Chronicles in Ordinary Time

I was born Back When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth; almost exactly seven years after V-J Day, the end of World War II. My father was born in the last year of World War I. These sorts of dates have become more important to me in my ‘senior years’ [I still have trouble accepting the term].

Growing up with two working parents, Superman was one of my babysitters, along with Robin Hood, Zorro and the Lone Ranger and Tonto. I grew up reading Tom Swift Junior, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. I brought home Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and other less famous authors. Space Westerns when Science Fiction had those two words for the genre. I still enjoy reading old books with cloth bindings. I’m reading a set of Tarzan books printed during World War I [the War to End All Wars…sigh].

I was not prepared for the Strange World of the 2020s.

I was not prepared for an American population that became mean and attacked ‘otherness’ with such careless abandon.

p45 was not the cause of this hostility; he was merely a symptom, writ large because of his position, and his unmitigated gall. Never in my remembrance was there a public leader, on camera, who mocked those with disabilities, who threatened individuals with violence, and lying so often that news organizations started keeping count of the numbers [30,573 false or misleading claims in 4 years]. Nixon was an awful President; but he at least attempted to act as a gentleman on camera.

President Eisenhower called it:

As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow…

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

The White Evangelical Church says that the solution to our current problems is to ‘turn our eyes to Jesus; and he will heal this land’. The White Evangelical Church has a problem with taking verses at random from the Bible and turning them into doctrine. This is one of the passages in the Jewish scriptures [Old Testament]:

…6 I will keep My eyes on them for good and will return them to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. 7 I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the LORD. They will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with all their heart. 8 But like the bad figs, so bad they cannot be eaten,’ says the LORD, ‘so will I deal with Zedekiah king of Judah, his officials, and the remnant of Jerusalem—those remaining in this land and those living in the land of Egypt.…  Jeremiah 24:6,7   JPS Tanakh 1917

First of all, Jesus was Jewish, not Christian.

Jesus’ teachings came from Torah, the Jewish Bible [Old Testament]. During my 48 years in the White Evangelical Church, I was taught that Christians did not need to pay attention to Torah; Torah was for the Jews. Like Jesus.

I submit that Christians never had this world in the first place. Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden of Eden. They did not leave, voluntarily.

We have borrowed this world, and like a 60s/70s Rock Band on tour, we tore up the hotel rooms and threw televisions out of the windows. Like the criminals who tore up the Capitol Building on January 6^th. They left excrement on the walls and floors, and a large contingency in the Halls of Congress refuse to admit this deadly demonstration of American resolve in 2021 ever occurred.

Humans have turned Planet Earth into an excremental nightmare. Like teenagers, humans need to learn to clean up their mess.

Dec 13, 2019 [CNN]  On Thursday morning, the President of the United States sent a tweet to his 60+ million followers blasting a 16-year-old girl with Asperger’s syndrome who has rallied efforts at fighting climate change around the globe. “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend!” Trump wrote of teenage climate crisis activist Greta Thunberg. “Chill Greta, Chill!”

In her speech before the U.N., she noted world leaders have “stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words.” She noted that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction;” and asked, “How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions?” Trump’s comment is meant to undermine the very thing that makes Thunberg an effective activist: the impassioned moral clarity with which she speaks about climate change.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/24/20881541/trump-greta-thumberg-tweet-un

At the center of our Milky Way galaxy, threads of superheated gas and magnetic fields weave around each other to create a spectacular galactic display captured in a striking new panoramic image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

This new image of the Milky Way’s core builds on previous observations from Chandra and other observatories. These newest observations stretch higher above and farther below our galaxy’s plane, or the disk where most of the Milky Way’s stars can be found, than previous imaging efforts have achieved…

https://www.space.com/milky-way-galaxy-center-chandra-photos-video

The Strange World of the Future

Somehow, the human race cannot translate the technological accomplishments of the 21^st Century into making a better society. We can view the center of the galaxy we travel within—a presently impossible distance to travel. And we cannot stop destroying this world.

The image above, for me, is a representation of what we could become. The Creator of the Universe is probably still Creating. Alpha Centauri is the closest star system and closest planetary system to Earth’s Solar System at 4.37 light-years from the Sun. I don’t know that we will ever know what Creator created there, 5 years ago.

The first law of thermodynamics states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another but can be neither created nor destroyed.

Think about this.

