Here is a collection of thoughts that perhaps some will find useful.

—There is a wealth of possibilities for explanations of this world's phenomena, but if one’s inclinations default to the supernatural, natural answers are not likely to be explored with vigor. Exhausting all natural possibilities is the most productive approach for human physical and emotional welfare, and to the extent that we proceed on this basis, the unknown tends to fade as our future brightens.

—Anthropomorphic gods exist as fantasies for effortlessly removing limits to human capabilities.

—Most people demand truth, like salt, sprinkled lightly on their daily ration of bullshit.

—Most failure to comprehend the elegant simplicity of evolution is a failure to comprehend the profound power of miniscule changes accumulating in deep time. 

—“Souls” entering or leaving the human race in artificially large numbers are likely accompanied by a fundamentalist religion. 

—What's a soul? A word, at the poetic level, for communicating the essence of a being. For some this can have supernatural implications. For me, when I move from the theatrical, make-believe level of poet to the deconstructionist level of scientist (when I become serious about reality and the way things are, as opposed to saying with the most beautiful word paintings I can muster, the way things are), it translates to "mind," a cognitive organ that functions dependent solely upon the life of the body in which it resides. No life — no soul. Nothing more, nothing less.

—The United States founding fathers believed that the wall of separation of church and state was requisite for freedom of religion. That was a tough stance in their time in the face of expectations of religious expansion into every facet of life, and it is a tough stance to uphold now in the face of the same misguided forces. Madison and Jefferson, etc. were wise men to take the position they did. Wise men and women of today and tomorrow should continue the traditions established by them and continue to patch, repair and brace that wall, the greatest protection of religious freedom ever devised.

—If there is a God, surely she will reserve an especially hot zone in Hell for those who deliberately choose to pollute and poison and denude once beautiful earth with the expectation that “Armageddon will come and the CHOSEN will be saved by a Savior while all others perish in the flames of Hell” or some such insane dogma, “so there is no reason to preserve the earth for our progeny, only to exploit it for the benefit of the current members of  xxxx religion.”

    And if there is no God, these people can be marked by society as just more shirking, thieving, cheating, slacking, swindling, low-life charlatans and dregs of humanity that have been squirming and slithering across the planet since man first stood on two legs.

—Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no live thing hears it? Does a sound wave stop being a sound wave because it strikes no capacitance of resonant frequency? Is an old saw a cliché if one has never heard it before?

—In nature, pecking orders are established intra-species, often in not so gentle ways. In inter-species competition, cruelty has no bounds other than a rare outcropping of empathy. Civilization is humanity’s attempt to nurture empathy.    

© 2006 R. Leland Waldrip