PATSY by Kenneth L. Ehrenthal (fantasy novels to read .txt) 📕

since he’d seen Sid.  Sid began to tell him about all the progress they were making.  Mohammed seemed interested.  But he began to tell Sid how he had become conditioned to accept the fact that he was not going to get out soon.  He had begun to spend long hours with the prison Chaplin Father Brady.  The kindly father convinced him that everything that had happened to him was apart of God’s plan.  Even though my name is Mohammed he told Sid, he was a Christian.  And even though he didn’t understand, he believed that the Lord did things for his purpose.  Sid certainly wasn’t going to interfere with anything that helped Mohammed make his jail time seem, to him, better. But, it really upset Sid, that Mohammed was losing hope.  It seemed that in talking to this Father Brady, he was losing himself.  He wondered whether this Father Brady was really being helpful.  Sid certainly didn’t believe any of what the Chaplin was telling him.  He decided to see the prison Chaplin, before he left.
 
 He was ushered into a small Chapel in the prison and met with the Father.  They introduced each other, and Sid told him about Mohammed and the progress being made to get him out.  The good Father sat back, smiled and told Sid, that everyone in prison believes they are innocent of the crimes they perpetrated.   That was not unusual.  But he believed that the best approach to these man, and women too, was to have them understand that “we are all sinners, we are all perpetrators of crimes and by accepting that and putting their faith in Jesus, and they would be able to sustain themselves here, even in prison.”  Sid, thanked the father, told him he would be seeing Mohammed next month and if the Father liked they could speak again.

As Sid left, he mouthed the words silently he was thinking...what bullshit!  Sid, while Jewish was not a believer.  He had come to terms with his beliefs years ago.  He had his own peculiar slant on religion and god.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
 
