Heading for the great aviary in the sky?

For some reason best known to its followers, Christianity attaches souls to human beings only. Reptiles, insects etc. and a whole raft of other mammals do not have them. So when you get to Heaven, there will be no pigs or iguanas or mosquitoes to bother you - not even their souls.

Buddhism, a far less inconsistent religion than Christianity, does not travel down this road - it allows souls to exist for all living creatures, and given the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, you have to be very careful in this regard. My Buddhist wife will not let me swat flies in summer in the apartment. Who knows what I might be killing - anything from her reincarnated grandmother to a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan.

This afternoon, cursed with the depression that is our current financial disaster, I went for a walk down by the Main. If there is one last therapy available to me it is watching birds, and you get plenty down there. Some stray gulls who have followed the rivers (Main and Rhine) down from the faraway coast, ducks, and even crows of different types a-plenty (virtually the local symbol), even near a river, sparrows and wood pigeons, all of which perch on the trees next to the river.

This set me off thinking, again. What happens to birds when they die? In reality, not in religious myth for a moment.

I grew up in a seaside town, and I was used to seeing gulls in many varieties. In Holland when I lived there, I used to be fascinated by the number of grey herons "fishing" by the canals. While here we have the various members of the crow family.

It then struck me that I have never yet seen a dead gull, a dead heron, or a dead crow. Do they just fall out of they sky or off a tree and fall among the foliage and disappear among the leaves? My wife and I saw a badly injured young sparrow near the house the other week (broken wing or foot - no hospitals or surgeries for them of course, just a lingering death). A couple of hours later it was lying dead among the foliage - see above.

There are millions of birds on this planet, and many live a full life span. No pension funds for them though, so once they have lived out their time, they die as expected. But where do their corpses go? If you ever do see thousands of bird corpses it usually means that there has been a (human-inspired) disaster of some kind. Otherwise they seem to have the knack of simply disappearing.

And back to the "spiritual" context, one wonders what they do to move on according to Buddhist reincarnation theory. Some become moles, some become horses, some (sadly) even become human beings. Why? What decides this.

And of course the Christians may well have go it wrong. Young parent birds could easily be telling their chicks as they feed them not to be too greedy, or else they will not make it up to the great aviary in the sky when they die ....