Hello, Russ. In your post to me #4645 and yours to Tom in #4691, you spoke about emotions in a negative way, and defended logic. Nothing against logic - we can't live without using that faculty - but may I remind you of this old saying:

"Information [ie, logic] can lead a mind to water, but only emotion can make it drink."

For heaven's sake, please don't tell me that you use the Bible as your Encyclopaedia for Living based purely on the logical side of your brain, without input from your emotions. Come on! It's your emotional brain that causes you to be attracted to the Bible's teachings in the first place; deciding that these teachings were, indeed, logical, came afterwards.

Though I believe in God, I originally came to see that human society was spiralling downwards and headed for a major fall, not from the Bible but from the writings of non-theists, confirmed by my observations. I kid you not.

Now fast-foward about 25 years: I finally read the bible and saw that it confirmed what those other sources taught me. I don't reject anything that appeals to me. Is that emotion? Yes. Emotion tempered by the wisdom of life's experiences.

It is also logical, not purely emotional, that I should try to not treat animals the way I would not want to be treated. It is LOGICAL that if I have no feeling for the suffering of all conscious sensate being - animal & human - then some day I will be regarded similarly and suffer for it. It is a giant error to try to separate logic & emotion. They both come from Almighty God, and we have to develop the wisdom to know when to subordinate one to the other. And it is not the same formula for all of us, all the time.