Long Lost Logos

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
- Albert Einstein 

For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
- Jesus Christ

Are humans merely a fancy breed of ape, no more special than any other beast on the planet? Is our existence inherently devoid of purpose? Is the search for meaning, happiness, and fulfilment a pointless pursuit?

Or are we different from other animals? Were we chosen by a higher power for a special purpose? Do we hold within ourselves a fragment of the divine, and is this fragment key to achieving joy and fulfillment?

Dan Meilleur did a fantastic job laying out the particulars of this debate in his post entitled "Special or Not?" In it, Meilleur clearly disagrees with the Judeo-Christian view of humanity's superior status. He states that

human life is no more important or intrinsically valuable than that of a kangaroo, a carrot, or a flea. Our sentience is different, yes, but our importance--our “special-ness”--is not.

Meilleur rightfully blames the Judeo-Christian view--that the creator of the universe personally made us, takes an interest in our daily activities, and that the earth is our birthright--for some of the problems we are facing as a species today. By thinking that we are superior to other lifeforms and that the earth is ours to subjugate, we can pollute and destroy without a shred of remorse.

On the other hand, blaming a book or ideology for human behavior is like blaming a wrench for the mechanic's sloppy work. The Bible isn't at fault: our interpretation of the Bible is.

There are splinters of wisdom and insight embedded within the Bible but in order to glimpse them we must read the Bible symbolically, as it was always meant to be read. The problem is that many people interpret the Bible as a literal history of the universe and in doing so miss the truth contained within its pages.

What truth?

That humans are indeed special; that we were chosen by a higher power for a specific purpose; that we carry a shard of that higher power within ourselves; and, that this shard of the divine is key to  discovering our purpose and achieving happiness.

Best of all, this truth does not contradict reason or modern scientific understanding; to the contrary, the two sides, seemingly at odds, compliment each other remarkably well. Let's examine the statements listed above.

We are Special

This isn't hubris, folks. Just look around you for a moment. You see the cars driving by, buildings towering above, and planes shooting across the sky? Did gorillas make these wonders? Did ants? Fleas? Seagulls?

I'm not saying we're special as in "better" or "superior" to other animals, nor am I saying that we aren't animals: we most certainly are. When I say special, I only mean that we are otherwise different from what is usual. If humans are animals, and no other animal has come close to rivalling our accomplishments, then one cannot deny that we are somehow different.

What is it that distinguishes us from our animal relatives?

The ability to analyze, hypothesize, organize, predict, and override our biological programming. Combined, these allow us to literally rearrange the world around us into forms that serve our needs. Tables, street-signs, wheelchairs, pace-makers, computers, and every other human-made object on the planet was once raw material which we extracted and reshaped for our own purposes.

No other animal on earth can do this.

That's not to say that we should mistreat other animals or subject them to needless cruelty; only that we are indeed different from them. As you will see, the thing that makes us different also demands that we take care of one another and treat all lifeforms with dignity and respect.

We were Chosen

It's important not to get hung up on terminology here. When I say we were chosen by a higher power, I don't mean that we were hand-crafted by a bearded sky-father. I don't mean that a deity told us that earth and everything on it was ours to do with as we please.

When I say we were chosen, I mean that we are the product of evolution, which is also called natural selection. This implies that certain lifeforms are selected or chosen to survive, breed, and evolve further. And since we exist here and now, we can safely assume that we are among the races chosen by nature to survive and fulfill our purpose.

When I say higher power, I'm not referring to an anthropomorphic deity who judges and doles out punishment to his unruly children; I'm talking about the "superior reasoning power which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe," as Einstein put it. It's the pantheistic God, aka the Universe. Nature is simply the creative spirit organizing God's parts into ever more complex forms.

Humans just so happen to be the most complex form on earth and, in all likelihood, in the solar system. If that doesn't make us special, I don't know what does.

We have a Purpose

When comparing like objects, what leads us to judge one as superior to the other? For instance, what makes one type of car better or more valuable than another? Only this: that one fulfills its purpose more efficiently, beautifully, and effectively than the other.

If a garden produces an abundance of fruit and another very little, one will judge the first to be better than the second. It is because a garden serves a purpose: to bear fruit.

We hold in our minds ideas of what different things ought to do and prize those that do it best.

