Remember those SAT analogy questions?

1.) BIRD : NEST as...

(A) dog : doghouse
(B) squirrel : tree
(C) beaver : dam
(D) cat : litter box
(E) book : library

I hated those questions. Though I was young, I knew in my bones that WORDS : ANALOGY as CUCUMBERS : MUSIC.

With that in mind...

Been noticing a lot of chatter on the Heaven/Hell issue lately. Since I'm sitting around with not much to do, I thought I'd throw in my two cents.

HEAT : COLD as LIGHT : DARKNESS.

and

COLD : REALITY as DARKNESS : REALITY as UNICORN : REALITY

That is, "cold" and "darkness" are not actual states of being. They don't, in a sense, exist.

They are states of nothingness.

"Cold" is simply the absence of "Heat," and Heat is simply the energization of lifelessness.

"Darkness" is simply the absence of "Light," and Light is simply the energization of emptiness.

Not everything has an opposite.

Take Love, for instance. You know, agape?

I used to think that the opposite of Love was Hate.

Then I got a little wisdom (a dangerous state), and concluded that the opposite of Love is Fear...that Hate was just a symptom of Fear.

As I've come (slowly and begrudgingly) to view and accept God's creation as complete, as "good," as "very good," I've also come to believe that the opposite of Love is neither Hate nor Fear. They are both symptoms.

Hellish symptoms.

The opposite of Love is Nothingness. Cold. Darkness.

HEAT : NOTHING as LIGHT : NOTHING as LOVE : NOTHING

The more removed I become from reading Genesis literally, the more I'm amazed at it's unexplainable, poetic accuracy.

I mean, think about the paradigm "Let there be..." There was not, and God said "Let there be..." Didn't have to be worded that way. Most other creation myths, if you examine them carefully, have creation occurring out of something else. Genesis? "There was not...Let there be...It (that which became) was good, very good."

To be or not to be? That is the question.

Imagine for a moment what would become of you (the eternal state of your soul, if you will) if you failed to embrace the notion that heat was real and necessary to life, and then lived accordingly. Or light.

There'd be some serious weeping and gnashing of teeth, I'd imagine.

Now then. How would you answer this one?

HEAVEN : HELL as...

...

Grace and Peace,
Raffi