Do animals have an afterlife?

I am talking about the non-Human variety, for all of the smart-asses out there. :P

edit to add: If you chose "something else", could you please tell us what it is?

You could maybe stretch the definition to allow for molecules of one dead critter to become incorporated into other living things.

As I accept the endosymbiotic theory for the origins of mitochondria, and I'm aware of the life forms in and on me it isn't all that hard for me to consider myself as something of group-life form anyway.

Isaiah 11.6-16

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

I know many atheists who are much more knowledgeable about the Bible than many so-called Christians.

Not an afterlife, but the fulfillment of the will of God for creation on earth.

The "Day of the Lord", which the prophets predicted would come on earth--not heaven.

How do you think that would work with reincarnation?

9 is the number of lives one lives before reaching Nirvana (others believe in reincarnated lives until you have fulfilled your karma), so cats must obviously reach Nirvana as well as humans. Whether other sentient beings must go through untold reincarnations before reaching such bliss or get it sooner is open to suggestion. ;)

my first real apartment, I was sleeping and I heard my dog persistently barking, I kept
telling her to be quiet but finally I was awake. I was lying in bed with my front door
wide open, someone had broken in and my dog's barking had awaken me, and my talking
had scared off the burglar. My dog had died 10 years earlier when I was 13.

Dogs are pretty cool, so I hoped you kept it nice.

Or maybe it was a combination of you sleeping and some other dog barking?

no, I am not saying it was doggie heaven, but I think that those who pass on have
an awareness of those they left behind, not every second, not every day, but I
think when there is a need.

for kidney failure back in 1994. It was unmistakable. She didn't resemble my other cat at all, and when she jumped onto the bed I could tell it was her, though I never saw her.

Neurological phenomena such as hyponogogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis are fairly common, and can easily account for such events. Do you think that it is possible that such sleep-related issues were at play, as opposed to a supernatural event?

You heard noises in your sleep, and your subconscious remembered your dog being restless during the night and interpreted the noises that way.

Dreams can seem so real sometimes, that it’s hard to tell the difference from real life. What happened was, you were sleeping, the intruder made some noise, which stimulated your brain to dream that your pet was barking. You probably talked in your sleep which scared the intruder away.

let's just say it's definitely not automatic.

Even the pit bulls that rip off kid's faces? Even flatworms? Even ameboae?

supposedly screwed it up. So any pit bulls that go there (BTW, they make the best patients of any breed) wouldn't be messed up in their heaven, they would be Happy Dogs.

Just my little idea of things. Ask any Christian. Animals are sinless because they do not know the difference between good and evil (though any cat owner may beg to differ, lol).

And it wouldn't be right to exclude any of Creation from the heavenly ecosystem. Whatcha got against amoebae anyway???? Betcha you hate bacteria, too.

but you raise an interesting point. What about the other kingdoms of life - plants, fungi, protists, and the two types of bacteria? Do they all get to go? Is this heaven just infinitely large, chock full of every little speck of everything that's ever existed? If not, where's the cutoff? Is it just animals, to the exclusion of everything else? If so, when did these creatures start to go to heaven? Life started with just bacteria, and the other forms of life branched off from them. When did these organisms, as they evolved away from their ancestors, start to go to heaven, while other creatures that descended from the same parent organism but did not evolve, their metaphorical 'cousins,' not go? Or is every living thing that ever existed on this planet "up there?" Life began about three trillion years ago, so that's a whole hell of a lot of little specks "living" there, considering some bacteria are known to reproduce in a period of about twenty minutes. And that raises another problem. Since each bacterium was split off in a pair from an earlier specimen, it is effectively the same organism, only having two of itself. Once it undergoes mitosis, is it considered "dead," its soul moving on the the next realm? Or is its soul just split in two, here until the two daughter organisms die? Since all bacteria alive today are descended from ancestors that date back to the origin of life, if the soul passes from parent to daughter organism, that creature has effectively been alive since the dawn of life. Although I guess that's not a problem, since as the heat of the universe dissipates, all organisms must die eventually. That little bit is logically tight. But the origin of life creates another problem: what about the little specks of self-replicating material, the proto-RNA, that predated and eventually led to life? If all life is allowed into heaven, what about those little molecules? And that's not even to broach the subject of life on other planets!

