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Reasoning has its value, but in some cases, animals have better instinct, particularly as it comes to survival. For example, an animal knows instinctively to put away food for the time when food will not be readily available. Humans often do not do that with their resources.
That is agreed. They also evidently have the instinct to get out of town if an earthquake or tsunami or something like that is about to hit. They can evidently feel the rumbling underground. This does not mean, however, that humans have higher ability to understand relationship to God.
I don't intellectually fear being dead. A complete null of experience is nothing to fear. I have a certain emotional aversion to the idea, but I chalk that up to millions of years of evolution selecting for individuals that did everything possible not to be dead.
Now, the process of dying - the 'approach path', as I once heard the late film critic Roger Ebert put it - could be unpleasant. One one hand, I might die in my sleep or get snuffed out by a bolt of lightning. Instantaneous and painless. Then there's a heart attack or a car accident, where maybe I take a few minutes to expire. That sounds miserable, though it wouldn't last too long at least. But an extended, lingering demise? Horribly painful cancer? The degradation of the body, and perhaps the mind where there's still enough of it left to suffer? That possibility doesn't terrorize me day and night, but I'd by lying if I said I don't have a certain degree of fear about how the process of my becoming dead will play out.
I know it's fashionable for people to blithely assert that death means nothing to them, but I doubt there are very many people who don't have at least some qualms about the experience of dying.
I'm not too worried about how I will die. But I am concerned that I will die. I don't want to die. But it looms in front of me, just like I know the sun will rise tomorrow. I still don't want to die, and I hope that the Bible's promise of everlasting life is true.
Language is a necessary precursor to self awareness I would think. Writing is just a method of recording language. To have both you need (1) language obviously, (2) motor skills sufficient to produce some kind of symbolic representation of speech and (3) high order conceptual ability to combine the two.
Natural selection has come "close but no cigar" you might say with some animals like dolphins or orcas (lack motor skills) or chimps (lack language). I suppose a sub-requirement in there would be that at least some members of a species would have to be far enough up the hierarchy of needs to have time to develop and practice writing or even oral story-telling. If your time and energy are entirely consumed with survival, more abstract and not immediately useful skills like symbolic thinking are going to go unexplored and undeveloped.
So here again I'm not getting the point of "no animal taught me to read". It's kind of a non-sequitur. If there were other species with speech and writing, they might well teach you to read, but there doesn't happen to be. All of this hinges on the uniqueness of humans in this regard, which actually proves nothing at all. Particularly since we are in a biosphere with only one species (ourselves) with these capabilities, and even at that, this ability emerged just yesterday in terms of evolutionary time. Since there are other species with less developed or integrated abilities for speech, tool use, etc., it seems very reasonable to assume that eventually we'll have company even in our own biosphere, much less what we might encounter as we become a spacefaring species.
These kinds of arguments are all variations on "but we're special, therefore god". We're not so special, just fortunate, and no gods are needed to explain our abilities.
Fortunately, over a long enough period of time, my hypothesis is falsifiable, unlike the basic god hypothesis and other ideas about invisible beings and realms. If we encounter abundant life throughout the universe, on thousands of worlds, and our study of these many species discovers an evolutionary roadblock to developing speech and writing and abstract thinking and self awareness, then there WILL be something far more overtly "special" about us to understand how we got past that roadblock. Even then, it could just as well (ok, really far more likely) be that it was just the luck of the draw than some baroque explanation like an invisible supreme being tipping the scale in our favor. But if it could be shown that only direct willful intervention could have produced humanity then at least it would open up a space to discuss a god-like being as the cause.
Here is my point: when I pass animals as I drive, I see cows grazing in the field, sometimes horses around here. But that is what they do. They don't write music. They don't read poems. Sometimes they may escape from their field and go lumbering on a road and get in trouble. But that is their life. Eat, procreate, go to the bathroom, etc., and die.