You are a brain with a body. All of you that is, your body, your ideas, your dreams, these happen in your brain. Your body provides transportation and nourishment to your brain. You theoretically are reading this on something that looks like a piece of paper. You do not have a screen in your brain. You cannot see a piece of digital paper. It’s all ones and zeroes translated into machine language. The light contacting the retinas of your eyes sends an electrochemical signals to nerve centers in your brain. What you are reading is a scientifically created illusion.

Take it a step further. Suppose that our current scientific understanding of the brain is missing what I believe is the key element: you are Energy. According to the first law of thermodynamics, you can be transformed; but cannot be destroyed. There is a YOU that is crafted by Creator and exists outside of our limited understanding of Life. I use the word ‘soul’ as many other people do. There are people who do not believe that the Soul exists because there is no evidence to prove it.

I have been following the Faith Walk, the Spirit Walk for 48 years. I cannot prove the existence of the Soul, but lack of proof does not mean lack of existence. The biggest problem I’ve had with my Faith Walk is religion. I have served in a variety of capacities in a number of denominations, and I am continually amazed at how people can take a few sentences out of their context, and then build a religious belief. I have also learned that I cannot change the minds of people whose minds are closed. The most I can do is provide an environment where change can occur, when someone wants to change.

You can be transformed; but cannot be destroyed.

This messes with the religious beliefs of many people.

I can’t help that.

“It is the rock, the storm, the lion, the flood, the desert. It is the bear, the leviathan, the whirlwind, the barely audible whisper, the voice, the silence, the city strongly compact, the mother with abundant breasts, the tearful father.

There is a mysterious reality, at the borders and at the heart of ordinary experience, suffusing and yet transcending all that surrounds us, a reality that can be evoked both with a thousand names and that cannot, finally, be caught by any name. This mystery judges us and energizes us, frightens us and gives us inoperable peace, overwhelms us and captivates us. Like Melville’s white whale, it surges up from the depts and sinks our ships, and like Jonah’s whale, it draws us into itself and gives us protection. It is as high as the heavens are above the earth and as low as the caverns of Hell; it is as dark as a pillar of cloud and as luminous as a pillar of fire; it is the burning bush that is not consumed and is water from the rock. It is the sheer act of Being itself and is nothing at all; it is what is hardest to see, and it is what is most obvious.

Every great mystic, prophet or theologian know that this mystery cannot be spoken of adequately, that, like a wily fish, it escapes all the nets of thought and language that we now set for it. Thomas Aquinas—the most talkative theologian in the tradition—simply stopped talking at the end of his life, convinced that all he had said of the mystery amounted to so much straw. And yet, as my catalogue of traditional names suggests, we talk, almost compulsively and maniacally, of this power, pushed by some inner drive of the spirit. We cannot speak of God, and we must speak of God. It is as simple and strange as that.”

Bishop Robert Barron

Creator is the Creator of the entire Universe, the Creator of galaxies and nebulae. This does not mean that Creator does not have time for us. Creator exists outside of Time and beyond distance, and beyond our understanding. And Creator is aware of all that goes on in our lives. Creator has known the entirety of our lives from the moment of Creation. We are unable to accept the idea because we are stuck living each moment of every single day. We are not yet eternal in our understanding.

Everyone wants to ‘go back’ to pre-COVID normal. It is not possible. I am not the same man I was a year ago. I’m not the same man I was, a week or more ago, when I started typing this. We cannot go back we can only go Forward. The world has changed dramatically in the last year. We cannot go back.

Creator does not control our actions—we are not puppets. We have free will, everyone we know has free will. If you do not believe in free will, you have never raised children. It’s called “the terrible twos” for a reason.

Whenever disaster strikes, in whatever form it takes, these words start appearing:

“I blame god for this…”

“How could god have allowed this to happen?”

“I’m a good person; how could this be happening to me?”

There’s a long list of these questions.

I must have missed the day when Creator was handing out immunity from the dangers of living on Earth. We are living on a giant rock that spins on its axis at something like 1,040 mph; and our Earth is orbiting the Sun at a speed of 67,000 mph. Our solar system is in a low-rent district in the Milky Way galaxy; and is orbiting around the Milky Way at 448,000 mph.

[the fine print]

Earth is unique among the known planets: it has an abundance of water. Other worlds — including a few moons — have atmospheres, ice, and even oceans, but only Earth has the right combination to sustain life.

Earth’s oceans cover about 70 percent of the planet’s surface with an average depth of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). Fresh water exists in liquid form in lakes and rivers and as water vapor in the atmosphere, which causes much of Earth’s weather.

