Animal Worship and Human Sacrifice

Pregnant Cow That Broke Free on New Jersey Highway Inspires New Legislation.

That was the headline on January 22, 2019, from a CBS news affiliate in New Jersey.  A cow had jumped off a truck which was ten minutes from the slaughter house.  A gushing young anchorwoman said this “daring escape” by the cow inspired a new bill that would make transporting pregnant livestock for killing a crime under New Jersey’s animal cruelty laws. 

Then the anchorwoman gleefully reported that the newly named “Briana” the cow, then living in a sanctuary home for animals, had recently given birth to a happy and healthy baby cow.  The date of this cute animal story, January 22nd, was the 46^th anniversary of the nationwide legalization of the killing of humans in what we call abortion.

How did it come to this?  How could people publicly celebrate a pregnant cow on the anniversary of the day we returned to the pagan practice of child sacrifice?

The giant abortion company Planned Parenthood, which received $700 million of our tax dollars last year and has made billions since the Supreme Court greenlighted abortion in 1973, was caught selling baby parts in 2015.  Its managers were caught on camera laughing and haggling over prices of hearts and brains and kidneys. One writer noted how the headlines that week were full of outrage—not against Planned Parenthood, however, but against a Minneapolis dentist who posted a photo of a lion he shot on safari in Africa.  His life and dental practice were nearly destroyed due to the bad publicity.  

The writer noted that over a hundred years ago, President Teddy Roosevelt hunted big game and posed for pictures.  It contributed to his “fearless and rugged image, a man with a zest for adventure.”  And no one complained. So, when did hunting turn into a sin?  

It happened when we stopped worshipping God and started worshipping Mother Nature.  And at the same time that hunting was becoming unpopular and then unacceptable, abortion went from being a crime to a right. The prolific English writer GK Chesterton wrote way back in 1920: “Wherever you have animal worship, you will have human sacrifice.” (Dale Alquist)

In 1985 I wrote a paper on a man named Peter Singer.  He had written a book called Practical Ethics in which he argued our philosophy of life should be utilitarian—meaning that whatever was most useful and convenient for society should dictate actions and policy. Singer argued that the life of a fetus was of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal.  And because, as Singer argued, no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person.  Carrying this logic forward, Singer wrote that since fetuses were not persons, newborn babies were not really persons either:

A week-old baby is not a rational and self-aware being, and there are many non-human animals whose rationality, self-awareness, capacity to feel and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If, for the reasons I have given, the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either. 

It’s interesting to note: on January 22, 2019, the same day CBS reported about the cow escaping the slaughterhouse, the governor of New York signed a law legalizing infanticide.  The World Trade Center was lit up pink to celebrate the ghoulish fact. Perhaps Governor Cuomo (or more likely one of his aides) had read Practical Ethics by Peter Singer. (Democrat members of the Senate must have read it.  They just voted for infanticide on January 23, 2025.)

I was a dumb college freshman way back when I wrote my paper. I had no clue who Peter Singer was.  I argued that in the end Singer was just joking to get attention and sell books.  My professor thought my paper was good, and she read it to the class.  She wrote some nice comments at the bottom of the paper, adding: “By the way, Dr. Singer is quite serious about his views.”

Dr. Peter Singer, now 78, is a highly acclaimed and influential bioethics professor. And his utilitarian philosophy has been taught to college students for decades. Like many in his profession, Singer is an atheist. And he teaches a philosophy that divorces traditional morality from one’s actions.  He replaces charity with practicality.  

This bankrupt philosophy ignores the first principle and first cause of all things, which is God, our Creator, who has revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. As Chesterton wrote, it is the strangest story ever told, and the greatest paradox that the hands that made the sun and the stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle in the stable—for God came to us as a helpless infant.

Peter Singer wrote:

[It] was worth remembering that our present absolute protection of the lives of infants is a distinctively Christian attitude, rather than a universal ethical value… In some of these societies, infanticide was not merely permitted but, in certain circumstances, deemed morally obligatory. Not to kill a deformed sickly infant was often regarded as wrong, and infanticide was probably the first, and in several societies the only, form of population control.   

So, you see, it’s Christianity’s fault for not letting our pagan world be practical.

One of the first things the pagan and practical Nazis did when they took control of Germany in the 1930’s was to kill deformed and sickly children, those the Nazis deemed “life unworthy of life.”  

It’s also interesting to note that Dr. Peter Singer’s grandparents were put on Nazi cattle cars during World War II and sent to concentration camps where they perished.  As human beings packed in those crowded railway cars, they were quite aware that something evil was happening and that their future looked very bleak.

Now, despite the media’s effort to humanize a cow on the same day New York legalized the murder of newborn babies, understand this: The cow is not a person. The cow, despite living in a “sanctuary” for unwed pregnant cows, does not possess greater dignity than human babies.  Briana the cow, when packed on the crowded truck did not know it was ten minutes from the slaughter house. It had no idea its future was bleak.  It was not saying to itself, “Oh no. They’re going to make hamburger and baseball gloves out of me.  They are going to sell my body parts for money.  I better make a daring escape and be an inspiration to millions of other women cows.”  

No, the cow did not think any of that—because it was a cow.  

Briana the cow never read and pondered the Psalmist’s words:

On you I depend from birth;
From my mother’s womb you are my strength.

Nor did the word of the Lord ever come to the cow as it did Jeremiah, who heard God tell him:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
before you were born, I dedicated you…

The person who spoke to Jeremiah is the first cause of everything.  He is God.  And He revealed Himself, not as a golden calf, but in the person of Jesus Christ.  And when Christ said as much in the synagogue in Nazareth, when He said He was the new law, they tried to throw Him off the cliff. 

They’re still trying today to throw Him off the cliff for His “distinctively Christian attitude.”  You see, a world that worships animals and practices human sacrifice finds Christ impractical.

How do you find Him?

My friends, fear God and understand something: God did not call you to be practical.  He called you to be Christian.  He called you to follow Him up Calvary and die to a world that hates Him because it loves its sins.

In the silence at Holy Mass listen to Christ speak to you.  Hear Him tell you that you are much more than an animal—and for the time being, a little less than an angel.  Listen to Him say to you:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.
Before you were born I dedicated you.

Photo by Jonas Koel on Unsplash