{"id":4556,"date":"2018-06-06T08:45:21","date_gmt":"2018-06-06T15:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/scientologybeliefs\/?p=4556"},"modified":"2018-06-06T08:45:21","modified_gmt":"2018-06-06T15:45:21","slug":"is-man-just-another-animal-a-scientologists-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/scientologybeliefs\/2018\/06\/is-man-just-another-animal-a-scientologists-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Man Just Another Animal? (A Scientologist\u2019s Perspective)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Eva Mahoney, Scientologist and blogger for STAND (Scientologists Taking Action Against Discrimination) on the answers she found in Scientology<\/a> to the question is Man an animal or is Man an immortal spiritual being?<\/em><\/p>\n

I grew up in the 1950s and \u201960s with the science versus religion debate in full swing. It was and is the major philosophical argument of the modern era and I found both sides electrifying and puzzling at the same time. How was the universe created? What was the nature of Man? Age-old questions were being caught up in a fresh storm.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"
The 1960s generation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

For example, my grandmother\u2014a devout Catholic who played the organ at Sunday mass\u2014indoctrinated and soothed me with the unknowable mysteries of the Holy Trinity, while my grandfather, a star-gazing, atheistic, university-educated civil engineer negated them with the stark truths of the Big Bang theory and everything-can-be-explained-by-\u201cscience\u201d argument. Man was just a more highly developed animal and the sooner we accepted that fact, the happier we\u2019d all be, he insisted. My grandfather and I agreed to disagree after I \u201ccleverly\u201d asserted that there had to be something there before the Big Bang. But even with this little controversy brewing, life was still pretty simple back then.<\/p>\n

Until, enter stage left: the advent of modern psychology, that pseudo-science wannabe and its immersion or perhaps more aptly intrusion into the mainstream of contemporary society.<\/p>\n

\"JFK
JFK signing the Community Mental Health Act<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After the signing of the\u00a0Community Mental Health Act of 1963<\/a>\u00a0by President Kennedy came the inexorable advance of other \u201cmental health\u201d initiatives in America. Psychology suddenly appeared not just in community health centers, but as college majors, and then into public school curriculums and today into the public welfare system. Like a red algae bloom on the rampage, psychology and psychiatry spread across the globe, bringing with them theories and hypotheses asserted and accepted, but never proven, about the nature of Man. Obviously, somebody was going down in this war and the human spirit seemed to be taking the hit, since the media and \u201cscientific\u201d publications like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) said it didn\u2019t exist, except as impulses in the brain\u2026.<\/p>\n

So, having ridden the wave of pop-psychology into the\u00a0State University of New York<\/a>\u00a0in 1974, as an education major, I remember having a sudden moment of realization while reading a psychology text for a class assignment. Apparently, Pavlov had proven we were basically nothing more than stimulus-response animals. This was mainly because dogs could be taught to salivate on command (and a few other things having to do with bells and mice in a maze).<\/p>\n

Remembering my former arguments with my grandfather, I experienced a moment of profound letdown. Really? Is that all I am? A stimulus-response animal with no divine spark of creativity\u2014just a breathing reaction to the environment around me? No. I rejected it. I knew I was something more and I was determined to find out what. (Besides, I knew that even mice were not that dumb.)<\/p>\n

But, I also wondered why they couldn\u2019t both be right\u2014the laws of the physical universe and the spiritual nature of Man that transcends that universe. After some years of searching, I found the solution to the riddle in Scientology: they can and are. Man is a spiritual being inhabiting a body. Upon further study, I found that, indeed, many if not most world religions and many philosophies held a similar view:<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to Hinduism,\u00a0man is essentially a soul that uses its body and mind as instruments to gain experience<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to the Roman Catholic view<\/a>, the image of God is something added to human nature. Man is a unity composed of an immortal soul and a mortal body which together constitute the whole of his humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe rabbis attributed a dual nature to human beings<\/a>\u2026 human beings are the only creatures whose souls are from heaven and whose bodies are from earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Statues
Statues of Plato and Socrates (Nice_Media_PRODUCTION Shutterstock)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cPythagoras held that the soul was of divine origin and existed before and after death. Plato and Socrates also accepted the immortality of the soul, while Aristotle considered only part of the soul, the no\u00fbs, or intellect, to have that quality. Epicurus believed that both body and soul ended at death. The early Christian philosophers adopted the Greek concept of the soul\u2019s immortality and thought of the\u00a0soul as being created by God and infused into the body at conception<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems that men of philosophy and religion have long held the view that there is a spiritual component to Man. It is something that sets him apart from everything else in his world. Even when he didn\u2019t understand the mechanics of the universe, Man somehow knew that he was different, godlike or of god. And science and psychology have yet to prove otherwise.<\/p>\n

For the last 50-plus years, the world has been assaulted with a materialistic, amoral, chaos-created version of Man. He is the impermanent, one-lifetime only creation of inorganic chemical reactions, whose dreams arise from his brain cells. His problems and travails can be treated with a pill.<\/p>\n

It is time to get back to our roots and return to the ranks of the great thinkers who brought us so far forward.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=kwK1byq0ndQ&list=PLCC9DAF3F74206FE6<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eva Mahoney, Scientologist and blogger for STAND (Scientologists Taking Action Against Discrimination) on the answers she found in Scientology to the question is Man an animal or is Man an immortal spiritual being? I grew up in the 1950s and \u201960s with the science versus religion debate in full swing. It was and is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":219,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1297,1374],"tags":[1598,3,333,335],"class_list":["post-4556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scientology-beliefs","category-stand","tag-animal","tag-scientology","tag-soul","tag-spirit"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Man Just Another Animal? 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