Friday, September 28, 2007

Will Fluffy go to Heaven?
















My friend Andrew forwarded me a link to this site, which paints ghastly memorial pictures of Jesus holding your recently deceased pet (done for a fee, of course.) This kind of idiocy does raise, however, the issue of whether or not animals go into heaven. The problem is that the Bible is silent on the subject, as far as actually outright stating whether or not they do.

This seems like a fun group, a church dedicated to getting animals into heaven:

'...Our Mission Is To Prove Without A Shadow Of A Doubt That When God Made Animals He Made Them With Spirits And Souls and intended that they have a place in Heaven...'
I found them doing a Google search on 'will my pet go to heaven.' I could write for months on those search results, but many of them say the same thing, focusing on the book of Ecclesiastes as the scriptural source offering proof that in fact they do. Of course one can also offer countering scripture that hints that in fact animals don't go to heaven. If you're interested, just follow the link.

But what I found funny is the volume of search results - over 2.3 million hits. If you use quotes around the phrase, requiring an exact match, you get 721 hits. So I decided to compare that result to others:

"Will my husband go to heaven." - 2 hits

"Will my wife go to heaven." - 0 hits (Give it a week or so, and the google spider will hit this website, creating one hit - this blog entry)

"Will my spouse go to heaven." - 0 hits..

"Will my parents go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my mother go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my father go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my brother go to heaven." - 4 hits

"Will my sister go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my child go to heaven." - 5 hits

"Will my son go to heaven." - 1 hit

"Will my daughter go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my neighbor go to heaven." - 0 hits

"Will my enemy go to heaven."
- 0 hits.

"Will my friend go to heaven." - 4 Hits

Again, "will my pet go to heaven" gets 721 hits. As a comparison I used "Is my ... going to heaven" and got very similar results. So there is a lot of angst out there about our pets getting into heaven. And not much about people close to us getting there. So we simply don't give a shit, either because we are convinced we are, convinced we aren't, or don't care about anyone other than ourselves:

"Will I go to heaven." - 805 hits.