In China, foxes are skinned alive. The ultimate cruelty toward animals.
Who will buy fur made in China?
May 31, 2005
China is a country we know very little about. What you're about to see here is not China. Nevertheless, these are the most horrifying images imaginable regarding human behavior toward animals.
We eat meat. We kill cattle, sheep, rabbits, chickens, pigs, and all kinds of animals every day. During fishing, we let fish suffocate in our nets as soon as they're pulled from the water. All these killings are part of animal life, since we are also animals, capable of killing to survive.
It took centuries for humans to begin limiting such killings, especially in the fur trade. Everyone remembers the images of hunters roaming the Canadian ice cap, striking baby seals—pure white—with a club. It took courageous campaigns to make this activity so unprofitable that it became nearly obsolete. In a world where violence is already rampant, some believed it was unnecessary to add more senseless slaughter.
Not killing animals means becoming vegetarian. I fully understand those who adopt this stance, which is a genuine philosophy and leads, in fact, to a very healthy lifestyle. Incidentally, one notices that this attitude, out of necessity, leads certain human ethnic groups to strange behaviors. For instance, Tibetan Buddhists are forced to consume meat. But to remain faithful to their beliefs, it is Muslim butchers who perform the slaughter and skinning!
Could a world without killing be conceivable? There was such a world before the Isthmus of Panama closed. South America was then populated—so I believe—by vegetarian marsupials. Giants like the megatherium grazed on tree leaves. Then, when a land connection formed between North and South America, predatory carnivorous mammals invaded South America and turned those peaceful herbivores, unable to defend themselves, into mere meat.
The myth of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden suggests that a life once existed on Earth, long ago, giving rise to beings exclusively vegetarian. This is by no means unthinkable. If Eve had been a marsupial, she wouldn't have "given birth in pain." When kangaroo joeys are born, they measure only a few centimeters long. To us, they are mere embryos. They manage to crawl into their mother's pouch, where they suckle milk that seeps not from nipples, but from... clumps of hair. Another variant: the emergence of a reptilian, yet vegetarian, humanity. Herbivorous reptiles do exist. Under either scenario, Eve wouldn't have needed a bra.
In such an idyllic world, suddenly a rogue planet crashes into Earth. The collision occurs. In the process, the Moon is created as debris. Life on Earth is devastated. Perhaps not entirely wiped out, but reduced to a very primitive state—though we know such life can be incredibly resilient. Bacteria exposed to the vacuum and space radiation have survived perfectly well. Another observation: if such a collision profoundly affected terrestrial life, much of Earth's fauna and flora might have survived the catastrophe. In doing so, we would gain billions of years for the next stage of evolution. It's possible this stage led again to humanoid creatures—but this time mammalian. In other words, you and me.
And Eve gives birth in pain.
Indeed, why does this strange sentence appear in the Bible?
Incidentally, if we believe—as the director of the Japanese film Final Fantasy does—that planets possess a noosphere (in the film, Earth's noosphere was called Gaia)—then the impacting planet might have had its own, inhabited by trillions of deceased beings. "Noos" means "mind" in Greek. This is the idea presented in this remarkable Japanese animated film, technologically impressive in its own right, where Earth, in a distant future, experiences a psychological disturbance due to a collision with an asteroid—a fragment of a planet that exploded, carrying with it a piece of its noosphere, its psychic sphere. From the asteroid emerge "ghosts" that kill Earth's inhabitants, forcing them to take refuge in "shield cities."
If we follow this idea, Earth's noosphere—Gaia—might have become parasitized by the noosphere of the planet the size of Mars, which collided with Earth, giving rise to the Moon and forming the dense core detected within Earth (through seismic wave reflection). This parasitic noosphere, populated by "spirits," would thus lie beneath our feet. If we accept the hypothesis of successive lives with reincarnation, living beings—especially humans—would be "guided" by noospheric structures, their "souls," more or less sophisticated depending on the level of development of the species, forming substructures within these noospheres.
If the impacting planet had harbored advanced, intelligent life—beings comparable to, or even evolutionarily superior to humans—they would all have been killed in the collision. Thus, the souls of these deceased beings would be trapped deep within Earth, where "the fire that never goes out" resides—namely, the magma. Hell, in short. Impossible to reincarnate! The only solution, when possible: to slip into the physical bodies of living Earthlings, in other words, "possess" them.
One day, we will have to seriously reflect on these great metaphysical questions. The so-called "modern" science has simply denied them outright:
- Before life, there is nothing.
- After death, there is nothing.
- Consciousness is merely a set of enzymatic processes.
- The true god is the god of Chance, aided by his assistant, the god of Chaos, who, as Science et Vie once boldly declared on its cover, "governs thought."
If we move away from this purely materialistic view, what then? Everything is possible, nothing is certain—just as the late Aimé Michel used to say. Perhaps the psyche is a structure that co-evolves with physical structures, existing in a "parallel universe" to ours, with consciousness arising from the interaction between these two worlds, neither of which can exist without the other.
Matter, spirit? Isn't this distinction illusory? Yes, a Buddhist would instantly reply, instead of asking, "What is this spirit made of?" they would ask, "What is this matter made of?"
There is still much to say on this theme. Contrary to what scientists believe, mathematical physics is capable of generating such a worldview—and one day, I must decide to speak about it. Yes, this world is dual. There is more than matter. There is also what we call by a thousand different names: spirit, for example, to refer to a Christian terminology...