Animals on Facebook

ANIMALS ON FACEBOOK
Written Wed. Aug. 17, 2022; posted Wed. May 3rd, 2023

Facebook is a great place to see animal videos!  Animal videos on Facebook are a genre which can be subdivided into many subgenres.  I'm particularly attracted to six subgenres of animal videos: (1) animals being cute, (2) animals being stylish, (3) animals being intelligent, (4) animals helping other animals, (5) animals helping people, and (6) animals asking people for help. 

Videos of animals being cute and animals being stylish are mood stabilizers.  Or you could say they are cheerer-uppers.  Most people feel happier right after they have watched a video of an animal being cute or stylish.  Videos like that are a powerful reminder that the world we live in is not one hundred percent messed up.

Videos of animals being intelligent are encouraging.  If dogs and cats can be that smart -- even some of the time -- surely there is some hope for the human race.

But the subgenres that impress me the most are the last three: (4) animals helping other animals, (5) animals helping people, and (6) animals asking people for help.  I think these videos are very deep in a way that most people understand at the gut level.  Videos like that suggest to me that, if we believe Darwin's theory of evolution (which I do), then  goodness was in our gene pool from the beginning.  There was goodness in our world before the first human being walked the earth -- back when God had not yet created anything smarter than the chimpanzee.

That should be encouraging both for atheists and for Christian Darwinists like me.  I am en­couraged by the idea that there was goodness in the world already before the first human being came into the world.

As a Christian, that suggests to me that religions did not invent the concept of goodness.  Instead, religions codified goodness and came up with lists of ways that one can be good, classifications of different forms of goodness, hierarchies of forms of goodness ("it is more blessed to do such-and-such than to do so-and-so").  Religions increased our vocabulary for talking about goodness, and began the project of keeping records about remarkable good people.

Did you notice that I didn't use the word "merely"?  I did not say "religions merely codified goodness" etc.  See, to my way of thinking, those are enormous achievements which the higher religions of the world can take credit for.

(Higher religions here means religions that do not believe in gods that are powerful but capricious.  Higher religions believe that the god or gods care about the fate of individual people, love the human race, and want the human race to make moral progress, regardless of how slow it is.)

I guess that's all for now.  One of the reasons I like being on Facebook is so I can see the animal videos.

Frank Newton