Am I aware that the Old Testament says god gave us dominion over the animals? Yes.
Are you aware that the same god found it fine to drown billions of animals because he was upset with people? The story: Noah and the flood.
That god didn't like how people were behaving - except for eight humans on the whole planet - so he considered it fine to drown all the others, including infants, along with every land animal and bird, except for the very few there was space for on one ark.
Do I disapprove of such lack of consideration for animals and also humans too young to have done anything wrong? Yes.
But that's not the story that stopped me cold when i was seven.
It was the story of a brother who killed animals and burned them for god.
I was stunned.
But that was not what shocked me the most.
More about the Old Testament god.
Some well-meaning friends of my parents gave me a child's version of the Bible, and many of the stories astounded me.
I read about creation.
So that's how we got here, I thought.
I had never wondered, but this answered the question in a very reasonable way for my seven-year-old mind.
God made us out of earth.
Then the first two people were bad, and god punished them.
That also made sense to me.
My sister and I were always doing things that were bad, and getting scoldings.
Then the people had children who fought - just like my sister and I did.
Part of the story, though, did not make sense to me.
One of the brothers burned some vegetables for god.
The other brother killed animals and burned them for god.
It didn't make sense that someone would kill animals just like that, just to burn them.
What happened next made even less sense to me.
The god was mad at the brother who did not kill animals.
He liked the brother who killed the animals.
I read that over and over, stunned.
I was sure that I was not reading the words right.
After all, I had a hard time with lots of words.
But no matter how many times I went over the passage, god always liked the brother who killed the animals.
I could understand what happened next.
The other brother, the one god didn't like, got mad at his brother and killed him.
This was worse than anything my sister and I got up to, but I could understand it.
I would be totally pissed off if someone who killed an animal got praised for it.
After that the god got mad and punished the brother who was left.
Again, not hard to grasp.
His favorite had been killed, after all.
I could not take it in, though, that the god liked it better if someone killed animals.
**** I never quite forgot that initial shock at reading the story of Cain and Abel.
I stopped thinking about it, but it stayed lodged deep inside me.
My initial shock told me: this is wrong, all wrong.
Over the years I learned that the stories I had accepted without questioning - on creation, for instance - were in fact not accurate representations of how people came into existence.
I remember being stunned when I found out about evolution in grade three.
The idea of evolution boggled my mind.
Horses had once been the size of cats? That was nuts.
No, it wasn't nuts, I learned.
It was science.
Wow.
Likewise, I learned that, though the story of Adam and Eve made sense to me - people disobeying and getting into trouble - again there was no historical backing for it.
**** But what felt wrong to me on first reading - animal sacrifice - continued to feel wrong.
And maybe the foundation for my holding ethics above any religion comes from my utter conviction that it was wrong what that god did, saying it was good to kill animals just to burn them.
I still hold that conviction as an adult.
**** I also hold that we sometimes deeply viscerally feel when something is right or wrong.
It doesn't matter what the outside voices say, or what we are taught, whether from family, religion or society.
Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall Apart, captures this inner experience of knowing something is wrong.
Nwoye comes from a tribe where newborn twins are put in earthenware jars and thrown into the evil forest.
One day, coming home from harvesting yams, he hears crying coming from the forest - and something just breaks inside him.
No one has told him anything was wrong with what is done to twins.
Yet inside him something breaks.
Lillian Smith, in Killers of the Dream, describes something similar.
As a young white girl in the south of the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, she stood at the edge of a crowd, listening to a white politician haranguing about black evil, black inferiority.
Most of the people listening were white, but among them were black millhands and the town's black doctor (he only treated black people, of course).
Inside her, listening to the rant, came tearing voices.
"What is wrong, what is wrong? How can he be talking like that.
Can't he see they're human, just like us?" Then other voices came, arguing against the first.
"But then why are they not with us, in our schools, in our churches?" Her book is aptly called Killers of the Dream - she felt racism kill the dream of equality inside herself.
Actually, the dream isn't what I see being killed.
I see that either we listen to what we hear from deep inside ourselves - or part of our ability to see, to experience, and to respond to reality gets squashed.
My inner voice wasn't silenced.
But there seemed no space for it in the world around me.
Everything was just too puzzling.
As for talking to a grownup, I had learned that they had a hard time listening.
My father was likely to give me a long speech on something or other.
**** And with that I'm back where I started.
Something inside me broke when I read about the god preferring burned killed animals over vegetables.
Maybe it happened because we had a dog, and I loved that dog.
Maybe it would have happened anyway.
I believe the breaking came from a deep down in-born sense of connection to animals.
**** What was it that broke? Acceptance of the story I was reading.
Belief that the story could be telling something true.
The god I was reading about could scare me.
He kept punishing people.
But he could not be my kind of god.
So one of the things that broke was the potential for a deep connection to a religion linked to the Old Testament (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) or any similar religion.
They went against my built-in moral sense.
**** I didn't know exactly what I was going to write about when I started.
I knew it had to do with the story I read about Abel and Cain in childhood.
More, as I found out as i wrote, it had to do with one place where our moral sense, our sense of right and wrong comes from - deep inside ourselves, in our connection to others, human and animal and more.
**** For another true story about animals, click here: Whose Dog Is It Anyway - On Pets, Ownership, Slavery [http://www.
elsas-word-story-image-idea-music-emporium.
com/the-idea-emporium-8.
html] The spark for the story: The dog next door wants to move in.
He's been hungry.
He's often cold.
He's left alone for days in the barn.
We have two dogs, nine cats (we live in the country) - and a warm house where our pets are welcome.
We'd like to give him a home.
But he belongs to the farm next door.
The question is: who should have the right to decide where the dog lives? The dog or the owners? **** Then, a couple of years I have moved to write a preteen novel.
It's about a thirteen-year-old girl and ...
an invisible ghost dog that may or may not be there.
The Fluffers Book - or Caro Carolina, Geela Gribbs, and Fluffers the Invisible Dog