Arson Pt I

So for a while now, I’ve been focusing very critically on society and this thing we call civilization. And isn’t it funny that we call this modern universe an advanced state of humanity? If we are advancing, I don’t want to reach our destination. Take a step back and look at the world for a second. Take a look at yourself, as a good start: are you happy? Is this dream life you’ve been living really what you wanted? Don’t you feel like you’re missing something… more? Like there’s something so essential to happiness and life and love and you’ve felt it before, but you can’t quite name it. And when it’s gone, the world dies.

I was reading an old update by the author David Wong the other day titled Honey and the Apocalypse and he said a couple things that made a lot of sense in a weird, sort of crazy way (to view the pictures mentioned, and the article this is from, click here.):

Our creepy pictures up there are of an enormous ant hill. More of an underground city, really. Researchers will fill all of the tunnels and chambers with cement, so they can map out the system (the one in the pictures took an astonishing 20,000 pounds of cement to fill it all in). Then they digg out the dirt from around the tunnels, and what is left behind is mind-boggling.

Sure, there’s tunnels and chambers. Big ——- deal, right? But then they looked closer, and saw chimneys at the top of the compound, and realized they were made to circulate air through the network.

So they traced those down, and found that some chambers below were “gardens” of fungus to eat, others were full of rotting waste material. And they were all positioned by the ants so that the warm air coming off the rotting trash would create a convection current, the warm air rising up through the shafts, with vents positioned elsewhere to draw fresh air in to replace it.

This was designed by creatures that have brains the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

But it’s not just that they created this without having the ability to imagine or think (and we know they have neither). Go back to Jack Chick’s end of the world scenario, where all of the souls of the unbelievers are sucked off the earth. What happens to the body at that moment? It just slumps over, right? I mean, that’s what death is, isn’t it? The soul leaving the body?

But… ants don’t have souls at all. No religion thinks they do. And yet they built that ——- city. So… it sounds like you can get a lot done without a soul. It sounds like a soulless man could keep eating, and having sex, and raising kids, and going to work, and could even cooperate with others to build magnificent creations.

It sounds like if the soul was sucked out of the guy in the cubicle next to you, it would take you a really long ——- time to notice. Like maybe it wouldn’t be until you saw the deadness in his eyes as he nonchalantly pulls the guts out of your belly.

If you will really start to look at the world, strange things will begin to find a home in your mind. Watch the people mindlessly float through a line at a retail store, without a clue as to anyone else’s problems. Watch the opposing politicians argue over whether or not an unborn child should live or whether two people have the right to wed. Listen to a song on pop radio and notice how empty and vapid the lyrics are. Then when the song ends listen to all the stupid ways people try to take your money. Drive through the suburbs of your town and count the cookie-cutter houses with white picket fences and realize they are just a mask. Uncover the truth. Wake up and realize that the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Don’t close yourself off to despair and anxiety but don’t let them take control.

“Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.”
— Rich Mullins

On to Part II!

Amanda