Don't Put God in a Little Box.

I guess the first thought of anyone who has been given a diagnosis of terminal Cancer is "I've gotta get right with God." When I received that diagnosis in August of 2022, those were my thoughts. For those of you who know me best and for the longest, you know my entire life has been a struggle with the concept of "God." For the rest of you, I'll try to make a brief summary.

Both of our parents, both Mom and Pop, as youngsters had suffered due to the abuses of two branches of Protestantism. Thinking back on it, it's a miracle they met "randomly" in L.A. in early 1941. Mom and Grandma were there to be close to Mom's older brothers who had joined the army and were being trained for Desert Warfare, out on the Mojave Desert. The government was thinking North Africa would be the first deployment for America. Pearl Harbor changed that plan.

But when Mom and Pop met, Pop had already been in the army for several years. He had gotten tired of riding on boxcars during the Depression, after his pius but abusive father kicked him off their Oklahoma farm for impregnating a school mate. So he joined the Army in California, receiving Basic Training at Fort Ord, near Monterey. By the time they had met, Pop had advanced to Staff Sergeant and Drill Instructor. They were on a date on Dec. 7, 1941. Returning home to Grandma's house, she ran out with the news, "The Japanese have Attacked Pearl Harbor and all military personnel are ordered to return to base."

Don't worry, the miracle of how our family was started, does relate back to my God-struggle. Keep reading. Because of the trauma both parents had suffered under Protestantism, they agreed that they would never try to influence any of we three sons in religion. As far as I remember, God was never mentioned in our house. Our parents never "sent" us to church. But they did allow us to go to Sunday school when other kids invited us. I don't know about my two brothers, but I always found Sunday school to be kind of weird. Even as a nine-year old I was old enough to notice that the teachings of each church contradicted what the other Sunday school teachers were telling kids. In the Sunday school class of the most progressive denomination in town, which shall remain nameless, we spent the entire hour discussing nothing but Little League Baseball happenings and standings around town. No word of God or Jesus whatsoever. Even at 9 0r 10 years old, the situation was dripping with hypocrisy, in my young brain. Bottom line, I decided to be an Atheist and stayed a happy one until I was 30 years old and was lured into a highly fundamentalist so-called "Christian" cult.

How did that happen?

I may have been an Atheist but I had my own "False God," my own "Idol." It was Intellectualism. By 30, I had completed all of the requirements for a Creative Writing major at San Francisco State, except for returning for my senior year and declaring a minor. Personal circumstances made that final year not happen. Later, a severe business and career reverse inspired me to take up the study of Law. I spent 3 years in 2 different law schools, studying at night, pursuing a JD degree and admission to the California bar. Again, that did not happen.

During the time of nightschool, we started being visited by ministers of the Worldwide Church of God. Each carried a thick black leather-bound copy of the King James bible, made thicker by every page being covered with variously-colored pencil highlights and notes written with fine Koh-i-Noor india ink. My "demon" of Intellectualism was intrigued. Here was a book I had never really noticed. It was printed on thousands of pages of onion-skin thin paper. The "books" or chapters were by hundreds of authors, whom the minister said were all "taking dictation," (writing down the exact words as God dictated them.)

Could it be that all my scientific learning about nature and evolution was wrong? "Yes," I was told. "Those dinosaur fossils, etc. were placed there by Satan in order to fool the gullible and discredit the Bible." It sounded rather illogical, but if that many scholars over the years had read and re-read, analyzed and exigeted. the King James Bible, following up on all the 1611 cross-references in center columns, "It could be true..." (said Intellectualism Idol.) I put my doubts on the back-burner and decided to go with the program.

I suppose we would still be in that Cult if the Guru, Herbert W. Armstrong hadn't died and the eventual church leaders essetntially said "you are free to go." Which we did. I was back to trying various denominations, again being struck by how they all had varying opinions and interpretations of the same "Bible."

Be that as it may, those years of trying to reach God, through prayer and meditation, even as a member of a "false" church, left me with the conviction that there was a God somewhere and He/She or It makes themself available for those who sincerely seek contact. Is that an agnostic, or is it a theist or a diest? I don't know.

Getting back to my date of the "bad news" in August of 2022. (Only 2 years ago!) I had only the most vague idea of "God." Like most of human society, I was only aware of around 6,000 years of "written" history. Before that, were the stone ages: the paleolithc, the neolithic, etc. The "intellectual human" began with writing, and most of us thought that the cuneiform found in mesopotamia was the beginning of writing. My discovery of two recent books expanded my thinking along those lines.

I previously thought the discovery of those "dinosaur fossils" — which caused my Mom's dad, who died before I was born, to resign his office as a Presbyterian Deacon — were the great disrupter of fundamentalist Bible belief. In the hundred years since, geologists, archaeologists and anthropologist kept digging around and have come up with human history (inferred from their excavations) dating back to the last Ice Age.) The recent book, The Dawn of Everything, by Graeber and Wengrow relates how "Western Thinking," (European thinkiing) about the Bible was disrupted 400 years before Darwin. The culprit was Columbus. When he and those explorers who followed, came across New World cities, including writing systems, which predated the Bible's version of history by perhaps thousands of years, that had to be absorbed. Surely, the God of the Hebrews would not "dictate" a lie to the priests and prophets. So therefore, the question arose: were the writers of the Bible merely inspired by God to put spiritual inklings into what was then modern terms, creating a "religion" that fit their already-developed patriarchal society's norms? The intellectuals of the 15th Century had to expand their "box" surrounding God to include this disruuption. It was that, or become complete atheists. Some did become atheists, I assume. Obviously, the results show that the rest became "denominationists." Nowadays there's a "flavor" of Christianity for nearly everyone. Even the discovery of those "dinosaur bones" 400 years later were not as big a disrupter of Bible belief, as was the discovery of the New World Indigenous Civilizations.

Retired, with time to think, I thought of the miracle of nature. Watching nature shows on T.V. the more I saw, the more complexity and order there was, the more I sensed that evolution was not just "random," but was planned, or at least "designed" to combine forethought and randomness together into some beautiful results.

Another disrupter of my own thoughts is the recent discovery of thousands of planets orbiting nearby stars. Thousands are dead worlds not capable of sustaining life. Earth seems more and more unique. Many factors had to come into play in order for our planet to support life. The distance from the Sun, in the "Goldilocks Zone," is only one tiny factor in the hundreds that had to happen for life to exist. It's hard not to assume intelligent planning in the creation of this home for human society to develope.