In order to discern our purpose as a species, we must look at the basic functions or traits of human beings. What are some hallmarks of humanity? What is unique about us? What do we do better than other animals?

In other words, what is our function?

First, we are social animals. This isn't a unique trait, of course. Most animals function in packs, tribes, colonies, etc. but no other species has devised such vast and complex social networks, nor leveraged them into a global civilization. No other animal has developed advanced methods of communication, nor the ability to contact others instantly across vast distances.

Second, and more importantly, we are reasoning animals. This, I believe, is the thing that also makes us special. Without the ability to recognize and analyze patterns, organize information, plan, predict, and rationalize, we would be no different from our cousins, the great apes.

There is no other trait that is uniquely ours. Everything else we do, every other skill or attribute we possess, exists in the animal world in greater abundance. We are not the strongest, fastest, or most resilient beast in the animal kingdom. Only reason allows us to reshape the world around us and more importantly, override our biological programming or instincts so that we may act rationally.

And so, in order to fulfill our purpose as human beings, we must first employ reason, our greatest tool, in all aspects of our lives and second concern ourselves with the common good of those around us.

The Divine is Within

If you agree with the above, this last one--which at first glance is probably the least believable of the bunch--becomes much easier to grasp.

The Universe is a higher power and Nature is the creative spirit that shapes and governs its parts. Using Nature, the Universe recycles and reinvents itself, moving from simplicity to complexity and manifesting itself into new forms.

Doesn't that sound a whole lot like what we do with our surroundings? We take existing matter in its crude form, refine it, reshape it, assemble it, and put it to work fulfilling some new purpose. It's this very ability that distinguishes us from other animals, and coincidentally, it is the very thing that drives the Universe along.

If we regard Nature as the intellectual force of the Universe, the thing that drives evolution in all its myriad forms, and we alone of all the animals on earth are capable of imitating the Universe, doesn't it stand to reason that we too must possess a fragment of the universal intellect?

That's what a bunch of ancient philosophers believed. They called this piece of the divine intellect the Logos and they claimed that only through it could humans find salvation.  Oddly enough, Christianity agrees with this notion. In the opening verses of John's Gospel, the author refers to the Logos by name, claiming that

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

We later find out that the Logos came down to earth in the form a man named Jesus Christ, who tells us that he is "the way and the truth and the life" and that "no one comes to the Father" except through him.

The Father is none other than the wondrous Universe itself and the only way we can truly know God and find salvation is through the Logos, which dwells within each and every one of us.

Conclusion

We have inherited a great and powerful gift that no other animal on earth possesses. That makes us special, but not invincible, and it certainly doesn't give us the right to poison our beautiful planet or abuse the other lifeforms who dwell upon it.

We would do well to remember Uncle Ben's warning to a young Peter Parker: "With great power comes great responsibility."

Atheists like to point to the book of Genesis as the source of our reckless behavior and ego-centrism. What they ignore is the second chapter of this book, which retells the creation story from a slightly different perspective. Here we are told that God made us to look after his garden. In other words, we are the earth's caretakers, not its masters.

As such, we must look out for our home and all its inhabitants. We must strengthen reason in our minds and use it to govern our instincts and passions. We must banish ignorance and destroy greed. We must put our petty, superficial differences aside and look to one another for strength, love, and support.

Alone even the mightiest human can accomplish very little; but together, working coherently toward a set of common goals, we can finally stop worshiping imaginary gods and become gods ourselves.

Look around you again. Clearly we've already begun our transformation but our progress is hindered. Along with the Logos, we carry the baggage of our animal heritage--our tendencies toward tribalism, violence, competition, insecurity, and fear--and this burden threatens to grind our progress to a halt.

Only the light of the Logos can frighten the animal mind into its cage where it rightfully belongs.

The holy spirit isn't upon you: it's inside you. You need only awaken it to transform your life and the lives of those around you.

/rant over

Gospel of Seneca (Letters from the Past III)

I'm not gonna lie: I have a serious man-crush on Lucius Seneca.

His insights into human behavior are painfully accurate and just as valid now as they were nearly 2,000 years ago. Dude's a poet, too. He sprinkles vivid imagery and allegories throughout his letters, helping readers grasp ideas that might otherwise elude them. The word "epic" is terribly overused these days but I can think of no better way to describe Seneca's writing.

