Thursday, August 22, 2013  Do animals have souls?  *If you are
taking the time to read this post, I would like your input. Even
if you disagree with me, I welcome dialogue. I don't have a blog
as a platform to project my views out into the world; I want to
know what YOU think.  I'm not sure that a soul exists in the
form of some ethereal version of our self that is transported
around this physical world inside our physical body.  So I will
argue for the "more than the sum of our parts" version of a
soul, the soul being that part of our essence which cannot be
accounted for, even if our bodies were dismantled atom by atom.
First of all, what does it mean to say that animals do or do not
have a soul?  Defining the nature of animals is really about
defining ourselves. We want to believe that humanity is unique
and set apart from the natural world. For the earliest humans,
the natural world was chaotic and hostile. As nomadic tribes,
our grasp on survival was tentative at best. We could be wiped
out by a flood o