We humans are animals. But most of us deny this fact.

I'm enjoying Melanie Challenger's book, "How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human." Here's some excerpts about our dental that we're animal.

The point here is that life is neither straightforwardly good nor progressive. This might be unbearable if it weren't for the possibility that humans are special. Something important saves us from the threatening parts of earthly life.

We're told this comes from the heart of human nature, some essential part of us. We can't see it and we can't measure it, but it marks us out as the most important life form on Earth.

For those with deep belief in a creator, we have a soul that is unique to the human body. For secular humanist thinkers, we have soul-like mental powers that are unique to the human brain. Each is a reason for why humans aren't truly animals. At least, not in any crucial way.

...This idea -- or something like it -- has been a source of profound solace for countless human lives. Whether it's the soul or some other property, these are ways to take humans out of a bewilderingly anarchic nature.

They are methods to save humans from the difficulties that nature's amorality presents to us. The idea may take on different hues in different times and places. But there's always something transcendent about humans that rescues us.

In this way, the major theories about the significance of human lives have the distinct whiff of psychological necessity rather than rational clarity.

...Hundreds of years of denying that we're an animal has left us with inconsistencies and confusion. 

...It is a testament to the depth of our denial that we are animals that we still can't admit this. All that we do, we do as animals. But we justify it as humans. The way we've structured the world is little more than the intuition of an animal whose greater interests lie with its own kind.

But we almost never confess to this. We tell ourselves instead that we have a soul. Or, if we don't want to call it a soul, we say there is a person inside us that is more important than the body from which it's made.

In this way, the bodies of other animals mean nothing. They are bits of machinery, spare parts. We may use them as we wish.

...It's worthwhile to note that no matter how deep into the physical substances of organisms we go, we never find an edge. There's no absolute dividing line between us and other animals, nothing that can offer us an unassailable moral category.

Science now shows us not only that the lives of other organisms are far more complex and sentient than we've sought to admit, but also that our traits -- to lesser and greater degrees -- are things that nature can reinvent.

A blow to God, perhaps. A far greater threat to a rational animal convinced it's the centre of things.

While the slightest insight into our experience shows how necessary it is to care about human lives, this doesn't separate us from the rest of our planet's life. Human life remains an animal life. Our awareness and our exchanges of ideas make us a powerful and sensitive animal, but none of this brings our animal life to an end.

That this idea has had such extraordinary influence across our societies is only now becoming clear. It is surfacing because it matters now more than it ever has that ten thousand years of modernity have delivered an animal that doesn't think it's an animal.

Comments

[Ron E.]

Initially I smiled at this blog as it’s obvious that we are animals – it needs no explaining. But I’d long since forgotten that there are still people who believe otherwise. And yes, it’s generally because, being religious, such people believe or assume we have a soul whereas animals do not.

The human mind, said to be the seat of consciousness and higher functions of the human brain, such as cognition, reasoning, perception, emotion, will, memory, thought and imagination, is looked upon as being something special, special in the sense that is something other animals don’t possess. But animals do share these attributes – though not as markedly developed as humans.

What may feel like a soul or some entity within us that marks as out as special, is most likely the fact that our brains are able to absorb, accumulate, store and recall a wealth of information – which we term the mind. The mind, this mass of information is the source from which a sense of a me – a separate and special self, and ego is derived.

Perhaps if we could see the mind for the brain derived structure that it is, along with the divisive ego or self, then we may be able to see ourselves as interdependent creatures sharing the planet with every other species. I believe (think) that humans have the capacity to maintain a harmonious world – but sadly, not the will.

[Spence Tepper]

The term animal, like the term soul are both human intentions.

[Spence Tepper]

... Intentions and inventions! ;)

[Spence Tepper]

When you look into the eyes of a bird, or a rabbit, or a dog, cat or spider, there is a connection. They are all people...

People of avies persuasion
People of leporidae persuasuon
Purple or canine persuasion
People of feline persuasion
People of arachnid persuasion...

We are all just people.

[Tendzin]

OK, if we admit that we're animals, then there should be no problem with eating other animals. Especially when science confirms that we human animals can't survive on a other-animal-food-free-diet. The bodies of other animals don't mean "nothing." They are essential food for us.

