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Mr. Tum turned over in bed.
Mr. Tum sighed, and he said,
“Argh.”

Mr. Tum was waking up.
The sun shone on Mr. Tum’s head
As he tossed and he turned in his bed.
Morning had passed,
And noon was coming soon.

Noon meant food for the stomach,
And the stomach meant to have that food.
Mr. Tum had very little to say about it,
For get up he would.
His tossing and turning meant
That he was beginning to suspect his fate.

Poor Mr. Tum.
No control, Mr. Tum?
Think of the joy, Mr. Tum.
No worry, Mr. Tum.
The world is a happy place.
A happy place and a safe place, Mr. Tum.
Your eyelids twitched, Mr. Tum.
You’re losing the battle, Mr. Tum.

A baby-blue eye looked out at the world.
It saw
The sun.
It saw nothing but the sun!
It closed quickly.

You are green,
And your arms reach up
To touch the sky
Gently, gently,
How I love you

You are blue,
Soft and smiling,
Kissing cool a promise
Gently, gently
How I love you

You are red,
Drawing me to you
Burning hot
Gently, gently
How I love you

You are yellow,
Burning softly with your head
Upon my shoulder
Gently, gently
How I love you

You are black,
Restful soft as satin
Hands upon my chest
Gently, gently
How I love you

You are white,
Curving over hills and valleys
Distance blinding
Gently, gently
How I love you

You are brown,
Earth and growing things
Come to life within you
Gently, gently
How I love you

You are flesh
And next to me where I can touch you
From time to time
Gently, gently
How I love you

Eating a meal
With friends and family
Far away

Bringing the harvest home

Water and salt
The substance of life
Our destination

Bringing the harvest home

Sorrows and hardship
Forgotten
Pretension, dissention
Put away

Bringing the harvest home

Prepare for separation
In cantination
And celebration

Bringing the harvest home

By PaulEdward Snyder
2004 C.E.

A garbage pail
Black on a street of pastel
Brimming with trash
And the leavings of trees
Alone on a curb of shaven green grass

A sad lonely bucket
Reminding the dusk
That others will come
Clatter and clank
Then silent and surly
Sprouting like mushrooms
Silhouettes in the night

Just before dawn
Clashing and clanging
First far away
Grows louder
Crescendo
Descends into distance

Silhouettes no longer
They’ve whisked out of sight
Furtive
Ashamed
Exposed by the light

Leaving the trash basket
Unlidded and emptied
To again stand alone
And blemish perfection
Inspiring this poem

Meanwhile in Heaven a long way away
The One Who Creates
Opens the gates
Allowing to enter one single sinner
Reminding the rest
That He is God
And they the blest

When I am asked if I believe in God, I feel defensive. I feel as if I have been cornered and there is no escape. I feel that if I answer yes I am not being truthful and if I answer no the person to whom I am answering will assume something about me that is not true. It is a quandary with which I have struggled most of my life. I have resolved it by answering no and accepting the stigma of being an atheist which technically I probably am, though in fact I am not.

I’ll try to explain. I have a relationship with God even though I see no evidence that there is a God. This relationship is partly one I have come to recognize and partly a decision I have made. There is deep within me a realization that I am not alone. There is me and there is not me. This not me is an all encompassing not me but not in a kind of inside outside relationship. It is more an ego alter ego relationship extended to what is outside of me and way beyond. In answering the resulting question of where did this extended alter ego come from, I am forced to make a decision. Is it real or is it imagined?

Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am a figment of my own imagination.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am here at this point in time and space. Who are you?
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am the water running under the bridge on which you are standing.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am looking back at you through this three dimensional mirror.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I am the other you are looking through to see me.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I was here a moment ago, but now I am still here.
Ask me who I am, and I will tell you,
I will be gone, and you will still be here.
Ask me where I am, and I will tell you,
You can see me. You can hear me.
You can even touch me,
but you cannot come with me.

I dreamed a dream.

2004 was 1984.

The president was a little boy with a brand new toy -- us. The vice president was Moriarity lavishing favors on his corporate criminal cronies. The secretary of defense was Napoleon swatting mosquitoes with cannon balls, succeeding only in stirring up the swamp and spreading the infestation. The attorney general was Joe McCarthy protecting our civil liberties by taking them from us and locking them up someplace safe. The Supreme Court was the Pope giving legitimacy to a President already duly elected by the people. The Congress was Marie Antoinette contemptuous of common people while turning over the nation’s prosperity to America’s aristocracy.

And the Christian Church was Candide singing, “This is the best of all possible Presidents. It is the right thing to do to impoverish the country. Our children and grandchildren will thank us for frittering away their inheritance. Working long and hard to pay just the interest on this overwhelming debt will make them stronger, more industrious, and more appreciative of the little things in life.”

When a fish dies in the water it goes belly up. This is a law of physics having to do with center of gravity. When battle is imminent and one contender sees no chance of victory, he too may go belly up. You can often observe this trait literally in a pet that rolls over deliberately displaying its lack of defenses when its master approaches. Physics is not given credit for this phenomenon but in a sense perhaps it should receive at least some credit, because going belly up during a contention is a survival trait. It is pretending to be dead to protect oneself from really being dead. This strategy of going belly up does not always work; especially if the conqueror considers the conquered food, but it must have worked often enough to have become part of our survival strategy. You may ask what going belly up (pretending to be dead) and going belly up when really dead has in common. For the rational person they, of course, have nothing in common. Mythologically (something not true that has truth in it), however, a connection can be made. For the defense mechanism of pretending to die to be truly affective, the contender must truly die. Again this is a mythological statement. To the logical mind it is complete and utter nonsense, but to the irrational (the intuitive) self it is comprehensible. The defeated must truly assume himself dead to convince his adversary. For survival purposes the conqueror must believe his opponent is dead, otherwise he must render his adversary truly dead to assure his own survival. I assume that goal was originally in dispute for there to be a violent confrontation.

