Tis the Season (of death and heartache)

One of the things that marks a person as belonging to a modern faith is having modern concerns.

What counts as a modern concern?

Premarital sex? Back in the fabled Puritan beginnings of the United States some towns had more than 90% of their children get pregnant before marriage. The modern US tends to do a lot better than that these days. Premarital sex is clearly not a modern concern. In fact, I don't consider premarital sex a concern at all, but then this probably doesn't surprise any of my readers.

Homosexuality? This is even less of a modern concern, being that some of our nearest genetic relatives also engage in homosexual acts it seems this is something that actually predates humanity. Don't believe me? Check out some of the antics of the bonobos. Check your local zoo to see if they have them, though be warned that a lot of zoos do not have bonobos as they embarrass the zoo patrons.

Automobiles are clearly a modern concern. Some might say that all of the common well-established religions predate the automobile.

Now, this week, I'm not going somewhere weird here. This has nothing to do with whether or not cars have souls or deities. This is just the modern phenomena of driving vehicles about.

I got a driver's license specifically because I knew driving would be required living where I do. This is the case for an unfortunate vast part of the US. I was in my mid-twenties before I got my license.

This is to say, by the time I got my license, I had done a lot of work on myself. I had become the sort of person that was prone to crying both when sad as well as when happy. I think of it as being tender-hearted.

Now, my family got together (as they continue to do) several times in the fall and winter. I always had a nice quiet drive for much of the way, but what struck me was always how much roadkill I passed. It pulled and tugged on my heart to the point where at times I would be risking my ability to see the road, due to the tears.

I had to do something about it. So I prepared to pray to the dead. It is heart-breaking to see the dead. Sometimes you'll see a friend or family member to the corpse, walk up, as if to ask if the animal is alright. While I prayed, I wept. I wept for the dead, left beside the road to rot or to be gathered up to be discarded like any other detritus. No one gains with roadkill. It isn't part of some grand circle of life, with everyone eating someone else. It is a life, cut short and abandoned, to feed nothing but bacteria.

Now, I'm not a vegetarian. I understand that animals eat other animals, and you can bet most of the roadkill (except, alas for some of the poor pets) know this quite well. It's a world filled with the hunt, prey and hunters abound. This is, after all, normal and natural when it comes to the natural world. Those we kill with our cars are not part of this natural cycle. They are not killed for food, they're not even killed for pleasure. We take nothing from them but their lives. We give back nothing but pain and loss.

My compromise -- since I can't quit driving -- is to acknowledge the dead as I pass them. I say "Bless its soul." I say this anytime I see anything that could be roadkill. I say this sometimes when I think I see trash or leaves. I say this when there are animals too close to the street -- bless them and protect them so they don't wind up as more corpses on our roads.

I'm freer than perhaps I need to be with my blessings. In truth, I do this so I don't need to look closely. I've seen what I thought was a leaf in the road (that I blessed -- and avoided hitting) turn out to be a live animal. It is enough to know that it has been blessed, if I don't see it clearly then perhaps I am lucky.

How many people talk about peace and love and nature without acknowledging the pain and heartache we bring in our wake?

Deities and animal spirits

It is my belief that cats, for one, have their own deities. I also believe that at least some of their deities enjoy live sacrifices and prolonged torture. I am distinctly a cat-person, mind you, but there's something about some cat behavior that seems best explained by this. Sure, part of it is the cats trying to teach us how to hunt. That doesn't cover everything, though.

More than a decade ago my housemate at the time and I had a pair of brothers from the same litter. We found a pile of entrails on the white bathroom carpet two days in a row. No hair, no blood, no bones. Just the entrails of something that must have been as large as a squirrel. It certainly didn't map to "teaching" at all. It stopped after we both talked to our cats about it. I said they could do whatever they liked, but they should keep it outdoors. What sort of strange ritual were the cats performing? I, for one, haven't the foggiest. I'm confident that it wasn't praying to Jesus, though. (Even though my wife says cats like Jesus -- anyone who can multiply fish like that has to okay in their book, right?)

Note that I'm talking specifically of the deities of the cats. This is entirely different than the human deities governing or pertaining to cats. Human deities may have a cat head or take a cat shape, however they are tuned to the human mind and spirit. Cat deities on the other hand are tuned to feline minds and spirits. That is to say, I suspect that even in ancient Egypt the cats did not worship Bast or any other human deity

It seems logical that cats, like most creatures capable of complex social interactions, probably have multiple deities. But what about the simpler souls? If we accept that amoebae have souls, (as I do), is it logical to expect them to also have multiple deities?

I suspect that the extent of the variation among the deities of a particular species is directly related to the number of ways that the species is capable of perceiving the world as well as the number of types of social interactions that are available.

Some things may only have a single possible deity available. Rocks? While they can form complex interactions with any number of things, on their own they are pretty boring. It seems logical that the deities of the rocks would be as boring.

If there is no distinguishing characteristic that separates two deities they are essentially the same. More than that, if there are no distinguishing characteristics between two souls they are essentially the same.

Is it possible that instead of having numerous distinct amoebae souls and deities there may be a single Spirit governing the aspects of the amoeba with no distinction between members or between souls and deities? Personally, I think it is possible. It certainly bears more research.