Kingdom Come

“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”

Continue reading “Preface: Advance Care Directives”

I do not claim to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I do claim to want to know the truth, and therefore rejecting the religious and social dogma dished out in my upbringing I investigated other options, and have changed many beliefs as additional or contradictory facts forced me to revise, not only my old beliefs, but even my revised beliefs, over the course of my study.

Don’t panic. This blog book is not an evangelical attempt to convert you to Christianity.

Absolutely not.

This blog investigates, by comparing and contrasting with other religious, scientific and philosophical sources, the revelation of a Creator-Sustainer God as given from the beginning of time “to infinity and beyond! in God’s own words, The Bible.”

Continue reading “Foreword: Scientific Research Methodology”

Every human is forced to trust that persons, places and things will perform as expected. At a minimum, we go through the activities of our daily life trusting that our past experiences will be replicated as our present condition merges into the unknown future minute by minute.

“In God We Trust” became the official motto of the United States when, as the country became ravaged by the Civil War, religious sentiment grew stronger. A Reverend M. R. Watkinson appealed to Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, to add the phrase to all U.S. coins with the argument that “This would place us openly under the Divine protection.”

Not true.

The belief that proclaiming a condition brings it into existence is magical thinking. Common in young children but considered psychotic or New Age religion in grownups.

Trust is formed by neurological connections in the brain through interactions with those who prove to be trustworthy over multiple encounters over time.

Continue reading “SECTION I: In What Do You Trust For Your Unknown Future?”

Death is the biggest crisis we’ll face in life. The most important information, guiding our values and behaviors during our lifetime, is what happens after this lifetime.

Since science does not have the tools to explore this condition, any information about this is typically delegated to religion. But there are over 4,000 religions in the world offering hope for a quality of spiritual existence after death of the body, severely limiting the credibility of any one of them.

As there is no consistency in the multiple religions or even denominations of religions claiming to be  based on the same source, this study does not include religious beliefs. This blog-book investigates the claims of the source document, not religions or religious leaders spinning off from the sourcebook.

It is a fact that the Bible is the single most trusted collection of revelation of spirituality, history, future predictions including the end of the world, and life after death. Despite massive culture shifts from hunter-gatherer to high tech societies it has remained relevant over the past 3,500 years since Moses compiled even more ancient documents into the multi-national Hebrew Torah, developed into the monotheistic faiths of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

I did not set out to prove or disprove the Bible. I just wanted to satisfy myself that my decisions about it were informed, not contaminated by dogmatic religious beliefs or rejected due to religious corruption.

Continue reading “1) Knowledge Or Ignorance Of Death?”

Stephen Hawking is a genius physicist and “one of the most important scientists and public intellectuals of our time, if not all time.” 

But despite being a top ranked scientist among scientists, Stephen Hawking does not base his choice of belief system on evidence.

Note carefully that Stephen Hawking’s choice of belief is made to resolve his emotional response to the concept of an afterlife. As he states, he is grateful to conclude that there is no afterlife.

This is understandable, since he spent his entire adult life struggling with a severely debilitating physical disease, experiencing, in essence, the misery of a disembodied soul as postulated to be the condition of the afterlife.

But is someone’s emotionally disturbed coping mechanism a viable basis on which to base belief directing your own life’s choices and plans for your own soul’s fate after death? 

Continue reading “2) Endless Or Pointless Existence?”

Hyperdimensions – having more dimensions than observable by humans.

Material – in philosophy, the view that everything is caused by physical processes.

The choice would seem to be obvious. The conviction that there are parts of reality that can’t be observed by human senses – like, say, things way off in the distance, or things really tiny – is intrinsic to all scientific investigation. Aristotle articulated it as the logic that ‘nothingness’ cannot “be”.

The birth of modern science is the transformation it entrained in our conception of space –the concept of empty space where ‘nothing’ can “be”, asserted by Galileo during the Renaissance in the 1600’s.

From Physics Forum online: The “fabric of space” is not made 0F anything- it is just space itself.

This is not a scientific finding. It was obviously impossible for Galileo to go up in space to prove his claim, not to mention it is, obviously, impossible for science to prove the existence of nothing. This a philosophical argument deriving from humanism’s postulate that there is nothing that humans can’t perceive, ergo understand, ergo control, ergo no Higher Power than humanity.

But further scientific developments in the 1900s beginning with Albert Einstein’s quantum physics determined that what humans perceive as solid matter, i.e. mass, is due to humanity’s perceptual limitations. In reality, the atoms that form objects and substances that we call solid are actually made up of 99.99999% movement, a form of energy.

Continue reading “3) Hyperdimensional Or Material?”

Why Religion Matters: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability 

When policymakers consider America’s grave social problems, including violent crime and rising illegitimacy, substance abuse, and welfare dependency, they should heed the findings in the professional literature of the social sciences on the positive consequences that flow from the practice of religion.

Continue reading “5) Reformation Or Retrogression?”