 
Chapter 40
 
 
When Sid got home from his visit to see Mohammed he was really angry.  Heidi had not seen him so angry.  He related to her the visit he had had with Father Brady.  Especially his formulation, which if you put your life in Jesus' hand everything will be all right.  Things are not right for Mohammed and possible others in jail. “Sid”, said Heidi, “this priest seems to have really got to some of your core beliefs.  Maybe if we talk about them and I can understand them, we might both learn from this experience.  If we are going to spend the rest of our lives together, then that lack of that knowledge and understood could never come between us.
So Sid told her:  "I have found God! But it, he, she, is NOT the usual definition. We are all God. NOT also in the usual sense. All the theistic definitions are incorrect. We have defined this concept based upon our own short life span. We have taken a short sighted very limited view. I assert that man's creation of god, i.e. religion is based fundamentally on our fears. Our fears because, as you will see, our vision is that we are god and that we are immortal seems to contradict our limited view of life and god.
I believe that God is survival.  That is survival on the genetic level. Humanness and our god means that as long as we reproduce our genetic being through all the generations, we are immortal and we are god. You see, Mohammed doesn't have to open himself to Jesus, to be saved.  All he has to do is affirm his own nature, as we all have to do.
Many thinkers have pointed out all of the attributes of God. But they locate this as outside of us, but each with a piece of god (soul). Thus all their Gods hand down their “laws” and if we follow them we will reach some type of salvation. We die and reach some kind of other life. All of these descriptions beg the question. I believe in a new definition of soul. Soul is the survival mechanism in all of us. It is not part of God, it is God.
All of the great books and writing of those who precede us articulate all the attributes and subscribe them of some kind of outside force. If we strip away all the mythology and anthropomorphic mumbo jumbo they are describing almost to a tee, what I am trying to explain. It is also quite possible that many of them came to the same conclusion as I. But, in translation and rationalization their interpreters, limited as they were chose to follow their own agendas.
Just take a few: Moses climbs the mountain, “speaks to god” and brings down the 10 commandments. Rather than being “handed down” as it were, suppose he went to the mountain to think and himself came up with these ideas which are certainly survival mechanisms. From then on, because of the conditions and limits of cognition usual concepts were rationalized and stories developed to make a broader concept, organized religion, more powerful. Organized religion creates a broad consensus and allows a degree of limiting a basic fear that is death. There are, in my mind two types of death. We tend to confuse them. There is of course somatic death. That is, our own limited temporal life. Fifty, sixty, etc. But there is a second and that is genetic death. I.e. the fact that we don’t reproduce and pass on our and our ancestors genes denies our immortality.  Just understand the projected hatred of homosexual behavior and abortion. But deny genetic survival and therefore deny GOD.
Darwin and Wallace in their own way stumbled upon, what they called the mechanism of evolution, but they could not take the next step. That is, that rather that the “survival of the fittest” as a mechanism it is the god-like force in all of us. Every organism in the universe is driven to survive.  Not in our human limited definition, but in the genetic sense.
Jesus, born of a virgin, certainly asks us to suspend our human disbelief and accept this as a miracle. But with an open mind, perhaps what was meant that in someway her genetic makeup was pure for many generations and that she, her genetic makeup was pure. Socrates states “know thyself”, in the broad self doesn't that include ALL our makeup. The Greek Gods were representations of good and bad human attributes Reflections and projections of humanness. Taunting us to see ourselves and make our own choices of life. If we look inside ourselves we will find the “god in us”. We are the all powerful the single god.
This is certainly a very limited view of life. In its simplest, we live to reproduce and once we finish we have no other purpose. I posit the following: We continue on to make sure we continue. We remain alive, fight the good fight to maintain that our progeny continue on from generation to generation and continue our life, the life of our ancestors, forever.  This will certainly explain all those that lie and cheat to protect their turf.  McGinty is no different.  Sarah Alpert threatened his life.  In the sense that the life he had chosen, high rank, loving family was all at stake.  The baby and her lack of understanding of his ego-centric nature, which of course is our own.  Her error was expecting him to affirm her's while denying his.  He had already created his salvation.  He was never going to do that! 
There are some fundamental facts that, I believe contribute to the correctness of my observation. There are two significant factors, one inherent in our humanness and the second environmental.  Most organisms are ready; at birth to survive in the environment they are born. As we ascend into the more complex organisms, nature has provided various compromise variations to support survival. Just a few examples, elephants have a gestation period of almost two years, and the new born, despite his tremendous ultimate size is ready to participate directly in his environment, walking, grazing, almost immediately.  That’s also true for many of the higher mammals. Humans, on the other hand, with it large brain size, comparatively, cannot sustain itself for several years. Biology has compromised brain size for immediate survival. This simple variation necessitates a long immaturity and important human bonding to support survival.  This necessitates an environmental structure, outside of nature, what we call nurture. An external society develops to support this survival. All of the structures of society develop to support the biological compromise, centering on “brain size.”
Given this long developmental time, and related to the physical environmental, abundance of water, food sources, and heat or cold, various reactions to these fundamentals develop. To support these needs, societies developed various procedures and processes to fulfill these necessities. Understanding the inherent nature of man is survival. Each of these developing societies defines survival in their own way. I.e. many children guarantee survival. In societies with high infant mortality rates, many wives become necessary. Protection of these breeders necessitates certain societal structure. Certain individuals seem more ready to do anything to support their survival. Ultimately mythological and religious ideals grow up to justify the obvious differences. Read the extant data from our past, in both written and non-written remains and see how many times they can be interpreted as survival.
It has always amazed how much time and effort mankind has spent to understand life. From the first shaman who interpreted their environment to learn how to control it, control to preserve life and pass it on. We call that the instinct for survival. To me calling survival and protection for what is ours is redundant. It is not instinct, as some kind of factor in life, it is life. We have created religions, ethical presentations, etc. all of which are rationalization of this simple fact. Let me use some popular words. Religions tell us that we have an immortal soul. That soul handed down to us by some supernatural “being”. I believe that that soul is that being and that being is survival of our genome. The psychological implications develop during our long period of nurture. We incorporate all of the factors in our environment for one fact and one fact alone to procreate and pass on this soul to continue to immortality. Our temporal self may be limited but our genome continues in our progeny. Thus it has always been.  Father Brady is just one in the long line of believers who refuse to really think and accepts prescriptive answers, even though they really don't make any sense.  That is his egoistic response.  Appeal to authority always renders the believer part of a larger group and in that the find security.  The real only security we have to accept ourselves.
All of the philosophies and ethical behaviors have just one goal, the survival of the genome. Every ethical system every economic system, every political system has been developed to preserve our life, to survive, survive to immortality. Let's look at one of our (American) fundamental writings. “....All men are created equal and are endowed by our creator with certain rights among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness....” I will re-write this as I believe it should be:  "All humans are created the same way and by their nature have life, make choices and create new life."
"Wow", said Heidi.  "I guess you have thought long and hard