In Reply to: Re: All Christians in general posted by Thinker on December 10, 2009 at 14:47:39:
I can accept anthropocentrism as a characteristic of some christians, but many would argue that christianity is theocentric instead. Personally I see God as the foundation of Christianity. In my opinion, the anthropocentric view is misinformed, a bastardized form of Bible-based doctrines that reflect a pseudo-ideological view within the material realm.
Christianity is by definition spiritual, hence beyond the material, as Scriptures continually remind its readers.
According to the Bible, God's creation, the center of concern of ecology in this view, is to be respected and treated with care. Man is the steward of the earth and its creatures, plants, etc. and it is required of stewards that each one is found faithful.
Abusing power is not part of the Christian doctrine but is part of certain ideologies that many erroneously identify as christians, and that take more than what they give.
Sad to say, those behaviors speak louder and historically writers whose particular expertise is not in Christianity confuse them, and call them christian behaviors when they are not.
I found your last two points extremely interesting:
* Saint Francis of Assisi is said to have failed in his attempts to promote "the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man." The predominant attitude of Catholics was "the idea of man’s limitless rule of the world and its life forms."
I think this understanding of equality is not correct about the Franciscan view. My understanding of what Saint Francis of Assisi was trying to promote is the equality *in the eyes of God* of all creatures. How much more are we than the birds in the fields? And yet God takes care of us and of them too. We are all equal in that God takes care of all of us.
* The Humanae Vita "is [probably] one of the main reasons why the Catholic Church has been so slow to enter the ecological debate." The Humanae Vita promotes "unbridled population growth" and sets out to "defend human life in a narrow anthropocentric context," thus creating "conditions that will, in fact, endanger all life on earth."
Again, I take this to be a narrow interpretation of the position taken by the Catholic Church. It is not how many children are being born in Africa that endangers the world but the way land is used particularly by industrialized countries. There are genocidal practices of indigenous peoples in some parts of the world because agriculture has become a big business and they are in search of new lands to plant crops. That is the real problem. By the way, these policies are also condemned by the Catholic Church.