Earth has multiple layers. The ocean basins and the continents compose the crust, the outermost layer. Earth’s crust is between three and 46 miles (five and 75 km) deep. The thickest parts are under the continents and the thinnest parts are under the oceans.

The crust is divided into huge plates that float on the mantle, the next layer. The plates are constantly in motion; they move at about the same rate as fingernails grow, according to NASA. Earthquakes occur when these plates grind against each other. Mountains form when the plates collide and deep trenches form when one plate slides under another plate. Plate tectonics is the theory explaining the motion of these plates.

The mantle under the crust is about 1,800 miles deep (2,890 km). It is composed mostly of silicate rocks rich in magnesium and iron. Intense heat causes the rocks to rise. They then cool and sink back down to the core. This convection — with the consistency of caramel — is thought to be what causes the tectonic plates to move. When the mantle pushes through the crust, volcanoes erupt.

At the center of the Earth is the core, which has two parts. The solid, inner core of iron has a radius of about 760 miles (about 1,220 km), according to NASA. It is surrounded by a liquid, outer core composed of a nickel-iron alloy. The outer core is about 1,355 miles (2,180 km) thick. The inner core spins at a different speed than the rest of the planet. This is thought to cause Earth’s magnetic field. When charged particles from the solar wind collide with air molecules above Earth’s magnetic poles, it causes the air molecules to glow, causing the auroras — the northern and southern lights.

The reason our lives are devastated by Natural Disaster is not that Creator has stopped intervening in the stories of our lives—Creator is the same, now and forever. Our lives become devastated because we were given the opportunity to live on a planet that is totally unstable. It isn’t some sort of curse; it’s some sort of fact. Magical Thinking allows to believe that some people are ‘more special’ than others. Read World History. We have pushed Free Will beyond any and every boundary. Nonetheless, we still call this Normal.

I’ve invested a lot of time in the study of Creator in these 48 years of Faith; I haven’t found any contextual Bible verses that say Creator promises we will never suffer in this life. There are passages throughout the Older Testament [Jesus’ Bible] that state that Creator will never abandon us; but we aren’t promised safety.

One can find individual verses that say we will not stumble on a rock. There’s a verse in the Psalms that says, ‘happy is the man who bashes the babies’ heads on a rock’ [Psalm 137:9]; this does not show up in sermons very often. My guess is this verse is being used often in these times of ‘almost-war’ between Israel and Palestine. People take a verse out of context and derive a religion around that verse and all of the others that seem like it.

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

John Dominic Crossan

I’ve long imagined that there are beacons in space, beyond our solar system, warning travelers to avoid us; because of the plague that human behavior can be.

We continue to lose thousands of people each week to COVID. So many deaths, that we cannot properly mourn their loss. As I write this [5/22/2021] there have been 589,670 COVID deaths in the U.S. and 3,449,399 deaths across the world.

The number of American military and civilian deaths during World War II, was 418,500.

COVID has surpassed World War II

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war

More people in the US have died from COVID than were killed in World War II.

Politicians attempt to normalize this. They have agendas to pursue that aren’t necessarily for the public good.

As a nation, how do we honor the dead?

Back When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and I became ‘serious’ about illustration, I became fascinated by the eye; particularly the human eye—this small ‘camera’ which defines the world for most people. I don’t have enough faith in Science to credit Evolution with the conversion of light-sensitive cells on a marine animal into a ‘device’ that becomes the model for the digital cameras currently located on Mars…

One aspect of the wonder that is the experience of sight is the Blind Spot. We all have a blind spot in each eye—the ‘hole’ in the retina where the optic nerve connects with the brain. So, find your blind spots—I’ll wait… 

You can’t find them, can you? The brain ‘fills in’ the hole in our vision with data that is adjacent to the blind spot. This should not be surprising, in that our experience of vision is a ‘construct’ created by our brain. Our visual perception of the world around us is created by ‘electrochemical’ signals that travel between the light-sensitive retina cells at the back of our eyes by way of the optic nerve, into to the brain. To make things stranger still, the lenses of our eyes flip the image upside down [represented by the candle in the image above]. So, not only is your visual experience of the world a creation of your brain, but the data your brain receives is upside down.

Close your eyes and the world is darkened; open your eyelids and you suddenly see the world as if you are watching television, or a streaming service to the screen in front of you. Stranger yet is the fact that each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle—this is how we perceive Depth—but again, the perception of depth is a ‘translation’ of the world created by the brain.

