{"id":705,"date":"2010-09-27T12:19:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T12:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/09\/do-all-good-dogs-go-to-heaven.html"},"modified":"2010-09-27T12:19:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-27T12:19:00","slug":"do-all-good-dogs-go-to-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/09\/do-all-good-dogs-go-to-heaven.html","title":{"rendered":"Do All Good Dogs Go To Heaven?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
On Huffington Post, Pythia Peay interviewed Ptolemy Tompkins<\/span><\/a>, author of a new book, The Divine Life of Animals: One Man\u2019s Quest to Discover Whether the Souls of Animals Live On<\/i>.\u00a0 With a title like that, you know I\u2019m going to have to write about it.<\/span><\/div>\n
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I love animals.\u00a0 I have two dogs and two cats.\u00a0 I\u2019m a vegetarian (okay, I\u2019m a pescetarian<\/span><\/a>, a mushy fish-eating compromise).\u00a0 Like any animal lover I have a tendency to anthropomorphize my furry friends.\u00a0 This is not entirely unjustified.\u00a0 Animal behaviorists have confirmed that animals display emotional attachments, loyalties and altruism.<\/span><\/div>\n
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From what I can glean from the this interview, scientific research was not among the author\u2019s resources.\u00a0 From the interview:<\/span><\/div>\n
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In our modern culture, where people are skittish about talking about whether humans have souls, you can\u2019t just immediately jump to the animal soul. So I saw myself as having to go back through history and see when the idea of the soul began. I wanted to address why we sense that the soul is real, but feel out of touch with what it really is.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
\u2026[P]eople used to have a much more specific idea of the soul. But we live in an age of metaphysical timidity: people don\u2019t want to ask serious questions about the soul and the afterlife because they\u2019re afraid that they\u2019re being naive \u2014 and all this goes triply for asking about your dead dog. But if an animal or someone I know dies, where is that specific personality that I knew? Did it melt back into some kind of larger consciousness? Does it still exist in another dimension? These are completely valid existential questions.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
People used to have much more specific ideas about all kinds of nonsense.\u00a0 They had really specific ideas that humans were specially created by a deity, that demons and angels were real, and that hell and heaven were actual places.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
Our problem is not that there is too much \u201cmetaphysical timidity,\u201d it\u2019s that there isn\u2019t enough.\u00a0 Metaphysics is fiction.\u00a0 Modern people continue to have all kinds of metaphysical ideas, whether products of their own imaginations or inherited through mythologies.\u00a0 What we really have is scientific timidity.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
It\u2019s not having a \u201csoul\u201d that connects us, it\u2019s that every single living thing on earth is a carbon-based cellular life form based on the same DNA-based code.\u00a0 This is not only provable, it is poetically powerful.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Huffington Post, Pythia Peay interviewed Ptolemy Tompkins, author of a new book, The Divine Life of Animals: One Man\u2019s Quest to Discover Whether the Souls of Animals Live On.\u00a0 With a title like that, you know I\u2019m going to have to write about it. I love animals.\u00a0 I have two dogs and two cats.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,38],"class_list":["post-705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-atheism","tag-science-and-reason"],"yoast_head":"\nDo All Good Dogs Go To Heaven?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On Huffington Post, Pythia Peay interviewed Ptolemy Tompkins, author of a new book, The Divine Life of Animals: One Man's Quest to Discover Whether the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/09\/do-all-good-dogs-go-to-heaven.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Do All Good Dogs Go To Heaven?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On Huffington Post, Pythia Peay interviewed Ptolemy Tompkins, author of a new book, The Divine Life of Animals: One Man's Quest to Discover Whether the\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/09\/do-all-good-dogs-go-to-heaven.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Atheist Rabbi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-09-27T12:19:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jeffrey L. 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