I Wonder What It Feels Like to Be an Animal?

I wonder what it feels like to be an animal.
I wonder what it’s like to be a squirrel--to love heights, the view from way up there, to fear the ground.

I wonder what it’s like to be a whale and to want to free yourself from the water for a glorious few seconds to breach.

I wonder what it’s like to be a sea turtle to travel three thousand miles to crawl up on the shore for a few minutes for a reason you don’t understand since you can’t possibly knew that you’re pregnant or even what that concept means. What pull do they feel to the shore? What push do they feel from the water and from their body?

I wonder what it’s like to be a cat and to love the thrill of the hunt.

I wonder what it’s like to be a beaver and to really, really enjoy gnawing, hording, piling, packing, building.

Or a bird building a nest for that matter. What do they feel!? What about sitting on an egg?

What about defending a territory or fighting rival mates?

I wonder what it’s like to be a migratory robin, albatross, tuna, sea turtle, wildebeest, prong horn, caribou or any other migratory animal and really feel a desire to move in a certain direction, toward a certain star formation, a certain azimuth of the sun, toward a certain polarity of the Earth. Is it a sense of hope? Is it a memory? Is it a wanderlust boredom?

Do predators that must have an enormous amount of patience waiting for prey to come close play mental games? Is what they’re looking at seem incredibly interesting? How do they prevent boredom? Are they thinking about nothing or a profusion of thought?

What’s it like to be a bird and really want to preform a mating ritual? Just gotta dance? Performance anxiety? Preoccupation to please? Just gotta sing?

What about a penguin that needs to huddle together to stay warm? Do you just feel so much better together? Is it just about the warmth?

Do meerkats feel a paranoia?

What about a reptile that needs to sun itself? Does the heat feel like a mind blowing ecstasy or a warm peaceful comfort?

Pictures from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Irrational Things Atheists Believe

We all believe irrational things--things that are subjective and not empirically testable.  

Is this such a bad thing? Is it even possible to live without the scaffolding of these ideas and many, many others? What would life be like without these kind of ideas? Can noticing these ideas give us humility and more level playing field when dealing with/thinking about/talking to people that believe things that seem utterly foreign and ridiculous to us?

• Epistemological Beliefs
• Reality is Coherent--As Einstein famously put it, "God does not play dice."
• How we live like reality is coherent: 
• Science invests billions of dollars into research.  Many of our expectations about what life will be like on a given day are met.
• Reality Is Not an Illusion--Is what you see what you get?
• How we live like reality is not an illusion: 
• We find love and life meaningful.  
• Continuity of Reality-- "We have no logical reason to assume that anything we've learned from science will be true tomorrow." --Cameron Green
• How we live like reality has continuity: 
• We act according to our experience.
• Causal Relationships--One thing leads to another--cause and effect. How do we know that when one cue ball hits another that the two events are actually connected? The philosopher David Hume wrote much on this conundrum.  
• How we live like causal relationships are determinable:
• We administer medical treatments.  We write and read history books.
• Memory Is Accurate--How do we know our most trust and dearly held memories are accurate?  How do we know our brain didn't just make them up and they seem real?
• How we live like memory is accurate:
• We go up to and kiss our loved ones when we see them again.  We cherish fond childhood memories.  We recall and use information like directions to get to work.
• Senses Are Reasonable Facsimiles of Reality--How do we know that we can trust our senses?  How do we know they correspond to reality at all?
• How we live like our senses are accurate:
• We follow traffic signs and lights.
• You’re Not Completely Crazy--Is it so crazy to think we're not crazy?
• How we live like we aren't completely crazy:
• We make decisions and live by them.
• Solipsism Is False--How do we know others are thinking, feeling, volitional beings?
• How we live like solipsism is false:
• We care for the needs of others.

• Existential Beliefs 
• Life Has Value--Funerals suck.  War sucks.  Abuse sucks.  Why?  Because life is precious.
• Life Has Meaning--What we do with our lives has some value otherwise we wouldn't keep doing it.
• Identity/Consciousness/Mind--We believe in ourselves and others as a whole, independent being rather than a talking set of individual neurons and atoms.  Attributing a volitional personality to a human is the same thing on a different scale to giving the random occurrences of 'life' and 'the universe' to 'God'.  
• Contiguity--Many have said (controversially) that every atom in your body is replaced every ten (or seven) years. Assuming something close to that is true, how can it be said that we're the same person? Yet we still believe it every time we see an old friend! 
• Free Will--Our choices are our own and not a mechanistic predetermined byproduct of things outside of our control. 
• Love--It's more than a hormone. It's more than a pre-programmed mechanism to create and rear young. We believe and behave like love is real.

• Justice Beliefs
• Virtue/Vice and Good/Evil--Every time we resist evil and do good we show that we believe in moral obligation/virtue/vice/good/evil.

Brenner Emmanuel Michel's "Hercules Between Virtue and Vice"

My point:


Of course all of the above has rightly been questioned and doubted by philosophical luminaries, but I bring it up to point out that both you and I have sacred ideas and that we all hold things true without proof everyday. That, by in large, is a very, very good thing. You may well cognitively doubt every idea above, but you still believe them functionally if you use them. Just as many believers deal with doubts about their religion's teachings so can an atheist doubt the list above, but still be counted as a believer on the basis of how they live--actions speak louder than words.


What is religion at its most very basic? Ideas. Ideas about life, morality, metaphysics, origins...etc. Just in the same way that believing life has value has existential and social utility so can other religious ideas--even if we deeply doubt their veracity. Ideas are tools--tools that can help improve our lives by being the scaffolding on which to build a life. What I'd like to show with the above list of things is that there is common ground between atheists and theists to discuss ideas, values and meanings. We all are subjective. We all are biased. We all operate with ideas that are unfounded. We all have memes.  It's a level playing field between atheists and theists in this regard. We all make assumption leaps and some of these ideas are vital to living a fulfilling life.

Pictures from here, here and here.