Seneca's philosophy really speaks to me, but lately it's his spiritual side that gets me inspired. His theology is a fascinating blend of pantheism and pagan spirituality layered with Christian overtones. He uses words like "God" and "heaven" liberally, regards earthly matters as secondary to spiritual ones, and believes that the human soul can be liberated from the body.

Despite the apparent similarities between Christianity and Seneca's Gospel, there is no mistaking Seneca's God with its Biblical counterpart, Yahweh.

Seneca's God is the pantheistic God, aka Nature, aka the universe. It's the intelligent force organizing matter into ever more complex forms, of which we are the pinnacle. 

Likewise, Seneca's soul is radically different from the winged ghost that rises from your corpse and floats peacefully up to heaven after you die.

Or, not so peacefully?

According to the Stoic philosophers, reason is a divine gift, a fragment of the universal programming that keeps the machine running smoothly. As such, Seneca swaps the word "soul" with other terms such as "ruling faculty" or "Logos." He could just as easily call it "mind" or "consciousness," as far as I'm concerned. The semantics aren't that important.

Because he believes that the mind is of divine origin, Seneca holds the material world in somewhat low esteem. This opinion extends by default to the meat-vehicles we inherit at birth. This body of ours, Seneca says,

is a weight upon the soul and a penance; as the load presses down the soul is crushed and is in bondage, unless philosophy has come to its assistance and has bid it take fresh courage by contemplating the universe, and has turned it from things earthly to things divine. 

Note the abrupt departure from Christianity. Whereas Christians believe that only Christ can save one's soul, Seneca believes philosophy is the guide to spiritual freedom.

The soul, imprisoned as it has been in this gloomy and darkened house, seeks the open sky whenever it can, and in the contemplation of the universe finds rest. The wise man, the seeker after wisdom, is bound closely to his body, but he concentrates his thoughts upon lofty things.

Reflecting on the universe frees your consciousness from its prison of flesh and allows it to roam among the lofty things where it may find enlightenment. One who has begun this process of spiritual liberation finds their priorities radically realigned:

Bound so to speak, to his oath of allegiance, he regards the period of life as his term of service. He is so trained that he neither loves nor hates life; he endures a mortal lot, although he knows that an ampler lot is in store for him. 

Such a message will sound backward to someone entrenched in our materialistic society. Why waste time pursuing wisdom and contemplating the cosmos? Why not focus on reality, on the tangibles, on the here and now? As always, Seneca answers with brilliance:

Mortal things decay, fall, are worn out, grow up, are exhausted, and replenished. Reason, however, is nothing else than a portion of the divine spirit set in a human body. 

And then:

Must I be ignorant of the heights whence I have descended? Whether I am to see this world but once, or to be born many times? What is my destination afterwards? What abode awaits my soul on its release from the laws of slavery among men? Do you you forbid me to have a share in heaven?

In other words, do you bid me live with my head bowed down? No, I am above such an existence; I was born to a greater destiny than to be a mere chattel of my body. And I regard this body as nothing but a chain, which manacles my freedom.

Not only does Seneca view the body as secondary to the mind, he goes one step further and identifies it as a form of imprisonment. Epictetus, another Stoic, says: "You are a little soul carrying around a corpse." The body, in other words, is luggage, a burden, an anchor weighing down your soul.

I must restate that Seneca and other Stoics don't promote mistreating or neglecting the body: quite the opposite, they value a life of self-discipline, exercise, and proper diet. The body houses the Logos, after all, a piece of God, and as such should be well-maintained. Seneca is simply saying that the body should serve the mind, not the other way around:

World-matter corresponds to our mortal body; therefore let the lower serve the higher. Let us be brave in the face of hazards. Let us not fear wrongs, or wounds, or bonds, or poverty. 

That last bit is also stated by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, by the way, when he advises us not to "fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul."

The physical world is always pressing us to take action. We scramble and toil to stay afloat and in the process neglect the single most important thing in our lives: our mind. Take a little time out of your day to exercise this gift which you have received from the universe.

Don't let society stifle your curiosity. Send your thoughts outward to explore the wonders of the cosmos. Answer every question that crosses your mind. Contemplate your place and purpose in this vast and glorious universe and you will find the world in which you dwell changed forever.

/rant over

Delusion of Consciousness

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

--Albert Einstein

You're not your ancestors.

You're not your culture.

You're not your beliefs.

You're not your government, country, or flag.

