When Muslims destroy the Quran

I would oppose the hate-mongering destruction of the Quran (or Koran) by Terry Jones even if it didn’t provoke some Muslims to violence and many others to outrage and resentment. But some groups of Muslims have intentionally destroyed mosques and thus Qurans, apparently without receiving such near-universal condemnation.

Imagining mortality

Scientific American has recently published a provocative article explaining humans’ seemingly universal inability to imagine a lack of consciousness and, thus, an end to consciousness at death. In short, the conscious imagination never experiences non-consciousness. When we’re not conscious, we’re not aware and thus can’t remember what it was like. At most, we can remember regaining consciousness. This inherent quality may be a key part of the explanation for the widespread belief in some sort of afterlife.

But the article does not address at least one important dimension of this issue: imagining that other beings – human or otherwise – have the same kind of consciousness. It is a categorical leap to apply insights about one’s own experience to that of others.

Gods’ pets?

While mucking around with my cats’ lives and seeing that they faintly comprehend that I enact my will on their universe, I often imagine that they see me as like unto a god. Will I feed them, let them out on the balcony, abandon them for several days … ? They undoubtedly notice that I exist in their world but that I also frequent a separate realm beyond theirs; I call it “outside” and “work.” To them, I must be awesome.

Here, then, is my hypothesis: Perhaps the roots of some religious beliefs lie in early believers’ imagination of how putatively less-conscious beings around them – such as domesticated animals – saw their relationship to humans. These incipient theologians might have taken inferences such as mine regarding my cats’ beliefs as analogous to humans’ relationship to other forces. In GRE fashion: ’(semi-)domesticated entity is to human as human is to other entity.’