I was sexually abused, but I grew up with a Mother teaching hell and brimstone that I learned that I must be gay and all I knew was that I was damned because I believed everything told to me, and I knew I was going to hell, and I figured if I killed myself, God might have forgiven me. I am over it, and not sorry it happened, it's just what happened.
I will pay more attention to your posts in the future, sometimes some ideas "catch me." You sound like a very sensitive person. And that's good. It has its merits. It has taken me a long time to get over my faults (sins). I spent YEARS beating myself up because of things I had done as a child and as an adult. For instance, I just remembered today (unfortunately because I wish I did not remember it) that when I dropped something on the kitchen floor in my parents' apartment, I broke a tile. My mother asked me if I did it, and I lied. I said no. I regret that to this day. She is dead and I never told her how much her kindness and friendship (although she was imperfect) meant to me. I do believe, however, she may come back to life and I hope I will have the opportunity to show her the love I never was capable of doing so while she was alive.
Here is my point: when I pass animals as I drive, I see cows grazing in the field, sometimes horses around here. But that is what they do. They don't write music. They don't read poems. Sometimes they may escape from their field and go lumbering on a road and get in trouble. But that is their life. Eat, procreate, go to the bathroom, etc., and die.
Yes and no. I think you're a little over-focused on domesticated farm animals, who are bred for stupidity and docility and helplessness.
One of my dogs, I'm convinced, has existential angst of a sort. We adopted him at 1 yr old. From what we inferred from his records at the pound, he was taken too soon from his mother, then left all day in a crate, and developed anxiety issues around it. We actually have him on Prozac so he doesn't whimper all the time. He's easily frustrated and if he wants something and can't have it he gives up with a great big sigh as if to say, "what's the point".
In other words he has JUST enough awareness to be a little frustrated and depressed with his existence because he's onto things a bit. He knows he's not in control and thing aren't as they "should" be.
Our little terrier on the other hand is dumb as a post by comparison.
Now I might be just projecting / anthropomorphizing but then you have to explain dolphins, orcas, the other great apes, elephants and more ... they have social structures, self-awareness even if of a lower amplitude, and they are not so much less than us, as just different. Some of them even evolved language -- again, just different and suited to their needs. They lovingly care for their young, strategize to defend themselves and each other, mourn their dead ... it is too bad that we urban dwellers are quite cut off from the rest of the animal kingdom such that we're not too aware of these things and have a rather overly determined view of how advanced we are -- and therefore how less than unique we really are likely to be in the scope of an infinite future and an infinite and almost entirely unexplored universe that likely contains many other examples of creatures with language and culture.
Sometimes I wonder if animals might know quite a bit, which is why they're
sworn to silence, in a sense, by not being able to speak with us in depth about
what it is that they actually know.
Sometimes I wonder if animals might know quite a bit, which is why they're
sworn to silence, in a sense, by not being able to speak with us in depth about
what it is that they actually know.
Here is my point: when I pass animals as I drive, I see cows grazing in the field, sometimes horses around here. But that is what they do. They don't write music. They don't read poems.
Things evolve because they have to. To my knowledge, no cows have needed to write music. It is why we find that some species have evolved a lot and others, hardly at all. Take the crocodile. It has hardly evolved at all in millions of years. Why? Because it hasn't had to; there has been no need to change. It is perfectly suited to the environment that it lives in.
I'm not too worried about how I will die. But I am concerned that I will die. I don't want to die. But it looms in front of me, just like I know the sun will rise tomorrow. I still don't want to die, and I hope that the Bible's promise of everlasting life is true.
This I don't understand. How does an everlasting life make dying any different? In this case, a promise of everlasting life?
This I don't understand. How does an everlasting life make dying any different? In this case, a promise of everlasting life?
I can only speak for myself, but it’s the difference between diving
into the water thinking there’s no coming up for air once
submerged, and diving into the water thinking that I’ll have the
opportunity to come back up for air.
Of course, what one expects is waiting for them on the Other
Side will impact the experience as well. I personally no longer
entertain the idea of endless conscious torment in a place called
“hell”, so I’m far less anxious about what to expect.
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