excreationist

I don't know if there has been a thread on this... but I was wondering if Christians think if pets have immortal souls (and go to heaven - or hell)...

Or are they soulless or do they have non-immortal animal-type souls of something?

himynameisPwn

Well, I once read somewhere that all dogs goto heaven....

seebs

I don't know. I don't believe the answer is ever clearly stated. I tend to assume that animals probably don't have souls, but I could be wrong. It may be that only some animals have souls; I don't think they're required to follow any obvious rules.

kwigibo

no. Do neanderthals or smallpox have souls? of course not, it's nonsense. if one living thing has a soul, all living things do, and i can't imagine a homosexual penguin burning in hell for all eternity.

[ June 23, 2002: Message edited by: kwigibo ]</p>

seebs

I can't either... However, I take exception to "if one living thing has a soul, all living things do". Would you agree with "if one living thing has a sense of self in relation to other, then all living things do"? I wouldn't! I wouldn't even say that all members of a species have to have the same qualities at that level; some abstract qualities appear to be optional, or accidental.

yahwehyadayada

I believe that the catholic church's position is that animals do not have souls. Many years ago I received a letter trying to raise funds for a pig farm some catholic order of monks was running in order to "feed the poor". I wrote back to them that I was a vegetarian & that I felt that slaughtering animals was cruel & wrong, & since animals don't have souls & therefore theoretically cannot go to heaven, all the more reason for us to be kind to them because they will have no happy afterlife as recompense. I received in return a snotty & selfrighteous letter informing me that I valued animals above humans & that this was a sin before gawd. (No meeting of the minds here).

My mother's church (anglican episcopal) has, every May, a "blessing of the animals" when people bring their cats & dogs & ferrets & hamsters, etc. to an outside ceremony. Never is any explanation given as to why those animals are entitled to be blessed but cows, chickens, pigs, etc. are not. I realize that this is as much a cultural dichotomy as it is a religious one, but it galls me nevertheless.

This same church also rents a donkey for some silly reenactment of what I think is Jesus entering some town & having palms strewn before him by the inhabitants (palm Sunday?). This poor donkey is tormented mercilessly by the small children. I really hate that church.

kwigibo

appear to be?

i am made of the same stuff as a mosquito, just because i happen to have a greater concentration of ganglia in my head doesn't make me special. what you take exception at is irrelevant, unless one evolves a soul, at some point on the tree of life. Then where is the transitional immortal soul fossil? What selective pressures brought about the transcedant self? were early hominids committing suicide because they didn't have as much soul as the hominids over in motown? You relate a supernatural 'phenotype' to physical, tangible ones, when you can't possibly reconcile the two under the same rules.

your example of a 'sense of self' is likely not a universal phenomenon of life (well, it isn't, we know that). but does that mean only animals with a forebrain, or the spiritual equivalent, have a soul. the fact of the matter is, that a soul, as it is defined, contradicts any logical understanding of the human species' relation to all other life. you'd have to suppose a deity had some special plan for our species and our species alone, and my point is, that i can't, and i won't, suppose i'm more special than a neanderthal, or a homo erectus, or a chimpanzee, or a goldfish for that matter. If a soul belongs to any other species, it belongs to all other species, there is no line drawn in the sand.

rest assured, this does not have any effect on your beliefs, because you believe, i assume, that 'god' does have a special plan for our species and our species alone, and this i have no problem with. if you choose to believe in god, than that is more than acceptable. my problem is, if you expand the group outside the species, you are in trouble, because there are no definable lines along which you could limit such an expansion.

i hope you see my point

Veil of Fire

Well why COULDN'T we evolve a soul? It would be advantageous... we'd breed more if we thought we'd all go to heaven! ...or something. I'm sure there's SOME evolutionary pressure there....

seebs

I think it does. I don't care about mosquitoes; I do care about people.

I disagree. Can you tell me where in the hominid tree "self-awareness" showed up? I can't. I can't tell you with any certainty what animals are, and aren't, self-aware. I don't know if any of them are; I suspect that many are at least somewhat self-aware. I bet that flatworms aren't, and birds probably aren't.

It does, however, mean that it is possible for lives to be distinguished by a quality we can't identify in a fossil.

I don't know about that. I'm not even sure how a soul *is* defined.

I disagree. Even when I didn't believe in souls, I believed that at least some cats were self-aware, and that no goldfish were self-aware. I am quite certain that mosquitoes aren't self-aware. Thus, there's a line drawn - but I don't necessarily know where it is.

I think there's an easy-to-define line for what gets souls: Whatever God says gets souls. I don't happen to have any idea how to tell which things are which, but this doesn't bother me, I'm used to not being sure about philosophical issues.

It doesn't seem any worse to me than questions of how to be sure which people were, or were not, "saved". I can't tell, and, in practice, it's none of my business.

I continue to act on the basic assumption that cruelty to animals is a bad idea, but that animals are, in general, food if we want to eat them. There is a balancing point to this: I can't find it in my heart to react with outrage when animals eat us. They are as they are designed to be; reacting with outrage is just plain dumb.

kwigibo

interesting you pick birds, when a bird brain is, in many senses, just as good as a mammalian brain, having to travel in 3 dimensions and such necessitates a bit of smarts, just like monkeys in the trees.

i'll restate my point, once you believe in the god that you do, none of what i said makes any difference. the only problem occurs when you move beyond the human species, once you purport multiple species having a soul. there has to be a definite line in the sand, and life doesn't make those.



[ June 23, 2002: Message edited by: kwigibo ]</p>