Worms

My cat has worms.  This, far from disgusting me, has sent me into existential crisis.  I had never before seriously considered the spiritual life of anything much smaller than a kitten, but once I thought about it, I was about to execute a mass slaughter. I mentioned to my boyfriend that the cat had worms, and he arranged for his mate, who runs a pet shop, to get a tablet to get rid of them. I could be charged with murder in the first degree or biological war crimes, there was plenty of evidence that it was a premeditated and well thought out crime, with intent to murder possibly hundreds of defenceless innocent worms.  His mate arrived, gave the cat a tiny pink tablet and that was the end of it. For the cat.  I, on the other hand, started thinking about all those worms living in total blissful ignorance in the intestines of my adorable little kitten.  They were about to be completely wiped out and they had no idea.  The same thing happens in the world all the time; a tsunami, a flood, an earthquake, a terrorist attack, a hurricane, pick your favourite.  Any one of these things can obliterate thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people in the time it takes to brew one cup of coffee.  Every news station in the known world covers the story, various political and religious leaders pledge support and aid; donations, food, medicines and money, all kinds of promises come flooding in.  The entire world pauses to witness the human suffering, momentarily fixated by the tragedy.  And the people caught up in the flood, the bombing, the earthquake? Their lives are destroyed, their families gone....do they renounce any idea of a Creator or Protector of human life? Or do they comfort themselves and each other by saying that it's all part of a greater plan? That their loved ones have gone to a better place? That all will become clear when they themselves die and pass into the Great Unknown? Fair enough.  But let's go back to the worms for a moment.  All these worms have just experienced their own tragedy, I doubt that there's any of them left to mourn the others but that's slightly beside the point.  What has happened to the souls of the worms? Do they have souls? This sounds like an absurd question, but why should it?  Why shouldn't worms have souls? I have one, or so I'm led to believe.  Does the fact that my physical organism is more evolved than theirs, or the fact that the mass of neurons and cells in my skull is more advanced and capable of complex actions such as speech and coordination, change the fundamentals? We are all clumps of cells fighting to survive on this planet. The fact that I happen to be a bigger and more intelligent mass of cells than your average joe soap intestinal worm doesn't seem to be a valid reason why there is someone looking out for me and my soul and not for joe worm.... So, I'm forced to conclude that either there is some great Creator who has an incredible, mind-numbingly complicated plan for every single living organism on the face of the earth, including every human, dog, cat, horse, mouse, lizard, fish, sea-snail, and all the worms living in all their stomachs, or else we are all just clinging to a great big ball of lava and dirt hurtling through space. 
Neither of which is very comfortable.  Or maybe I just don't like being put on the same level as the intestinal worms of a sea-snail. 
We are so convinced of our own evolutionary superiority it's astounding.  Personally, I blame Darwin and his monkey to man theory.  We all have a vague impression of evolution as being a gradual run up to us, to the grand finale, the highest branch of the tree. Like hell it is. We are a blip on the radar, if a book was ever written about the history of the Earth, we wouldn't even make it into the footnotes. 
In a book I read once, the protagonist was talking about religion, to be honest I don't really remember exactly how it went, but  he said something along the lines of  we are all wandering around in the pitch dark, but that we each hold a lantern before us, so that we can see ourselves and what's just around us, but when reality intervenes too strongly, the light blows out, and we are left searching and groping  in the blackness.  We seem to hold our beliefs up as a shield against the world, against reality.  If we didn't have some system to make us feel looked after and important, could we even go out of the house? How often have you prayed that you would get out of a car alive, or that the plane would land safely, and it does, and you thank god, sure in the knowledge that there was someone looking out for you? I'm not saying there isn't, I'm just asking what if we found out for certain that all the praying, sacrifices, churches and monuments (none of which are built for God, or to pay homage to him, but are testaments to the wealth, pride and greed of previous popes and princes)  offered as much protection as a paper umbrella?  From what are we hoping to protect ourselves? When someone dies, we see it as a tragedy yes, but inevitably someone will say that it was ‘their time to go'.  So, if we have ‘a time' to go, then is everything else we do not predestined as well? So the point of praying for protection would be?  I'm not negating the existence of  a God, nor of protective spirits or angels or anything of the sort.  I'm just saying that we seem to believe what suits us, and this is what works. We believe what we need to believe, so that we can function normally in day to day life, so that we can waste an entire Sunday in front of the tv without feeling guilty that precious minutes are slipping by.  We do all we can to keep our mortality at a distance, so we can work, eat, sleep, go shopping, go dancing, have a life basically, without marvelling at blades of grass and weeping at cloud formations every five minutes.  If we are comfortable with our beliefs, we can function.  But we tend to tailor them a lot, how often have you heard someone say that they believe in God but not in the Devil? Or that they don't believe in Hell, but have no problem accepting that when they die they are going to a lovely fluffy airy afterlife?  One of my friends has a thing for angels, she firmly believes in them, and is convinced that when anything good happens, her angel has helped her. I have no problem with this, I too believe in angels. But she absolutely refuses to believe in demons.  For her, the coin has only one side.  I believe in demons.  I wonder do the worms?
