A Distant Barking

The title of my blog was a title proposed by my father. He, along with my mother, urged me to write my college thesis on the afterlife of animals. In hindsight, it could not have gone any worse than my attempt to prove that mercy is the greatest of the human virtues.

Do dogs go to heaven? This was the question that the unwritten thesis was intended to answer. I think that much of the dispute comes from the vagueness of "go to heaven." I don't think that the expression is necessarily vague in itself; I think that people have vague notions of heaven, life, and death.

If only people understood matter, form, and the agent intellect. Most people, though, are as unaware of these things as Stella and Tiny are ignorant of the nature of a camera.



Tiny will never understand the nature of a camera or the nature of anything for that matter. Stella, though, will come to know the difference between cameras, pencils, and crayons. Tiny would nibble them indiscriminately.

Many live indiscriminately. Worse, many live with false distinctions. To sunder things that have their own integrity is a brutal act. Many men are no better than the brutes. What place do brutes have in heaven?

The human form can become brutish and therefore monstrous. I hold, though, that the form of brutes, Tiny's nature, has a place in the new heaven and new earth. So does Stella, though in a different way and for different reasons. Such is my faith and understanding.