Atheists and Our Fine, Furry Friends
By - Dean Van Drasek
As Aron Ra says so eloquently, “it’s not that we descended from apes, we
are apes.” If we accepted our equivalence with other animals, perhaps we
would treat them better.
At a Family Reunion, my First Cousin is a Chimp
A recent report highlighted by the BBC focused on the emotional connections
between bonobos, which like chimpanzees are our closest relatives in
the animal kingdom. Chimps and other apes have one more chromosome
than we do, and it looks like the human chromosome 2, known as the super
chromosome, was the result of a merger of two smaller chromosomes found
in other apes. Also, humans lost a caspase-12 gene, which other apes have,
and which some geneticists think may be related to Alzheimer’s disease.
Chimps are also immune to malaria. So, god in his great compassion gave
other apes protection from a debilitating diseases that he withheld from us
humans. Nice guy.
It has always been a curiosity to me as to why many human cultures moved
so far away, philosophically and in terms of religious orientation, from our
fellow animals. It was not always like that. Early human ritual practices were
focused on the natural world, including a respect for and acknowledgement
of the importance of other animals. We don’t know enough about these early
ritual practices to call them religions but these belief systems probably
functioned in a very similar way. This is generally true for all hunter gatherer
societies and perhaps early farming communities. (See Joseph Campbell,
“The Masks of God: Primitive Religions” and James Frasier, “The
Golden Baugh”.)
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