Back When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and cameras were analog rather than digital, light traveling through a camera lens caused the light-sensitive chemicals on a piece of film to create a ‘negative’ image on that film, when exposed to a different set of chemicals. Shining a light through that film onto a chemically treated piece of paper produced a ‘positive,’ but invisible, chemical image on the paper. By applying other chemicals to the paper, seemingly blank sheets of paper became photographic images on paper.

Our concept of the world is essentially the analog process by which we perceive the world. Our perception the world is based on the ‘chemicals’/ideas that are in our environment. I grew up in Portland, Oregon—sometimes called ‘the Whitest city in America’. The original State Constitution specified that Oregon was intended to be for White people. The City of Portland was intended to be a place for White people to live. That idea was shattered by World War II [does it bother you that Wars get numbered/identified by decade?]. Portland had shipyards, which were converted for use in the construction of Liberty Ships to replace vessels lost at Pearl Harbor. Most of the White guys were in the War or preparing for the War; Portland’s ‘City Fathers’ had to allow brown-skinned people to move into the City for ships to be built [when the War ended, the City Father’s relocated the brown-skinned people into the part of Portland with the lowest property values].

My Dad, labeled 4-F after learning he was diabetic while nearly dying on a troop train, went to work in the shipyards. My Dad was relatively small and skinny; he knew how to weld, so he was hung by his feet and shoved into a ship’s funnel to weld the connection between the funnel and the ship. My guess is that the men on the rope, keeping my Dad from falling, were brown-skinned.

My Dad’s brother, when I was old enough to notice, was a racist, and a mean drunk. He served overseas during WWII. Prior to that, the two brothers were raised in the same environment. This is all conjecture on my part—I never had much reason to interact with the adults in my family. The problem was mine, not theirs.

I never heard a racist word come from my Dad’s mouth, my Uncle, not so much. I wonder if the difference came from my Dad working in the shipyards among brown-skinned men.  

If you’ve read my stuff before, you are probably aware of parts of my Faith journey. It doesn’t matter to me if that description has meaning for you; and my lack of concern isn’t judgmental. We all have our own faith journeys. Some more difficult than others. Some, more complex than others. ‘Seventy’ is a number that will have new meaning for me, in about 15 months. My world became entirely different in my twenties [last night I watched an older Doctor Who episode that revolved around one of the Doctor’s companions, and her decision to make a right-turn one day, instead of turning left. That single decision alters the entirety of Earth history from that point forward. Donna Noble thought she was nothing but a ‘Temp’—a person of no significance. She becomes the most significant person in Earth history. Fiction? Yes. And the analog version of our lives—we have no idea who we will influence. Faith was my ‘left turn’ [no, not that Left—my first turning was to the Right].

How do we see our world…

I’m listening to a song about how the Breath of God breathed dry bones into a mighty army. Factual? Probably not. Stories to provide courage to those without.

Today, this sort of story comes under the general heading of “Conspiracy Theory”—the explanations that certain members of the electorate, and those they support, as to what their ‘enemy’ believes, and is working to accomplish. Nonsense, that sells a message.

When did our two-party governmental system become war, with enemies?

Metanoia

Jesus’ opening speech in Mark’s Gospel: “repent and believe the Good News.” The word so often and misleadingly translated as “repent” is metanoia. This Greek word is based on two words, meta [beyond] and nous [mind or spirit], and thus, in its most basic form, it means something like, “go beyond the mind that you have.” The English word, “repent” has a moralizing overtone, suggesting a change in behavior or action, whereas Jesus’ term seems to be hinting at a change at a far more fundamental level of one’s being. Jesus urges his listeners to change their way of knowing, their way of perceiving and grasping reality, their perspective, their mode of seeing…

Robert Barron

“Christianity moved from the position of being a type of exilic community, existing on the fringes of society of the first cen­turies of the common era, to becoming the religion of the state. When this move was made, certain changes emerged in the com­munity which would alter the direction of faithful witness down to the present age.
“Previous to the year 313 C.E., Christianity was in a precarious position. Outlawed at various times by different rulers, enduring several waves of local and empire-wide persecution, the church had developed a way of being in the world that addressed the present culture in challenging and prophetic ways…

“All this changed when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, a decree of toleration for Christianity. While the accounts differ, the impetus for this shift was Constantine’s victory at Milvian over an­other claimant to the throne of the empire. One account says that Constantine had a vision that showed the cross in the sky, accom­panied by the words, “By this sign you will conquer.” Whatever may have happened, it is surely the case that with the Edict of Milan the position of the church in the Roman Empire changed. No longer were Christians ostracized for their faith or persecuted to the point of death; rather, they entered into the agenda of the empire in a new way…