Who decides what the rules are for being ‘good' and ‘bad'?  Assuming that the Catholic church has actually hit the nail on the head and all its horror stories are true, if we are bad we go to hell and get poked with sticks for all eternity, if we are good we get a prize and go to heaven.  Ok, that's for human virtue and vice. What about cats? Do they go to hell? Or dogs? Or worms? Is there a set of rules for every species? Or every genre? Or are we the only ones who have these rules because we're the only ones who have the opportunity to be evil? Which puts us at an unfair disadvantage in the general scheme of things really.  But then here I go again, displaying the ever-present yet unconscious certainty that we are the most intelligent and highest up creature that exists.  So, how do cats sin? For that matter, how does something like a jellyfish sin?  Does it think bad things? Maybe it fantasizes about being a great white, or even a six year old child, so it could destroy other things instead of just stinging its dinner and flobbing on the beach waiting for the tide.
However, ever since humans were sufficiently evolved to start making tools, discovering fire, and painting on cave walls, they have had a belief system.  There has always been a deity to pay homage to, to sacrifice in the name of, whether it be the sun, the moon, or some other nameless faceless presence. Why? Perhaps because there is something there, and man could only start expressing his worship or acknowledgement of this presence after he had reached a crucial stage of mental evolution, or was it that he had reached this stage of mental awareness or acuteness, and maybe only then was he capable of understanding that there was something bigger than him in his world, or perhaps, just like today, he needed to not feel alone in a world that was savage, harsh and unforgiving.  To help him make sense of death in this new stage of awareness?  Or perhaps it came intuitively, or maybe gradually? We will never know.  What we do know is that this need is ingrained in us, we have to have something to hold on to, to believe in, even if that is to not believe.   
The ancient civilizations had many, many Gods.  Why? To help them make sense of a world where death walked among them like just another person.  Babies died of cold and hunger in their thousands, young men died in ferocious battles, young women and children were enslaved and slaughtered.  In a world where forty was considered quite an advanced age to live to, there was a more insistent, and very human need to believe that they were the playthings of capricious Gods who however had a plan for them all. 
Yesterday, I met a girl who was celebrating a dinner with her friends because today she is going into a convent.  She was dressed in a grey habit, with a wooden cross and rosary beads hanging from her belt, on her feet she wore plain black sandals and had her hair cut into a neat short bob and wore a pair of clear framed glasses.  She is 26 years old.
I was struck dumb by this.  The entire concept seemed so alien, it belonged to a vague, dust-covered past.  Images of Joan of Arc, peasant girls forced into nunneries flitted through my mind.  Yet, in Ireland, not even that long ago, it wouldn't have been such  a strange thing.  If this girl had been out celebrating because she was getting married today, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid.  It's basically the exact same thing, pledging to spend your life with someone.  The only difference is who you're making the pledge to. 
Later I learned that until a very  few years ago, this same girl was a wild, shaven headed,  multi-pierced punk.  What causes such a drastic change in a person?  Obviously, she found God. Or maybe he came looking for her, on account of all the noisy parties.