Apropos of various things...

[avevale_intelligencer]

Neil Gaiman's blog entry for today pokes gentle fun at a New Scientist article which confidently proclaims that the reason we have religion and other animals don't is because of our sophisticated brains. A few buried assumptions there, perhaps...

I'm quite ready to believe that animals have religion. Cats, for instance, are several steps up on us in that the object of their religious belief is provably real and answers their ritualised prayers by providing food, opening doors, tickling their tummies, et cetera. (There are those who like to think that cats feel nothing but contempt for us, or even that the relationship is exactly reversed and we worship them. I'm not sure why thinking that would give anyone pleasure, but hey, whatever illuminates your manuscript. I think my interpretation is at least equally valid and a lot more satisfying.)

That our ability to postulate gods that are not evidentially apparent is a concomitant of our creative imagination I think is certainly true, whether one believes the gods in question are real or not. We've certainly imagined a lot of other things that have later been found to be real. That other animals do, or do not, possess a similar faculty, is something we simply don't, and can't, know. If they do, it's another point in favour of the belief that we are no different from chimpanzees except for a deformity of the hand from which they do not suffer; equally, though, it would support the notion that the religious impulse might be unlikely to be something of which we could easily rid ourselves.

In other news, something has apparently gone wrong with my cookies, which is why I'm having to log in to everything afresh every time I start up Firefox. Gah.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Well, there is a difference between religion and just a feeling there is something supernatural on an individual level, which is all that animals without language could manage, even if intelligent. Religion implies a degree of sharing of belief, and an element of ritual. Also, most animals do not seem to have self-recognition, as far as we can tell from experimentation (a line of inquiry started by Darwin.) If you don't have proper self-recognition you don't have the ability to recognise something beyond-self.

Oh, and we have imagined far more things that have not proved to be true than that have proved to be true. The power of belief stems from the fact that we give far more attention to things that happen than things that don't, and we are inclined to imagine causation. If the grass sways, it probably isn't a lion, but you would be advised to run anyway, because if it just happens to be a lion, your life is on the line.

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

Rudyard Kipling: "Thy Servant a dog".

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I read that when I was far too young to understand why it was written so strangely.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I knew a person who had a cat with a religion of 'up'. Specifically, the trapdoor in the ceiling which led to the attic. Every so often one of the humans would open it and go up there, and when they did things either appeared or disappeared. When the cat was upset (like when one of their other animals died) the cat would go and sit under the trapdoor and look up at it and mew, obviously expecting or hoping that their companion would come back from there like other things had.

As you say, their beliefs tend to be based on past experience, but then so often are ours. Many 'superstitions' are actually based on experience -- after you've had a bad thing happen just after seeing a black cat enough times it becomes natural to connect the two. And walking under ladders is just a bad idea in general, especially when there's someone up there wit a paint pot. For that matter enough people have direct personal experience of things like prayers being answered to convince them, even though there is no way that they can 'prove' it to anyone else. If you do a dance and it then rains, several times (even if sometimes it doesn't rain), you're likely to do that dance every time you want rain just to improve the odds a bit...

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

My dance involves laundry. Or going out without a coat.