I Got a Soul, You Got a Soul, All God's Chillin Got a Soul

I wouldn't be surprised if Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, got some of his ideas from Plato. I understand that he did a lot of reading on his own before that angel came along and told him where he could dig up yet another book. It's been a long time since I talked to those nice Mormon missionaries, but I think you have to be more than just good before you can be put in charge of your own planet. You have to go through several levels of enlightenment and learn a whole bunch of stuff. Some of this stuff can be learned more easily on Earth than it can in Heaven, which is why we were sent here in the first place.

If you believe that all souls are identical, I think you would be closer to the concept that a person has a soul than the concept that a person is a soul. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm sure lots of people believe it that way. Me, I try to keep an open mind about stuff like that, but that's just me.

Your understanding of the Big Bang is somewhat different than mine, but I'm sure you know more about it than I do, so I will take your word for it. The trouble with all these theories is that they keep changing them, and I'm usually a step or two behind the latest update. Still, saying that there was nothing before the Bang seems like a cop out to me, kind of like "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." The first time a lot of kids hear that, they ask "Where did God come from?" I don't remember hearing a satisfactory answer to that one at Elsdon, but that was along time ago, and a certain amount of memory loss is to be expected at my age.

I hadn't thought of it that way before but, now that I think of it, I think you're right about spoken language not being a construct. It's more like it evolved than it was constructed. If that's true, it seems that language must have evolved in tandem with the human brain. You can think without words, but you can't think of much. It's hard to tell how deeply animals think because they can't tell us about it. Animals communicate with each other, and you can communicate with them yourself if you know how, but their messages are not nearly as complex as ours, which leads us to assume that their thoughts aren't either. Another way of looking at it, though, is that a dog knows everything it needs to know to be a dog, a deer knows everything it needs to know to be a deer, but we humans still don't seem to know everything we need to know to be human.

Have a nice weekend.