We're about to get Aristotelian, so this can't be stupid. Right?
Do Animals Go To Heaven?
Catholic Answers:
Do Animals Go To Heaven?
Catholic Answers:
Quote:Okay, so first of all, this idea that you hear that animals don’t have an afterlife is not church teaching. That is a theological speculation that is based on Aristotelian physics or metaphysics.
I’m not convinced by that. I would say that I don’t propose animals go to heaven. I don’t know whether they go to heaven or not. Heaven is full spiritual union with God. But I do think there is evidence that they have an afterlife and that at least some animals do, and that it may be a positive afterlife, even if it isn’t the kind of full union with God, you know, where you have this intellectual vision of God known as the beatific vision that humans can get.
I don’t know what animals get, but I do have evidence that they may well have an afterlife and that it may be a positive afterlife. Whether it would or would not count as heaven is a separate question.
When humans have near-death experiences, they not only see their departed relatives in the afterlife while they’re temporarily clinically dead, they also see animals.
I did a search of a major database of near-death experiences. It has like more than 5,000 near-death experiences in it. And I found by searching on terms like, you know, cat, dog, rabbit, horse, pet animal, things like that, that as many as a quarter of the near-death experience reports that the database contained might have references to animals in them.
Humans very frequently have experiences that are what are known as after-death communications. Okay, well, turns out it happens with animals too. There are animal after-death communications.
https://www.catholic.com/video/do-pets-go-to-heaven
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
