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Biggest Slapstick Joke Since Vaudeville

By: George Wallace

Humans have souls. This may be the biggest slapstick joke since vaudeville. This may be the second biggest egocentric concept and assumption. It reassures us humans that we have importance, especially to someone as powerful as God. This idea does a lot for humans. It allows us to believe that there is life after death. This idea allows us to believe that we have a connection to God.

This idea permits a self-indulgent, a self-satisfaction degree of pride that we are “better than” animals. It justifies, only to ourselves, our otherwise stupid actions in knowingly, or unknowingly, changing our environment in disastrous ways. It justifies to ourselves for giving ourselves a sanctioned license to “seek dominion over all of the earth”. If you read (Genesis 9:16), this might not be a good idea. God plainly says He has a relationship with animals.

I worry a lot more about this question than I ever have about the existence of God. I have felt connected to God as long as I can remember. I have never known if He has ever answered one of my prayers. We humans, and Me, Myself, and I, want desperately to believe that we are important. We want it so much, so badly, that we could have invented the idea of “soul” to fight the observable facts of sudden, violent, or slow, disease-driven death.

We could have invented soul to give ourselves false, but inspired, hope. And, then as an after thought, we may have invented “God” to “create” our souls. In other words, a falsehood nested inside a falsehood, circular and self-supporting. You know how lies can grow and grow with each telling, until you are trapped in a fine mesh net of your own falsehoods. That worry worms inside my consciousness and causes me to squirm intellectually more than a bad case of hemorrhoids.

The closest I have ever come to evidence of soul is as follows. There was a time and place when there was this custom of sitting up with the dead. When my grandfather died, my father, at about age 16, was considered old enough to take part in this custom. My father, a devoutly religious man all his life, swore to me with his hand on his Bible, when I challenged his story; that as he sat there, observing his father’s corpse, that he saw what he interpreted as the “soul” leave my grandfather’s body and ascend upwards until it vanished through the ceiling. I believe my father believed that it did happen. I still have to question.

Humans are not the only intelligent species in the universe. I think God has been running around like Johnny Appleseed for 30 billion years planting His Gardens all over His universe. Why waste all that good gardening space? God does not waste. Other sentient species have got to also be a part of God and His Plan.

Animals, life forms of all sorts, even insects and plants may also have a part of Deity, or soul implanted in them. This would maximize God’s ability to learn without waste of the other possible strands of DNA operating on this planet. I think that God began His system of soul placement very early in the development of life. As the life forms gained in complexity, God's ability to use life to gather information and learn from it grew. To think that God waited until humans evolved is simply more egocentricism. God expects nothing more of us than He does of any other species.


(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, and the priesthood. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will interest everyone. This article may be freely reprinted so long as all copyright attributions, and the full content of this resource box are included. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

Article Source: http://www.writerspenarticledirectory.com


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