This matter of the afterlife sure is complicated! Who figures all this out? Was there a committee that made these decisions? Was there a democratic election? Who got to vote, or who sat on the committee? And who made those decisions? (Alright, I think I've take this quite far enough.)

and I'm glad to see someone got my point. When I hear someone say "All animals go to heaven," the counterargument in my mind goes, "No, you mean you think the fuzzy animals that you have formed personal attachments to will be rewarded after their lives end."

I told two of my friends about this today and they looked absolutely horrified. One said she really hoped her dogs would be waiting for her in heaven, and I said logically it just doesn't make any sense. She said I put too much thought into it. It seems I always put more thought into her beliefs than she does.

I'm sure you've seen skeptics ask astrologers what mechanism could possibly connect the motion of the planets with events on Earth, and seen that there is no real answer. I think the problem has traditionally been resolved in Christian theology by assuming that animals just don't go to heaven. The concept of the soul in Christian theology comes from Augustine. He modified Plato's concept of the soul in order to explain the relationship between man and God. It was a solution to the problem of evil.

According to Augustine, the human soul was created by God but is distinct enough that Original Sin can be definitively attributed to man rather than God. Only human beings had souls because they were made in God's image. Of course, both Plato and Augustine were woefully ignorant of biology. None of the questions you raise would have occurred to them.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#3

They are probably a step above us in the afterlife.

but to paraphrase, any heaven without cats and dogs would be no heaven at all.

I find the idea of a blissed out heaven to be as preposterous as the eternal torment of a hell. I am willing to entertain the possibility of the kind of reincarnation that leaves the ego behind.

What I'm not willing to accept is that the only creatures that achieve any sort of immortality are humans. We largely don't deserve it. Cats and dogs do.

then so should insects. because ALL would be considered 'special'. But I do not believe in an afterlife.

Just because an idea is of comfort does not make it so.

I'd like to hope that my kitten will have an afterlife.

Think about it - the problem you raise is just the first one in a long line of problems with that idea. First, what is heaven? Let "heaven" be some place where the human consciousness continues to exist in the form of a "soul" after a human's death. (The first problem is of course the total lack of evidence, but let's skip over that. I find that introducing evidence in these kind of discussions is usually considered "raining on the parade.") Think about the universe - how long has it existed, 15 billion years, 18 billion years, I don't know, a fucking long time. And how big is the universe? I have no idea, but I happen to know it's fucking huge, so huge in fact that it is the only thing that can rightly be called "huge." So heaven was just waiting for us all those billions of years, empty and free of anything, waiting for the first human to die? And what about the whole rest of the universe? Out of the whole entire fucking universe, heaven is waiting for a stupid tiny little species like ours? That means that heaven was designed for us. Of all species that have existed and will exist, on this world and others, heaven was designed for us, one little species that exists for only a small fraction of the existence of the universe. That implies that we are special among the universe. Was the whole universe, in its unimaginable scope and scale, in both time and size, waiting for one little insignificant species?

I also wonder sometimes how long people think they could be happy, even in a heaven that's the way they imagine it. The universe has only been around for 13.7 billion years, and most of us will only live about 70-80 years. Wouldn't even heaven become boring and wearisome after 800 years? Or 8000? Or 8 million? Or 8 trillion? I'm sure you'd have read all the magazines by then, so how do you keep from going mad, unless you're a mindless robot, trapped forever in a place you can never escape from? Is that heaven, or is it hell?

why don't we just assume that we are all happy forever, magically? Once you've abandoned logic, you can pretty much do whatever you want.

I do however find immense amusement at the fact that we put more thought into this than they do. They don't really seem to put much thought into the implications of their beliefs. But then, that's why they believe such crap.

What with all the logic and facts and whatnot. You should blog about it.

This is one of the reasons I never find the "fine-tuning" argument compelling. Every time we have thought that the human race means anything in the scope of the universe, we have been wrong. We used to think whatever little corner we lived in was the center of the world, and then we learned that there is a whole world out there. We assumed that Earth was the center of the planetary system until Galileo proved otherwise. Then we believed in a heliocentric universe. Eventually Hubble proved that we are a tiny planet orbiting an unremarkable star in one of billions of galaxies in a universe with no discernible center. It's not comforting, but the truth rarely is.

Plantae?
Fungi?
Protista?
Monera?