“…Once the cultural pretensions of the state were baptized with a Christian veneer, the results were mixed to say the least. When Christians held political power, they did not hesitate to use it to force conformity to their own beliefs and morals…

“And in the captivity to political powers conformity was always exacted to compel adherence to particular doctrines and pronouncements of the church. This history has been one of embarrassment to the church. Even though the church needed to have some discernment about what represented faithful witness to Jesus Christ, the exclusions and history of slaughter and murder carried out in the name of the church make a sorry spectacle. Indeed, the efforts of the church to assure conformity to its doctrines would lead to such a backlash that modernity would seek to deny the church any place at the table of the political process at all.

“The removal of the church from the political process and the founding of society on secular principles in the Enlightenment were ample evidence that coercion in matters of faith left a tragic legacy. It also called into doubt how the most central convictions of Christianity became the guiding factor for people’s faith. How could you trust something built upon the edifice of political power? Once Christianity let itself be identified with the aims of the state, how could anything be trusted that was a product, not of discerning consensus, but of who had the greatest political power?”

The Matrix of Faith Jeffrey C. Pugh

In this time of Pandemic, people keep waiting until things can return to Normal.

Normal is what got us here.

Normal is what inspired the deadly insurrection attempt at the US Capitol Building in January.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” 
Not Albert Einstein; no one seems to be really sure who said this first.

I would add, Normal is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

What would Not Normal look like? I have no idea; this is the task that presents itself to us. Much like Climate Change and CO₂ emissions and a raft of environmental and social problems that need to be fixed.

There is no shortage of money to fix these things; there is a large shortage of Will and Imagination; and an excess of the desire for Power.

We need to change our way of knowing, our way of perceiving and grasping reality, our perspective, our mode of seeing…

BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE

January 3, 2021

President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that legal scholars described as a flagrant abuse of power and a potential criminal act.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

January 5, 2021

At 10:50 PST, ballots are being counted in Georgia. Jon Ossof leads David Purdue by 3500 votes. Raphael Warnock leads Sen. Kelly Loeffler by over 40,000 votes.
Tomorrow, Congress receives the Electoral Votes for the Presidential candidates.
On Wednesday, some of Trump’s GOP allies on Capitol Hill will attempt to block congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-to-232 victory in the electoral college—two weeks before Biden is set to take the oath of office.
Trump’s strategy represents a brazen attempt to overturn or “steal” the election, historians and political scientists agreed. Some said he is tiptoeing toward an “autogolpe,” a Spanish term popularized in Latin America to describe a “self-coup” attempted by leaders who came to power legally and acted outside the law to try to maintain it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-election-coup/2021/01/05/26afcfc0-4f6c-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html

This is the America we live in for another two weeks. Meanwhile, 357,377 Americans are dead because the president refuses to do his duty to the country by leading a plan to fight CVirus. He does not know how. But it isn’t his fault or failure… For the first time in his 75 years, he has become what is commonly called, ‘a loser’.

By the time I finish this, it will Wednesday, January 6^th; and it will also be the Feast of the Epiphany. The feast of the Epiphany is celebrated on the 6th of January in Western tradition. This celebrates the coming of the Magi to the newborn infant.

The word epiphany comes from the Greek ἐπιφάνεια (epiphaneia) meaning to make manifest, to show forth, to appear. This was associated with the appearance of the Spirit at Jesus’ baptism and the voice of God making manifest the identity of Jesus as his Son (cf. Mark 1:11).
The gospel calls the men from the East who visited the Christ child μάγοι (magoi) meaning sage, wise or learned. They are first referred to as kings by the theologian Tertullian (160-220) who calls them fere reges (‘almost kings’ – because of their noble calling, representing the Gentiles paying homage to Christ and no doubt reflecting the Old Testament reference to kings in Psalm 71 (‘The kings of Sheba and Seba shall bring him gifts’) which is used at the Mass of the Epiphany). The gospel does not say how many Magi there were; this tradition seems to have started with the theologian Origen (185-254) who assumes there must have been three kings because there were three gifts (gold, frankincense and myrrh).

http://jesuitinstitute.org/Pages/Liturgy/Epiphany.htm

Historically, this is when my wife and I give presents to our children. I grew tired of Christmas as celebrated in the US, long ago. Creator entering Time and Space as a single cell inside the womb of a teenaged girl, has ALWAYS been the gift.

