AW! Epistles
From Russell Odell 4
Abstract
Wednesday, September 06, 2000
- Peter Rabbit, Humpty Dumpty, Mother Goose and God
- What the Missionaries Taught
- Strange Births
- What is Nothing?
- Faith and Common Sense
Peter Rabbit, Humpty Dumpty, Mother Goose and God
©1980 Russell Odell
As a youngster I read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the story of Alice in Wonderland. The part of that story that left an impression with me is when the White Queen told Alice that she was 101 years, 5 months and one day old.
Alice said, "Oh, goodness me, I can’t believe that"!
"Can’t you?" questioned the Queen in a pitying tone, "Try again. Draw a long breath and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed, "There’s no use. One can’t believe in impossible Things."
The White Queen replied, "I dare say my child, you haven’t had much practice, have you? Many years ago when I was your age, I always thought of impossible things a half hour every day. Why sometimes I thought of as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
As children it was easy to believe in impossible things. There were Peter Rabbit, Humpty Dumpty. Mother Goose. Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs. All of them invisible and impossible. Yet, as children, we did believe in them, didn’t we? We had the love and the faith to make them real.
At the same time we were romping through the meadows with Peter Rabbit or walking along the country dirt road with Mother Goose, or racing through the woods with Robin Hood, we were also going to Sunday School.
As our minds were already self-trained and very well programmed to believe in invisible and impossible things thus,we accepted, in childish innocence, the stories of how the baby Moses was found in the bulrushes by the Pharaoh’s daughter. We didn’t question the story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale and living in its guts for three days and nights before being puked up on the shore as good as new. We accepted the story of Noah building a big boat and taking thousands of animals aboard to save them from the flood. And a very loving God drowned every living man, women and child on earth except Noah’s family.
Unconsciously, we self-indoctrinated ourselves with the impossible, the invisible, the untouchable and the unpractical. We were now ready to believe in heaven and hell.
We felt no reason to ask questions because these stories came from the bible. As children, we accepted the bible as the word of God as though God Himself wrote every word. Many fail to understand that God never wrote one word of the Old Testament and Jesus never wrote one word of the New Testament. The bible was written by 39 men and one woman. To question the bible would be a sin and if you sinned you would go to hell. Of course, no one wanted to go to hell.
The fantastic stories of the bible originated in the minds of imaginative story tellers just as Peter Rabbit, Humpty Dumpty and Mother Goose originated in the minds of their writers.
Washington Irving used his imagination to write his story about Rip Van Winkel. Edgar Allen Poe used his imagination to write The Fall of the House Usher. Matthew used his imagination to tell his story of the Three Wise Men. Jonah used his imagination to write his experience with a whale. Luke used his imagination to write the story of the Virgin Mary. What wonderful imagination did Jules Verne use to produce his story, A Journey to center of the Earth? What imagination inspired Moses to write his story of the parting the Red Sea?
From the realms of imagination came many unforgettable stories. Aesop’s Fables were spoken and written contemporary with the bible and were then more popular. If you mix in a little religion, put the story between the pages of a religious book they take on an air of authenticity.
The reason the bible has been around for hundreds of years is because it is the only textbook religion has. It is the basic text book of every Christian Church in the world. It’s their bread and butter. The bible is their survival kit.
For hundreds of years preachers have been telling us about the joys of heaven and the torments of hell as though they have been to both places many times. But they know no more of heaven and hell than you do. They remind me of Chicken Little running around and yelling, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling !" And they have no more substantiation than Chicken Little. They are still wandering around in the storybook domain of Peter Rabbit, Humpty Dumty and Mother Goose.
All the hell we are ever going to get we will get right here on earth. I have had the experience myself. Most of you have too. We get a free ticket to hell every time we loose a loved one in death. And we sizzle in that hell a long emotional time. While our emotions are tearing us apart we look around for that great loving God who loved us so much that He gave His only begotten Son to comfort us. It is then I begin to realize that He, like Peter Rabbit, Humpty Dumpty and Mother Goose must be looked at from a different perspective, with a deeper understanding, leaning more toward logic than fantasy. I am reminded of Puck, that little elf in Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Nights Dream, who said, "What fools we mortals be".
