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According to the Hare Krsnas, the soul is a teeny little thing. I conceive of their idea of the soul as being a tiny pill-shaped translucent thing, with a gradient of hippie colors (to demonstrate how close or far it is to or from enlightenment). It subtly affects and is affected by the person animated by the soul; as if the person and the soul seep into each other.
I spoke with a evangelistic Christian holding a big sign on a street corner, and asked him some of these questions. According to him, the soul is the ability to think and to feel emotions. I asked him a out cats, and he answered with horses. Supposedly with some basis in the Bible, he said that horses have souls and that there are horses and motley other animals in Heaven. I started asking him if horses could go to hell or heaven, and what determined where they went; whether and how the criteria were different for horses than humans. He answered that he thought that horses had a different deal with God than humans do. However, both are God's creations, and hence in part why he felt that the questions of the afterlife should be similar for humans and horses.
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