“The letters of the name of God in Hebrew are infrequently pronounced Yahweh. But in truth they are unutterable. This word {YHWH} is the sound of breathing. The holiest name in the world, the Name of Creator, is the sound of your own breathing. That these letters are unpronounceable is no accident. Just as it is no accident that they are also the root letters of the Hebrew verb ‘to be’… God’s name is the name of Being itself.”

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

Your very existence, every breath, is an unceasing invitation to awaken to the reality of God. You inhale God and exhale God. Every breath is into and out of God. YHWH. Breathe, and your being calls out to the name of Being itself.
This also adds a whole new dimension to taking the name of God in vain. It’s about your life, your existence.

Jacob M. Wright

Historically, the three Magi are considered to be Kings. What better event for a Time Lord to attend…he is also a British Lord, in an investiture by Queen Victoria. Immediately followed by Victoria banishing The Doctor from Britain for consorting with that which should not be mentioned; and coinciding with the creation of the Torchwood Institute, dedicated to the protection of the Realm from Alien intrusion…

When life gets too crazy, I visit The Doctor.

12/5/2020: California certified its election results, bringing the Biden
Electoral Votes to 276; assuring his election victory.
In 2016, Trump had 306 Electoral Votes.
In 2020 Biden received 306 Electoral Votes.
Biden received 7 million more votes than Trump.
Attorney General William Barr has stated that
there is no evidence of election fraud.
12/15/2020: State Electors Vote for Joe Biden

I avoided Avatar for a long while, primarily because of the Jarhead Colonel and his total lack of comprehension for any life but his own.
Sort of like humans today.
We live in a world where everything is connected; and we are too blind to see it.
We live in a Universe where everything is connected; and we are almost totally blind to its reality.
For years, I’ve been trying to come up with an analogy that explains my understanding of the Universe, and a life of Faith. I found what I was looking for by watching Avatar the other day.
For those unfamiliar with the film, the story takes place on the far distant planet, Pandora, far in the future. As with all examples of Manifest Destiny, the planet Pandora contains an incredibly valuable mineral called Unobtainable; a name, and a metaphor. The largest deposit of Unobtainable on Pandora is located under a Great Tree in the center of a forest amidst floating mountains. As with all examples of Manifest Destiny, earthlings who have created spacecraft and machines of War believe they can plow their way through any obstacle to get to the Unobtainable and steal it. [Manifest Destiny is a term coined in the early days of the European Occupation of the lands on which the America’s Indigenous peoples lived. An expression of belief that their occupation of lands belonging to others was, ‘ordained by god’]
The Indigenous population of Pandora, the Na’vi People, resembles, in terms of technology, the Lakota Sioux of 19^th Century Earth. Defending themselves from gunships with arrows. Each of the Na’vi People has a nervous system that connects with all life on Pandora, animal and plant. “There be Dragons” on Pandora. For Dragon Riders, the bond between Dragon and Rider is permanent, once made. The Rider communicates with the Dragon by thought and the physical neurological connection between them.  
Manifest Destiny on Pandora is occurring by means of mercenaries commanded by the Colonel Jarhead mentioned above. Since the Indigenous People do not use technology, they are considered to be ‘savages’ that are in the way of the human armed heist. A repetition of the histories of the Americas and of Earth.
In order to ‘encourage’ the Indigenous population to relocate, ‘Avatars’ have been created to infiltrate the Na’vi People. These ‘Avatars’—living robots to a large degree—are inhabited by a human intelligence and personality, linked to an individual’s DNA. The Na’vi refer to these Avatars as, “Sky People” and they are looked upon with suspicion. Enter Jake; a soldier whose legs have been blown off in battle. Jake relies on a wheelchair to get around; by inhabiting the Avatar of his deceased brother, a scientist working to better understand this mysterious culture, Jake once again has working legs. He understands his job as a soldier; he learns how to live as a scientist understanding a different culture. In the story, Jake has his own destiny, one which he does not understand—Jake will be the One who will inhabit both worlds—for he has become a Na’vi by will of the Creator—his own world, and the world of these people connected to their planet, as one entity. 
The Na’vi are victorious in resisting the attack of the earthlings, but at tremendous cost. Unlike the intentions of the mercenaries of Earth, the Na’vi allow the mercenaries of Earth to leave Pandora.
Since numerous sequels to Avatar are in production at this time, no doubt the mercenaries will return, and the battle will start again.

