I often start religious reflections with mention of one or another of my last few sticking points while still a secular agnostic, as you may have noticed.
One of them was that Christians would speak of Christ conquering death.
Well, I'd think, it's not just humans that die. Dogs and cats die. Gazelles and whales and iguanas. Even oak trees and algae. And none of those organisms sin. So what's with this connection between human sin and human death?
It wasn't until I let the business about humans having been created in God's image and likeness in on a deeper level that I began to see how that might be. We were created in his image and likeness; Fido and Tabby weren't. In fact, we were granted dominion over them.
In a sense, a lower animal doesn't need a soul due to its complete innocence. It nurtures its young when that's called for and it reacts fiercely to threats when that's called for. But it can't create anything. That is reserved for the one creature made in His image and likeness.
It also has no sense of anything it does being right or wrong.
Actually, neither did humans, until they violated the hard and fast rule not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
That was kind of a two-edged sword. Our inventiveness - our power of creation - was unleashed, in large part, in order to find more efficient and traction-gaining ways to complete tasks, now that we had to live by the sweat of our brows.
We'd be overlaying our own creations upon God's. It would show up in ways that continued to demonstrate that we were His image and likeness. Life-saving technologies, transportation allowing us to span continents and oceans in mere hours, and such. But it also showed up in ways that laid waste to ever-greater numbers of us.
And we knew good and well when we were engaged in the latter.
No other organism - at least on Earth - needs grace.
But clearly we did.
And God, because he couldn't bear the thought of eternity without us, delivered.
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