p****y 发帖数: 23737 | 1 这个世界大大小小各宗各派很多,宗教之间的争议非常多,谁也不服谁,
谁都认为自己所选择的宗教门派才是正教,才是正道,才是真理。还没
见到天堂地狱,没见到佛陀上帝,就先信心满满,傲慢心比须陀山还大。
大多数宗教都有其闪光点,有导人向善的言论。可惜,不是每个人都能
领会教主最初的教导,发展到后来宗教间各种恶劣的行为甚至连战争也
出现了。也难怪圣经说,人是有罪的,罪人什么样的坏事不敢做?
天堂地狱我等肉眼凡胎的俗人无法看到,但是衡量宗教好坏有一个很简单
的方法:能教化人心,导人向善,宣传和平精神的宗教,是个对世界有益
的宗教。反之,哪怕套上名门正派的名堂和光环,哪怕信徒众多,要小心。
看下面这则新闻,我就想起孟子的一句话,而某些教派是反着做,宣传暴
力行为。
孟子曰:君子之于禽兽也,见其生,不忍见其死,闻其声,不忍食其肉,
是以君子远庖厨也。
Activist Relies on Islam to Fight for Animal Rights
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/world/africa/22egypt.html?_r=2&hp
CAIRO — It is never easy to be an animal rights activist in the Arab world.
But on Id al-Adha, the annual Muslim religious holiday when the streets run
red with the blood of slaughtered sheep, cows and camels, it is a nightmare.
“Ah, I can’t stand it!” wailed Amina Abaza, wincing as she drove through
a gantlet of hanging carcasses and entrails, with doomed sheep bleating all
around her. “Islam is all about compassion, but we don’t practice it!”
An ebullient 55-year-old with a big mane of blond hair, Ms. Abaza has spent
a decade campaigning to spare the animals, or at least require more humane
slaughtering methods. She has a long way to go.
The scene in Cairo’s working-class Sayyida Zeinab neighborhood Tuesday
morning was fairly typical: camels bellowed as blood-soaked butchers
wrestled dozens of animals to the ground and slashed their throats for an
admiring crowd.
Neighbors leaned out their windows to watch and cheer, or snap cellphone
pictures. Little boys daubed their hands in the blood and spattered one
another, and teenagers helped remove steaming entrails from the carcasses.
Scores of people pressed forward to buy fresh meat for the ritual holiday
meal, standing in puddles of clotted gore.
For most Muslims, the holiday, which ended Friday night, is a joyful time
with a charitable theme: according to tradition, a third of the slaughtered
meat is to be given to relatives, and a third to the poor. It is a welcome
gift in Egypt, where the price of meat has been rising and many families
cannot afford it.
What bothers Ms. Abaza and other activists is not the principle of Id al-
Adha — the Feast of Sacrifice — which commemorates the biblical story in
which God allows Abraham to slaughter a ram instead of his own son. Nor do
they object to animal slaughter itself (Ms. Abaza is not a vegetarian).
Instead, they complain that many butchers fail to abide even by Islam’s own
strictures: that the animal should not be mistreated, and should not see or
hear other animals being killed.
Amateurs slaughter their own sheep at home in many Arab countries, with no
special training on how to spare the animals pain. It is common to see men
hurling terrified sheep into the backs of trucks, and beating the animals as
they herd them to the killing grounds. In abattoirs, some workers sodomize
the beasts with knives to drive them into the pens, Ms. Abaza and other
activists said.
“If you want to give a good image of Muslims and the Koran, why do you do
this?” Ms. Abaza said, her operatic voice rising in indignation. “Why are
we Muslims the ones known for this kind of behavior?”
Ms. Abaza and a small but growing band of fellow activists have had some
impact. In 2006 she helped an Australian reporter film at a slaughterhouse
with a hidden camera. The resulting exposé created a scandal in Australia,
and soon afterward the Australian government suspended shipping live sheep
to Egypt.
That got Ms. Abaza some attention, most of it negative. “People think we
are attacking Islam,” she said. “They accuse you of being an American, a
Jew, a Freemason.”
It is true that Westerners tend to recoil a bit from the mass slaughter that
takes place on Id al-Adha, despite the reality that plenty of animals are
slaughtered in the West in ways that make animal rights activists cringe.
Muslims can be sensitive about the Western reaction, and Ms. Abaza, who grew
up here in a wealthy Francophone family, is an easy target.
When she first started her organization in 2001, the Society for the
Protection of Animal Rights in Egypt, her rhetoric was largely borrowed from
similar Western groups.
“Then I discovered that there are animal rights in Islam,” she said. “
Once we started using the Islamic arguments, they didn’t attack us as much.
”
Some religious authorities agree with Ms. Abaza, but they rarely raise their
voices, certainly not on the Adha holiday.
“Muslims are passing through a period of degeneration where they are
applying the Shariah law circumstantially and moodily,” said Sheik Ahmed al
-Baba, a prominent Sunni cleric and member of the Islamic Endowment Council
in Lebanon. “Some ordinary people do the slaughtering process and in a
wrong way. They don’t have experience, they don’t know we are obliged not
to harm the animal.”
In fact, the Koran and the Islamic written traditions that form Shariah, or
religious law, specify minimum ages for animals to be slaughtered, and
provide details about avoiding any unnecessary pain, Sheik Baba said.
In fairness, those rules are difficult to apply on a large scale. At the
Basateen slaughterhouse, near the vast cemetery known as the City of the
Dead, butchers stride about in knee-high rubber boots, surrounded by lakes
of feces, blood and urine. It was here that the Australian reporter
documented animal abuses in 2006.
But the procedures do not appear to have changed. On Monday, one butcher
described it this way: “We just throw them on their sides and cut their
throats and say ‘Allahu Akbar.’ ” Asked whether the beasts were able to
see and hear others being killed, he replied: “Sure, why not?”
As for Ms. Abaza, she chose to celebrate the holiday in her own unique way.
She drove to the local sheep market, where she bought a female sheep for 1,
000 Egyptian pounds (about $175) and asked the butchers to load it in the
back of her S.U.V. The men offered to slaughter it for her, and on hearing
that she planned to “rescue” it, they could not contain their mirth. She
paid no attention.
“Baaaa! You’re lucky!” she said jauntily, beaming at the animal.
She then drove to her ramshackle farm in the town of Sakara, on the
outskirts of Cairo, where she keeps donkeys and sheep as pets. On the way,
she groaned as she passed trucks full of sheep headed for slaughter, and
dozens of fly-specked animal carcasses hanging in the sun.
“It’s a bloody day,” she said scornfully. “I hate this feast. Millions
will be killed.” |
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