What the Missionaries Taught
© 1986 Russell Odell
I use to go to the Sunday Night Church Services with my mother when the visiting missionaries from Africa were to talk. I hoped they would tell about the lions, elephants, rhinos and all the other wild animals, but that never happened. All they talked about was saving the natives’ souls for Christ. They spent many words of how they rescued them from their pagan gods.
I asked my mother what was the difference between her God and the African’s Pagan God. She told me the God we believed in was the only true God. All the other gods were false gods; untrue gods; pagan gods; bad gods. Those gods belonged to the devil.
I asked my father, who was atheistic, the same question. He told me that every religion has their own God and the God they believed in is supposed to be the only true God. All the other religions’ Gods were considered pagan gods. "Basically," he said, "it was strictly a maffer of personal opinion."
When I asked my Sunday School teacher about this, she told me my mother was right and my father was wrong. I knew my mother and father would not lie to me and I found this very conlusing. I satisfied myself that it was as my father said, "A matter of personal opinion." I also noticed when reading religious articles, their God was always spelled with a capital "G", while other Gods were spelled with a small case "g". This tactic seems to be allowable religious discrimination.
I began to remember the stories the missionaries from Africa told at their Sunday Night Sermons. When they first encountered the natives in the jungle, the natives had never seen a white man, never saw a shirt with buttons, and never saw a pair of shoes and they believed in their God who lived somewhere up in the sky. Strangely,ihe white man’s God also lived somewhere up in the sky.
The natives had a special man such as a witch doctor, who was in charge of their religious functions. He dressed differently than the natives; wore a special head piece with feathers in it; wore a special necklace of animal teeth and a garment made of animal skin.
The white man’s religion has a similar head man to conduct their religious functions. They are called ministers, priests or rabbis. They, too, dress differently than their congregation. They wear a special robe; a sacred string of beads with a cross hanging from it. They wear special little hats according to how important they are in their religious hierarchy as though their God holds some in higher esteem than others. This format is no different from that of the witch doctor.
The natives offered sacrifices to their god. The white man’s religion did the same thing. Isaac and Abraham offered sacrifices to their God and Christ was sacrificed for mankind.
The natives met in a special or more sacred grass hut to worship their God. The Christians, too, meet in a special building to worship their God. They call them chapels, churches or cathedrals.
The natives sang chants to their god. Christians do the same thing only they call them hymns.
The natives believed in a life after death of some sort having to do with spirits. Christians too, believe in life after death having to do with spirits.
All this I pieced together from what the missionaries told me. Natives in the African jungles had the same format, step by step. The only difference is, the Christians have polished and fine tuned the format with great finesse, and made it into a million dollar business. The natives were not smart enough to capitalize on their religious congregations as the white man did.
It appears that every clan of people adopts a religion to fit their culture. Because of the variations in the cultures of civilization, religions varied also. Each sought their own God in their own way to fit their needs. Who is to say they are wrong and you are right? Basically, God is the same God, it is just the different way we interpret what He is to us.
Those missionaries from Africa didn’t tell me any stories about the wild animals, however, inadvertently, they did tell me much about the religion of one animal.
Strange Births
©1979 Russell Odell
As an agnostic I have trouble believing in the virgin birth of Christ. It is an unusual birth. However, if you study Nature you will find there are marry spectacular and unbelievable births, one more bewildering than the other. Einstein believed in a Creator, although he could not define the Creator. I will start with the premise that there is a Creator in the scheme of things. I think it is reasonable to have this thought in mind because the last words of knowledge have yet to be written. We still have much to consider and learn.
One of the most bizarre mating I have I ever read is described in Steve Parker’s book, Ocean Life, on page 73,
When a male deep sea anglerfish finds a female, he bites her and never lets go! His mouth grows into her skin, his body merges into hers and he becomes part of the female. Almost all of his internal organs disappear, apart from the testes which are needed for breeding. The male spends the rest of his life as a shrunken parasite on his mate, useful only for providing the sperm which fertilizes her eggs at breeding time.
