I have been noting this more recently and it seems to be a trend, at least with people I converse with on the regular. The really religious types aren’t animal people or downright dont like them. The more chill or agnostic types seem to be more apt to love animals.
I could go on my theory of this but I’m interested to see if anyone thinks this is a trend.
I don’t say this out of malice, but please, please, avoid using “religion” (and indirectly “belief in deities and other supernatural entities”) as a synonym for abrahamic religions because this ends up attacking countless religions and belief systems worldwide, some of which even lack a male capital-G God and/or are Goddess-centric.
The latter case is my case, I’m primarily a worshipper of Goddess Lilith, and I’ve been literally worshiping owls, especially because I believe owls are Her familiars, even Her zoomorphic manifestation (see Burney Relief) sometimes… not to mention how owls are majestic and amazing on their own, as beautifully cute yet fiercely powerful raptors possessing the most silent flight observable among avians… I mean, just look at any Bubo (my favorites, not necessarily in order of preference, are B. virginianus, B. ascalaphus, B. scandiacus, B. bubo, B. magellanicus and B. cinerascens), Megascops/Otus (M. kennicotti and O. bakkamoena) and Athene (especially A. noctua, A. lilith (yes, there’s literally an owl species named after Lilith, native to Middle East), A. brama and A. cunicularia) for long enough and you’ll hopefully understand how goddessome they are!
(And the fact that “I know my favorite Strigidae” by their taxonomic binomials may also tell ya something about how deep I got inside this
rabbitburrowing owl’s hole of Science’s ornithology primarily motivated by non-scientific reasons (and also by my neurodivergence’s “hyperfixation” and “special interests” traits)).There are also other religions and belief systems that are very animal-friendly (especially friendly to wildlife), including but not limited to Wicca, Druidism, Buddhism (“a monk must watch their steps lest they harm ants”) and (as far as I know) Hinduism/Shaktism (cows as sacred symbols of motherhood and abundance).
!asklemmy@lemmy.world
If its religious, it’s wrong. I don’t care if its an abrahamic religion, Islam, Hindi or whatever religion, it’s all imaginary and never for the betterment of the people, it’s always about control
“Always about control”? Whom and how exactly am I trying to “control” through my practice of an extremely solitary, idiosyncratic practice, whose convoluted syncretism (borrowing concepts across Sumerian, Egyptian, Thelema, Wicca, Gnosticism, Luciferianism, Goetia, Quimbanda and many other religions) alienates me from practically all religions from which my syncretism derives because I don’t exclusively follow any of those?
Yes, I know!, and? So many things are imaginary around you right now, too. For example, as you’re reading this text, you’re seeing before you a mesh made of millions of trios of red, green and blue tiny dots shining in a very specific intensity so to interact your (respectively) L, M and S cones all over your retina, fooling your occipital lobe to interpret a large portion of the visible spectrum, then your Inferior temporal gyrus interprets symbols (letters from the English alphabet your graphics card is rendering a large raster bitmap based on this text’s UTF-8 byte-stream), as well as pictographs (Lemmy mascot from both the community’s avatar as well as from your lemmy.ca instance with the shape and colors of the Canadian flag; the maple leaf from the Canadian flag therein; all those colors and shapes from the Anubis “making sure you’re not a bot” anime girl shown every time you access the lemmy.ca instance to interact with the Fediverse) out of the bigger picture once projected onto your retina. The orange color you’re seeing outlining the Lemmy mascot icon from this community, it isn’t orange because there’s no orange dot on digital displays. You can neither touch nor interact with Anubis anime girl, she’s not even closely real. You can neither touch nor interact with the Maple leaf symbol like you could with an actual physical Maple leaf.
So, are you sure you’re gonna play the “deities are imaginary” atheist card with me, a religious, pagan person whose ground is heavily covered in nihilism (as in, nothing fucking exists, not even myself, as everything is a gigantic ocean of baryons and leptons from which the illusion of order, together with this Pale Blue Dot and all the self-rearranging carbon-based structures therein, have been emerged out of cosmic chaos)? At least I’m using the belief on my “imaginary” owl-goddess (because, yes, I can only imagine Her, as my retina never exactly saw Her) to seek and learn actual, scientific (ornithological) knowledge, instead of denying Science like Abrahamic religions often do.
!asklemmy@lemmy.world
I don’t disagree with what you said, but Islam is an Abrahamic religion.
They all (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) worship a deity based on the Canaanite god of war and weather.