Animal Personhood and Animal Mediums
A strategy of the antichrist
This article includes exerpts and/or summaries from Daniel O'Connor's monumental book "Only Man Bears his Image" (Used with permission) In the coming weeks this article may morph into a shorter summary.
Most Christians know that the devil can't do anything original. He can only take something that God created for good and twist it. Animals are no exception.
In the near future, transmediums specializing in pets will tell the owners details that only the pet would know and will then begin communicating with the owners with demonic directions to stear them into the funnel of the antichrist. Where the devil was unable to go mainstream with Ouiji Boards and Tarrot Cards, he will succeed with AI and pets. This is how the devil tricked Eve, a talking snake (Gen 3: 1-24).
The Mysterious World of Jimmy Akin Episode #298 discusses rise of animal mental telepathy. Unfortunately, Jimmy fails to recognize this paranormal activity as a lead up to the Great Reset.
Animal personhood
Aliens and Artificial Intelligence aren't persons because they don't exist. Animals do exist but they are not persons because they have no rational free will, and thus do not bear the Divine Image.
There are many great children’s books and movies with talking animals, such as C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia which personify animals to tell a story. However children’s movies where animals are “the good guys” and humans are “the bad guys” is a growing trend.
ET, AI, and Time Travel Deceptions emerged in popular fiction in the 1800s. So, too, did the Animal Personhood Deception, with the 1877 publication of Black Beauty. From that novel onwards, there has been a steady stream of exhortations in popular culture not merely to respect animals as gifts from God (a noble thing to encourage), but to treat them as if they were really persons (a diabolical deception).
There are massive and well-funded movements which fight for animals to be given human rights. For example, in 2022, New York State’s highest court heard arguments seeking to grant personhood to a certain elephant in the Bronx Zoo. Although the elephant was not granted personhood, two of the seven judges dissented.[401]
As people choose fewer (or no) children, many seek to fill the children-shaped hole in their lives with pets. Pets are a gift from God but sin arises when people begin implicitly or explicitly treat them as human beings. Increasingly, owners label themselves as “pet parents”, spending tens of thousands of dollars on cancer treatments for dogs and cats, while millions of children across the globe continue to die from lack of basic food, water, medicine, shelter, and sanitation.
Many owners get “therapy” and antidepressants for their animals. A popular doormat says “I’m family, you’re not. They love me, they’re only friends with you. To you, I’m just the pet, but here, I’m their baby.—Charlie.”
This perversity has infiltrated the Church. Some Christians don't evangelize human beings buy worry whether their cat will be in Heaven with them. Even popular “orthodox Catholic” authors who have caught on to sci-fi deceptions, succumb to the Animal Personhood Deception; buying into “studies” that show animals apable of rational communication, and only await our ability to “unlock their language.”
This deception is phrased as a “acknowledgment of how good God is in giving us animals.” We can only honor God in accordance with the order He has created. To “honors” food by overeating is gluttony; to “honor” an individual saint by regarding him as Divine and infallible is idolatry; to “honor” sex through promiscuity is lust. And in the present matter, the order God created is entirely unambiguous:
Of all visible creatures, only human beings bear His Divine Image. (Cat 357)
There are no exceptions. To violate that truth under the pretense of “honoring His creation” is to sin against His order which can become a means of diabolical instruction.
False and likely diabolical “private revelations” from the “Voice and Echo of the Divine Messengers” promote not only the ET Deception, but also the one now under consideration. They say that we must “love the Animal Kingdom as [we] love [our] own lives” (implying—heretically—that the Christian duty to love one’s neighbor as himself also applies to animals). They assert, “if you want to learn how to live love, let yourselves be loved by the Animal Kingdom.” In fact, animals cannot love, as they have no free will.
Remaining consistent with their own false premises, the messages likewise condemn the killing of animals for food, despite Scripture specifically allowing this. The “seers” themselves insist, “one of the greatest causes of problems in the world today—such as wars, physical illnesses and mental disorders—is the killing of animals.” As we can see, whatever dark spirit has inspired these messages is intent on its recipients believing not only in aliens, but also animal personhood.
Nor is this strategy in vain. If the Devil cannot seduce a soul into one NHI Deception, he will try another. Perhaps, for example, there is a lonely person somewhere who (rightly) has no excitement whatsoever when told of aliens or sentient AI or time travelling, but has poured all her love into her cat.