This is a scientific fact, not just a theory. After reading this, I wonder how many would believe this it they read it in Genesis? Maybe we would be inclined to say it was a biblical myth. Such things don’t happen. But, the author of this book gained First Class Honors in Zoology, then worked as an exhibition scientist at London’s Natural History Museum. He became a full time writer and editor in 1984 and has written several books.
Another strange birthing is found with the little sea horse, an ocean fish measuring from two to fourteen inches. The male, not the female, gets pregnant and gives birth to the offspring. There are 35 species of sea horses and their size varies They swim vertically by beating their dorsal fin 70 times a second (the hummingbird beats it wings about the same frequency). David Attenborough writes in his book The Trial of Life, on page 26:
Three or four days before mating, the male develops a pouch on his belly. The female squirts several thousand eggs into his pouch in about five seconds. The male then dumps his sperm intQ the pouch and the eggs become fertilized. In about two weeks, the male gives birth to more than a thousand babies.
If you read this in the creation story of Genesis that a male becomes pregnant and gives birth to more than a thousand babies, would you believe it? Of course not. Who ever heard of a rhale of any specie becoming pregnant? But this is a scientific tact, not a theory
The oyster is one of the 15,000 species of Mollusks. They developed during the Cretaceous Period about 135 million years ago. Oysters affached themselves to rocks where they live for 10 to 15 years.
The male of the American-Canadian specie releases his sperm into the water. The female then releases her eggs. As the eggs float by and through the sperm they become~fertilized. This contact between the egg and the sperm is purely a chance happening. Thousands of eggs never make contact. If the water is cool, the fertilized eggs will hatch in 10 to 12 hours. If the water is warm they will hatch in 5 to 6 hours.
The European oyster has a similar method but it is a little different. The male releases his spetm into the water. When the female oyster senses the sperm, she draws it into her shell. Here it fertilizes the eggs. The fertilized eggs are then released into the water. If you were to read in Genesis how these two oyster specie propagated themselves would you believe it? I wouldn’t. It sounds too mythological. Sperm and eggs floating out into the water and coming together? The male and female oyster never touching each other? You will note that the female oyster always remains a virgin! Hard to believe, isn’t it? However, you can read about it in Jacques Cousteau’s book The Ocean World It’s a fact, not a theory. Here is undoubted proof that virgin births do happen.
Creatures that can change their sex is another mystery of the unknown. It is a common occurrence in Nature. However, you will not read about such a miracle in Genesis. If you did, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. The clown fish that lives amongst the poisonous tentacles of the anemones is one of the fish species that can change their sex. If the breeding female dies, the partner changes his sex, becomes a female and mates with another male. Sounds like a scientific myth, doesn’t it? Just a fairy-tale? No, it’s a fact, not a myth.
Even more spectacular are some of the species of the lizards that can give birth to young without mating with a male. Remember, if the male is not involved we have a virgin birth. Attenborough writes on page 288 of the same quoted book:
At least twenty seven species belonging to seven different families exist mostly, if not entirely, as females. None of these individuals, however, can reproduce herself if in solitude. Each needs the encouragement and stimulation ot another female, who plays the part of the courting male. Such a pseudo-male will later, with the help of another companion, produce her own clutch. (It is a type of parthenogenesis.)
Now we come to a strange phenomenon called parthenogenesis It was discovered by Charles Bonnet (1720-1793) a Swiss entomologist. He became deaf at the age of seven and was blind since early youth. He discovered that the infertile eggs of some insects, like the aphids and the bee would hatch. From the Encyclopedia of Insects and Arachnids by Maurice and Robert Button, pages 13 and 14, we can read of the parthenogenesis birth of the aphid. This tiny garden pest propagates without the male. Not only are the babies born at virgin mothers, they are born pregnant! Would you believe this if you read it in Genesis? The Buttons write:
A single parthenogenetic female, with her offsprings, could produce in a year, it they all survived, a weight equal to 500,000,000 stout will men. (That number is the figure 5, followed by 8 zeros.)
