Kingdom Come

From the Department of Health and Social Behavior, Harvard School of Public Health: intimate relations exist between mathematics and material reality, that counting and categorizing are the currency of durable knowledge, and that empirical study of variegated humanity…can uncover universal truths.

Incidence and prevalence are measures used to describe patterns of disease in communities…The term disease is used here in its broadest sense to mean any impairment (whether psychological, physiological or anatomical) that interferes with a person’s ability to meet the needs of daily living.

The arguments for and against God certainly consider the opposing position to be an impairment.Epidemiologists frequently make use of two measurements of disease. The first – the incidence – measures how many people began to suffer from the disease during a particular period of time. The second – the prevalence – measures how many people had the disease at a particular time.

Religion concerns itself with the spiritual / energizing / life force aspect of the human condition, gods and goddesses (or a single personal god or goddess), the creation of the world, a human being’s place in the world, life after death, eternity, and how to escape from suffering in this world or in the next.

From a research perspective, the place to start investigating the reality of a religious belief is the statistical evidence of

• high prevalence – consistently high numbers of believers over time
• and high incidence – consistently high numbers of adherents over time.

Religion has been a factor of the human experience since pre-historic to modern times. There is no culture recorded in human history which has not practiced some form of religion. This fact alone lends credibility to believing in religion.

According to the following chart, after 6,000 years of recorded history only 8% of the world’s population didn’t believe in some kind of a god – even after atheist Communism engulfed the highly populous nations.

One could take the perspective that the atheism of Communism drove their populations to seek a loving God.

Currently there are 2.4 billion Christians basing their beliefs on the Bible, and 1.8 billion Moslems whose Quran drew much of its fundamental beliefs from the Bible. Judaism is of course rooted in the Bible, and there are other ancient religions which are rooted in the same ancient concepts although not named in the Bible, such as Zoroastrianism, but it is notable that at least half of the world’s religions are openly rooted in the monotheistic God of the Bible.

By comparison, Hinduism, the third largest religion has only 14% of believers. When you take into account Hinduism’s diversity without consistency, Hindus are pretty much taking a shot in the dark.

Fifty years after TIME posed the question Is God Dead? on the cover of the magazine, Americans’ belief in a supreme deity appears to be declining.

The article…cited a 1965 poll by Lou Harris finding that 97% of Americans still believed in God…in 2014, that number had fallen to 86%.

In other words, the prevalence – total number in the population – of people who don’t believe in God increased from 3% of the population to 14% of the population.

But, we have to take into consideration that the group of individuals being questioned had changed in the 49 years between the first and second polls. Assuming the poll only questioned adults, defined as age 18 and above, the youngest member of the second poll would be 67 years old by the time of the second poll, and many who had been questioned in the first poll would be deceased or incapacitated in some way during the second poll.

So these figures don’t demonstrate that many of the original individuals being polled had changed their minds. Instead, it demonstrates that the incidence – number of new people who don’t believe in God, had increased.

In clinical research…homogeneous patient population needs to be selected…The inclusion criteria identify the study population in a consistent…uniform and objective manner.

Incidence statistics support the emergence of a new condition, such as the COVID pandemic, but not for the facts behind the emergence. Incidence statistics simply indicate a need for further research to uncover cause and effect, appropriate response, and, simply put, the truth.

We could frame the research question as What has changed in American society since 1965 to cause American adults to stop believing in God?

Without question, one major change in society has been the technological advances in what is purported to be a purely materialistic scientific methodology for discovering pure knowledge and developing applications for controlling our world.

Putting men on the moon and devising instruments to collect data from far reaches of the universe, and harnessing nuclear power for bombs in war and energy sources in peace has been understandably persuasive. Many people switched sides once America broke through the barriers between heaven and earth and the inner workings of the atom.

As if human accomplishments alone prove that there is no God or gods. That’s not even logical. There can be both.

In the scientific universe matter came before mind. Mind is an accident of matter. How that happened is not even begun to be explained.

In contrast, religions report that mental activity, e.g. electrical energy, and sound, another form of energy, came before matter.

The reality of a Creator is substantiated by the incidence and prevalence of reports of a Creator from the beginning of known history.

Science and religion agree that in the beginning the cosmos moved from a state of nothingness to the existence of matter. But science has very little to say about this mysterious transition, all of it highly speculative…

By contrast, there was remarkable unanimity among…the sacred texts of the world’s great religions.

• an all-powerful immaterial pre-existent Being
• expressed in four-dimensional constructs as a trinity of body, soul and spirit,
• who created other hyper-dimensional immortal beings, the material universe, and humans,
• and provided mortal beings with a means of attaining immortality,
• in a battle of good – the Creator’s productive force – against evil – the Enemy’s destructive force.

Ancient religions in all cultures recount the actions of a Creator who brought material substance, life and death / time into existence.

Close to Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia, the inhabitants of housing settlements of Catalhoyuk left behind numerous clay figurines and impressions of phallic, female, and hunting scenes. Here, as in Gobekli Tepe, there is no documentation, so the specifics of religious activities are best determined using Occam’s razor logic rather than speculation. The likelihood is that the same motivations driving later groups are present in this earlier group.

This provides a justifiable deduction that the figures indicate use of magic – access to hyper dimensional sources – to empower four dimensional virility, fertility, and provision of food. This is also supported by common sense, as the basic necessities of survival are food and a pack to support each other in procurement and defense and old age.

This perspective is validated by Hinduism, considered by some to be the oldest religion still practiced today, Archaeologists have found bull and cow motifs, sacred to Hinduism, associated with an ancient civilization inhabiting the area near the Indus River, dating back to the same time as Catalhoyuk.

The end goal of Hinduism is restoring unity with the Creator. This theme is found in virtually all subsequent religions.

~5000 BC The Sumerian creation myth can be found on a tablet in Nippur, an ancient Mesopotamian city founded in approximately 5000 BC.