Is there an echo in here?

 Blessings, Darlings!

I don't usually invest my blogging time on religions other than my own, but I DO often invest it in rants, so I guess what follows is going to still be on-brand.  

This is inspired by a Facebook post by an ex coworker and now Facebook ex-friend.  He  posted that humans are not animals.  As one would expect, I took issue with this idea.  Since he's one of those people who didn't take well to me disagreeing with other things he posted on his timeline, I disagreed with it on MY timeline, and tagged him in the discussion.  

I posted the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, my main religious text!) definition of 'animal' into the discussion, "a living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli", and didn't include other details like embryology, oxygen breathing, etc.  This left room for him to bring up and defend the concept that 'humans are more than 'just' animals' - which is a different concept than the one I was objecting to, but would be interesting to discuss.

I asked him for his definition of animals and to state what he meant when he said that humans are not animals.  He repeatedly refused to define animals, but said that humans aren't animals because we can't breed with any other primates, and that 'all other animals can interbreed with others in their family'.  While that seems to be true about humans (I am assuming that some scientists got funding to see if human sperm and eggs could fertilize/be fertilized by all other primates), that even among primates only like 30% can interbreed to begin with.  And in the Canine family alone (don't ask why I have this factoid in my brain) foxes can't breed with any other species, and most coyotes can't breed with most wolves.  

Interestingly enough, while he didn't bring this up in the discussion OFF of his timeline, ON his timeline he brought up the idea that 'all other animals just go by instinct' and humans don't.  Since I was choosing to nor harsh him mellow on HIS time line I didn't point out that this idea was blown away by the fact that animals can be trained, they can LEARN to do things that increase their survival chances.  My cats, even the barn cats, know what noises I make to tell them I'm giving them food right now for example.  This is different than a cat's instinctive knowledge of 'cat sounds'.  I've never known a cat that had to be taught how to hiss, or what it means - THAT is instinct.  

At this point, he said that MY timeline is an echo chamber, because I had previously posted a meme saying "Not everybody has to like me.  I can't force you to have good taste."  I disagree with lots of my friends on a LOT of different topics, and they are all welcome to air these differences on my timeline.  In fact, I celebrate some of my friends exactly FOR calling me out when we disagree and pushing me for more information and my logic behind my opinions.  As it happens one of them, Tony Brown, was reading the thread and spoke up pointing this out.  He is probably the #1 person I invest time disagreeing with - because disagreeing with people and citing sources and logic IS A GOOD THING for me.  Wrestling vigorously with topics of all sorts is valuable in my life, for many reasons, the biggest of which is that you learn when you are hiding from looking deeply into your reasoning.  You recognize your 'hiding' behaviors and emotional reactions.  Now, those hiding behaviors and emotional reactions might be instinctive reactions.

Now, it turns out that he has a big investment in this 'interbreeding' issue.  I saw him post elsewhere that 'what people mistake for evolution is animals interbreeding and spreading genes to new species within a family'.  It's really a shame we didn't get to that - I could have gone on about Covid.  And, of course, I'm going to go on about it HERE, because, well, it's my blog.  

SARS-CoV-2 has been mutating since damn near day 1.  It doesn't matter if you think it escaped from a lab, or was released from a lab, or come directly from animals.  From the original strain, mutations have occurred - mutations, not 'they merged genes with other microbes' - to form new variants.  Different symptoms, different proteins in the spike, etc.  Not enough to be SARS-CoV-3 yet, but constant mutations never the less.  But he feels that 'all mutations are deadly'.  None can make something better at what it does.  And yet - here we are, with constant mutations  going on and we are finding out that some of them make the virus 'better' at spreading.  Are most of the mutations leading to variations that can't reproduce at all, or can't infect humans at all?  Probably.  But that is exactly the way Nature works.  Nature over produces and lets the variations fight it out.  Winner keeps reproducing.

For that matter, there are the Suffolk Pink and Winter Wonder apples.  Both are 'sports' - apples that came from mutations on existing trees of different varieties of apples.  Chance mutations that turned out to be darn fine apples, even if the Winter Wonder will never be available here in the US.

To get back to the original disagreement:  Are humans animals, or did he really mean that 'humans are more than 'just' animals?  For us pantheists/panentheists - animals (and plants and rocks and planets and etc.) are all infused with God-stuff, so even animals are 'more than just animals'.  I'm guessing that my ex-FB friend would say that either animals don't have souls or spirits OR that the souls/spirits they have aren't eternal, and only humans have eternal souls or spirits.  I also suspect that he thinks that there are no other sentient tool using species like humans anywhere in the universe, because that would be problematic for him - maybe Jesus would have to visit every planet and repeatedly die (and yes, I just got an image of Jesus as the Highlander)?  But since he didn't just unfriend me - he blocked me - I can't continue the conversation with him.

Yes.  They guy who I had said weeks ago was only interested in an echo chamber, and then accused me of only being interested in an echo chamber . . . blocked me for disagreeing with him and asking him for definitions and to cite his sources.  Welp, you KNOW I feel that proves my point.  

Frondly, Fern

Reincarnation: What, Me Worry?

Blessings, Darlings!

Many of us in the Northern Hemisphere have Samhain on the brain for this entire month.  I'll quibble about what date it 'should' fall on, but I did that in April of '09 about Beltane, so I'll give it a rest now.

This time I'm up for talking reincarnation. Why? Bbecause I'm wonder how folks figure to contact their ancestors when so many  neopagans believe that everyone reincarnates.  World population being what it is, how many old souls are currently between incarnations and available to be contacted?  And why do folks think that the same people who weren't the sharpest tack in the box when alive are suddenly going to be fonts of info now that they're dead?  But, back to reincarnation......

I touched on reincarnation a bit before, in last years post http://www.fernsfronds.blogspot.com/2009/07/strawberry-in-jello.html.  There I talked about the soul and what initiation might do to it, and if that was good or bad. 

But now I want to talk about how neopagans have the ever so Western view that reincarnation is all rosebuds and unicorn farts, while in Asian countries - where belief in reincarnation was far more common that it was in Europe - it was seen as being pretty awful, something to get out of as soon as possible.  Life wasn't pretty for most of the world.  Heck, life still isn't pretty for most of the world.  Getting out of it, whether to the afterlife of any sort or to the relative oblivion of Nirvana, was a grand thing. 

But here we neopagans are.  Mostly we're in Western countries, with Western sensibilities.  And most of us just LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea of reincarnation.  Why is that?

So I looked at modern western life.  Anyone reading this on a computer in their home is among the top 1% elite of the world.   You have a home.  You are literate.  You have a computer in your home.  You have electricity.  Etc.  Yeah, I think that being part of the world elite colors our view of reincarnation.

Reincarnation including a rather 'evolutionary' view here in the West, 'clearly' anyone Elite enough to be reading this must have been quite the ubermensch in the past life, eh?  How else would you have earned this?  And, since we're all already so enlightened to have earned this, certainly WE aren't going to be facing a life of starvation, misery, etc in our next lives, either.  Fear the next life? Don't be silly.  WE won't be born in a slum in India.  WE won't be working the garbage heaps in Rio.  We will born in a clean environment, be educated, have enough food, have the right number of chromosomes,  etc.

After all, we have evolved.  We have learned all the lessons we needed to learn by being poor/3rd world/whatever.  So WE have no worries.  Clearly THEY still have lessons to learn.  Not us.

Frondly, Fern

PS = we REALLY need a dedicated font for sarcasm.