Though we seem settled and our thoughts determined by preconceived directions and boundaries, we are, in fact, in constant mental conflict. As rational beings as well as evolved animals, our minds move in two often opposing directions, the logical (mechanical) direction (which we revere, probably way too much) and the tribal (communal) direction (which we hold in contempt, but adhere to nevertheless with great passion and perseverance). In effect we live in two entirely different worlds which must, even so, function efficiently together if we are to function effectively.

Our logical self is mostly mechanical in its contrivances, whereas our tribal self is based largely on instinctive reactions to situations. Both are shaped by the passing down of information (for our mechanical [dehumanized] self’s instruction) and of tradition (for our instinctive [communal] self’s enrichment). The shape of information creates a foundation on which more information can be built and by which the usefulness of articles that surround us can be determined. The structure grows and is refined from generation to generation as is the usefulness of and effectiveness of our tools and weapons. The shape of tradition determines our culture, the things we value and how we value ourselves, others and our surroundings in general.

God

God created

God created big time

God created so much big time

There was little time left

In all the Old Testament the most convincing evidence for God’s existence and for mankind’s actual encounter with God is the answer given by the burning bush to Moses’ question, “What is your name?” It answered, “I am I am.” Consider the implications of that reply. It implies that there is only one God, because otherwise God would need to have a name to be set apart from other gods. Consider Moses' motivation in asking the question. If he knew there was only one God, he would surely have known He would need no name. Instead he actually assumes that I am I am (Yahweh) is this god’s name as have generations after him. They believe this so sincerely that saying the name Yahweh was forbidden for a very long time because to say the name of a God was to summon Him and could have dire consequences.

Republicans and Democrats seem to have adjusted well to the results of the last few presidential elections. Liberals and Conservatives, on the other hand, seem determined to convince one another that the other side attempted, one side successfully, to steal the election. Consequently, I don’t think it would be too far out of line to review the last few races for President from a slightly different perspective. It’s not who wins or loses; it’s how you run the race. It’s having fun when you run.

Spirit and soul are often confused one for the other. They are, in fact, quite different. Spirit is understood as animation, motivation, thrust. Soul is intuited as alone, unique.

Soul has no rational basis unless Plato’s pseudo-metaphysical argument is taken seriously. In that case, our soul is immortal having existed from before our birth and continuing to exist after our death. The fact that it is ours temporarily is inconsequential and our affect on it is minimal if at all. As a person of faith, I do not accept that. I believe a soul is given us at birth by God, that it is our essence so to speak, that it has no form or substance, that it is pure potential much as energy is potential in a boulder on the edge of a cliff, and that we begin to shape our soul as soon as we begin making decisions. I believe that at any moment in our existence our soul has been shaped by the sum of all our decisions up to that point, that this is what God values in us, and that this is what we are held accountable for if we are held accountable at all.

There are so many things going on around us constantly that we could not possibly assimilate all at once. We must pick and choose what is necessary for our survival. We choose what we see. We choose what we hear, what we feel, what we smell, what we taste. We select from this chaos around us what we need to know and we ignore the rest until and unless it becomes necessary to our survival. You may respond that there are many things you are aware of that do not contribute to your survival. I would suggest that in reality there is nothing you are aware of that does not contribute to your survival or does not make you feel more secure in your survival.

God had a choice when he created us and our reality. He could create us from His own substance and separate Himself from that substance. We would therefore be perfect and good, but two perfect beings would seem to be a contradiction. I am convinced that God could have done this if He wanted, but it seems unlikely that He would. God already is. There would be no reason to create another. His second choice could have been to create us and our reality as part of himself. We would live out our lives in paradise and we would be part of God and parts of God would be us. Some of us predict such an event on our death. I suspect this is wishful thinking. Since we were not created part of God, there is little reason to suspect we would become part of God when we die. I could be wrong of course. You may be able to suggest other possibilities or you may believe He actually did make one of the above choices.

Could we move beyond the various names for God? To presume to know the name of God is to presume the power and authority to summon Him and to control Him. We realize today that this is not possible. It is, in fact, blasphemous in most main line religions to even suggest that we might be able to control God. Yet we continue to imply that we can by presuming to name the God who has no name, because He needs no name. He is the only God there is. Could we, perhaps, even move beyond minimizing God by insisting He created the world only a few years ago compared to an awesome and almost incomprehensible number of years ago simply because we want to assert our dominion over all other forms of life? I don’t care what any book has to say about it, that is so arrogant it's embarrassing.

The strongest argument against the existence of God is the wanting so much that God exist. It contaminates the good sense God gave me. I am unable to objectively evaluate and realistically extrapolate my observations, and I am continually tempted to stop searching for answers, because my emotional response to questions about how things work is that I am challenging God; I am questioning His judgment by subjecting His creation to my criticism. There is also the naming problem. It was once believed that knowing the real name of something gave one power over what was named, even God. He could be conjured by calling His name. This is more obviously true of what one understands; the better one understands God’s creation, the better understanding one has of how something works, the more able one is to control it. In a sense, God is being challenged. It is, therefore, more pious to accept without question what is. The believer must limit his view of God’s creation to an appreciation of that creation rather than attempt to understand how it works. To see God’s creation through God’s eyes, one must become an atheist.