning, but remain symbolically overcharged.

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What is radically secular is to include—and truly perceive—Animal Sapiens. Once that happens, an entirely new epistemology emerges anyway, with or without religion.

 

Single Issue vs. Intersectional vs. Real Antispe

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Dear proponents of > multiperspectival liberational > approaches:

a.) the single-issue people, aren’t even single issue but rather using activism as a proxy for other agendas, consciously or partly consciously

b.) the intersectional people aren’t even intersectional since they value issues in hierarchical differences of moral weight and importance.

Gruppe Messel

 

 

 

Followerism and no infighting against Animal Objectification

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Followerism and no infighting against Animal Objectification

“Hi, no infighting”, but a bunch of people rally for closing down animal shelters and bring this argument forth as their academic output from within Animal Rights + Animal Liberation scenes. You may call a clear cut stance > a critique within movements “infighting”, while we simply talk about messages. One must be seriously upset about of the amount of speciesism that’s being tolerated as part of antispeciesism. To us it’s time to take the unhandy step of an explicit even more far reaching separation from these currents, even if they are the norm/mainstream, within all that what we conceive as animal advocacy.

We wrote on social media:

„Wir können ja auch jegliche Schutzeinrichtung für Menschen aufgeben wollen und es bleibt trotzdem unethischer Quatsch. Wir sind gerade allen entfolgt die den hier benannten und kritisierten Akademiker*innen folgen, welche dafür plädieren … lest selbst“ > https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/regarding-henry

„ … Tierrechts- und Umweltschutzthemen machen klar, dass weiblich gelesene Personen gleichermaßen zur Verantwortung zu ziehende culprits sind, wie ihre männl. gel. couterparts, nur nehmen sie in dem Theater eine andere Rolle im gemeinsam getragenen Skript ein. Subject closed!“

“We can also want to give up any protection facility for people and it still remains unethical nonsense. We have just unfollowed all those who follow the academics named and criticized here, who advocate this … just read for yourself” > [Nathan Winograd bringing up the issue and writing an excellent critique] https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/regarding-henry

“ … Animal rights and environmental protection issues make it clear that female-read people are equally culprits to be held accountable, as their male-read couterparts, with the only difference that in the theater they take on a different role in the shared script. Subject closed!“

—

The tipping point really has been reached by this call that Nathan Winograd criticizes here, where two academic animal advocates unitedly call for closing down shelters – and with that proposal they implicitly undermine all the crucial efforts of the no kill movement in the USA:

“The Anti-Heroes: Katja Guenther and Kristen Hassen betrayed animals for self-aggrandizement. They now want to abolish animal shelters and leave animals to fend for themselves on the streets.” https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/the-anti-heroes

This, while at the same time some proponents of Total Liberation within the Animal Liberation field seek to undermine discursive pluralism and normal democratic behaviour as animal advocates, calling divergences, critical analyses of speciesism and animal objectification and debate signs of „infighting“, and suggesting that Animal Liberation was only to be achieved when advocates would speak in unisono, and obviously consider themselves to be one political body in itself (though I assume they do secondarize animal issues in regards to any other issue that might lay in their interests – otherwise why would they even consider Animal Liberation to work in a more simplified way that Human Liberation, etc.).

How can people assume that Animal Rights issues should not be evaluated using all possible ethical criterions that apply – and that from people coming from all political angles. Animal Rights subjects are not a „world in itself“ that stands outside of all other political issues. They are to be understood exactly like Human Rights: They are our direct concerns. And no one can lay a claim on being the authorative main movement with an unquestionable entitlement.

Just learn to think of Animal issues like Human Rights issues and Animal Rights like Human Rights, and you can understand the approach our group choses. And in times of human conflict we may choose to do so decidedly.

 

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rev. 24.10.24

Ecocide is foremostly and ethical issue

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The moral and the ethical aspects of environmental destruction need to be addressed for the sake of “nature”/nonhuman spaces/communities/life themselves.

The form of thinking that “nature” and nonhuman spaces exist for societal gains – in either direction constructive or destructive – poses a problem.

Our dependence on “nature” doesn’t legitimate our fundamentally hegemonial-anthropocenic attitudes towards “nature”.

The notion that nature and nonhuman spaces ought to serve human interests implies that we assume

a.) nature as a “resource”

and that b.) nature was void of autonomous meaning and ecosocial completeness.

Both notions are presumably the core ones that lead to destructive behaviour towards “nature”/nonhuman spaces.

