When people read my writings, I’m not trying to get them to believe what I do. I’m trying to get them to NOT just accept what I say, but rather to encourage them to do their own deep dives into these subjects. I have come to the passionate belief that it is our unquestioned following of those we perceive to be in authority, our peerage, or educated experts, that has led us to the point where we face a dozen eminent, sincere threats to all human life.
I have explored those threats in other writings, so I won’t dive into them now. Rather, I would like to turn to an exploration of God. Hopefully we can begin to apply logic to that subject, rather than simply following traditional perspectives and beliefs.
My first point is that God exists. There is a very logical basis for this statement, if you follow the argument that nothing in nature exists in a vacuum and there is order to everything. Matter doesn’t just fly into the atmosphere without reason, and every element of the Universe exists in organization. It is simply illogical to assume that, as we now believe, trillions of universes could exist in perfect order. Even a volcanic eruption, or a tornado, happen for a reason. It is all logic and math, everything can’t come from nothing.
That doesn’t mean that humans can understand God. We’ve been making the attempt for thousands of years, but all of our attempts end up making God resemble humans, which is illogical.
Obviously, despite depictions in renaissance artwork, God isn’t a bearded man with long hair that sits on a throne, and while I can’t claim to understand exactly what God is, I think we can explore what God isn’t.
Perhaps you have noticed that I try to avoid referring to God as ‘he.” Neither shall I refer to God as “she.” Again, it makes no sense to quantify or qualify God in human terms. So, let’s explore what God isn’t and in some manner, perhaps we can unlock a few glimpses of what the creator of universes is. I reference a link to an article that lists some attributes of God. One of the statements there is, “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
Another statement is, ““The incommunicable attributes are those that belong to God exclusively, so that there is nothing resembling them in a created spirit. They admit no degrees, but are divine by their very nature. Such are self-existence, simplicity, infinity, eternity, immutability. The communicable attributes are those which are possessed in a finite degree, more or less, by men and angels.” Which is attributed to W. G. T Shedd.
Faith and Religion
I am a person of faith. Being a faithful person simply means that even though I can’t understand or prove every aspect of something I believe in, I have arrived at a point where I will operate within, and accept, something as truth. I have often retold the story of when I was in college as a passionate biology student and found that my professors were not scientists, they were priests in the religion of secular humanism. I’m not certain a casual reader of those words can fathom my disappointment. The specific event was when it dawned on me that Darwinian Evolution, as it was presented as the origin of species, was mathematically impossible.
If you understand that the entire concept relies on random errors being beneficial, and that those mutations can accumulate without becoming extinguished through time, until another random mutation (an error) happens, then those two mutations also fail to be extinguished by nature, and over a billion years, untold billions of those mutations resulted in approximately one hundred million different species of plants and animals.
The mathematical improbability of that is so astronomical that a human being can’t hold the number in our head. All of that is explained by the belief that given enough time, all of it happened. There is one problem with that. Time is not the friend of random error, it works the other way.
Imagine the incredible complexity of one mammal species, humans for instance. Think about our eyes and how complex they are. Our hearing, skin, organs, reproductive system, being able to walk and talk. Think about how complex it is for a two humans to walk down a hallway and pass each other without colliding. Now think about developing one hundred million different species randomly.
Think of it this way. Let’s say you have 100 decks of cards. That is 5200 cards. If you shuffle them completely, then begin laying them out on a table. What are the odds that you will lay out 5200 cards in sequence?
I will answer that by explaining that dealing only one deck of cards in perfect order would happen once in the number one followed by 68 zeros times. The earth hasn’t been here long enough to even develop one species by random.
My point is that when I approached my college professors with the dilemma that math didn’t support what they were teaching, they admitted the issue and told me it was what they believed happened.
Belief in the impossible seemed to me to be more of a leap of faith than did a belief that some entity designed and created it. I accepted that even though I could not understand it, as long as I was going to accept something by faith, God made more sense.
As I explored that idea, I came across an argument in favor of Christianity, or perhaps I should say, in Christ. I found the evidence to be compelling, and while I despair of what humans have done to the faith, I have never found a reason to doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was who he claimed to be.
Religion isn’t the same thing as faith, although the two words are often conjoined. While faith is personal, religion is the creation of a systematic organization that attempts to regulate and conform people to a structure that is thought to bring them to God. The issue with religion, as with all governments, is that it is noble in concept but inevitably corrupt in practice. I often struggle with the way humans have twisted what God has presented to us; turning something inherently righteous into wickedness.
What Can We Assume About God?
God exists. When asked to describe himself, he said “I am.” In Hebrew that is a statement that everything has God in it. God holds everything together, and is what keeps every universe and each molecule within them from simply imploding or drifting away.
God is logical, and is the entity that ordered everything. To believe that God is capricious or random, simply has no evidence.
God is not a respecter of persons or nations. I see no evidence that God picks and chooses winners and losers outside of their respect for natural law. Nations often have declared themselves favored by God, but it is not logical that all of them are. To the degree that God has a “people,” I will leave to history. It is certain that many have made that claim and I have no way of proclaiming a winner. As to the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, that is clear and has been adjudicated. The decision to believe he is God incarnate, and to follow his teachings, is a personal matter of faith. As I have stated, since we all must believe in something, I chose that as a matter of logical conclusion.
God designed the universes in accordance with unbreakable Natural Laws. These, like the Law of Gravity, Newton’s Laws of Motion, and a great many more laws that govern physics, cannot be broken but they can be temporarily overcome by applying other Natural Laws and energy. When that energy is exhausted, there will be a correction.