The Universe is so large that we don’t even have words to describe it. Some astronomers believe there could be two trillion galaxies in the Universe, spanning an unknown distance. Our Milky Way galaxy has perhaps 200 billion stars; many of these stars will have solar systems; many of those solar systems will have planets; a fraction of which will be located a distance from their suns where life can exist.
I’ve been a designer for close to sixty years. I don’t remember a time that I didn’t draw. Designing stick figures on a sheet of paper, telling a story in my imagination. In time, I designed furniture for my shop class; then I started designing houses; and in time I designed schools. When I worked for the City of Portland, I analyzed the designs of architects building high rises, to ensure that the buildings were compliant with the Building Code.
This all took place when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.
In this century, I started designing books and videos in addition to designing construction solutions for architects and building designers. In relatively recent years, I’ve had to design a new way to create illustrations, since my hands don’t work very well anymore.

After sixty years of exploration, I recognize design when I see it.

Creation is designed. I’m not referring to “Intelligent Design”—there is too much in Creation that defies logic—the appendix, for example. That open question that nearly took my life. The chicken and the egg. An Australian website claims to have solved the age-old question of ‘which came first’—”At some point, a different kind of egg began to evolve” as explanations go, that one is pretty lame. Why would a different kind of egg evolve? Do we owe our breakfasts to a evolutionary mistake?
There is no reasonable explanation as to how light-sensitive-skin cells in our genetic chain evolve into the wonder that is the human eye. I don’t have a problem with the idea that humans are incapable of understanding the intricacies of how we got here. The Human Genome Project has shown that the Human Genome has similarities to a wide variety of creatures on earth. As a designer, I use repetition whenever it is productive. Newly created things don’t have to be entirely original.
One of the problems that arise when people of Faith start talking about science, is that they let their religious belief system get in the way. Much of the theology of the White Evangelical Church is a system of theological ideas, mostly derived from an interpretation of Scripture, rather than Scripture itself. Frequently, these interpretations come from Prophecy; and seem to overlook the notion that, in Scripture, if the words of a Prophet did not come about, the Prophet was supposed to be stoned. I tend to think that some of the prophets were stoned, in the modern sense of the word.
Most people in the White Evangelical Church don’t do a lot of research through the historical documents that shape their belief systems. This practice is often discouraged by Pastors who seem to think that they have special powers of interpretation. The historical record—the actual documents that have been found, which shape these beliefs—is pretty sparse.

This above image is a photo of one of the oldest papyrus fragments that collectively became the Bible:
This page contains 2 Corinthians 11:33-12:9
There is no punctuation. There are no spaces between letters. There are no verse numbers. “Papyrus 46 is one of the oldest extant New Testament manuscripts in Greek, with its ‘most probable date’ between 175 C.E.  and 225 C.E.—two to three centuries after the events took place. The document uses the abbreviated version of common divine names and words, a type of writing that began in the first century C.E. and referred to as nomina sacra. Words such as God, Jesus, cross, mother, Israel, and heaven are shortened from their conventional Greek.” 
“Another text, The Codex Sinaiticus, or Sinai Book, is an ancient fourth century C.E. Bible, handwritten in the Greek language. This manuscript contains the Septuagint, a version of the Hebrew Old Testament, that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians, as well as being the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. The pages are made of vellum parchment, or calfskin. The work is written in scriptio continua—without spaces between words.”

Hebrew script relies on a variety of added symbols for understanding. Greek does not include these added symbols. Therefore, the Septuagint is flawed, compared with the Hebrew text.
We live in a time unlike any other in the less-than-United States, one where objective truth is doubted by almost half of the American people. All because of an extremely successful propaganda campaign put into place in the last four years by the President of the United States [‘the President said it, therefore it must be true’]. Protests over the results of this year’s election occur every day, some violent, some threatening violence against State officials, the goal being an attempt to overturn a legitimate election, falsely described as ‘stolen’. The idea is held by 73 million voters. 80 million voters agree with the outcome.
This week, on 12/8/2020, the President’s hand-picked Supreme Court Justices, and all of the other Justices of the Court refused to hear the President’s suit to have the election overturned. Something like 49 other suits have been found to be without merit.
With Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and refusing to concede, and his ‘believers’ certain that COVID-19 is a hoax created by Progressive Liberal Democrats, it seems that there are a bunch of ‘prophets’ that need to be stoned.