You're not the labels forced upon you by society.

You're not even an individual. You see yourself as distinct, as whole, as singular, as separate from your fellow humans and your environment, but this is a delusion of your consciousness.

This delusion robs you of your humanity. It distorts your perspective. It tricks you into seeing an enemy in the face of your brother. It causes you to identify with falsehoods and trivial matters. 

Stop attaching yourself to things that aren't you. Stop perpetuating the sins of your fathers. Wake up and do better than your predecessors.

Evolve.

We all come from the same source. Whether you believe that source is Adam, the first man, or a single-cell prokaryote that came to life 3.5 billion years ago, it makes no difference: you agree that we are all related. Look around you at the war, genocide, poverty, famine, and pollution.

Why is our family so dysfunctional?

All humans know love and fear, joy and suffering, hope and despair. Recognize yourself in the face of your so-called enemy. See that they are, on the most basic level, no different from you. They yearn to live, loath to suffer, and pursue happiness.

Beneath your religious beliefs, ethnic identity, cultural conditioning, judgments, biases, and petty grudges, aren't you the exact same? If you loath to suffer, how can you justify making others suffer? If you yearn to live, how can you justify taking the life of another?

So long as a corrupt few succeed in convincing you that we're all different, that we can't get along, and that our well-being and survival depends on the suffering and death of others, we will never know peace. In Ephesians 6:12, Paul writes:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high [places].

Greed and ignorance are the powers against which we wrestle.

Greed is a sickness that corrupts men to their very core. It is an insatiable hunger for power that overrides all other desires and decencies. Ignorance, on the other hand, allows the greedy to spread their lies, thereby facilitating their actions. Do you not question why governments are always cutting funds to public education, the one thing that could improve the lives of the masses?

The corrupt spread lies to muddle your identity. Any time you identify as a patriot, God-fearing Christian, libertarian, or anything else that isn't truly you, you are being mislead. False labels are like double-agents; they infiltrate your psyche, sabotage your personality, and create turmoil within. The real you cannot thrive in such a chaotic environment.

As the psalmist wrote, "Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it." Not for God and the reward of heaven but for yourself, here and now, and for your brothers and sisters across the world.

Everything is made up of the same universal coding, 1's and 0's stacked in a dizzying array of configurations. We see differences by virtue of imperfect sense-organs. We feel solid matter where there is empty space. We see colour where light strikes pigment and rebounds into our eyes. We smell and taste particles with the little receptors in our noses and mouths. We touch surfaces and judge them smooth or rough, yet these are merely signals from nerve to mind.

All is illusion. Nothing is as it seems.

What you call reality is only your imperfect and subjective interpretation of the Truth, which is this: the universe manifests itself through matter and energy, but through humans it also experiences itself.

As Alan Watts wrote:

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

Come together now. Stop killing one another over superficial and illusory differences. The words "Israelite" and "Palestinian" are symbols attached to vague meaning. We need not be subject to words and labels. We need not recognize imaginary lines drawn by dead men. We need not resort to violence and conflict to resolve our quarrels.

We can work together instead of against each other.

There can be no peace in the world until we find peace within ourselves, and this is impossible to do so long as we believe the lie of individuality. Awaken the light inside yourself and dispel the delusion of your consciousness.

Dissolve your ego. There is no "you," only the collective of which you are a part.

/rant over

Metaphor

Have you ever had a genuine spiritual experience?

No, I don't mean speaking in tongues or hearing a deity's voice in your head--that's called being crazy. What I mean is coming face to face with something profound, mysterious, or unimaginably beautiful and experiencing a moment of peace and wordless understanding.

The feeling eludes definition. Trying to grasp it with your mind simply disperses it back into the ether, leaving behind an imperfect memory. If you tried, you might describe it with words like "awe," "reverence," "wonder," or "zen."

People often experience such moments while deeply pondering biblical scripture. The words, chosen and arranged carefully by people who were well-versed in the language of the spirit, allow the reader to slip through the doors of symbolism and into the deeper meaning hidden within.

That's the core of every spiritual experience: cutting through falsehood, illusion, and symbolism to glimpse the guiding principle that governs and underlies all things.

For a brief moment, you break through the barrier and reconnect, if only briefly, to the source.

Religion is not the only door through which one may experience revelation. One may find it by meditating, stumbling upon a scene of natural beauty, reading an eloquent line of poetry, or contemplating ideas related to the guiding principle.