I close by telling you a little about the hermaphroditism mode of reproduction. If you think the foregoing methods of reproduction were different from the norm, hermaphroditism will blow your mind. I will take this directly from Jacques Cousteau’s book The Ocean world, page 26:
Hermaphroditism is the condition which an individual animal posseses the reproduction organs of both sexes. It can increase the reproductive potential of a species, since eggs are produced by all the individuals instead of only half, as in the case in species with separate sexes. Also, in solitary or rare species it guarantees that whenever two individuals meet, mating can take place, because each individual has both sperm and eggs.
Cousteau continues with:
Hermaphroditism is the normal mode of reproduction in many animals. For instance, the sea hare is a marine snail without a shell. At mating time one sea hare climbs on the back of another. Both face the same direction with the on behind fertilizing the eggs of the one in front. A third may, mount the second so that its eggs are being fertilized while it is supplying sperm to the sea hare in front. In this manner long chains of mating individuals may form. Sometimes the first individual will swing around and mount the last so that the circle is closed. All the mating animals are thus simultaneously fertilizing the eggs plus being fertilized themselves. Some species don’t rely on locating others of their species. The are capable of using their sperm to fertilize their own eggs.
Read that last sentence again! Such a birthing procedure excels all others. Would you believe this if you read it in Genesis? I don’t think I would. However, this is a scientific fact, not a myth or a theory.
These are all very spectacular births. So spectacular as to be unbelievable. But, each one is true happenings, happening every day that the sun rises and sets. However, religion has developed the outrageous birthing of all. They have concocted a story where a heavenly special spirit comes from heaven and hovering over a young Jewish girl makes her pregnant without any physical means. This is sort how the oysters do it and the lizards that Attenborough told us about. However, there is a catch to the story. It is said that this Jewish girl impregnated by God as a spirit gave birth to God incarnate in the form of the baby Jesus. This is the belief in the Trinity (another interesting mythical story.
This sounds like the shenanigans of the over-sexed Greek god Zeus that had hot pants for many of the goddesses, nymphs and an occasionally a Homo sapiens. The Greek myth claims he had 115 sexual partners that gave raise to 140 children. When these little bastards grew up, they too, became gods and goddesses.
If you are curious as to how many gods there has been through the ages of time, read the Enqclopedia of Gods byMichael Jordan, who lists and describes over 2,500 deities that have appeared through time. It would, no doubt, be interesting hqw each god came into existence. I believe each and every one of them, including the present, were created by man when his superstitions overcame his powers of reasoning.
What is Nothing?
©1987 Russell Odell
In many discussions that I have been involved with concerning creation, one hang-up that was always most prominent was,
Did a Creator create the universe from nothing?
The final answer always resolved that material things could not be created from nothing. Ex Nihilo could not happen.
How can nothing be defined? Can it be defined as anything that is nonexistent? Or, is nothing really a dimension we can’t understand at the present time? That’s possible. Let’s explore a few concepts concerning nothing.
The astrophysicist Dr. John Gribbin writes in his book, Genesis: The Origins of Man and the universe, on page 5,
In the beginning there was nothing at all. This is a very difficult concept, and one which causes a great deal of misunderstanding.
In Isaac Asimov’s A New Guide to Science, he makes a startling remark about the word "nothing." Asimov writes,
Not everyone is satisfied with the Big Bang as a way of starting the universe. In 1948, two Austrian astronomers, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, put forth a theory, later extended and popularized by the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, that accepted the expanding universe but denied a Big Bang. As the galaxies move out, new galaxies form between them, with matter created from nothing at a rate too slow to detect with present-day techniques.
If, as Bondi, Gold and Hoyle say, matter is created from "nothing," then, what is this "nothing" from which matter is created?
England’s disthguished Stephen Hawking, writing in his book A Brief History of lime, explaining some functions of black holes, writes on pages 107-108 that after a time, all the matter sucked into black hole will be "evaporated completely." In other words, the matter will become nothing.
