When I was four, I went to a very religious school. We did a lot of praying.
When we learned about abortion we had to make a poster covering the pros and cons of being pro-life versus pro-choice. When I handed in my overwhelmingly pro-choice poster, the teacher (who was the headteacher) told me to go back and think about it more. I just hadn’t thought about it hard enough, according to him.
We sat and watched / listened to lots of religious assemblies: One every morning. At first, you might not realise that the assembly you’re watching is actually religious: The headteacher is talking about how aeroplanes(?) work: About how they were invented and the raw genius of the Men behind the invention (And yes, Men were overrepresented in these assemblies).
It was supposed to be inspiring: Look at how Great these Men are! Look at how Special Mankind is! To bring a flying machine into the world: To be Creator: Man is like God in that sense: We are made in His image, after all. We are imitations of Him. But—
(And then came the twist)
But we are nothing: We are NOTHING compared to God / the glory of God and His Creation. Man’s Creation: the aeroplane is a pathetic imitation of God’s almighty Creation: the bird: the elegant bird who flies with grace and prude, quite unlike the aeroplane, as a matter of fact.
And we learned of the unimaginable Greatness of the bird. I remember the hummingbird being picked out and focused on. Numbers were presented to us about how fast it flaps its wings / how still it can be while hovering.
But the hummingbird is not Great because of the hummingbird. The hummingbird is Great because it was Created by God. It is His glory and wisdom and expertise that makes the hummingbird Great. That’s how Special He is. We are Special too, yes, but that’s nothing to do with us. We are Special because of Him: He Created us that way: Just like he Created the hummingbird.
But we are luckier than the hummingbird because he did not make the hummingbird Special. The hummingbird is only Great.
But we are Special because it’s only us that were made in God’s Special image. The teachers at that school also told me that you should never start a sentence or a paragraph with the word “But”.
But I don’t care.
I ate meat for most of my life. I always felt bad about it but I gave myself all sorts of excuses about why it’s okay.
“It’s natural. It’s nature. It’s the food chain. Who am I to intervene with that?”
“Animals are different to us. They don’t feel or think the same things / the same way as us. It’s okay to slaughter them.”
“Because we are Special.”
But are we really?
When I came out to my best friend I sent them a PowerPoint presentation over Steam chat and then I went to have dinner. When I came back, they sent me a GIF. It was a custom GIF that they had made while I was eating. It started with one of those Rage comic thinking faces 🤔
Then it zoomed out, showing that same face inside a building, visible through a window to (presumably) my best friend’s home 🤔🏠
Then it zoomed out again, showing an even smaller thinking face within a larger city 🤔🏙️
And then, zoom out again to reveal the planet we live on 🤔🌍
Zoom out further 🤔🌌
And further, and beyond 🤔⚛️ Yes, we truly live in a universe!
And then bam it snapped back into the close up thinking face at the start, which I can only assume was my best friend thinking about their place in all of this: Their miniscule footprint in the grandiose of all Creation— or whatever it is. We are a speck— not even a speck in the eddy of reality we call home. Not even a faint afterthought of the unquantifiable magnitude of the galaxy, let alone the others. And even then, stretched out over time, Mankind’s glimpse on history is a razer hair, even when compared to the infamously doomed dinosaurs, let alone the others. We are products of atoms, we breathe and we shit then we die, like raindrops in an ocean, we might resemble individuals momentarily.
But then we re-enter the grand liquid of continuity: The sprawling depths and breadths of the oceanic universe, ready to be blended and evaporated into the next cloud, drop, splash, splish, splosh, spl, splsh, glp, blp, np ggyh jbbg frrd fvb niiuffrrd
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