The fellows who put pen to paper in ancient times to transcribe the bible from the source documents had never seen an ape and didn't even know what they were. It's certainly not clear that God ever illuminated them to the nature of apes.
Ever see a mother mountain gorilla tend her baby? That's exactly how human mothers do it. We have some over here in the zoo and we stop by to see them every now and then. There can be no doubt that we and they are kin.
God's message to mankind also extends to those who we identify as animals ~ else God would not have asked us to name them ~ or to treat them "humanely" ~
Otherwise, animals are just meat.
That mindset has caused some people on these thread to even deny that humans are mammals. They pointedly mock those who recognize that humans are descended from other apes. And they explicitly base their beliefs on the bible, because the bible says that humans were made in the image of God. Why they would believe such stuff is beyond me. Why don't you ask them.
Ever see a mother mountain gorilla tend her baby? That's exactly how human mothers do it. We have some over here in the zoo and we stop by to see them every now and then. There can be no doubt that we and they are kin.
Well, if you can understand that we are evolutionarily related to the other apes, then you are not of the mindset of those I described. They refuse to believe that humans and the other apes are related at all.
God's message to mankind also extends to those who we identify as animals ~ else God would not have asked us to name them ~ or to treat them "humanely" ~
Of course, you have to buy into the rest of the religion in the first place for this to be so.
Otherwise, animals are just meat.
This attitude -- that nature and the animals in nature are nothing but tools for humans to use -- is another notion that I find all to familiar in some religious people and quite distasteful.