She wants nothing more than to commune with this animal as if it were a person. Such sentiments, if willfully fostered in her heart, constitute wandering outside of the boundaries of both basic reason and Christian Faith just as much as the other Deceptions we have addressed. She has strayed into the radius of the Devil’s chain, and there is no reason to suspect he will neglect to take advantage of that. He has already done so in many cases; as, for example, in the increasing numbers of pet owners seeking out “animal mediums” or “pet psychics.”
Animal Mediums and Pet Psychics
These charlatans claim to unlock the communication of living or deceased pets, and their antics are seducing not only devoted New Agers (as in days past), but, increasingly, more mainstream pet owners who now regard their cats and dogs as persons. Far more problematic than the loss of the money wasted on these “psychics,” however, is that demons will gladly use this fraud as an opportunity to subtly slip in destructive communications.
Among the demonic fruits of these “pet psychics” are destroyed marriages. A dog or cat can suddenly become a very effective inlet for Satan when, after a consultation with a “pet psychic,” it “becomes known” that the pooch “needs” tens of thousands of dollars of some medical treatment or a major life-change on the part of its owners. One spouse realizes this is ridiculous for a mere pet, while the other, due to his or her regard for the creature as if it were a person, feels compelled to insist upon it.
Sometimes, these charlatans will gladly destroy the family. All of this is the work of demons. Let us consider just one case; the woman who is perhaps the most famous “pet psychic,” Sonya Fitzpatrick. She claims to be on a mission from God, due to a “private revelation” (an ounce of discernment will indicate it is clearly of demonic origin). An article from the National Review details her “Divine calling” which arose:
...with the appearance of first an angel (“large wings...beautiful and gentle face”) and then St. Francis, both of who [sic] told Sonya that she was going to be working to help animals. It was God’s work.”[404]
When one peruses the letters posted on Sonya’s own website[405], however, he will quickly find that her undertaking is not of God. For example, one letter recounts Sonya “speaking for” the dead dog of a certain young woman who wrote to her. She tells this young woman that the dog (“Princess”) has a soul which has been together with her “in many lifetimes” and is “with her in spirit all the time.” (Reincarnation is a particular heresy that rears its head repeatedly in demonically-originated deceptions.)
This is the general pattern of today’s “pet psychic” industry, and here we can only repeat the same warning that Fr. Stanley Jaki provided with respect to the ET Deception: “Behind these bravados...you either see the strategy of the devil or you remain blind.” Many people (perhaps now numbering in the millions) around the world are receiving orders straight from hell by visiting these seemingly innocuous “mediums” in order to “learn what their cats and dogs are saying.” Here as elsewhere, one simple recognition could have prevented it all: the unqualified affirmation that only man bears the Divine Image.
Some [who] would be friends of animals are often their worst enemies, ‘heaping excessive affection on animals and bestowing on them what has been denied to our fellowmen.’ ... Further, animal lovers are sometimes cruel in their kindness, destroying the health and fine instincts of their animal companions by excessive pampering ... The Church, therefore, is careful not to (as Cardinal Gasparri says) ‘disturb the admirable order of Creation by despoiling man of his royal crown to cast it down at the feet of inferior creatures.’... Man was created in the image and likeness of God: animals were not. Man is rational, animal is irrational ... Man therefore is a person; animals are non-persons. Man is a person because he is an end in himself, and not a mere means to the perfection of beings of a higher order. Animals are not persons or moral beings, because devoid of reason and free will (and so of responsibility) and because they were created for the service of man, and as a means (if properly used) towards his perfection. Next after animals comes vegetative creation, not sentient, and destined for the service of man and beast.—Fr. Ambrose Agius, O.S.B.[406]
Cultural havoc commencing from "animal rights"
- Anti-human environmentalist groups pressure governments to lay massive burdens on struggling people to help a few birds, turtles, or other animals. While millions of humans languish in extreme poverty (across the globe, over half a billion)
- Pit bull attacks kill or disfigure hundreds of people (often children) each year in America alone. Governments are intimidated to do nothing. The “inalienable rights” of these beasts are being violated.
- Humans convicted of animal abuse are often given life distroying severe punishments. Flagrant animal abuse should be outlawedbut the disparity between this and the previous point is telling.
- Renewed attacks on meat-eating are made each year, from “zero carbon” agendas, or PETA.
- PETA also lobbies companies to not test their products on animals, which makes humans the new guinea pigs.
