The Divine Life of Animals: Do Pets Go to Heaven?

a few years ago I lost my big Labrador Retriever Marty who died at a fairly young age of about ten and I mentioned it in an editor's note and then thought nothing more of it until the editors note was published and I got this amazing response from readers I got people writing me letters of condolences I got cards I got flowers it was just amazing and in these letters a lot of people talked about the grief the very real and deep grief they feel when they lose a pet and they also talked about how sometimes people who don't have pets or not animal lovers don't quite understand the depths of that grief at about the same time an editor for guide posts named Tony Thompkins brought forth an idea of whether or not pets go to heaven so I went and I told him the experience I had but the readers and we talked about the possibility of doing an article like this and I the only reservation I really had was that I thought that there might be some theological stickiness with the idea but Tony assured me there was actually Bible references to to the souls of animals and that he would be able to cite some of those in his articles so we let him we saw we turned home a loose on the article and it turned out to be one of our most popular articles ever I mean it was a huge hit with readers totally got tons of mail and he got so much mail that he eventually decided that that the subject deserved a book and eventually that book and the work he did on it took him away from guideposts today he remains a contributing editor and this month his book called the divine life of animals is going to hit the stores and we think you'll all be interested in the book and in this issue we have an article from Tony about writing his book so I thought you'd like to meet him him in person Tony welcome back to guide post thank you it's nice to be back when I got into this what I started to realize was you cannot tell the spiritual history of human beings without talking about animals human beings are not human beings without animal creation if you look in the Bible and you look around for the first notice of humans they show up in the midst of an awful lot of animals and if you look in the Bible for the first appearance of Jesus cry taystee shows up in the middle of an awful lot of animals I don't think this is a mistake you see this constant reference to the intertwined nature of animals and humans now one of the reasons people get itchy about this is they say oh wait a minute you're just going you're going to tell me that human beings are the same as animals that there's nothing special and that's not biblical well it doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean that and part of the one of the major questions I wrestled with in writing this book was trying to answer the question how can we see human beings as spiritually different from the rest of creation set apart which is of course what the Bible tells us again and again without simply throwing all the animals out and saying they don't matter well it would certainly be a very lonely planet without animals we were the only animals on it well we literally wouldn't be who we are without them and the further I got back into history the more apparent it became that talking about humanity without including animal creation is sort of talking about Edward grinning but let's remove all the carbon molecules okay we know Edward grinnin is fine but so just I'm full of carbon so yeah so you know we need the carbon if we're going to have you around and we need animals if we're going to talk about what human beings are we need to include nature it sounds like you're saying that animals actually make us more human yeah not even more human we would not be human without and I think if you read the Bible with that idea in mind you see evidence for it everywhere now in this book you talked a lot about dreams and in the article you you you expound on that quite a bit there are two main hints that people seem to get when they lose an animal they care about very often they will have a dream in which the animal appears to them very vividly and it's a dream some dreams stand out so everybody has dreams I have dreams all the time where you go to sleep and it's just a mixed-up mush of stuff that happened to you that day and a bunch of nonsense that you can't figure out but then there are other dreams that have a certain kind of atmosphere to them and they they have there's a feeling to them that they are trying to tell you something and those are often the more vivid wants to and again and again in researching the book I would run into narratives of people who lost an animal and to within two or three days after losing the animal would have this dream where the animal appeared in intense vividness in a scene where they seemed to be happy and at peace and you think you think that scene is heaven I think I'm not going to go that far I'm not going to say it's not I'm going to say that there is I'm going to make this point which I think it is a really important point we tend to think of visions and inspirations and stuff like that as things which happen to Abraham or Moses and they don't happen to ordinary people but I think all of us have a little bit of visionary capacity all of us if we're open to it are capable of having dreams and intuitions which are larger than ordinary life and which means something thanks told me for coming in and talking to us about your new book the divine life of animals which is out this month and which is featured in guidepost magazine this month good luck with the book Thanks nice to see you again good to be back

Channel: Guideposts

Views: 36,450

Keywords: Guideposts, Ptolemy Tompkins, Edward Grinnan, The Divine Life of Animals

Id: TfzexpD7ngc

Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2011