I had the weirdest thought today. My dogs instinctually know how to go to the restroom. They learn how to get potty trained by humans, but they know how to squat and do their business without any problem. The interesting thing about it is that they don’t urinate all over themselves and the way they do it keeps them fairly clean. They don’t get many rashes or UTIs until they get older. Then, I realized most animals know how to go to the restroom without being taught and they keep themselves clean without developing rashes or UTIs. Yet, human beings who are supposed to be the most evolved take years to learn how to go to the restroom. And even after they learn, we still have difficulty with keeping ourselves clean and not getting rashes and infections. It is literally one of the biggest parts of life on this planet and we are probably the worst ones at expelling our own waste.
That begs the question: Are we really as superior as we thought? I like to say this sentence a lot: “I am the smartest stupid person I know.” What I mean by that is simply I am a very intelligent person, but sometimes being intelligent causes me to not be able to see the forest for the trees. I am great at understanding complex ideas and putting together concepts, but if you put a tool in my hand and ask me to build something, I would have difficulty because I am not very good with my hands due to my body dysphoria. I know it, and yet at the same time, it makes me appear like a stupid person because some of the simplest physical tasks evade me. I still to this day can’t understand how people run and kick a ball at the same time. Every time I tried, I would invariably trip and fall.
I believe everyone and everything for that matter has different abilities, talents, and intelligences. My father was not book smart, but he was a mechanical genius who could take apart an engine and put it back together without any problem. I may have been better at school than he was, but that didn’t make me superior to him at all. Instead, it just made us unique.
So, the different religions want us to believe that certain people are God’s chosen ones. They want us to believe that we are favored over the animals or the angels. We are special because we are God’s children, created in His image. I wonder about that. Of all of God’s creations, we are the ones who have hurt Him the most, we have caused Him the most pain, and we have disobeyed Him. Maybe we are God’s special creation because we are God’s problem children and the ones who need Him more than the rest of His creations.
It’s funny. I hear comedians say that the platypus is proof that God has a sense of humor, but I think that if we really thought about it we should be looking at ourselves. He created a being that would die without someone to take care of it for at least the first few years that doesn’t know how to expel its own waste efficiently, suffers from delusions of superiority, and has the capacity to destroy itself and all life on earth. He must see something special in us.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