For me, there is no better way to incur a genuine spiritual experience than by studying the vastness, majesty, and complexity of the universe, and realizing how blessed we are to experience it for this brief moment of awareness.

It's no coincidence that our ancestors felt drawn to the night sky, that the dancing lights and their movements became the first human myths, and that those myths turned into religions. Even back then we sensed that we were a part of something greater than ourselves.

Just how great is that "something?"

Forget the universe for a moment and think only of our Milky Way galaxy, which measures 120,000 light years in diameter. It contains between 100 and 400 billions stars held together in a whirling spiral by the immense gravitational pull of the super-massive black hole at its center. Oh, and it's hurtling through space toward the Andromeda galaxy at 110 kilometers per second. Even at this velocity, the collision won't occur for another 4 billion years or so.

Delve down to the subatomic and here too you will find a micro-cosmos filled with mind blowing factoids. Particles pop in and out of existence and all matter is composed almost entirely of empty space. Want a real spiritual experience? Learn about string theory.

It should come as no surprise that many great scientists and philosophers have come to regard the universe itself as a divine being of sorts. By using reason, thinkers throughout history have been able to scratch and peel away reality's thin veneer, revealing the Truth beneath.

Far from being at odds with spirituality, science actually complements it.

If a greater understanding of space, evolution, nature, biology, and the human mind fills you with awe, reverence, and/or wonder, then you may be a pantheist. And you're in very good company, too. Some of the greatest thinkers in human history were also pantheists.

What is Pantheism?

Pantheism is the fusing together of science and spirituality. It is the recognition of something great, mysterious, and holy in the inner-workings of the cosmos. 

Don't let the "theism" at the end of the word fool you: pantheism isn't a religion. There's no doctrine, church, or holy book. Pantheists don't worship Yahweh or take the Bible as literal truth.

The star-studded firmament is the pantheist's Sistine Chapel; the secluded wood is her temple; science is her scripture.

Who is her God? Let's ask our good friend Seneca:

If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of a deity.

Nature--and by extension, the universe--is the pantheistic God.

Which begs the question: what if God was always meant to be a metaphor for the universe? What if our ancestors were trying to verbalize what they saw above and felt within? It may not be apparent at first, but God and the universe have a lot in common.

God is without maker; the universe appears to be the same.

God is everywhere at all times; so is the universe.

God is an intelligent designer; so is the universe. Evolution is the universe's unseen hands: with them, it took three elements--hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of lithium--and made all the marvels you see around you.

In Romans 8:11, the apostle Paul writes: "The Spirit of God lives in you." In 1 Corinthians 3:16, he writes: "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?" 2 Timothy 1:14: "Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us." And so on.

Seneca, who influenced the early Christian movement, wrote the following: "God is near you, he is with you, he is within you."

What about the universe? According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, rock star astrophysicist and host of the TV show Cosmos:

We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us. 

God is a stickler for rules. So is the universe! And whereas God's rules are often nonsensical or arbitrary, the universe's rules are measurable, testable, and constant. Gravity, the speed of light, evolution, thermodynamics, and a slew of other laws govern matter at every level, from the subatomic to the cosmological.

God speaks through divine revelation; the universe speaks through mathematics.

God loves to play favorites. Jews, Muslims, and Christians--not to mention the countless sects fragmenting each of these groups--all claim to be the chosen people of God.

The universe plays favorites, too. It has selected humanity to inherit its most valuable gift--a piece of its own ruling faculty, which the ancients called the Logos. How do we know this? Look around you. No other animal on earth has the ability to reason, to theorize, to test, to create, to unravel complex problems, and to transform its environment. No other animal has discovered a way to decipher the universe's secret language.

Make no mistake: we are not special in the universe's eyes. It did not knowingly choose us to receive its gift. Circumstance made us beneficiaries; we are free to use our inheritance for good or for ill, and in doing so we decide our own fate.

***

So when a pantheist refers to God, he isn't talking about the Abrahamic God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims; he refers to the pantheistic God of Lucius Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, and many others.

Let's be real: he's a closet pantheist.

The pantheistic God won't intervene in our affairs. It won't bring us salvation or damnation. It gave us a powerful tool and set us loose. It is entirely up to us to learn how to use this tool and put it to good use. If enough people can do this, we may one day bring everlasting peace to earth without the aid of an imaginary sky-father.