- It is difficult to find volunteers for soup kitchens and homeless shelters, armies of volunteers help cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, whales, or just about any other irrational animal.
- Many news stories about individuals who risk their lives to rescue an animal in a burning building or tornado. It is evil to consider any human being’s life (including one’s own) remotely close to on par with an animal’s. Many of these individuals wind up dead.
- While entire populations of humans languish for lack of proper housing (or any housing), untold millions of acres near them are absolutely off-limits as “wildlife refuges;” being cut-off from any human use.
- Dangerous, carcinogenic, noisy industrial establishments (dumps, landfills, factories, etc.) are built adjacent to heavily populated residential (poor) neighborhoods to protect animals in these “refuges.” Human beings, made in God’s image, suffer, while animals with no intrinsic and infinite value, who exist only for the sake of human beings, are the sole beneficiaries.
Indeed, even if we ignore the apocalyptic dimension of the Animal Personhood Deception, we are still left with a grand delusion that is being counted in human lives.
“Friendship cannot exist except towards rational creatures, who are capable of returning love, and communicating one with another in the various works of life ... The love of charity extends to none but God and our neighbor. But the word neighbor cannot be extended to irrational creatures, since they have no fellowship with man in the rational life. Therefore charity does not extend to irrational creatures.” -St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. I. Q19. A12. and II-II. Q25.
Animal communications with people
An academic and institutional phenomenon is gaining steam and merging with other sci-fi deceptions. We are seeing increasing studies about "unlocking" communications with animals. Announcements of the “Day of Disclosure” (aliens) and “Moment of Singularity” (rational AI) may well be accompanied by official announcements that a technology can now allow us to “learn the secrets of the world” from dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, ravens, or elephants.
Animals communicate with each other but this is not language or rational communication. No animal can have any knowledge, understanding, or wisdom of its own, much less can it convey such things to another being. All animals are creatures of pure instinct.
These instincts are astonishing wonders of creation designed by God—well deserving of our appreciation and scientific study—but they are never rational or free. Unfortunately, thi s is lost on atheistic modern scientists, who are well funded against a Christian world view.
Consider the September 2023 article in The New Yorker magazine, entitled “Can we talk to whales?” Not only is the present deception well summarized in its content, but so also is its relation to the ET and the AI Deceptions. The article follows Dr. David Gruber and charts the origin of his fascination with the communication methods of sperm whales. It then describes his encounter with another researcher:
One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award [the so-called “Nobel Prize of Computing”]-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges... Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas [whale communications] to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. at Oxford... Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species. “I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” ...
As the purse strings of scientific research are usually carefully monitored and controlled to further the preferred narrative of the global elite, we cannot avoid coming to certain conclusions in seeing how much money is now being funneled into ostensibly discovering how to communicate with whales and other Cetaceans (e.g., dolphins and porpoises).
Although this “knowledge from the whales” will, if and when it is announced, be nothing but a charade, it will nevertheless provide a disguise—as convenient as the ET and the AI Deceptions—for either a government-orchestrated psyop or even a more directly diabolical ploy. If a small group of deception-managers can present themselves as the world’s intermediaries between the “language of the whales” and humanity, then all that will be needed for the masses to readily accept the lies this dialogue promotes will be an established structure such as CETI which can be easily employed for that very end.
The article’s author joined CETI on some of its expeditions, and she described her own take on the clicks (“codas”) the whales emit by insisting they sounded “...as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.” The intended implication was clear. The article continues:
CETI received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project... Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet—six times the size of humans’. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal... Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions...[Gero told me,] “there’s some part of the sperm-whale experience that our primate brain just won’t understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we’re here.”... It may be that there are nuances in, say, pacing or pitch [of the codas] that have so far escaped human detection. Already, CETI team members have identified a new kind of signal—a single click—that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark...
Here we see the introduction of the deception, which will be emphasized later in the same article: whales will tell us “why we’re here”—as soon as we can “unlock their language.” They will reveal to us the meaning of life. The article then returns to the matter of Artificial Intelligence, recounting:
As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats... ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. ... In theory at least, what goes for English ... also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT... “One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets,” the team wrote ... CSAIL [the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T.,] is an enormous operation, with more than fifteen hundred staff members and students...[there, scientist Jacob Andreas] told me that CETI had already made significant strides...it had found that codas have much more internal structure than had previously been recognized. ...”The holy grail here—the thing that separates human language from all other animal communication systems—is what’s called ‘duality of patterning,’ ... sperm whales, too, [may] have arrived at duality of patterning. “Based on what we know about how the coda inventory works, I’m optimistic—though still not sure—that this is going to be something that we find in sperm whales,” Andreas said.