 As I’ve watched the current election cycle unfold, I have seen what I’ve encountered for decades—people who seem to equate Creator with some sort of ‘fairy godfather’ who grants our wishes. This ‘fairy godfather’ apparently floats above the Earth, controlling the events on Earth. Despite help being called upon from ‘angels in South America and Africa’, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election. Despite a belief system that says COVID-19 is a hoax that was perpetrated by Progressive Liberal Democrats, over 3000 Americans died from COVID-19 yesterday. That number will be exceeded tomorrow. More people will die from CVirus every day than died on 9/11; and the CDC predicts that this will continue for months. The number of deaths that will exceed 300,000, could have been greatly reduced if half of the population believed that the wearing of face masks was a tool for public health, rather than an imposition upon individual liberty.

Imagine, if you can, a Universe that is entirely connected to an invisible ‘neurological system’ located outside Time and Space, one that we usually cannot perceive through our normal senses. This ‘system’ is the Spirit of Creator, available to all who desire to be ‘connected.’ This description is what I believe, because this is what I have experienced. I have no ‘proof’ beyond my experience.
Creator exists outside Time and Space. The words, ‘eternal’ and ‘omniscient’ and ‘omnipresent’ are in our vocabulary because these words refer to an experience outside of our normal understanding. I believe that all of Creation has been known from the moment of Creation; in such a manner that everything that happens, and has happened, and will happen, is known by Creator. Creator is never surprised by the events of our life. Not because Creator controls these events, but because Creator has known these events since the moment of Creation. Does Creator cause bad things to happen to us? No. Creator has known about CVirus since the moment of Creation. Did Creator create the virus? No. Viruses are part of the nature of living things. Not all viruses are ‘bad’; viruses enable immunity to occur, and CVirus is a virus transmitted from bats to humans. CVirus does not seem to harm bats and a growing number of other animals; it does harm humans. About 2% of the humans that are tested Positive for CVirus die. Many people that have been infected with CVirus have serious physical problems that take a long time to recover. Some people seem to think that a virus that does not kill 98% of its victims as something that is not worth the effort to avoid.

Until the victim is a beloved family member or friend.

Does Creator intervene in our lives? I have to say, ‘yes’, because there are events in my life that I cannot explain in any other way. Do these events happen often? No. Do these events occur because I am in some way, special? No. I believe these occurrences happen in my life as a ‘side effect’ from some other intervention into Time and Space, some other place. Sort of like a cosmic ‘twofer’. However, I cannot prove this assertion.
Thirty-plus years ago, our 5-year-old daughter was subject to painful earaches; a not-uncommon phenomenon. We had ear drops that normally reduced the pain; but this night it wasn’t happening. I tucked her into her bed, still crying. I checked-in with her, an hour or so later, and she was happily playing in her room. I asked her, ‘what happened to the earache?’

‘I asked Jesus to take the pain away, and He did.’ The faith of a child. 
Do I believe these ideas make sense to the general population? No. They only make sense to those who desire to better understand Creator.

A lot of religious people believe that their experience of god is the only way to believe; as if there are multiple gods in the heavens, and you select the god you want. Happens a lot in the White Evangelical Church. ‘Our way or the highway.’ My explanation is that there is only One Creator; and people use different names/addresses to contact the same place. A ‘place’ that is outside Time and Space.
There are four centuries of silence between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Four hundred years with no Prophecies, no recorded interventions into human life. Creator apparently had nothing more to say to the people rescued from captivity. Believers would do well to remember this.

I am of the opinion that when Creator does attend to us humans, it’s more like picking up a rock in the yard and looking what is underneath that rock, than anything else. The Human Propensity to Foul things Up fills our millennia of warring upon each other. The savage warring that is occurring right at this minute; the abuse of children, the abuse of women, the abuse of those who do not have the power to overcome their adversaries. You and I are doing nothing to stop this savagery. We feel powerless.
Creator entered time and space in the form of a single cell implanted into the womb of a teenager; the young woman who gave birth to Jesus; the Man who came to us to show us a new way to live. Jesus ended the four centuries of silence and promised that through the Spirit of the Creator, we could change. And that we could stay in our brokenness, if that is what we want. Freedom from the jail cell that is locked from inside the cell.
The religious elite, who had power over the Jewish people, had Jesus murdered in the most shocking way that the Roman invaders had: Crucifixion. This death was to prove a point—Rome rules. Tyrants Rule. Autocrats Rule, unless they are voted out of office.
People want proof that there is Life on other planets, so that we will know we are not alone. Our knowing that we are not alone is one of the major accomplishments of Jesus’ short life on Earth. Creator entering Life on Earth. To prove we are not alone.