I know how you feel. I love getting religious callers to home, novices, I spend time with them, and send them away with their heads spinning. Most never return. Ha ! Such fun.

Animals do have emotions, just we often don't notice. Fish do feel pain; elephants remember their dead; dogs and cats fret and get depression if neglected; many animals have a sense of humour; some, like cats, are vindictive; some get outraged and want to hurt you, like snakes and bears; some are appreciative, like rescue animals, the thirsty and starving, and neglected, etc.

We don't know their language or expressions to be able to understand them, but they communicate with each other fine. Even across different species.

You can't expect animals to adopt human traits and expressiveness, so using them as some sort of test for emotions won't work for all animals.
Monkeys, apes, and domesticated house pets may show human like expressions for attention, but may really only want food or something else.

Remember the Gilgamesh story, where the man/beast of the field was one with the animals, until he laid with a human female, then after that all his animal friends avoided him, as they would a human.

We can't claim any superiority or intelligence over animals while we destroy the only place we can live with our technological lifestyles.
Homo stupidus destructor. Made in the image of god.

Having eaten from the tree of knowledge, we are still extremely stupid, gullible, stiff necked, greedy, righteous, and destructive to all life forms.

Science claims we are from Apes, and yet, Ape males will kill one another in a heartbeat!!

just like all other Species will!!

Men will kill in a heartbeat and with no justification other than "I wondered what it would be like to kill someone".No anger,no self defence,no striving for top dog.

I wonder what you are drinking today.For a man who claims to be intelligent and educated,this series of posts appears to me to be riddled with contradictions,non sequiturs and assumptions.In the past you have provided me with very adequate answers to queries and I appreciate the time and effort expended in researching those answers.Not only do I not accept some of the information provided in this series of posts but several of your comments seem to be at odds with your stated Biblical beliefs.

Large numbers of men will kill large numbers of other men in a war. Often those doing the killing will have been told to consider the enemy as some sort of sub-human animal. It makes it easier to another person that way. If you think the man you are about to kill has parents, a wife and family, just like you have, then it becomes more difficult to kill others, just because they are 'on the other side'.

I find it hard to understand why Christian priests would 'bless' a submarine before it went to the seas in the second world war to find and destroy other submarines. Somewhere in the bible it says something about not killing other people, but I guess there's a bit written in invisible ink that says it's OK to kill others in wartime.

For me, as a pacifist, it is never, ever, OK to kill another person. In the first world war that means I would probably have been shot. In the second world war I would probably have been able to drive ambulances or some other non-combatant role to help injured people. Let's hope that in any future war, I will be able to help in a non-combatant role. I doubt that at my age I would be able to do anything else!

The majority of people in England do not believe in a god. They are not Muslem, not Christian, not Hindu and not any other faith. It seems reasonable therefore that if you make a claim that most other people disagree with, it is up to you to prove your claim. It is not necessary (and quite difficult) to prove the non-existence of something. Although one famous biologist has written a book in which he claims to have proved the non-existence of god. I must get a copy and see if it is written in normal English and not in complex science that goes over my head.

Just quoting what other men said in books thousands of years ago does not count as proof. Neither to weird things that happened once and are not repeatable. A proper scientific test is something that other people can duplicate. If others consistently get the same result it becomes more likely to be true.

If you put your hand on the hot plate of a cooker and it gets burned, you have a theory which can be tested by asking others to do the same. If everybody who tries that experiment gets the same result it is reasonable to assume that human skin does not like too much heat. For this experiment I'm sure I can say that 'it works' - would you care to try it? People are so sure that this theory works that I doubt any reader here will try it - they don't need to! Nobody is going to say, "My god will protect me, so I will do the experiment and not get burned". If they did, that would be scientifically interesting. If that person could repeat the experiment in front of other people as often as required, it would become very interesting.

However, to become accepted as proof that you don't always get burned, it would require a large number of people to show to others that they don't get burned. At that point the theory would have to be modified to say that some people get burned if they touch a hot plate. If it happens to only one person, a likely explanation is that the person lacks sensitivity to pain. There are such people and they have to be careful what they touch as they genuinely cannot feel pain. Their hands will certainly get burned if left on the hot plate for a few seconds, so that experiment does not invalidate the theory.

I believe it is up to those that claim there is a god either to say they know there is and they are quite happy in that belief (as some have done here) or to try to prove their claim, which has been shown to be a complete waste of time and effort. As far as I can tell, belief in a god is an internal thing, something in your mind which is convincing to you, like people who 'hear voices' in their head. The voices don't actually exist, they are not heard through the ears, else other people nearby could also hear them. They are imagined by people who have a vivid imagination.

Those who are convinced there is a god, while obviously deluded, are no doubt people with vivid imaginations. Perhaps they ate too much cheese the night before they had a weird experience. I've heard this can happen to some people, but I think I must be boringly 'normal' having never had any such experience. As I said before, if you 'expect' something odd to happen then it is very likely you will find it. And conversely, if like me, you have no such expectation, you won't find god no matter how much you try and how hard you look.