We have Bondi, Gold and Hoyle saying the cosmos is created from nothing, and Hawking saying that matter will eventually evaporate into nothing. It appears, if something can become nothing, then, the other side of that equation is, nothing can become something.
Nothing, like Time and Gravity, is another dimension that science does not as yet fully understand. However, there are many excellent theories. They know, somehow, it is there, but they don’t know what it is. Job 37:14 tells us to consider the wondrous works of God. For some, this too is a very difficult concept and one which causes a great deal of misunderstanding. Science is quick to respond with, "You believe in the supernatural?" To which I reply, "No, I do not! I believe in the super intelligence, the supernatural is mythology." We have this mortal ego, if we can’t do it, neither can anyone else. Maybe we had better leave this discussion open until we learn a bit more about what "nothing" is. It appears that "nothing" is a secret material known only to the Creator. Science says "it just happened". That rates a positive maybe.
Faith and Common Sense
©1992 Russell Odell
The Bible defines Faith in Hebrews 11:1 as "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
Webster defines it as, "Confidence or trust in a person or thing. Belief that is not based on proof. Belief in God or the doctrines of religion. Belief in anything as a code of ethics. The science that deals with the principle and criteria of validity or inference and demonstration, the science of the formal principles of reasoning. Synonyms: Trust. Reliance. Aspiration. Hope. Optunism. Expectation."
From all above, you can see you have a wide choice of alternatives to help you to make up your mind. Faith is the result of you developing your logic. To develop logic you must get rid of any pet peeves you have and become strictly unbiased. For some, this can become an insurmountable challenge especially if you had become a die-hard for a long time. Let us first try and get a slant on what logic itself is.
When I was a kid growing up, I often heard older people talking that something was very logical. Logic meant that the true facts had been established, they were unquestionably correct. Later I learned that this was not correct. There are different kinds of logic, some you agree with and some you don’t.
Does logic have anything to do with faith? If your logic believes it does the answer is yes, because logic is an opinion. For example: Religion believes in a God that created the universe. That is their logic. This is the logic of religion. Science says there isn’t a God, the Universe just happened. This is the logic of some scientists. Even though they are 180 degrees out of phase with each other, they are both logics of their philosophy but not of each other. Religion cannot prove beyond all doubt there is a God; science can’t prove that there isn’t. Logic is only logical within itself Truth is truth whether or not it is believed, but who knows the absolute truth? Logic, is an opinion as personal as your own toothbrush.
Generally, the word faith is associated more with religion than with anything else. It is used in stating whether or not you believe in God. Some do. Some don’t. It is said that by definition faith is what you believe in without reason. How do you handle the shady areas and there are areas that are questionable both in the religious and the secular. You have trade-offs in uncertainties. That’s when it gets difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat. Basically, it settles down to your opinion which may be right or wrong, but nevertheless, your oplinon.
An egg is a very common household item. Millions of eggs are use every year. You can buy a dozen for less than a buck. They are a much needed commodity. However, while we can send a man to the moon and bring him safely back to Earth; we can fly across the ocean faster than a bird, we still don’t know how to make an egg!
Bees flit around from flower to flower gathering nectar and producing honey. Man has tried for years to make an artificial honey to replace the lowly honeybee but failed. We don’t know how to make honey! We are not as smart as we think we are.
Nature takes two gasses, hydrogen and oxygen and changes them from a gas to liquid water, a substance man can’t live without. I have always wondered how Nature knew enough to make this essential item or there wouldn’t be any life on planet earth.
The first atom to come into existence was made in the so called Big Bang of creation. It is the only atom that does not have a neutron in its nucleus. Ever wonder why this is so? Science has never been able to figure it out. How can the hydrogen atom exist and function without a neutron? No other atom can!
When we look at the stars we can wonder, why so many? Who needs them? What do they do? Basically, the only thing a star does is produce the atoms of the elements. They are atom manufacturing plants. A star can only create the first 28 elements. Element from Helium (atomic weight of 2) to the element of iron (Atomic weight of 29). [Remember, Hydrogen, atomic weight of 1, is not made in the stars.] All the other heavier elements are made when the star explodes into a supernova. Let me carry this a step further. Every atom began as a hydrogen atom. If the hydrogen atom was not created during the Big Bang, there would not be a universe and you and I wouldn’t be here either. I wonder who or what created the hydrogen atom and who or what programmed it to make all the other elements? No scientist can answer that question.
