All Souls Day

One of the funniest things in modernism, especially in scientistic modernism is the often made accusation that someone is "anthropomorphizing" when they do something that the accuser doesn't like.   One of the most common uses I've heard of the accusation is in the rather absurd argument and assertion that animals lack consciousness or other mental attributes by scientists whose ideological predilection leads them to deny that as even a possibility.   I think anyone of minimal observational skills and who isn't totally self-centered who has ever had a dog or cat or any of the other animals I've kept as pets or farm animals would  realize that rigid belief that does, in fact, rule a good part of official biological science is total and complete nonsense.

But the accusation that someone who does something like attribute human-like consciousness and human-like emotions to animials they observe are "anthopomorphizing" them is clueless in a more basic way.  Humans,  being human beings, it is absolutely inescapable that EVERYTHING they think about creatures and things non-human will be thought of in human terms.  It is impossible for human beings to transcend human perceptions, human experiences, human mental equipment, human habits, etc. in order to come up with some non-human view of those.  In the conceit of such scientistic dolts, their claim is that they can achieve some"objective" point of view.   Their non-attribution of consciousness is as much an act of imagining animals from a human point of view as those who believe that animals minds and souls are exactly like humans' minds and souls.  And it is as much based in their emotional preference as those who humanize animals.   I think their conceit that they can transcend their humanness due to their great sciencyness (ignoring the fact that science, itself is a human invention which exists in no known place except within human minds) leads to a compounded or meta-anthropomorphic superstition that comprises a higher ignorance than the derided "folk lore" which doesn't carry that enhanced level of denial as to what is being done.

The Jewish Bible is not so presumptuous, as early as Genesis, Chapter 9 animals are included in the great Covenant God made with Noah:

8 Later, God told Noah and his sons, 9 “Pay attention! I’m establishing my covenant with you and with your descendants after you, 10 and with every living creature that is with you—the flying creatures, the livestock, and all the wildlife of the earth that are with you—all the earth’s animals that came out of the ark. 11 I will establish my covenant with you: No living beings will ever be cut off again by flood waters, and there will never again be a flood that destroys the earth.”

12 God also said, “Here’s the symbol that represents the covenant that I’m making between me and you and every living being with you, for all future generations: 13 I’ve set my rainbow in the sky to symbolize the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow becomes visible in the clouds, 15 I’ll remember my covenant between me and you and every living creature, so that water will never again become a flood to destroy all living beings. 16 When the rainbow is in the clouds, I will observe it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings on the earth.”

If those who date the book of Job even earlier than the text of Genesis are right, that far broader, far more generous, far less anthropocentric view of reality is even older than that.  In Chapter 12, in Job's examination of what has become known as The Question of Evil, it says: 

7 “But ask the animals, and they will teach you,

    or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;

8 or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,

    or let the fish in the sea inform you.

9 Which of all these does not know

    that the hand of the Lord has done this?

10 In his hand is the life of every creature

    and the breath of all mankind.

Job attributes knowledge that seems to surpass the common sense of human beings to animals, even fish, even the earth.  I have to say that last one reminds me of nothing more than the Buddhist story of the enlightenment as the Buddha is getting ready to take his final step into enlightenment and is challenged as to his right to do that, he touches the Earth to ask it to testify as to his right to do so and it answers.  Though that's an entirely different tradition.  I know that an atheist will use that to ridicule the idea, which is about the only case I know of where multiple attestation of an idea is used to discredit instead of support it. 

My old cat who I buried the other day was one of the most unceasingly affectionate creatures I've ever known, including human beings, right up to her last hours when she was in considerable distress over her sudden paralysis.  She seems to me to have had a very cat like wisdom and an indiscriminate love.  I certainly could learn a few things from her and I think I have.  And not only from her but from all of the animals I've known intimately, even some I haven't known intimately.  I can imagine God making a covenant with their kind, though one that human beings wouldn't be able to articulate.  What they teach is certainly not as foolish as cognitive eliminationism believed by so many humans who hold advanced degrees and university posts in science and other supposedly rigorous academic fields.  I have as much faith that they possess a soul as I do, though I don't for a second believe I could comprehend what their soul is like.  I'd have to ask them and I can't except in human terms. 

I've been struggling with just a little of the theology of Karl Rahner this year.  And I mean just a little of it.  He wrote more than 3000 books and papers and articles of very, very tough reading, some of which I don't think has been translated into English.  I am interested in his ideas about the soul because it is a radical departure from the Platonist view of the soul that predominates in much of the history of Western Christianity, the conception of the soul that atheists deride and to which many problems are attributed.  It's not that easy a conception, being intrinsically (if that's even the right word) connected with the body but which doesn't seem to be to be identical with a materialistic view of the soul.  I have to say I don't think even all Rahner scholars agree as to what he meant.   This is the last paper on it I read (by a scholar of, NOT by Rahner) which might point to some of the complexities and problems of it.  I do think that one of the problems that is unstated is the one about science which I started with, it is inevitably a human conception of a soul inevitably caught up in human conceptions and very specific human intellectual history, Western, Catholic, Christian, 20th century modernistic, scientific, and other aspects of human culture comprise the point of view which Rahner talks about something which, to start with, science is likely irrelevant and even profound human thought expressed in language can't reach. 

It's one of the stupider things that those who scoff at theology don't realize,  the purpose of doing theology isn't to find out what you're supposed to think, it's to think hard and seriously. 

I do have to say that I find a lot of theology, not just modern theology, is far more of an intellectual challenge than much of philosophy because theologians, knowing their work will inevitably be opposed, can be far more rigorous thinkers.  The intellectual level of the theology I'm reading right now is a much greater challenge than anything I've read in philosophy and it is far more relevant to life.  And it is far, far more interesting than most of philosophy because of that. 

I do think that what I just said about theology should be said of science, that it doesn't tell you what to think but forces thought.  And that is related to the alleged claim that science is always open to falsification, though even some very famous scientists hold the more simplistic and fundamentalist view of it as the presenter of hard fact. 

No view of science is more absurdly doctrinaire and simplistic than that of atheist-materialists of the legion of "skeptics" and sci-rangers, informed by the likes of Carl Sagan and his imitators.   Heaven help them, the intellectuals among them are informed by that bull shit artist puzzle maven and sleaze Martin Gardner.  

It's All Souls Day.  Apparently the Google doodle about it reduces it to an Anglo-version of the Latin American Dia de los muertos.   Having just experienced American style Halloween c. 2018, I'd rather avoid that too.  I'd rather ask the animals or at least to think about them and their souls.