Apropos of various things...
Mar. 20th, 2009 02:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerNeil 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.
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.