Here are some quotes that speak more eloquently than I:

"If I have any beliefs about immortality it is that certain dogs I know will go to heaven, and very very few people." ~ James Thurber

"No heaven will not ever Heaven be;
Unless my cats are there to welcome me." ~ Anonymous

"You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us" ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

"Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." - Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

"God forbid that I should go to any heaven in which there are no horses." - Cunningham Graham

"The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his
heaven, not man's."
Mark Twain, letter to WD Howells 1899

and a final story:

An old man and his dog were walking down this dirt
road with fences on both sides, they came to a gate
in the fence and looked in, it was nice - grassy,
woody areas, just what a 'huntin' dog and man would
like, but, it had a sign saying 'no trespassing' so
they walked on.


They came to a beautiful gate with a person in white
robes standing there. "Welcome to Heaven"
he said. The old man was happy and started in with his
dog following him.


The gatekeeper stopped him. "Dogs aren't allowed,
I'm sorry but he can't come with you." "What
kind of Heaven won't allow dogs? If He can't come in,
then I will stay out with him. He's been my faithful
companion all his life, I can't desert him now.
" "Suit yourself, but I have to warn you,
the Devil's on this road and he'll try to sweet talk you
into his area, he'll promise you anything, but, the dog can't
go there either. If you won't leave the dog, you'll
spend Eternity on this road " So the old man and
dog went on.


They came to a rundown fence with a gap in it, no gate,
just a hole. Another old man was inside. "Scuse me Sir,
my dog and I are getting mighty tired, mind if we come in
and sit in the shade for awhile?" "Of course, there's
some cold water under that tree over there. Make yourselves
comfortable " "You're sure my dog can come in?
The man down the road said dogs weren't allowed
anywhere." "Would you come in if you had to leave
the dog?" " No sir, that's why I didn't go to
Heaven, he said the dog couldn't come in. We'll be spending
Eternity on this road, and a glass of cold water and some
shade would be mighty fine right about now. But, I won't
come in if my buddy here can't come too,
and that's final. "


The man smiled a big smile and said "Welcome to Heaven."
"You mean this is Heaven? Dogs ARE allowed? How come that
fellow down the road said they weren't?" "That was the
Devil and he gets all the people who are willing to give up a life
long companion for a comfortable place to stay.
They soon find out their mistake, but, then it's too late.
The dogs come here, the fickle people stay there.
GOD wouldn't allow dogs to be banned from Heaven. After all,
HE created them to be man's companions in life, why would he
separate them in death?"


Author Earl Hamner
The Twilight Zone

not.

I'm not a critter person. At all.

then if there's an afterlife for people, it stands to reason there'd be one for animals, too. Here's a true story: About ten years ago I went with my then girlfriend to visit her parents in Buffalo for Thanksgiving. Almost as soon as I walked into their house, I had the slightly disconcerting sensation that I was almost (but not quite) seeing a small animal, just at the very edge of my peripheral vision. I'd be talking to someone, and there'd be this nearly transparent, moving blur at floor-level, a few degrees behind my ear: if I turned my head, it was gone. This happened several times, and I finally asked my GF's mother if they'd ever had a small dog in the house. My GF had never mentioned having one, but it started to seem to me that they must have, somehow. Sure enough, they'd had a small terrier for years, my GF's childhood dog, much beloved, etc. Again, my GF had never mentioned this pooch to me. Shortly after my conversation with her mother, my GF pulled me aside and said: "What was that about?" When I told her what I'd been seeing, she looked genuinely spooked. Let me note that I'm not a person much given to belief in the paranormal, etc.—in fact I waver generally between agnosticism and atheism, and consider myself a rationalist. Still, weird shit happens sometimes.

So it strikes me as sort of fanciful to speak of "after."

I suspect everything is always; we just can't see that.

Duh. :P

Obviously, since that's what we are. So it's not surprising that they're all human-centric to varying degrees.

It's the height of hubris to think that's the only kind of spirituality that can exist; totally incompatible with the "humility" that many religions claim to value.

I have no idea if other species would even want an afterlife. I have no idea if other species experience "God" in those terms at all - but it would be damn presumptuous of me to assume they have no faith of their own, or that I could understand it.

For all I know, my cat was a member of a heroic resistance movement in a past life and is rewarded by having a lifetime of no responsibilities but eating, playing, sleeping in the sun and being petted. Doesn't sound like a bad deal to me. :)