Do animals have a sense into the spiritual realm that we don’t have? Mark 5:13, when Legion entered into the pigs, the herd freaked out and started a stampede into the sea.
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6 comments
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It wouldn’t seem so. They were not given the breath of life at creation so their thoughts are almost always going to be instinctual in my opinion. The demons just knew they couldn’t go into another human so they picked the nearest animal they could find to ask. I actually think the opposite in regards to spirituality. Jesus allowed the demons to go into a lesser being. Why we aren’t sure but he did.
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I never thought of it this way. I’ve always thought the pigs were possessed and in a trance, and the demons drowned the pig. Interesting.
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I always found it interesting that the pigs jumped into the water. Why? If they were purely instinct sand controlled by the demons then why drown the pigs? Only the pigs would die and not the demons.
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There are some theologians (like JP Moreland) that hold to a sort of spiritual gradient or spectrum, with ‘no soul’ on one end and God’s Trinitarian soul on the other. Animals with some level of intelligence (like great apes, dolphins, etc.) would be “soulish”, falling between humans and purely material, mechanistic creatures like insects. This would explain why we attribute different levels of moral value to different animals (the moral difference between wantonly killing ants vs. dogs).
I think the verse you quoted says more about the nature of demons than the nature of animals. As spiritual beings, angels and demons can “move” unencumbered by the material world, so it’s not clear to me that the pigs would have had to have some sort of spiritual component to their being in order to be possessed.
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They sense I think yet.
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