Interfaith Group

This is analogous to the question of whether non-human animals have souls. Part of my thinking on this comes from my Native American background, which ascribes not just spirit but spiritual power to non-human beings.The other part comes from the obvious fact of evolution. Our "human" attributes must come down to us from a non-human lineage. If humans have Buddha nature, then so do dogs. If I have a soul, then so does the cat who's vying with the phone for my attention at the moment. All of which leads me to the idea that religion and its roots lie deep in our history, well beyond our emergence as a species.

The chimpanzee dances seem to me to be clearly a response not just to awe but to power. Whether the dance is a means to communicate with this power or to control it isn't yet clear. My guess is that it's both. These observation s dovetail closely with Dudley Young's argument in Origins of the Sacred that human religion had its genesis on "the dancing ground" where it also became ritualized in the person of the shaman.