God, Me and the Quantum World
03/29/2006
I cannot pinpoint exactly when I began to give thought to my spirituality and question it, but I can point a finger in the direction of who got me started on the journey. Sunday school, Andrew Chapel Methodist Church in Baltimore is where the firestorm within began. My Sunday school teacher was discussing Moses’ journey out of Egypt…where Moses leads the newly freed Jews back to their ancestral home in Israel. Mr. Gross, a very nice man and a long-time member of the church, was my Intermediate Sunday school class teacher. He, too, questioned the biblical tale of Moses’ trek (there is no record of the Jews being held in against their will in Egypt other than this one) and the fantastic miracles Moses was to have preformed, one such being the extraordinary “Parting of the Waters” as fleeing Jews were pursued by Pharaoh’s army.
Mr. “G” explained it to us this way. He said because Moses had most likely explored this swampy, quicksand riddled area as he was growing up in a privileged life as the adopted son of the pharaoh. He knew the paths and trails of the low lands near the Nile one needed to take to reach solid ground, without becoming trapped in the quicksand, eaten by alligators, or just plain lost in the tall grasses. Bottom line, the story of the Jews making their way home appears to have had the facts embellished as it was handed down orally from one generation to another, and prior to it being codified several hundreds of years after the event. Well, there you have it. I like things neat and orderly. It is probably why I am so skeptical of anything with even the hint of the miraculous. Did Moses get divine guidance, perhaps, but the story told this way seemed more reasonable to me. I can easily picture the chain-smoking Fred Gross, a tall, rail-thin man, with graying, blond hair and a long thin face. He had a slight lisp and a terrific smile that accentuated the laugh lines at the corner of his eyes. His smile lit up as he told the class the story and his take on it, and it was afterward that I began to question the biblical version of events – Adam and Eve; The story of Lot and the Pillar of Salt; Methuselah living to be a nine hundred sixty nine years old; and Abraham becoming a father at age ninety. I kept my skepticism and opinion to myself until today.
If I were to guess, I was somewhere between thirteen and fourteen years old at the time. That is when I began my life-long search for God, began reading articles and books on biblical archeology (which is fascinating), and began to explore agnosticism. For a very long time I was very vague with my beliefs. I would choose not to believe on one day and saying “what if” the next. I have read most of the Bible – the King James Version. I would get bogged down in Numbers – a book probably begun as a genealogy or a census of some kind. I have dabbled in reading the Nag Hammadi library – talk about repetitive writing. I have devoured many books on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I loved the DaVinci Code. I got lost in Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I have twice read a booklet entitled “Where We Got Our Bible,” although I knew a long time ago the Bible is an assemblage of books codified over a long period of time, and long after the supposed events took place. Adam and Eve always blew my mind especially when Cain goes to Nod, becomes a farmer and takes a “wife.” Where in the heck did she come from? It was very hard for me to accept a book as irrefutable fact that is made up of stories passed down generation to generation in a verbal tradition, then put to paper (parchment, copper scrolls, animal skins) hundreds, perhaps thousands of years after an event was to have occurred. Then these stories were translated from one language to another language by men often interpreting what they read with their own spin, and others then seeing these events as irrefutable truth. These books, known as “Apocrypha,” where selected as part of the Bible by men looking for a commonality of thought, aka theirs. These stories were passed down to an illiterate populace for the most part by their elders and leaders, people who believed what was told to them, and because to doubt it may have been deleterious to their health. Hell, people threw stones at people for violations of The Law as laid down in Leviticus, like cutting the hair of the temples – the guys not the women. Women didn’t have much say in anything those days. These early Jews were bad to the bone when it came to The Law.
Not long ago I read a book called A Short History of Just About Everything by Bill Bryson, a fascinating book about the science of how this planet came to be. He delves in quantum physics and it is really fascinating. Particle science, quantum mechanics, the behavior of molecules, matter and anti-matter, parallel universes, time travel…whoa, baby! This is stuff I can buy into. You have to see the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know.”
A little over a year ago I completed the Millennium3 Education workshops. During the four months I did this, I came to realize there is connectivity between me and all things in and out of this world. All the matter that exists today…and this is deep…every particle - electrons, protons and neutrons, has always been and will always be. Every miniscule particle in your body has always been and will always be, and that may be the promised “life after death.” I am a part of the whole of the universe. I am not separate from any of it, and it is God. Get it? We are all God. The earth, the animals, the people, the valleys and mountains, the water, the sky, the moon, the sun, planets, stars, space and time are all God. WE are here as a result of a vast plan formulated by what, I have not a clue. And, is does not matter, for we are here.
I don’t think there are words in the language to adequately allow me to describe how free I am these days. I have finally found God. I am at peace.