As far as animals believing they're "the center of things," every animal believes that. So what? And so much for whatever point she's trying to make with her other strawmen arguments about how belief in God is bad, bad, bad.

As I've mentioned before here, to credibly make a argument that all religious belief is harmful would require evidence. For example, a demonstration that religious belief per se detracts from a human being's personal and social welfare.

I think it would be very hard to make such a wholesale argument. But why not at least try to make it, instead of pretending that the argument has been conclusively made that religious belief is harmful?

[Uchit]

The only real animal is those that are corrupt to the core, and manipulate public opinion with no regard to anyone else but himself and his family. Gurinder Singh Dhillon , is an example and I would say he would be best described as a snake. Apparently, RSSB has no political affiliation, yet the slithery snake GSD has been visiting punjabi politicians and holding private meetings this week. Why? May be it's trying to get favours for majithia, the punjabi drug trafficking mogul, and GSDs own brother in law. This in return for pictures with political figures, and therefore indirectly influencing a huge sway of RSSB voters - guilty of voting manipulation. This is a mafia trinity bringing together religion, politics and drug addiction for controlling the blind masses.

[Tendzin]

@Uchit,

There's no doubt that Gurinder has often met with politicians, as these meetings have been news items for years now. But when has Gurinder posed for pictures with these politicians, or otherwise signaled to the RSSB sangat a message to vote en blocfor any candidate? i'm not saying I know this never happened, but on the other hand I've never heard news of Gurinder directing voting in any way.

Then again, when we get news reports that so-and-so politician is visiting the RSSB dera...could Gurinder's agreement to a public meeting with this person at the Dera be interpreted as a public endorsement of that candidate?

Key question perhaps: Is Gurinder meeting with a broad spectrum of political candidates, or just those of a particular party? Or, if we wish to indulge in crass speculation, those who are offering some kind of quid pro quo?

[Vinny]

Osho's Conscious mind will transform animals to Christian jokers. Then Osho's Super conscious mind will transform Christian jokers to humans. Indian gurus build deras but they could not build one electric bulb, this fact was exploited by Christian jokers to create false English language and impose Christian jokerdom on world.

[um]

Humans are biological animals,
But not all animals are human.

Animals can and do cater for their own food. They have everything that is needed, inside themselves and in the environment, the habitat they happen to live.

MOST humans, are not able to cater for their own food in a natural way. The have not the attributes the other animals have to catch food and once catched, consume and digest it.

With their bare hands, no human can catch a prey as other animals do and most of what they consume is indigestible without cooking and often even poisonous.

Humans simple do not have the biological instruments that other animals have, to hunt, catch and consume other animals above the some insects.as is still practiced by the Aboriginals in Australia.

Each reader can prove it to himself by buying let ius say a piece of a pound of raw pork or cow and try to consume it as it is with his bare hands, his teeth and nothing else ... hahaha.

Yes Tenzin ...even the knowledge of cutting meat in the proper way is someting that had to be invented by humans a skill the Inuit have mastered as they are among the very few that can handle raw meat with little tools after being catched.

The original human as an animal must have lived in an habitat that was suitable for him like all other animals without, culture, without inventions the like of fire, raising crops and cattle and the development of crafts like butchers, cooks etc.

But ... humans can RE-create their original habitat wherever the go or are forced to go, something that no other animal is capable of ... and for that he needs a greater brain and the qualities that are linked to a brain.

And ... the mental qualities can be use for other goals than their biological need .... think of sports as the replacement of fysical labour no longer needed as a gatherer etc.
Restaurants that are only for the consuming of "taste" etc etc.

Yes we we are animals, animals that use and misuse their invborn qualities for reasons that are not related to their biological instincts, to survive as an individual and a species

[umami]

"Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent" (He that goeth to bedde wyth Dogges, aryseth with fleas).

[Spence Tepper]

The bee is not afraid of me,
I know the butterfly ;
The pretty people in the woods
Receive me cordially.
-Emily Dickinson

[Appreciative Reader]

"OK, if we admit that we're animals, then there should be no problem with eating other animals."

..........How on earth do you figure that?

This is not to comment, at this time, on whether it is good, or bad, or ugly, to eat animals; but only to point out that your conclusion does not, at all, in any way, follow from your premise.