When do we cross the line from 'animal' to 'person?'

[jstrodel]

Can you tell me what difference it makes that the human spirit and uninhibited soul act on impulses that are divinely given, rather than naturally? Any poet will tell you that all the best impulses are whispered in the ear by little birds .. a point that Genkhaus refuses to acknowledge.

I would not say that they are divinely given, as in special prophetic revelation. I have seen prophets, and the Holy Spirit does absolutely whisper things to people. It is not so much that intellectual knowledge is really less natural than other kinds of knowledge. They arise out of the same person. I think that there is the propensity for people in approaching problems using reason to be creative and to have other motivations that influence the direction of what they do and these result in either a corrupted or just a limited picture of the human experience.

The point that I am trying to make is that certain means of understanding behavior can bear more fruit than others. If someone was to simply observe normal human tasks and processes, I think they would understand people better than if someone was just to spend a lot of time thinking about what normal human tasks are in most cases.

I think when people are responsive to their bodies and to human nature and become aware of what they are designed for and their inner sense of what is good and bad and what they see their role in the world, they have the potential of seeing their own instincts and bodily drives and appreciating their nature more than someone who was writing a science fiction novel for instance.

I do not think that this is foolproof, people could misconstrue deeply embedded human created values as biological absolutes (atheists do this all the time when they talk about things like "rationality" which refer to cultural rather than biological processes). But I think that people can see into their nature to some degree, and this can be more effective than pure reason (which really has a lot of detractors even from its strongest advocates).