Over the break I was thinking a lot about C.S. Lewis an his issekai Christianity as well as the alternate-world Christmas of Terry Prachett’s Hogfather so I was really in the right mood when Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door.
They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.”
Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life)
Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite.
Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.
They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.”
Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life)
Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite.
Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.