Mark 16:15
15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
Do any theists preach to animals?
I have asked many & they never answer.
There is also this: Instead of going after the topic inquiry as "bigoted stupidity" in lieu of "religious nonsense", a more affirmative retort also awaited, to note that yes, the inquiry is, in fact, religious nonsense. Of course, that alternative is of a common form that pretty much anyone can imitate; and if we aren't muttering thanks to God that the inquiry wasn't so solipsistic as
falsely asserting, for no apparent reason↗, that explicit disagreement is somehow in unexplained agreement, well, the other is a retort, a
tldr best suited for responding to short posts, or else trying to skip out on the hook in the
tldr one-two, the follow-up explaining in detail what is wrong with what one didn't read.
Yet, there is more also: It stands out that we have been considering the inquiry according to a particular explicit term, the invocation of the Gospel of Mark.
But the question is about theists:
Do any theists preach to animals?
If we actually open our consideration to theists in general, instead of restricting ourselves to Christianity in particular, the answer is so unquestionably affirmative we can suggest that between the first familiar and twenty-first century videos explaining how to train the family dog to pray, the answer has never at any time been no.
Part of this, however, arises from constriction of perspectives leading to the inquiry itself. Start with a simplistic analogy in order to establish a particular point: Imagine a scientist, and let's make him otherwise a perfectly legitimate scientist. Otherwise? Well, today we might find him down at McDonald's, having a cup of coffee and a hashbrown, waiting for the church ladies to show up with their developmental care wards in tow, at which point he will start asking disrupted students to tell him stuff about God so he can tell them to their faces how wrong they are.
I know, it sounds cruel, doesn't it? Set aside the cruelty for a moment; anecdote from history: When I was a junior in high school, the family took a trip to Hawai'i. I think it was at Waikiki, there was a market just outside our hotel, and just outside the market was a crazy haole street preacher handing out Chick tracts. In this case, it was the hyperaggressive AIDS case, pricked by an infected needle last week while doing missionary work, and now the doctor has (
gasp!) only six weeks to live. But, yeah, try talking to that guy; all he could do was howl about the end of the world and repenting.
Consider, then, that preacher is what preacher is; I can seek emotional solace in presuming him delusional, or I can, you know, not worry about it at all, but if "religion" is so pressing a problem, I can also try figuring out how to deal with the problem. It's one thing to address the strange as they preach, but this part where people go out of their way to seek the lowest common denominators of gutterborne delusional faith—in order to, what, feel better about themselves for thinking they're smarter than someone they've already identified as presumably unable to compete?—isn't really that much less unhealthy.
There is a joke I used to tell, about what we come to know as New Atheism, or a more general range I refer to as evangelical Atheism, and if these people read novels: "'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'? Oh, come on, it can't be both!"
It really should be just a joke, and a silly one at that. Hell, it wasn't ever all that funny to begin with. Still, though, it shouldn't endure as an actual argument with over a decade's worth of value; that it finds perpetual market demand makes some sort of point.
If I want to treat, say, evangelical Christian scholar Mark Noll so simplistically as this atheistic pretense of discourse presumes, he would bury me. Should I so challenge Elaine Pagels, she would devour me. Karen Armstrong would slowly grind me to dust.
Comparatively:
•
Two reasons two-bitting religious and theological discourse is so popular:
→ More substantial criticism requires greater labor and immersion in what one already disdains; i.e., it's easy enough to be fun or, at least, diverting.
→ The learning required for more substantial criticism presents arguable theses less superficially appealing or immediately rewarding; i.e., once one gets a clue, insistent balbutive fallacy is antithetical, antisocial, and generally dysfunctional.
It isn't that religious balbutive somehow fails to cause society any problems; it's a cancer on the species. Rather, deliberately failing to properly address the disease in order feel better about ourselves by mocking it and those who suffer its effects is actually worse than doing nothing. Prodding and agitating the malignance, compelling it to reinforce itself, fails to serve any purpose that isn't harmful.
It ought to be easy enough, for instance, to take down Marcussen's
National Sunday Law (Harrisville: Mountain Missionary Press, 1983), or Nelson's
The Antichrist (Middleton: CHJ Publishing, 1996). However, if the whole of refutation is or relies on asserting the nonexistence of God, one is missing the point; to the other, if the point of the refutation is to have a slappy-war of attrition with people one considers incompetent, well, that makes a point of its own. And
for sport?
I have a note
stashed aside↱, for instance, about Noll's description of transforming societal iterations of faith in the American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (
America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); my point is not so much to oppose, but to set aside the scrap until I can figure out what it means. I don't have to agree with the distinguished professor, but neither need I fight; we can easily predict Noll would find plenty to disdain when I set my political teeth into the critique, but it would be similarly easy to expect he might also notice when contemporary journalism
discovers transforming definitions in American Christendom↱ that only validates the sort of note that gets scribbled into his introduction.
To the other, if the retort involves asking about God meddling in human affairs or tinkering with the weather, well, that would be a manner of going about it wrongly.
Anecdote: Once upon a time, I was completely wrecking myself in a 300-level history of Christianity course but, having once done a stint as a heavy metal Satanist in a Catholic high school, noted a journal article (
Harvard Theological Review, v.84 n.2, April, 1991) I couldn't use for the paper I was working because it was the wrong subject. Fast forward a few years, and I'm in a bookstore, and I see this book, and because I did the stint as a heavy metal Satanist, I'm fascinated by the title. Oh, wait, something is familiar: Pagels? That article. So, the book:
The Origin of Satan? Okay, and ... oh, hey, there's the article, "The Social History of Satan", right there in the table of contents.
It's like, if I could explain Boiled in Lead, and how it came to me as a joke in the back of a (different) book, but also what it brought me over time. The sad thing is to wonder how many just wouldn't understand the analogy. No, really, it's just one of those things. To the one, I'm talking about music. That band began a worldbeat period for me that changed the way I perceive music, much like Pagels' book led me to literary treasures teaching me about religion. It's because of that article I went on a theology kick that includes much of the canon I brought with me to Sciforums; the weird overlap is that while Yolen is an important person in the history of why I use femme avatars,
Yolen's kid's drummer is part of the reason I followed up on a joke about Sufi drumming that went alongside the one about the soundtrack for the book.
I guess I've been at this for a while; I can remember when the naïveté of some preachers was a question of not understanding the internet, as such. These days it looks more like mental illness.
Follow the bouncing ball:
• [Preacher] is wrong. Therefore we should base subsequent arguments about religion on [Preacher] as if [Preacher] is credible.
The topic question is a reactionary box projected large; one of the weird things about this manner of argument is that it relies on what it disagrees with:
• [Argument] about [subject] is wrong; therefore all future consideration of [subject] must be based on this wrong [argument].
What would the world would look like if the moronic street preacher in Hawaii, or that one crooked televangelist I would imitate for laughs, had such power to define Christendom? It is impossible to account for all the things I never would have learned because I never would have noticed.