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Do any animals recognize God's existence, believe or pray?

Do any animals at all believe in God or are mentally aware of Him?

  • Total voters
    19
  • Poll closed .
Rakovsky

Rakovsky

Active Member
The Bible has a verse about all living things praising God, and another verse, I think in the book of Job, asks where animals' souls go to.

Several articles have come out speculating on whether animals have belief in God like this one:

http://religiondispatches.org/what-if-animals-believe-in-god/


Elephants have funerals where they bury their dead, and one essay claims dolphins are conscious. There are many photos of mammals in prayer poses, but that itself doesn't mean they are praying.
 
RoaringSilence

RoaringSilence

Active Member
There is a deeper reason for saying that all that exists is singing "his praise" . How i see it is that god itself is radiating a never ending mantra AUM. and the sound that comes from each soul is the same , with a more tensed up frequency. similarly animals and all that exists is also uttering the same mantra at a different tension of frequency. Even light , sound itself forces that aren't objects are hailing that same word , at their frequency. Same for inanimate objects. That prayer is the word itself. To answer where their souls go , if this is Christian only section then idk :) but if its all mixed , then they all get recycled till each soul has done the learning and experiencing that it needs to ripen up.
 
Quintessence

Quintessence

Consults with Trees
Staff member
Premium Member
YmirGF said:
I'm pretty sure that the writer of the OP was not including human animals in the equation.
Click to expand...

Oh, I wager that's the case too. But you know I just had to. :D

There are so many communications barriers between species, that it is unlikely this question is empirically answerable within our lifetimes. Personally I find it foolish to surmise that non-human animals believe in the god of the Bible. Given classical monotheism is something of an oddity as far as the history of human religion goes, it's far more likely that non-human animals have an idea of the sacred more in keeping with pre-monotheistic cultures, if anything. Elephant funerary customs suggest ancestor worship, which was (and is) a practice not uncommon to Paganisms, but is typically frowned upon by believers in the one-god because to them it is idolatry or something.
 
jeager106

jeager106

Learning more about Jehovah.
Premium Member
Ever since I saw Bambi I've been unable to harvest a deer or rabbit.
Yeah, right!:rolleyes::rolleyes:
 
N

Nietzsche

The Last Prussian
Premium Member
Rakovsky said:
The Bible has a verse about all living things praising God, and another verse, I think in the book of Job, asks where animals' souls go to.

Several articles have come out speculating on whether animals have belief in God like this one:

http://religiondispatches.org/what-if-animals-believe-in-god/


Elephants have funerals where they bury their dead, and one essay claims dolphins are conscious. There are many photos of mammals in prayer poses, but that itself doesn't mean they are praying.
Click to expand...

George-ananda said:
I don't think they think abstractly to that extent.
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YmirGF said:
That would be a safe bet. The idea is anthropomorphism at its finest, really.
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Even if they were technically capable, I imagine finding food, shelter & mating would be slightly more important than praying. If the prick who gave them the ability to fear for their lives wanted them to thank him, maybe he should've considered making it so they're not constantly a few steps from being eaten by something way bigger than they are.
 
Revoltingest

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
th
 
Saint Frankenstein

Saint Frankenstein

Wanderer From Afar
Premium Member
There's evidence that non-humans have what we'd call spiritual experiences, such as feelings of ecstasy and rapture. I doubt it has anything to do with any human-created transcendent, specific, doctrinal deity, though. It's the same experiences that you get from shamanic practices and other actions that produce altered states of consciousness.
 
YmirGF

YmirGF

Bodhisattva in Recovery
Saint Frankenstein said:
There's evidence that non-humans have what we'd call spiritual experiences, such as feelings of ecstasy and rapture. I doubt it has anything to do with any human-created transcendent, specific, doctrinal deity, though. It's the same experiences that you get from shamanic practices and other actions that produce altered states of consciousness.
Click to expand...
Such as?
 
Subhankar Zac

Subhankar Zac

Hare Krishna,Hare Krishna,
No living being, not even humans can consciously perceive God. God is a spiritual existence that exists in the material world as energy and the consciousness guiding the energy to create and evolve with time.
That is all our senses can perceive.
 
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