Dear brothers and Sisters,

It might be of interest to students of Theology and Creation to read
the following notes from the Studies and papers of the Theologian,
Philosopher, and well know Creationist, Father de Selby.
de Selby provides some genuine
mental sustenance if read objectively for what there is to
read. In the Layman's Atlas3 he deals explicitly with
bereavement, old age, love, sin, death and the other salien-
cies of existence. It is true that he allows them only some
six lines but this is due to his devastating assertion that they
are all 'unnecessary'.4 Astonishing as it may seem, he makes
this statement as a direct corollary to his discovery that the
earth, far from being a sphere, is 'sausage-shaped.'
Not a few of the critical commentators confess to a doubt
as to whether de Selby was permitting himself a modicum
of unwonted levity in connection with this theory but he
seems to argue the matter seriously enough and with no
want of conviction.
He adopts the customary line of pointing out fallacies
involved in existing conceptions and then quietly setting up
his own design in place of the one he claims to have
demolished.
Standing at a point on the postulated spherical earth, he
says, one appears to have four main directions in which to
move, viz., north, south, east and west. But it does not take
much thought to see that there really appear to be only two
since north and south are meaningless terms in relation to a
spheroid and can connote motion in only one direction; so
also with west and east. One can reach any point on the
north-south band by traveling in either 'direction', the only
apparent difference in the two 'routes' being extraneous
considerations of time and distance, both already shown to
be illusory. North-south is therefore one direction and east-
west apparently another. Instead of four directions there are
only two. It can be safely inferred,5 de Selbys says, that there
is a further similar fallacy inherent here and that there is in
fact only one possible direction properly so-called, because
if one leaves any point on the globe, moving and continuing
to move in any 'direction', one ultimately reaches the point
of departure again.
The application of this conclusion to his theory that 'the
earth is a sausage' is illuminating. He attributes the idea that
the earth is spherical to the fact that human beings are
continually moving in only one known direction (though
convinced that they are free to move in any direction) and


that this one direction is really around the
circular circum-
ference of an earth which is in fact sausage-shaped. It can
scarcely be contested that if multi-directionality be admitted
to be a fallacy, the sphericity of the earth is another fallacy
that would inevitably follow from it. De Selby likens the
position of a human on the earth to that of a man on a tight-
wire who must continue walking along the wire or perish,
being, however, free in all other respects. Movement in this
restricted orbit results in the permanent hallucination
known conventionally as 'life' with its innumerable con-
comitant limitations, afflictions and anomalies. If a way can
be found, says de Selby, of discovering the 'second direc-
tion', i.e., along the 'barrel' of the sausage, a world of entirely
new sensation'and experience will be open to humanity.
New and unimaginable dimensions will supersede the pres-
ent order and the manifold 'unnecessaries* of 'one-direc-
tional' existence will disappear.
It is true that de Selby is rather vague as to how precisely
this new direction is to be found. It is not, he warns us, to
be ascertained by any microscopic subdivision of the known
points of the compass and little can be expected from
sudden darts hither and thither in the hope that a happy
chance will intervene. He doubts whether human legs would
be 'suitable' for traversing the 'longitudinal celestium' and
seems to suggest that death is nearly always present when
the new direction is discovered.

With peace and love,
James.





Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself
the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an
insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of
black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at
the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known
as death.

DE SELBY