Right now, I'm looking at my dog, Kobe.
He's lying on the ground beside my bed.
Most of the time, he's hyper, lovable, adorable.
But right now, he's just a mellow brown blob of fur,
leaving hair on my clean clothes and carpet.
And it makes me think,
he has an amazing personality.
Really, I couldn't ask for a better dog.
No matter what happens, how cruel the world is to him,
he's always there next to me,
wagging his tail,
doing his funny little dog smile.
I look into his eyes, and can see the happiness shining through.
But then I remember:
he has no soul.
He's just a dog.
In a few years he'll die, and nothing of him will exist.
He has no spirit to move on.
All that will remain of him will be his big, brown body,
which will most likely just be tossed in a big hole in our backyard,
have dirt thrown over it,
and never be seen again.
And it makes me sad,
to think that something so amazing can end so abruptly
and so absolutely.
And it makes me wonder,
why are we different?
What makes humans so special as to have souls?
I am a Christian.
I believe that humans were created in God's image
and that we are the only beings in the universe to have souls.
But I also believe that we're the least deserving of them.
On a daily basis, I am the poster child of all the 7 Deadly Sins.
On a daily basis, I show my neat, happy exterior to everyone around me,
only to hide the decaying mass of corruption inside.
But my dog, he hides nothing.
His being is merely a mix of chemical compounds,
that create feelings of joy, sadness, fear, exhilaration, pain
inside a short-lived body
and a brain, incapable of intelligent thought.
But really, when you think about it,
what is a soul?
What makes a human an individual person?
Many people say that our emotions are our souls.
I don't believe that,
because then everything that lives would have a soul,
and their souls could be changed with something as simple as an anti-depressant drug.
Emotions are just chemical reactions
that can be easily controlled by means of medicinal correction.
You wanna know what I think a soul is?
I think that there's a certain element to someone's personality,
something that can never be changed,
that is their soul.
Something that can make two people,
who've lived in exactly the same circumstances,
take two completely different roads in life.
While my dog, Kobe, sleeps,
I wonder how it feels to exist without a soul.
Or, without a soul, do you even exist at all?