I am obsessed with that question, so please help answering and justify your answers.
And what about plants?
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I am obsessed with that question, so please help answering and justify your answers.
And what about plants?
Only cetaceans, elephants, bonobos and a couple of Homo Sapiens.
I don't really believe souls exist, so I'd say no. But if humans have a soul, then animals should also have one.
Souls don't exist.
So I have tried to present the question a bit better, to summarise it. I wish it is not too nebulous.
The community of all creatures is a concept that is more present in the Old Testament than in the New one. In fact, the New Testament was subjected to a huge Hellenistic influence. The references to the animals are rarer, a more important gap is established between humans and other creatures. The change in the mentality may be illustrated for example by the following: in Dt 25,4, God expresses a law in favour of the oxen (“Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain”), which was always understood literally by the Jews of that time, but then, in the New Testament, it becomes inconceivable for Paul to believe that God is actually talking about the animals, that God actually cares about them (1 Co 9, 9-10: “For it is written in the Law of Moses: “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” Is it about oxen that God is concerned? 10 Surely he says this for us, doesn’t he? Yes, this was written for us, because whoever plows and threshes should be able to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest.”).
Furthermore, in the Catholic Church, the views on animals have been extremely influenced by the Thomistic Aristotelian synthesis. Christianity has always (except during the short Cartesian episode) considered animals have a soul (as according to the Old Testament, they have the “nephesh”, like humans), but a material one, attached to the body, so mortal, as dying with the body, supposedly because animals are not made “in the divine image” (although the new exegeses offer a broader range of possibilities to interpret the fact that “man was created in God’s image”). And this material and mortal soul the animals are said to have supposedly permits to reach a certain knowledge, but only through the senses, as they wouldn’t have an intellect, wouldn’t be able to reason. Only humans are said to have an immaterial and immortal soul (cf. agent intellect). Consequently, animals would not go to Heaven.
But the Orthodox church, which was far less influenced by the scholastic thought, leaves the possibility open for animals to go to heaven, insisting more on a verse such as Rm 8,19, “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.”, in which there is the idea that all the creation can benefit from the Salvation.
Personally, I consider myself a Catholic, but I really have a concern with the Catholic views on that question. I think that the Catholic Church should definitely drop the Thomistic/Aristotelian views on that topic.
What is your opinion? Would it be reasonable to interpret the Christian scriptures in a more animal-friendly way (including concerning the New Testament episode of the Gerasene/Gadarene porks, which is I think the only passage from the Bible that really troubles me).
Anyway, this is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church currently says on animals: “2416 Animals are God's creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless him and give him glory. Thus men owe them kindness. We should recall the gentleness with which saints like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Philip Neri treated animals.”
Animals in my opinion have immortal souls, maybe even plants and bugs etc. God is all powerful, loving and merciful. He may have put us at the top of his earthly creations, but surely he loves all living things and has the power to give them eternal life.