Unknown

I have a highly active and imaginative mind, and it has always been that way. I can't think of a time when my mind has been turned off (not even when I'm sleeping). I've spent a lot of time thinking, who is God? Now, that's a very open-ended question and can be interpreted in many ways. And that's the beauty of it - it can be interpreted in so many different ways.

Usually when I ask myself this question I go back and forth between two answers. In the first, I project human qualities onto Him. It seems accurate because He did create humans in His image. The second is that I find the first completely impossible and give up trying to answer the question altogether, because there really is no way to know.

When we think of animals, we tend to project our human qualities, our human emotions, our needs, our desires, onto them - just like I do when I think about God. But what if animals were so different from us, that we can't even fathom what goes on in their minds? Maybe we've got it all wrong. I'm not in any way comparing God's mystery with the mystery of animals, because that isn't on the same level with anything. However, it's a parallel that can be applied to many aspects of life.

Take the notion of stereotypes for example. When we see a person wearing a certain outfit, or carrying a significant item, or doing a certain activity, it is so easy to label them with a stereotype - to assign them an identity. Humans do this because we LOVE to compare what we don't know with what we do. And for good reason; that's the entire basis of scientific experimentation and theory and mathematics, and pretty much everything. This is how we find out information about the unknowns - by comparing and contrasting with what we do know.

By assigning a person an identity based on what they appear to be wearing, carrying, doing, etc. we can automatically deduce a number of facts about them (whether they are true or not). It is so easy, we've been doing it for our whole lives. The problem arises when we are wrong. When we assign a stereotype and someone breaks that - then how do we know what is right?

As I have seen in the videos and readings about animals' emotions, fantastic animal feats of survival or companionship, or animal-animal/animal-human relationships, animals have great potential to break their stereotypical mold.

Lots of people in my class raised the valid point that these cases are extreme, that a strange animal to animal cross species relationship is administered only under human care. Yes, it's also hard to believe that a chicken would respond to CPR. But the question that I raise is, how many of these extraordinary acts occur without being noticed? Yes, we have a whole lot of the animals in the world under surveillance, whether in a home, a farm, a slaughterhouse, a pet store, a circus, a zoo, a forest reserve, etc. - but there a also a whole lot that are not. How much goes on without us noticing? How much of animals have we over-looked?

Rather, not just what about animals have we over-looked, but what about animals have we over-looked by projecting our human characteristics onto them? How many people that we label with stereotypical identities break their mold drastically - enough to render that stereotype invalid? Maybe animals are more highly developed than we are but can't act on it because they don't have opposable thumbs (that is besides chimpanzees). Maybe these "unnatural" acts are just glimpses into the animal unknown - maybe it's enough to render our current understanding of animals invalid.

After many years of pondering, I don't feel the need to know everything about God. I believe that that's the way it should be. We as humans always want to find answers - we want to solve the problem, create something new, discover something undiscovered. What if we don't have to? What if we aren't meant to solve all of the problems, or uncover every single mystery. Is the unknown that awful? More relevant to animals - can we contently co-exist with the unknown?