July 99

And the new financial year starts, hope you all have your tax returns organized. Mine is done, all I have to do is send it in. Aren't we a mercenary lot though, we should be letting the poor government have our money without asking for any back. God knows they need all they can get, not that we do of course, not with the politicians taking care of us the way they do. Ha bloody ha!!

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God, Religion, Afterlife..... I have been getting a few strange ideas lately. As I have said I like the idea of reincarnation but I think I am beginning to believe it. I remember many years ago watching tv, I was meant to be at school. There was a show on ABC tv, an educational show on music. They were showing instruments dating back many centuries, and played music from that time. It could have been early baroque, the sort of thing I would imagine would have been played in the village green, flutes, pipes and drums. I felt that I remembered this music , not that I had just heard it before but had been personally involved in it. It was a very strange feeling. I feel that if reincarnation is true I had, at one time, been there listening or even playing. Weird huh!
Religion I personally have no time for. It can play no part in my life, I would feel no better being a part of what I consider to be little more than a sham. I can't help but think that we would have been better of without religion or at least a far more enlightened version. Man has been held back from what he could have been. (by the way, all references to man, mankind or he are meant to be nongeneric and could be equally applied to womenkind, women or she.) Looking back though history you can see wars fought in the name of God, torture, murder and mass destruction, much instigated by popes and priests. Things we now take for granted once held to be heretical, the earth was never the center of the universe much less insignificant Man.
And my belief in God?? I am an agnostic, whether God exist or not is something I don't think we will ever know. Besides God is a question of faith and wouldn't proof of God be in itself a contradiction? And if He doesn't exist how do you prove that? I mean how do you prove something doesn't exist if it doesn't exist? Either way I feel that if God does exist then it will be in a way completely different than what is now believed. I don't think that we have been made in his image (assuming that He does exist), and that it is a very egocentric idea. We have made Him in our image, merely to bolster our own insecurities. I would see Him as being a far more basic creature, far more tune with nature, perhaps being a fundamental part of nature itself. Or perhaps God is just a creature that has evolved far longer than we have. Think of how far we have come in the past few millennia, now think of a race that has millions of years of civilized development. How far could they have gone?? Could they have evolved into a race of being so far in advance of ours that they would be godlike, or maybe a gestalt of a billion individual personalities combining in a form of scope and power beyond our understanding. It's not such a strange idea. We are not that far done our own evolutionary path that we can say what is and what isn't. I don't think that we have truly reached any real form of civilization yet. At the moment we can dimly see what can be and are blindly reaching out for that vision, but we have a long way to go. We have learnt to crawl and have taken a few tentative steps but have yet to wipe the evolutionary slime from behind our ears. {July 17, '99}