Ear Mites
Krill.
Creel?
No, baby. Krill. They’re tiny crustaceans, sort of like miniature shrimp. They remind me of cattle. They eat plankton, which I think of as ocean grass, and then they’re eaten by nearly everything larger than a krill. Whales, fish, penguins. Even baby seals.
Okay. And why on earth would you be thinking about krill?
Not krill themselves, but krill consciousness. Krill thinking.
Krill have no consciousness. Not if they’re crustaceans.
I don’t believe that. I believe everything that has a brain or a nucleus has a consciousness. Take planarians, for example.
You’ve lost me again. What are planarians?
They’re minute flatworms used in laboratories to study organ regeneration. You can split their heads apart and they’ll become two-headed. Interesting creatures.
Oh, wonderful. A two-headed worm. What has any of this to do with krill?
Planarians have vestigial eyes that can detect light, and they tend, in the wild, to move away from light sources. But in the laboratory they can be trained to associate the presence of light with feeding, and eventually they’ll move toward light. I think they do it by choice.
It isn’t a choice, it’s a reaction. Like Pavlov’s salivating dogs.
Maybe. But I prefer to believe planarians, in their planarian consciousness, choose the light knowing there will be a reward if they do. And why not? Science doesn’t even know what consciousness is, really. It says there is no planarian consciousness because science still arrogantly subscribes to the Judeo-Christian notion that humans are the center of the mind universe the same way it once insisted Earth was the center of the physical universe. Certainly planarians and krill don’t have human consciousness, but it doesn’t mean they have none. Dogs have consciousness. My cat dreams. Anything that dreams has a consciousness.
All right. So all God’s chil’ren got consciousness. You want to know what krill are thinking, right?
Yes. Yes! But more than thinking. If krill have consciousness, maybe they have an awareness of God; and if an awareness of God, maybe they pray. What are krill praying?
I know that one. “Oh, please God, don’t let the whale eat me.”
Silly.
I’m being serious.
Okay. Maybe they also pray for lots of plankton or great sex. But what they’re praying for is secondary to the essence of krill prayer. Consider this. A single species of krill, the Antarctic Krill, has a biomass nearly twice that of humans. An average krill weighs about a gram, and the average human weighs, say, 55 kilograms, taking into account the weight of children being smaller than adults. That means it takes 55,000 krill to make one person. There are roughly 6.5 billion humans on Earth, and twice their biomass would be 13 billion humans, or 13 billion times 55,000 krill, or 715,000,000,000,000 krill. Now let’s say only a fourth of them are praying believers. That’s still 178,750,000,000,000 prayers God hears from one species of krill on a planet that probably contains several krill species, a multitude of crustaceans, and trillions upon trillions of animals. All of them with their different consciousnesses. All of the believers praying.
Which comes back to what I have said all along. There is God, but God doesn’t give a whit about the desires of his creatures.
It could be an infinite God is able to sort out an infinite number of prayers as God chooses. But what I’d really like to know is how those trillions upon trillions of prayers sound at any given moment.
Honey?
Yes?
You think too much.
[Rok-Ee the Cat God shook his head and scratched deep in his auditory canal with his back paw: Ear mites.]
Ear Mites has 1 response
Anaxios says:
2 March 2008 at 6:32 pm
I believe that all living things have knowledge of God, and all non-human living things have a much closer relationship to God; since they are not so burdened with humanity. I believe that it is our humanity that makes us think that we are the center of everything and everything is dependent on us. We don’t make god in our own image; we believe that we are god, and we seek to know all things, just as Adam and Eve did in the garden. We are the product of our own self-centered desires.
What we consider lesser creatures have no such megalomaniacal ideologies. They exist to survive and fulfill God’s will in their lives with far more accuracy that the most pious true follower of God. They do not concern themselves with hoarding more of something than they could ever possibly use; they seek sustenance and shelter as each day passes. Sure, some store up food for times of shortage, but you will never see a squirrel who is jealous of his neighbor’s new HDTV, or even his neighbor’s horde of acorns.
They are better examples of how humans should behave than most any person whom I have ever known. Even Jesus said so. Luke 12:23-34
