Quote:
Originally Posted by TheFourthBottle
But can animals without the mental capacity to make reflective decisions be promised an afterlife anywhere but in Purgatory?
|
How do you know that they don't have mental capacity to go into Heaven? When human babies were born, they were the same as any wild animals out there. The only reason why we are able to "think" is from the experiences that we will gain in our society throughout our lives and from the way how society defines which social norm as "normal" to accept. And through that, we try to maintain the status of "normal" in the view of others in our society, or "pack" if you want to see it in the format of unrestrained animal kingdom's term, by doing things in a reflex with what we now call: "Thought".
Animals, regardless if their bain capacity might be lower than ours, can still learn to a certain degree through experiences and reflexes that are generated from the events that they have encountered. I'm sure that the same animal, like dogs for an example, will not go near the electric fence the second time when they were brutally shocked the first time. Sure, to us, they look stupid because some species of the animals need a much,
much longer time to learn and even if they can utilize whatever knowledge that they have gained, it's limited to their capabilities via mobility and the such.
A question here - do you know how human brain functions?
There's only a limited amount of memory cells in the human brain to store information about our daily routines. Once any old information that has not been accessed for a long time, they will be forgotten due to the excessive amount of memory that the cells cannot store. New information comes in all the time and pushes out the old ones. This goes for short-term and long-term memories.
So, from what I've read so far, the only reason why animals cannot or possibly cannot go into Heaven is because they cannot "think"? How do you define thinking? How do you justify any creature that can see, hear, touch, walk, taste, and/or smell whether if they are worthy to go into Heaven, a human definition once again, or just disappear when they die?