Competition Rages Most Fiercely in Christian Lands

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 10 pages

The argument is that the societies most given to preaching brotherhood are the ones organised around competition. Despite missions, armies and enforced commercial intercourse, the file says, the so-called heathen find nothing in the teaching of Jesus that Krishna and Gautama had not taught them before; and the history of the Church shows the Fathers demolishing each other in the name of a Master who bequeathed them peace and love, with envy, jealousy and a deplorable feeling of rivalry reigning in a society whose principal object is brotherhood. Western education, and the Anglo-Saxon especially, is described as pervaded by emulation and strife.

The second half extends the charge to the treatment of animals, and traces a line from one to the other. The whole Christian world admits that man may indiscriminately slaughter animals on the theory that they have no souls; the meat-eater, the sportsman and the vivisector alike justify their cruelty from the grant of dominion in Genesis. Porphyry is then cited for the historical claim the file rests on: that it was the cruelty and slaughter of harmless animals which first spurred man to homicide masquerading as sacrifice, and thence to murders, wars, crusades and the atrocities of the present day.

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