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All the News is Not Fit to Print

I have spent life-changing hours this morning, reading heartwarming and fantasmagorical tales of how things might have been had they not been what we know they are.

Michael Laitman is a professor of Ontology, with a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah and an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and he or someone apparently purchased half a page in the New York Times of today.  What caught my eye was the line, "Buying Our Way into Heaven".  "That," I thought, "is my only chance, and I cannot afford it, but I had better pay attention!"

I cannot do justice to whatever that cost turns out to be, but I did enjoy the business about Jonah being thrown overboard by the crew of a boat that suspected that he was a Jonah, and how he ended up in the whale of a belly of a whale, and how, after walking around in there for some days, finally agreed to do God's work, which taught him a lesson, I think.  I never did figure out what it would cost me to buy my way into heaven, or even out of a whale.

But then, a few pages on, I happened upon a much more comforting story having to do with somebody named Fudge, who is from Katy, Texas, where we have relatives, as you might have guessed.  The Rev. Mr. Edward Fudge was offered a research job for a year by someone from Australia, where it is hotter than hell in the summer time, to get his mind clear about the final fate of the damned.  As you undoubtedly know, God is both holy and good, as has taken a bad rap about consigning ordinary, run-of-the-mill sinners like you and me to hell forever, even though we may simply have skipped church or forgotten the catechism.  It doesn't seem quite fair.  The Rev. Mr. Fudge concluded that hell does not go on forever, but that after a while, God shows his great kindness and mercy and annihilates the scorched sinners; puts them out of the misery he has put them in, so to speak.  This view is called, "Conditional Immortality", or "Annihilationism", which is a great comfort if you have ever been in Australia or Arizona in the summer, although another scholar, at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix disagrees, insisting that God is not Conditional; that the fires are eternal.  And somebody named Gin Lum, at Stanford, has offered her own Lum explanation about all of this.  I do not pretend to do complete justice to the depth and compassion of such scholars as these, nor even--God forbid!--even to God Him- or Her-Self, who immerse themselves in studies of hellfire and whales and things.

Personally, when I find myself out of my depth, as I tend to be whenever there is a whale, or an ocean, or eternal fires involved, I turn to the comfort of Coyote tales; how Coyote created the world, and such things as all that.  I will confess that it might have been a very human need to find comfort and compassion and common sense that led me to think about the time Coyote schemed to turn bison loose on the earth.  Before that, as you know,  Old Humpback had all the bison corralled in a stone pen behind his stone house, and would not allow any of the rest of us the pleasures of bison meat or robes.  Those were the days when one could drive through Yellowstone Park and never see a single bison.  Coyote, who is something of a shape changer, changed his shape into a dog, and stampeded the bison through Humpback's house and out into the world.  But you knew that, if you have been to Yellowstone!

It is probably just another fundamental flaw in my nature, but sometimes I simply cannot take any more research about whales and hellfire and divine punishment, and I yearn for those simple, heartwarming stores of how Coyote created the world and did all those tricky things he did.


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