Denying Our Nature

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 ^“Then God said, ‘Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.’  So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'”  And so we began.  It is undeniable.  Whether you believe mankind was created by the God of Judaism and Christianity or whether you believe that man evolved from apes, the superiority of mankind is undeniable.  And yet we try so hard to deny it.

The so-called “environmental movement” has, since inception morphed into a denial of our superiority.  It attempts to transition our relationship with creation from one of dominance to one of “equity,” if not subservience.  This has reached peak expression (to date) in a ballot initiative proposed in the state of Oregon called “The People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions Act.”  The act would, ultimately, not merely bring an end to dog fighting or puppy mills, it would ban hunting, fishing, ranching and even the consumption of animal flesh of any kind.  as such it would erase the distinction between humanity and animals.

We should think about this in light of a recent op-ed about the death of “The Western” in our culture:

It was what Americans aspired to be – self-reliant, independent, indomitable, resourceful, upholders of law and order, and strivers for justice. The West meant freedom; it was the place for winners. It was, and its virtues were, the reason Horace Greeley urged a nation to “Go West, young man.”

And by aspiring to these and tapping into their own traditions, Americans strove to be what they were, even when we failed to be. By making models and measuring ourselves by them, we also remake ourselves….

The American left would have us not accept any of the Western’s ethos. Self-reliance has no place in the American left’s agenda. They want people to be reliant on the government just as much as they want to be the ones running it.

I hope you can see the connection there.  We are the same as the animals – we are herd.  And herds need tending.  The thought that we are no different than animals is an essentially socialist one.  It seeks to treat us as an unthinking herd and it desires to set itself up as the one tending the herd.  Yet the opening paragraph makes plain that we are all intended to be herders, not members of the herd.

That does not mean we are all supposed to be John Wayne battling Montgomery Clift as they drive a massive herd north from Texas to the rail lines in Kansas.  But it does mean that we are intended to be masters of our own destiny.  We may elect to stay east and work for the bank, but we are meant to choose, not be herded.

And what we truly need to understand is that whether we are longing to be in the herd, and voting accordingly as so many have in recent primaries, or we think of of ourselves as without distinction from the cattle most of us like to eat, and voting as such as some in Oregon just might, we are denying our essential humanity.