When I was searching through my filed archives, I found this descriptive argument for the intelligence of human beings vs. animals. I wrote this when I was about fourteen or fifteen, so forgive the mistakes when they come.
"From one man God made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live."
A shiver of wonder, a feeling of being lost, crushes my spirit as I read these words---that we are individually placed and sanctioned: left to wither or root, blossom or fade as every flower that is planted. Careful making eased us into the ground---warm, compassionate hands left us within the earth and led us to where we are now. The hypocritical scoff at this---tell us it was no ultimate power but cold conception that breathed life upon meagerness, and a soul into the yet unread heartbeat. With the comfortable facts of pregnancy and birth, with the new methods of probing the unborn's mind and picking apart the little section of awaiting arrival; by scientific theory and method, the thought of Intelligence is weaned away, left to drift, lost and long gone, amongst the watered-down beauty of life. Many a man may explain away growth of the cell and the completed product, but what of the soul, the realization that dawns and the newness of a spirit that matures in a child? No fox pup, growing older, develops an idea of how to solve a complex crisis or rule over its fellow mammal. No rooster scratches together a rude crown of briers and exalts himself king in the hierarchy of the henhouse. Rather, the blood and throb of wisdom and journey, excitement and emotion, falls into the sterile confines of dull animal, a scientific no one. We are, certainly, a bunch of of test tube cells---indeed, we can be probed and killed, desecrated and defiled, forced from our clan of family as surely as our lower creature-kind; yet there remains conscience of mind: we may regret, or scorn and continue, and what animal has reason to love except for maternal or paternal reason?
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