While we are into this atom stuff, let’s go one more step just for the fun of finding things out. The hydrogen atom has one electron and one proton. The scientist Robert Jastrow writes in his book Red Giants and White Dwarfs, page 22):
The electron is indeed a tiny object. Its diameter is one 10-trillionth of an inch, a million times smaller than can be seen with the electron microscope. It weight is correspondingly small; 10,000 trillion trillion electrons make up one ounce.
("trillion trillion" is not a misprint.) The proton is much larger, weighing 1840 times the weight of the electron.
The electron has a negative (-) electrical charge. The proton has a positive (+) electrical charge. But the power of the tiny electron’s charge is balanced to the positive electrical charge of the larger proton. Who or what determined this critical electric balance? Who or what determined which of the two would have the negative charge and which the positive charge? How important are these electrical charges? Are they necessary? Let the late Carl Sagan answer that question from his book Cosmos, page 219:
Turn off the electrical charges and everything crumbles to an invisible fine dust. Without electrical forces, there would no longer be things in the umverse—merely diffuse clouds of electrons, protons and neutrons, and gravitating spheres of elementary particles, the featureless remnants of worlds.
Elections and protons without their electrical charge would be worthless. Who was it that had the intelligence know how to put the proper electrical charges on these two particles? And, I also wonder how it was done! To know that would be an interesting bit of science. I think that there had to be a Creator in the scheme of things. I would have to be quite naive to believe this critical balance happened just by chance.
This is my common sense approach to building a logic I can be comfortable with that the universe was created by a Creator and didn’t just happen purely by chance.
Today we know there are billions of galaxies and as Jastrow writes in his book The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe page 15), our universe is expanding "…all the galaxies in the Universe are moving away from us and from one another at very high speeds, and the most distant are receding at extraordinary speeds of hundreds of millions of miles per hour."
Common sense tells me that anything the size of a galaxy that is moving through space at millions of miles per hour has to have somebody in the dispatchers office on 24 hour duty. I think with this I can rest my case that there has to be a Creator in full charge. Of course, this is my agnostic viewpoint.
From Mike Magee
Thanks for these contributions. I am surprised, though, that a physicist accepts the old argument from design of William Paley that has been discredited by scientists of several disciplines. It might be true to say that it is impossible to prove that there is no god (or Creator, if that is the preferred name), but it is also impossible to prove Mother Goose does not really exist. Trying to prove negatives is not considered fruitful work, if only because the world is too big to allow every possible instance to be discounted.
Scientists instead form hypotheses—positive assertions that can be disproved. If they cannot be disproved then they are not valid hypotheses. Furthermore, to avoid hypotheses from being absurdly complicated—a complicated enough hypothesis notionally being capable of explaining anything—the methodical rule is introduced called in America, "Parsimony," and in Europe, "Occam’s Razor." By this rule, a hypothesis can be no more complicated than it need be, or, in other words, the simplest hypothesis must be preferred when there is a choice.
Once the hypothesis is that there is an intelligent Creator or God, one has the problems of "Is the hypothesis falsifiable?" or "Is the hypothesis valid?" and, "Who created the creator?" posing the same problem at another level of supposed reality. The hypothesis does not therefore meet the criterion of validity, or that of Occam’s Razor because Creation might as well be thought to begin ex nihilo from here as from another level of reality. It does not prove that it does but, until more information comes to us about the hypothetical existence of God or the Creator, there is no advantage in requiring an intermediate level in our grand hypothesis.
So, it might be a question of faith in a sense whether one believes the Big Bang or the Creator, but imperfect though it might be in mortal hands, science has been shown to be effective in revealing the world whereas belief in God or Creator has been effective only in making rich those who falsely claim a special relationship with, at best, a hypothetical being. The proper word for these people is—charlatan!