/rant over

Trinity

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead. 

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man." 

--Albert Einstein

There is embedded deep inside the human psyche a powerful urge to venerate, worship, kneel before, and praise forces that transcend and overwhelm our limited mental faculties. It’s no wonder: we’re surrounded on all sides by the wonders and terrors of nature and beyond that by an endless black sea dotted with twinkling stars, each one a nuclear furnace suspended by unseen hands in the great void of space.

In eras past we gave these forces names, faces, and personalities eerily like our own. We grafted humanity onto the elemental. We saw the workings of a superior intellect in the unfeeling, unthinking forces of nature and attributed commandments to it.

Now, in this age of science, we have lost our gods and replaced them with false idols. We worship money, praise celebrity, and place ourselves on altars of our own making. We no longer look upon the cosmos with awe and wonder as our ancestors did. We no longer love that which made us and sustains us.

We have lost touch with the divine that is all around us.

We need not worship false gods or false idols when real deities abound. We can praise our creators without violating the laws of science. Reason and spirituality are not foes: they come from the same source, that undying spark smoldering in the unexplored recesses of your mind, and can be potent allies.

Let us give praise to those who played a hand in our creation; not the gods fabricated by our ancestors but those we can see, touch, hear, and feel.

Let us venerate a holy trinity deserving of our love, fascination, and respect.

Universe
Grand Creator, your thunderous and violent awakening 13.7 billion years ago made possible all that we see today, from the star-studded firmament to the earth beneath our feet.

Like a child roused from sleep you unfolded and stretched forth your limbs across the void, giving form to the formless. We approach you humbly, mere bacteria in your galactic gut, and thank you for bestowing upon each of us consciousness, reason, and free-will so that we may have a brief moment of awareness against the backdrop of Eternity.

We humans are but parts in your galactic machinery, awakened by way of the Logos to the nature of the machinery itself.

We are the culmination of your intelligent design, for what is evolution if not the most intelligent design of all? You worked tirelessly throughout the epochs, painstakingly weeding out organisms ill-suited for life on earth, until there rose an organism capable of receiving your holy spirit and deciphering your secret language.

We gladly accept your gifts, Grand Creator, and employ them to unravel the layers of mystery in which you are cloaked.

Sun

The ancients recognized your power and importance, Mighty Sun. They watched your movements obsessively, tracing your path across the heavens and calculating with great accuracy the waxing and waning of your reign. Our ancestors used your journey through the stars as a model for some of their most poignant myths, many of which live on to this very day.

They saw in your cyclical journey a parallel to the human life. Childhood, adulthood, middle age, and old age: these are the seasons and the transition from each to the other is akin to death and rebirth.

Even the final passage from life is but the dissolution of our parts back to the earth, which yields up more life--another rebirth--until time indefinite.

Imagine if the ancients knew that you set the planets in their orbits and that your light make life as we know it possible; how much would they have worshiped you then? Yet even in their ignorance, they venerated you above all others.

You formed the worlds that surround you and made life possible on this, our one and only home. For this we thank you.

Earth

Enduring and benevolent Mother, you bore life in your womb from its infancy and released it upon dry land. Aided by evolution--the master-worker--and nourished by the Mighty Sun's rays, that life matured and spread forth to cover every inch of you and to become one with your flesh.

The jungles and forests are your lungs; the soil your skin; the mountains your bones; the seas and winds your circulatory system.

We are not your masters, as some would believe, nor have you been given to us for subjugation. We are but lice clinging to your hide. We depend on you for protection, hiding beneath your invisible cloak from the poisons of space. We depend on your for food and drink. In fact, all that we possess--all the discoveries we have made and wonders we have erected--is made possible only by your grace.

We ought to approach you in reverence and thanks; instead, we inject poison into your flesh and fill your lungs with noxious gasses. We are a sickness unto you but by no means a terminal one.

You will endure long after all traces of our existence have faded away.

It is only ourselves who need be concerned with the destruction we sew upon you. The forces of greed and ignorance cause you discomfort perhaps, but threaten to bring us to a final extinction.

We come to you begging for guidance: teach us to live in harmony with you and the plethora of life you have birthed; to restore balance to your body; and to cleanse you of the filth we have spread into every part of you.

Amun.

/rant over