(At first I was just going to put this in MPSIMS. But upon closer reflection, I now realize that this might spark some debates.)
As I must’ve made clear by now, I have a very unconventional approach to life. And as I also have said, I have a number of medical and scientific theories that I have tried to share with people. Interestingly, you may be the first ones to read this one.
Could animals, especially wild ones, all have inborn religions? Let me explain my theory carefully for you. Religion clearly serves a very important psychological and social need for humans. This surely must also be the case for feral animals. Now humans get their skills, their language, their very knowledge from society. Little or none of it is inborn. No such thing is true of wild animals and insects. They’re basically born with all that they need. So is it so wild to presuppose that they are born with a kind of quasi religion already intact? This is very true of their language and moral/social code. So why the heck not?
What kind of religion? I don’t know. For you diehard Christians, yes it could be monotheistic. But it also may be polytheistic (cf. humans for most of their existence). Or it may just be Animism. As I said, I just don’t know. Any input would be appreciated.
And as I said, this is a new scientific theory of mine. So feel free to share it with any scientist, especially already on this board. Oh, and I don’t want to hijack my own thread. But I do wonder if we’ll ever be able to read animals minds, because wouldn’t that be great? But we’ll leave that discussion for another time and another thread .
I find it interesting that the first reply goes straight into the subject of heaven and immortal souls, a very human approach. But be that as it may, I think animals do not have religion, that is way to complex and abstract, but have just the right metaphysical awareness they need and are capable of (the one conditions the other) as a function of their intelectual capabilities. They need it to navigate this world they are in, and they are capable of it because natural selection went that way: if they did not need it, they would not have it, nature does not indulge in that kind of waste. And they only need it in accordance with their intelectual capabilities, that is, in a very rudimentary form. Even higher animals like whales, orang-utans, elefants… that have been observed caring for dying members of their group do most probably not picture angels, immortal souls or even an abstract goDott in their tiny minds, the most they can achieve is some sort of limited causality chain. If at all. Affection and empathy is already a lot.
But if animals do not have an idea of goDott I think they have a picture if the devil in their minds: he walks on two legs and wears clothes.
It is a nice theory, but it hardly qualifies as scientific, if I understand scientific correctly.
“Wouldn’t that be great” is not a reason and not an argument. Wittgenstein: If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.
Thomas Nagel asked: What is it like to be a bat?
Religion is a byproduct of the human tendency to understand the world in terms of narratives — beginning, middle, end, aka starting point, cause, effect.
Animals do not tell stories to one another or understand them in any way.
If you take religion as a understanding of how and why things work and perhaps some ritualization of them, yes some things we observe in animals may be religious in their nature. Stuff like howling at the moon, while may serve a purpose of making the pack more cohesive somehow, the reason it is done at the full moon as understood by the wolf may be religious as understood and how they learned it. Emperor penguins chick also seeming abandoned by their parents who are their only source of substances in that wasteland they were hatched in must make a journey of faith, never knowing the sea, to find the sea. This is very akin to spiritual and religious journeys that people take especially when they feel they see a dead end situation in life. Also diving into native american spirituality (a form that I have joined in practice), was that the animals teach spirituality to us, and they help us and guide us, and, my term, they even adopt us giving us our spirt animal guide. Much like some religion have guardian angels or patron saints (which I believe are all the same thing, our spiritual guardians). The wild animals have their own societies and practices and we are here to learn from them. Some have equated the story of Adam (of the famous Adam and Eve team), naming the animals, as first observing and learning from them, not just quickly naming them. It was God using animals as teachers for Adam.
I suspect most animals don’t have any kind of mystical/ religious beliefs because they don’t have any curiosity about where we all come from. But then who knows? It’s not like we can ask the.
In any philosophical discussion, an operational definition of the concept being discussed is necessary in order to ascertain whether or not we are actually discussing the same thing. The key concept here is, “religion”. My feeling is that your definition is so broad as to be inaccurate.
According to my definition of “religions”, they are constructs that require a level of sentience that, quite frankly, is beyond that of which they are capable. Animals spend their time surviving and reproducing.
Well, if abasing yourself and lying prone on the ground before your God, or the image of your God is an indicator of religious beliefs, then all my animals (cats, dogs, horses, goats) worship the Sun. Spring and late fall are apparently have special significance as the abasement is much more frequent.
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But no, as much as I adore animals I do not think they have or need religion. Also, there is a difference between wild and feral. Both wild and feral animals need all their energy and acumen to stay alive, and if feral animals have in their genetic makeup some familiarity with religious matters, then that may be what prompts them to stay feral. Human religions, for the most part, have done nothing good for animals.
Religion is not necessarily about belief. Or a god/gods. Or abasement. Or worship. Or narrative. I believe that all that is necessary is the awareness of what Jung called the numinous; that which is mystical, beyond the concrete, divine. However, in order to have this awareness, one must experience oneself as separate from it, outside of it. I don’t think animals do this. Only humans experienced The Fall.
The sentience and intelligence of animals is consistently underrated by modern human beings, out of self-congratulatory self-absorption, and lack of exposure. Non-agricultural peoples, who live inside the animal world, do not make this mistake.
I have never observed an animal show a preference for one church over another. Therefore, animals do not have religion because the basic precept of all religions is that all other religions are wrong.
On one of those BBC nature shows there was video evidence of a leopard carefully burying a dead cub, and (unless I am misremembering!) in one instance a leopard disposing of her cub’s body by eating it. But I doubt the cat could articulate an elaborate mythology or metaphysical explanation that would closely conform to the psychological motivations of a human. Why would you assume something like that? Much less assume wild animals instinctively imagine anything analogous to Christianity or any other specific human religion.
If you wish to talk about a “scientific theory,” you should lay out a testable hypothesis, etc.
(Bolding mine) I wrote a Black Mirror episode in my head where a priest realizes he can talk to animals, so he gets them practicing religion… and they all end up depressed.
Ooh, and enslaving humans! Now it’s the pilot for a Netflix series.
Chimpanzees have their rain and fire dances, and their shrine trees. Supposedly. But they are, after all, the closest to us. I don’t think it goes beyond them.
On the black earth on which the ice plants bloomed, hundreds of black stink bugs crawled. And many of them stuck their tails up in the air. “Look at all them stink bugs,” Hazel remarked, grateful to the bugs for being there.
“They’re interesting,” said Doc.
“Well, what they got their asses up in the air for?”
Doc rolled up his wool socks and put them in the rubber boots and from his pocket he brought out dry socks and a pair of thin moccasins. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I looked them up recently–they’re very common animals and one of the commonest things they do is put their tails up in the air. And in all the books there isn’t one mention of the fact that they put their tails up in the air or why.”
Hazel turned one of the stink bugs over with the toe of his wet tennis shoe and the shining black beetle strove madly with floundering legs to get upright again. “Well, why do you think they do it?”
“I think they’re praying,” said Doc.
“What!” Hazel was shocked.
“The remarkable thing,” said Doc, “isn’t that they put their tails up in the air–the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we’d probably be praying–so maybe they’re praying.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Hazel.
.
How can the light that burned so brightly suddenly burn so pale?