Bravo, John Hardly, for that lengthy post on all the various illegitimate forms of argumentation that people use to attack someone else's position on something.

I have saved it for future reference. It is THE answer to most of the unreasonable arguments I see advanced daily on this forum by people intent on proving that their form of belief is superior to someone else's.

Bee - You said,"I have an affinity for mammals, wild and domestic. I've never been close to a mammal that I didn't sense was 'other', individual, in the same manner in which another human is 'other'. I don't mean that a cow or bear or cat thinks as humans think, or is emotional on the same gradient humans are, but they do think, and do exhibit emotions, and my thought is always 'there but for a chance of evolution go I'. So if human consciousness is a manifestation of something larger, I have to think that so is the more basic, less convoluted, consciousness of all those other critters."

Yes! Of course. Your conclusion seems eminently sensible to me, and that's the way I see it. An animal's consciousness IS, like a human consciousness, a manifestation of something larger. The same something. Just to a different degree, that's all.

Then you said, "This is a serious component of my reasons for being agnostic. When it comes to First Causes, I don't know, can't even guess, if Something with a larger consciousness directed that. But when it comes to my fellow warm-bloods, I definitely cannot conceive of a well meaning First Cause/Deity which deliberately would elevate my species over another to the tune of giving us that little extra invisible something referred to usually as a soul."

Neither can I conceive of it. I think everything has a soul. Every human, every animal, every plant, every microbe, everything. Either that...or nothing does.

Again, the various souls would most likely be at different levels of consciousness, that's all. Each one existing at its own unique level, just as each thing has its own unique nature in every other respect as well.

This does not imply some kind of favoritism "from on High". ;-) It simply implies the expression of a vast variety of possibilities or potentials, all of which tend to manifest in their own fashion in some particular time or place.