While The New Yorker strategically shies away from outright affirming whales engage in rational communication, it unabashedly implies that this is the case, and it fosters the expectation that we will, very soon, discover how to understand it. Returning to the article’s protagonist, David Gruber, we are given a closer look at his inspirations and expectations. Referring to the famous environmentalist Roger Payne, Gruber relays:
“I always look to Roger’s work as a guiding star...he thought that CETI could be much more impactful. If we could understand what they’re saying, instead of ‘save the whales’ it will be ‘saved by the whales.’ “This project is kind of an offering,” [Gruber] went on. “Can technology draw us closer to nature? Can we use all this amazing tech we’ve invented for positive purposes?” ChatGPT shares this hope. Or at least the A.I.-powered language model is shrewd enough to articulate it. In the version of “Moby-Dick” written by algorithms in the voice of a whale, the story [I asked it to write] ends with a somewhat ponderous but not unaffecting plea for mutuality: “I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean’s embrace.”
The convergence of deceptions here is stunning both in its audacity and unabashedly apocalyptic aspirations. The managers of this massively funded “CETI” operation admit that their desire is not, like the environmentalist of old, merely to “save the whales,” but rather to enable mankind to be “saved by the whales.”
The final line in the quote above is the same one with which the article concludes. It was apparently produced by Artificial Intelligence in response to an instruction for it to generate a version of Moby Dick written from the perspective of the whale. It’s plea? “Man and whale” understanding each other—humans “finding harmony” with the “White Leviathan.” Scarcely could one manage to describe more accurately the dark reality latent in this deception. One wonders if this AI program’s output, in this case, consisted in the very possibility we considered earlier, wherein the demons themselves can influence digital technology. Leviathan, of course, is a Biblical term. Although many recall it from the Book of Job, its most relevant usage may be in Isaiah:
On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea. (Isaiah 27:1)
“Leviathan,” therefore, is a symbol for the Devil. Yet we are here presented with a White Leviathan—the Devil masquerading as a benevolent being. And, as we have seenother articles in this series, there is no more convenient way for him to do so than through the various elements of the NHI Deception.
A return of pagan animal practices
Discerning Christians should both be aware of the dark undercurrents of this movement and sound the alarm to warn others. As an article in the popular periodical, Scientific American, declared in February 2023 (even inviting Pagan practices into the foray): ...
“deep listening” has a long and venerable tradition. It’s an ancient art ... There are long-standing Indigenous traditions of deep listening that are deeply attuned to nonhuman sounds.
So if we combine digital listening—which is opening up vast new worlds of nonhuman sound and decoding that sound with artificial intelligence—with deep listening, I believe that we are on the brink of two important discoveries.
The first is language in nonhumans. ...
The second is: I believe we’re at the brink of interspecies communication... That is where artificial intelligence comes in—because the same natural-language-processing algorithms that we are using to such great effect in tools such as Google Translate can also be used to detect patterns in nonhuman communication...digital bioacoustics, combined with artificial intelligence, is like a planetary-scale hearing aid that enables us to listen anew with both our prosthetically enhanced ears and our imagination. This is slowly opening our minds not only to the wonderful sounds that nonhumans make but to a fundamental set of questions about the so-called divide between humans and nonhumans, our relationship to other species.[407]
Here is essentially a return of the Pagan “gods.” What is now brewing, however, is far more dangerous, since today’s Paganism-revival has the backing of “the science,” and the mythology of science fiction lending it almost unanimous (secular) cultural endorsement and excitement. Whales, bulls, cats, bears, dogs, elephants, monkeys, ravens, and more, all factor heavily into ancient Pagan idolatry across various pre-Christian cultures scattered about the world, which also often advocated for the view that human souls are reincarnated into the bodies of animals in “other lives.” All such doctrines are, of course, diabolical, and what is brewing now is a (pseudo) scientific revival of them.
When today’s scientists tell us they have unlocked the language of one or more of these irrational creatures and that we can now “learn their hitherto secret knowledge,” they will be putting on a charade no less deceptive than the shamans and oracles of old. But they will be providing an even more powerful opening for the activity of demons than those shamans could ever dream of.