To the extent that these laws govern what is physical, they also rule over economics, relationships, and every other aspect of existence in this Universe and, as we are coming to believe, a trillion more.
The order of the Universe is designed to be productive. Nature eliminates behaviors that are nonproductive. This concept is immutable and cannot be negotiated. Regardless of human desire, unproductive behaviors will eventually be culled.
In one of my references, it is said that “God… is the overseer of our lives.” What does that mean? Is the implication that God is pulling strings that are attached to our limbs? Does it mean that individuals have no say in their actions? I think the answer is obvious, there is no evidence that God manipulates us moment by moment, although I have had events in my life that are beyond coincidental. What I believe is that if you work to align yourself with nature, which is God’s flow and energy, good things tend to happen to you.
What then, do we say to people who are born in horrible places where they are abused? What do we say to children who are abused or trafficked?
This is the reason why I believe that God doesn’t respect persons, there is no choosing winners and losers. Horrible people live long lives and innocent children die miserable deaths. It strikes me that we are natural animals and we are born where we fall. From that point, we have a opportunity to do the best we can in that time and place. I have no salve for those who suffer horrible fates, and this is one of the great mysteries of life.
I had a near death experience. It was as the stories say, a warm accepting being welcoming me, and other beings, obviously former humans, there to help me cross over. I can’t say why I didn’t die, I guess it wasn’t my time. What I took from that experience is that I am no longer afraid of death, although not in a hurry either. I also believe that this life is not what is ultimately important, so what happens here isn’t the final result. Perhaps that explains why some people have plentiful lives, and others starve. I am not sure we will ever fully understand while we are still here.
Conclusions and Opinions
I believe that the concept of sin addresses people living in opposition to the Natural Laws that God designed. If you study the scriptures in Hebrew and Greek, you get a picture of a society that was structured to align, instead of resist. Other cultures have similar observances.
When evaluating what is sinful, I think we need to consider culture, time in history, location, and if the act is productively aligned with nature. In the parables, Jesus was critical of being non-productive, and natural law rebukes it.
Often through history we have seen societies and individuals who were measurably out of alignment with what is natural. The magnitude of those declines is well recorded throughout history. It is possible for people to exist in opposition to Natural Law if they apply enough resources to sustain that misalignment. It is also possible for someone to create so many resources from one successful aligned endeavor that they can be misaligned in another aspect. Nevertheless, that area of misalignment will eventually be corrected. The greater an individual or society strays out of alignment from Natural Law, the greater their eventual collapse will be.
The story of the Garden of Eden was an illustration and warning that the pursuit of knowledge without the balancing of wisdom is damning. It is a failing of humanity to desire knowledge in an attempt to overcome or improve on what is natural. This is the ultimate folly and is completely illogical. If we know anything about nature, as explained by Newton’s Laws of Motion, it is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Nothing can stay out of balance indefinitely, and it is impossible to improve on the order of the Universe. As I explain in my paper on Liberalism vs Conservatism, chasing knowledge is vanity without the wisdom to know what not to do, and humans have failed that test every time.
The original Laws of Moses were not actually laws in that they could be broken; they were rules that allowed society to deal with issues of that day and place. Some are universal, others do not apply to modern times or geographic locations. Two examples were eating shell fish and pork. In that time, in the Middle East, eating them was relatively dangerous and carried diseases. In other places of the world this was not the case. Similarly, the people of that time were relatively ignorant of science and biology. In the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, there are prohibitions against things like cross breeding cattle or plants, or even wearing clothing made from two different fabrics. Obviously these were cultural and we should treat them as such.
There were regulations, if you want to call them that, which dealt with other dangerous behaviors, either dangerous to individuals or unproductive and risky to society. These prohibitions involved having sex with parents, or siblings. Another was the practice of anal intercourse, which can transmit many diseases. I explore some of these topics elsewhere also, so there is no need to do so again here.
As I have discussed in other places, many people say they read scripture when what they actually read is The Bible, which is a translation of scripture. Scriptures were primarily written in Hebrew and Greek, and has been translated into thousands of Bibles. Those two languages are both highly descriptive and precise; English and most other languages are not. As such, when you read translations you are missing most of the nuanced messages that were given. One example of this, an important one, is that in Hebrew there were nearly forty different words and phrases that were all translated into one word, “wife”. That word in English is very limited in its cultural implication. In Hebrew, what was usually being described was very different from our culture.
Humans cannot understand the magnitude of a being that could order and create universes. We cannot even define the questions that could be asked. What we can do is study the laws of nature the Creator has given us and align our lives accordingly. There night be behaviors and regulations from our heritage that should be set aside as being currently nonproductive. Others might be resurrected, since they might contribute to solving issues we are dealing with. There are some things I have always found to be true:
If you are not getting the results you desire, the reason is usually that your belief driven actions are out of alignment with Natural Law.
You won’t solve your problems by doing more of what you are already doing.
Nothing can be gained by doing the wrong thing better, and when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.
By 2035, computers will be able program themselves in ten minutes what it would take humans a million years to achieve. We will have created a species that can evolve a million years in ten minutes.
Certainly there are few subjects that draw stronger negative opinions than that of incest. Neither is there one that is more commonly experienced, nor is more ingrained in the human culture and history.
Fewer than half of the heterosexual people in long term relationships reported being satisfied with their sex lives. Conversely, lesbians reported as high as 86% sexual satisfaction in their relationships.
What we see around us in human society is all perverse, and becoming more so every day as we apply increasing amounts of invented resources to push the balance of nature further from the center. In time, nature will correct us.
Nearly all public and private universities have the same mindset, and that is a problem because they represent an echo chamber that promotes and gives authority to only one point of view, liberalism.
