Day 109d: To celebrate strangers as Soulmates … (August 16, 2019)
I made it into and through the towns (cities, really) of Newport & Jersey City, and then onward (with a little directional assistance from two kind paramedics, who were both openly astounded over the Walk’s Way) into Lafayette, where the Clair Memorial United Methodist Church beckons to me, and I enter just in time to sit in silent reverence while a body is brought in for that day’s imminent funeral …
“When people ask me if a god created the Universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. For time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there was no time in which god could have made the Universe at all. Asking if God made the Universe is like asking directions to the edge of the Earth. Our planet is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for the same is an utterly futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, of course, and it’s my personal view that the simplest explanation is that there is no external conscious god. No single ethereal being generated our Universe, and almost certainly no single ethereal being directs our fate. This leads me to the profound realization that there is no afterlife either; that we all have only this one life to appreciate the miraculous design of our unfolding Cosmos, and to do so meaningfully – with repeated acts of generous kindness and humble charity. Intriguingly enough, if one reads the Scriptures closely, Jesus himself agrees! … And so it must be the mission of God’s people not to strive to arrogantly save people’s souls from a painful postmortem existence, but rather to do as the godly have always encouraged – namely, to identify & address the injustice and violence around us — to do whatever we can each day to call out & minimize poverty, bigotry, oppression, corruption, war, environmental destruction, and animal cruelty, and to thereby allow the salvation of justice and peace and loving kindness to blossom and merge as one.” ~ inspired by Stephen Hawking, Jesus Christ & Jamie Arpin-Ricci
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