Day's funny quote but serious reflection on it

Quote for the day

When I woke up this morning, this thought occurred to me, and so I thought I’d make it my erstwhile quote of the day. (For non English as native language readers, erstwhile means that even though I say “quote of the day,” it’s actually something that is not a daily regular but rather more sporadic, kind of like the expression, “when I get around to it.”)

“I would not blame God if he sometimes wished he had created talking dogs instead of humans.”

LOL.

(Now, by dogs I mean dogs in the Western view of them as lovable cuddly pets and loyal coworkers who are members of the family, not the connotation of dogs as an unclean animal or symbolic of infidels.)

Anyway, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t understand that proto-humans learned to speak in large part because God chose to converse with them. This is one of the obvious implications of the creation event and the Garden of Eden, which is where God spoke, using human’s own language, with them for the first time. This is what gave humans that incredible breakthrough in speech, by the way.

So this is why I thought, gosh, with what God hears from humans, and what they say to each other, I bet he often wished he gave dogs the capacity to speak instead. Even if dogs spent half of their time talking about what they sniffed under each other’s tails, in each other’s mouths, and on the sidewalk, that would still be more pleasant than what many humans think about (which God hears) and speak about. Dogs are just trying to get along and collecting information, certainly not for any mean reasons since dogs, by definition are sinless, like all animals.
This is probably why God encourages dolphins and whales to speak. It certainly is much better listening in to what they talk about than what humans are inclined to say and think. But I know that God is grieved at the depletion of these intelligent species. Much of their speech is plaintive searching for even one other of their own species. Articles have appeared about this in the press recently, where species of whales that are depleted so that there are only a few solo individuals probably spend much of their time calling for a mate or another social community member. That is sad and grieves God.

This leads me to another thing I thought of today that I want to explain. Secularists and non believers, and infidel New Agers, often try to find “human attributes” and even “flaws and limitations” in God. This is impossible of course, since God is complete, perfect and all goodness comes from him, since God is all goodness. The only thing that I can explain to people about how to connect emotionally to God in a somewhat human way that expresses a shortcoming is that God does grieve. What I mean is that God feels sadness when things do not go the way he wants them to, which means that humans are unhappy and sinning. God wants humans to not sin, and to be happy, but he will not force that on them. The whole point of creation was to create sentient beings who are the children of God, but who have their own personalities, willpower and freedom of choice. If God wanted to force happiness on humans he would not have made them at all.

Why do I say that? Because angels are independent personalities but ones that are entirely “facing,” as Jesus once described them, God. So the uncountable numbers of angels in heaven are all distinct in their identity and personality, but they are like electrical appliances that are constantly turned on and plugged in to God. Thus they are alive and animated only by goodness and beatific joy. Angels are literally made of the same substance of God in that sense of deriving their entire life force from his goodness and will. So when God wants beings that are constantly sin free and constantly happy, all he has to do is look around him and there are uncountable (except by him of course) numbers of angels that are exactly that.

But remember, angels live in God’s space, God’s realm, which means they have no matter, no energy and no time. Heaven is a place that is only of God’s substance, which has no dimensions, either of physicality or of time passing. However, even without matter, energy or the passing of time (since that’s what eternity is, not endless time ticking away, but no before and after of time at all), heaven is full of the will for the impulse of life. It is the origin of the desire to see life come into being and flourish. It can be thought of as the origin of the desire to plant a garden and obviously that is what Genesis tried to explain, putting literal but not easy to understand works of God in terms that humans could understand. And so there is the radiation from heaven of God’s will to be always pro-life, as in the ultimate desire to see new life come into being and flourish. That is why the physical universe came into being through God’s creation. In order to grow life and let it flourish, the dimensions of matter, of energy and of time had to be “willed into being” by God, and this became the Big Bang that originated the universe. It really is as simple as that.

This is why humans have substance (bodies) and the reality of time (events take place in sequence in order to allow life to come into being and to grow). But this is also why there is a limit to life spans, both of living beings and of galaxies and chunks of rock. The only things that are in existence “forever” are those in the realm of God, made of his substance.
So back to the talking dogs. God does not “need” to “make” people be good or be happy. He’s got “plenty of that” in heaven with countless angels, and the millions of just souls who lived good lives, were found worthy and achieved heaven. The soul is the substance of God, and this is why it is able to abide in heaven, while the body cannot. So you must understand that God has no need of any one person in particular. If you think you are pissing off God by doing something deliberately wicked or sacrilegious for example, it’s not like God is sitting there going, “Oh my, what will I do, he or she is sooooo irreplaceable and dear to me.” Um, not so much. God loves all his children, but he does not need any one of them. (*Dash of cold water that is much needed on humans today*). Heaven is packed with awesome and cool angels and saved human souls. Heaven is so awesome that people whose family members, um, don’t make it to there are never even missed by them. Sooooo… humans who sin and who are evil, or determined to defy God, grieve God and make him sad because they are a lost child. But God will, at some point, to use an accounting expression “write them off.” This will particularly happen when that sinning and unhappy soul is leading others of God’s children into sin and unhappiness. This is what Jesus warned about. This is also what the Bible writers mean by "fear of God." They don't mean that they fear he is going to do something bad to them. No, what fear of God means is the fear of losing your relationship with him. When you lose your relationship with God then your soul is not going to go to heaven, it's really that simple. This is why Jesus warned not to fear humans or the devil, but fear the one (God) who can destroy a soul (do not permit it to come to heaven, and thus it can only go one place and that is the really bad place "down there" and I don't mean Oz.

So this is why I made the comment about the talking dogs. Dogs aren’t trying to lead other dogs into damnation or nihilism. The worst they do is to promote pack instincts regarding chasing and hunting for food, and possibly stealing the pizza off of the counter top, and maybe hump a visitor’s leg. But dogs don’t talk trash (they may dig in it for fun), they don’t try to addict other dogs, and they don’t try to lead puppies into sin and depravity. So while God is listening in on his children (not in a creepy way, as I’ve explained before, but in his capacity to know all that has transpired in someone’s entire lifetime), I know he must be so weary of the nihilistic, depressive, sinning and often downright evil thoughts and talk that humans use their God given speech abilities to promote. So listening to tail sniffing dogs talk about it probably would be some sort of relief to him in comparison!