About a year ago, on one of the religious TV shows on Sunday morning, where a married couple discuss modern issues vis a vis Bible teachings, the subject of an afterlife for animals came up. They had previously felt not, but changed their minds, and even advertised a book called Fido in Heaven? I have not read it, maybe you have, Demi. I'd sure like to get a hold of a copy. If my late pets aren't going to be there, I don't want to, either, and I mean it.
I haven't heard of the book. I've been a vegetarian for about 15 years, but it's only pretty recently that I came to believe that animals share eternity. This came about when my dog died last year. We put him down as he was very sick. One moment he was alive, the next he wasn't, and there was...nothing.
I really struggled with my faith after this (a lot of my friends are atheists) and I believed what I had always been told at church - that animals don't have an afterlife. I had seen so many emotions in my dog. I had seen personality. A personality more sweet and adorable and loyal than in most people I had ever met. He was his own "person". He knew what he wanted, he knew what he liked. He got scared, he showed affection, he made demands. He would wag his tail when happy and he would cry or sulk when he wasn't. I couldn't believe that all this emotion, which wasn't in any way different to human emotion, just that he wasn't as clever as us, would just fade away into nothing. If he had no afterlife, if everything that he was was just inside his brain, I couldn't believe that we, as humans, were anything more than our brains either.
So I really prayed for answers on this and rather than abandoning my faith, kept with it. When I read in the Bible passages that suggest that animals do share in eternity, then it all made sense to me. It was all consistent with that "spark" of individual life that we see in living creatures as opposed to non-sentient ones, and that every creature, great and small, matters to God.
I think that, with so many things, we believe what we are told, and then there will be something in life that will make us question it and seek answers. So far in my life, the Bible hasn't failed to give me answers to things that I thought I knew without question, but when I approach it with a different heart I see things from a different view.
In any case, I am not religious, but trying to respect religious people, I must add that I don't care what any Holy Scripture says - Christian, Jewish, Muslin, Buddhist, etc. I have a powerful feeling that we will indeed meet our "pets" in the Next World. And meet not only them, but the ones we harmed also by careless and unappreciative meat-eating. (Not all meat eaters are like this but most are.) Can I prove this? Of course not. And nobody can prove the opposite point of view, either.
According to the Bible humans are accountable to God. I don't believe that meat-eating was in God's original plan for humans. I believe that after the fall humans disobeyed God's original command that the grains and fruit would be food for them and hunted animals. It's not until after Noah has been saved from the flood does God say to him "now I offer the animals as food to you". So, I kind of think it was a concession from God, that he was giving his "blessing" to eating animals, which hitherto had been against his commands. But as God did say that eating animals was okay after this point, and that Jesus ate fish (I think, anyway) then eating animals isn't a sin, but I don't think it was God's original plan. I don't think that humans or animals had craving for flesh of other creatures, but that it came about after the fall.
