Domestication of animals radically changed our relationship to our environment, and the price we paid was high. Diseases from livestock killed many (and with the rise of BSE and avian and swine flus, still do) and only those who developed immunity survived. We can thus see these survivors developing a morbid attachment to these creatures who sustained them with meat and milk and hides, yet had killed so many of their relatives.” The rise of a religion based on animal bloodshed and intricate food laws is then perhaps not surprising.

We are so used to living in a domesticated world that we forget that it could ever have been otherwise. It radically changed ideas of ownership and stewardship, and the power structures that rose out of it led, as we have seen in the story of the Levites, to a priest-based power-religion. In other words, it may be possible to plot a direct line from the domestication of creation to the domestication of the Creator.

We have house-trained God. We have localized, accommodated and claimed ownership of God, and fabricated a sort of divine social contract with ‘him’: only ‘he’ can use his great power to smite our enemies. We will be obedient subjects – so long as we are protected and prosper.

The excerpt above come Kester Brewin’s book Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures.

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