Eat
Your Pet
By
George Brozowski
I
know, I know I usually write about spirits but you really can't
blame a guy for wanting to expand his horizons. After all spirits
are usually paired with food and in many cultures today pets
are food and I eat food so why couldn't I eat my pets?
As
I typed that last sentence I looked down at my feet and there
laying comfortably next to me and looking up at me with big
brown eyes and a perpetual smile was my Golden Retriever Chimmy.
I named him after my favorite food, chimichangas so why couldn't
I turn him into a great big Golden Chimichanga? He noticed me
looking down at him and he got up, stretched lazily and placed
his paws up on my leg and bent close and licked my face. That
bastard knew what I was thinking!
OK, so this wasn't the greatest
idea I ever had but nobody has sent me any booze to review now
for over two weeks and I was getting desperate for a topic to
write about in my column. I couldn't eat my dog but maybe my
cat Gabby. There he was sprawled out in a ray of sunshine on
my desk sleeping peacefully. Maybe I could sneak up on him and
strangle him and throw him into a crock pot with some carrots
and onion and celery and after 8 hours he just might be tender
and tasty. I reached over to grab him and he woke up and started
"talking" to me. I named him Gabby for good reason.
He meows and meows and meows almost without end at me. He cocks
his head to one side and asks Meow? And then he'll answer his
own question with a couple of more Meows and then he'll wait
for me to respond and if I'm not quick enough he'll ask again,"
Meow?"
I can't eat him either.
This is hopeless. Those critters are my best friends. They have
intelligence and souls and when I die they're going to be with
me in the hereafter. That bit about having souls sparked a heated
debate with half a dozen other people some of whom said I was
crazy and that couldn't be while another group just as fervently
agreed with me. Well that argument went on for some time so
I decided to get to the bottom of this soul question.
This all really started
out as a simple exercise to get a simple answer to the simple
question of whether or not pets have souls. Turns out it really
wasn't quite that simple.
If you go to your local
preacher or priest or whichever other person you turn to for
answers in times of religious need I'm sure they will give you
one solid unwavering answer. However if you make the mistake
of going to several of these people from different religious
persuasions, like I did, you will discover they will give you
different answers. Of course there will be black and white totally
polar opposite responses and there will also be as many shades
of gray as the number of people you consult. Having quickly
lost "faith" in these official interpreters of the
word of God I determined to go to the source.
In an attempt to get the
truth from "the horse's mouth" so to speak I consulted
the Bible. Unfortunately that ended up being as confusing as
consulting all the previously mentioned Biblical scholars. Turns
out there's not one Bible but quite a few and, of course, versions
not officially approved by a given religion are condemned by
it and not considered the "official" word of God.
Stupid me, I always thought that the Bible was the Bible and
was one in the same Bible. Go figure?!?
Adding
to the confusion, on top of the different versions officially
sanctioned by their approving religions there were different
translations with their own subtle and not so subtle variations.
Originally
the text that became the Bible was written in Aramaic, Hebrew
and Greek. Over many centuries these texts were found, lost,
rediscovered, translated and retranslated and edited and condemned
and approved and folded, spindled and mutilated until a thousand
years after they had been written they finally became the Bible.
Consider if you will that the writings of the Old Testament
and the New Testament were written over a period of thousands
of years. And yet the first complete Bible did not appear until
325 AD during the Council of Nicea and the first printed Bible
didn't appear until 1456 shortly after Johannes Gutenburg invented
the printing press.
On top of that there are
6,809 languages in the world today and at least 3,000 will go
extinct during the next century. 230 are spoken in Europe, while
2,197 are spoken in Asia. Interestingly, one area of particularly
high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are
an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of just around
3.9 million.
So what? Well, the complete
Bible is available in 438 of those languages with just the New
Testament available in 1168 languages and various parts and
pieces available in 848 languages for a total of 2,454 languages.
So full circle back to the
original question: do pets have souls?
In the Old Testament Hebrew
the original word for "soul" is "nephesh"
while in Greek it's "psuche" with both meaning the
same thing and used interchangeably with one even used to translate
the other. Nephesh occurs 750 times in the Old Testament and
500 of those times it is translated "soul" while the
other 250 times it is translated into 40 different other English
words. Don't ask, I have no clue! 22 times the word is used
when animals are referred to alone and 7 times to refer to men
and animals together and of course over 320 times when souls
are the subject of death and dying.
So if you put yourself
through all this scientific and religious mental masturbation
you will come to the same conclusion that I have come to. Don't
believe a word of it. Simply look in your pet's eyes and ask
them if they have a soul and then believe them and your heart
and mind to tell you the truth. Nothing else matters.
Humorist Will Rogers famously
said "If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I
want to go where they went."
I ordered a pizza.
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