Harming and polluting “nature” and nonhuman spaces are actions of anthropogenic ethical disregard for “nature” itself.

florae obscurae by Farangis G. Yegane

Antibiologistic Animal Sociology

( > repost from our Visual Opinions Workshop @ tierechtsethik.de > https://tierrechtsethik.de/ecocide-is-foremostly-and-ethical-issue/ )

Faunacide and Ecocide

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Nonhuman and human animal friends are confronted with a one-sided anthropogenic faunacidal war against nonhuman animality and animalness.

This one-sided destruction war runs parallel to the ecocidal war, by which Homo sapiens denies the entire animality its natural habitat and tries to deprive them of it by arbitrariness. Everything nonhuman is destroyed in its own reality.

Gruppe Messel

And: on Tierrechtsethik.de – a bilingual page – you can find a broad range of toughts on Animal Sapiens, Animal Sociology and subjective activism … .

A fragment on insect mythologies

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Slightly edited repost of: https://simorgh.de/niceswine/fragment-on-insect-mythologies-and-representations (2014)

A fragment on insect mythologies and insect representations, and why symbolism is not sufficient to explain the relation

Insects in mythology are mostly explained as a phenomenon that stands for a “symbolism”. It seems that authors/researchers find it hard to imagine that for instance the Scarabaeus (attributed in the Egyptian pantheon to the God Kheper), a “dung beetle”, was appreciated for more than just that, what humans attributed to him in terms of their own anthropocentric concept of the earth, its meaning and the universe.

What if for instance the early Egyptians did see a world of unique value in the life and activities of the scarab beetles?

It could likely be that it was fascinating to observe, how the beetles rolled this ball of soil and dung, to think about what meaning the beetles might have given to their existence on earth overall. Maybe it was that ancient civilizations/cultures had an ability to take nonhuman animals as cultures? A small beetle that rolls a ball like a planet, from which new insect life would spring forth … .

A typical thought you find on the topic of nonhuman animals and nature in mythologies is, that humans would imbue nature with meaning. Quite contrarily, people could have felt that nature did in fact have meaning, and that nature (being) is meaning in itself.

As far as I could find out now, the most prominent mythologies about insects and alike, evolve around: bees, butterflies, spiders, scorpions, cicadas and the scarab beetles.

If we add the heavy weight of underlying such a relationship in mythology to our today’s definition of “symbolism” – that is if we say that i.e. such insects were mere symbols for anthropomorphic attributions – then we should scrutinize more closely the epistemological history of “symbols” and the term’s etymology to shed light on the construct that we apply here.

 

Subversion and Oppression

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Who pretends that subversion functioned differently in society than oppressive patterns, with both relying on similar basic assumptions about the human-animal-nature schisms – mostly in regards to the phenomenons of “existential meaningfulness” and the question of “self-authority”?
antibiologistic animal sociology

Alternatives for the term speciesism

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PREAMBLE

We need a term that describes the broad discrimination/s or injustice/s exerted by human collectives and human individuals towards nonhumans animals and towards nonhumanity overall – in all its facets in which these oppressive mechanisms, thoughts and actions occur in different human cultural layers, such as religion, science, law, arts, etc.

Also, we need a term for the overall phenomenon of human destruction and destructivity in these regards. I refer to it as faunacide, as far as nonhuman animals are concerned. Some criticize the term “speciesism” on various grounds, I ask everyone to come up with more descriptive terms for what we witness and might conceive differently.

antibiologistic animal sociology

Alternative terms for speciesism

SPECIES/ANIMAL-DEROGATION

SPECIES/ANIMAL-DEROGATIVE

-DEVALUATION

-HUMILIATION

-…

antibiologistic animal sociology

Animal portrayals in language 1

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CN: animal portrayals in language

Why do speciesists and antispeciesist alike verbally make/cite basic similar descriptions when it comes to talking about Nonhuman activities, referring to instinctual behavior patterns more or less? Observationwise they both obviously fetch their language from the same biologistic box. As if lived subjectivity, outside that of a “human” self, was non-describable. As if an idea of generic pictograms ruled our language about what in reality is the nonhuman autonomy missed by these portrayals per definition.

antibiologistic animal sociology

Trauma 1

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When nonhumans are forcibly subjected to trauma, it does produce trauma, but translates into a problematic that a biologistic approach to nonhumans won’t be able to unravel. Trauma occurs in context with all fine tunings of psyche and mind – can’t ever be understood by violence.