From: waltzgreen@fuse.net   
      
   I'm no expert; I am guessing that many religions start with an illustration.   
   The person who becomes the founder sees something in the world around him,   
   something that makes sense in physical and spiritual ways.  An illustration   
   of how the physical world is comparable to the spiritual world or   
   vise-a-versa.  After some time a group of illustrations are stitched   
   together into a system of thought.   
      
      
      
   There are illustrations I would like to start with.   
      
      
      
   Imagine a forest after a fire.  Everything is scorched.  Yet it does not   
   stay dead.  As soon as possible new life springs forth.  Imagine a rocky   
   outcropping.   See how trees and other plants grow in strange ways, hard   
   ways; any way they can to establish a foothold of life.  Think how   
   tenaciously life grows between the cracks in cement or asphalt.  And not   
   just in hard places, life grows in extreme places.  Life grows around hot   
   vents in the ocean floor.  Life grows in boundaries between hot and cold,   
   fresh water and sea water.  Why would life need to develop special organisms   
   just to live in the boundary between fresh water and sea water?  Why can't   
   life just leave some places devoid of life?  Why does it try so hard to live   
   everywhere it possibly can?   
      
      
      
   Why?  Why would it do this? If the world was created by a God primarily   
   interested in the afterlife of human souls, why would it want or even need   
   life to be so diverse and grow in places man might never even see?  Surely   
   there are places where the pursuit of life has no bearing on the support of   
   human life.  Why waste the time and energy designing life to grow in all   
   these strange places.  And why have such diversity?  All you would really   
   need is the minimum to sustain human activity.  In fact less diversity would   
   be better.  The life around the humans would just be incidental.  The only   
   thing being salvaged from this world is human souls.  Why invest more than   
   is necessary in anything else?   
      
      
      
   To me it does not appear that the non-human life is just incidental.  We can   
   feel, see and know there is some purpose to it.  There is a reason it needs   
   to be there.  The old saying would be that everything exists for the Glory   
   of God.  Yet not all life speaks of Glory.  A good bit of it speaks of   
   desperation, desperate to survive and grow.  It the purpose of all life is   
   Glory, why is survival and growth more important that Glory?   
      
      
      
   Now if the simplest explanation is most likely the right answer, then we   
   should look for a simple answer to this mystery.  Why is survival and growth   
   under any and all circumstances so important?  That, which appears to be the   
   strongest natural life-force, perhaps is the strongest natural life-force.   
   And if the physical world is the way it is for the benefit of the divinity   
   beyond it, perhaps the divinity beyond needs as much life as possible to   
   survive and grow where ever possible.   
      
      
      
   Now why would such a force need as much life as possible?  Not just human   
   souls, but life in any and all kinds.  What if the natural world was   
   injected with such a survival instinct because the force beyond was itself   
   consumed with self-survival.  What if the force beyond life, received some   
   benefit from any and all kinds of life.   
      
      
      
   What if that which was beyond was not a perfect, self-contained,   
   all-powerful divinity.  What if it, itself was a living being that needed   
   energy to sustain itself, to grow itself?   
      
      
      
   What if there was a force or forces that were sustained by the living   
   bio-energy in the universe.  Such a force would seek to promote any and all   
   life for its own self-survival.  This is especially so if such a force could   
   not sustain itself completely without living bio-energy to support it.   
      
      
      
   Such a force could be well familiar with basic building blocks of life, from   
   cells up through body systems.  It would have some ideas of what it could   
   combine to produce life that would survive and grow under various   
   conditions.  Such a force or forces would be motivated to generate a wide   
   range of diverse living organisms.  It would be sustained by the living and   
   dying of the bio-mass.  It would be interested in generating balanced   
   systems that sustained long term bio-mass stability.  Without perfect   
   knowledge or absolute power, such a force would have successes and failures.   
   These would include families of living things that were dead ends as well as   
   families that made it for various lengths of time.   
      
      
      
   Would not such a system of a life-needing force fit well with the natural   
   world we see around us?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)