God and Proofs

It seems like there is always somebody asking for proofs.

As near as I can tell, God does not keep Himself busy offering proofs. 

(Himself/Herself/the Most Excellent Self, let's not argue English grammar gender problems. The Japanese grammar would work better -- 「御自分」(go-jibun) or something like that, but English does not have that, so we are stuck with needing context. "... in His own image, ... male and female". If I try to adopt the "modern" borrowing of plural for non-specific, it introduces questions of how many Gods there are, and that would be a distraction. I do that sometimes, but "Themself" just sounds weird to me.

Sometimes you just have to accept that, when it's facts versus ideals, facts win.)

[JMR202411020834 note:]

It occurs to me that I have an allegory that might help. 

If we are talking about paradigms and such in software engineering, and you work with the standard implementation of the language C++ and free/libre software methods, and we have a friend well-versed in Microsoft's .net, and another friend who works mainly in Apple's Objective-C and LLVM/Clang framework, and someone is there talking about Lisp, and Matz is in the conversation talking about Ruby, and my son is there talking about perl and its derivatives, and I'm talking about some highly theoretical stuff that I am trying to implement in a sort-of Forth derived set of languages, it's clear that there is going to be a disconnect when we say the words, "object" and "module", and even "stack", and "paradigm". 

These are necessary, vital concepts in software engineering, but the disconnect is going to be so great that we will often not be able to agree on important details of what constitutes proofs.

And yet the programs we each write will often function correctly cross-platform -- on each others' computers. Not always, but often.

[JMR202411020834 note end:]

When three messengers stopped by to visit Abraham on their way to check up on Sodom and Gomorrah (and extract Lot and his family if they could), the record does not talk about them proving their identity to him. Abraham knew.

Likewise, in the plains, when Jacob wrestled all night with a messenger, the record does not talk about the messenger specifically proving himself. It was Jacob doing the proving. 

And when Moses turned aside to see what the deal was with the thicket that was so brilliantly and glorious lit and not oxidizing, Moses didn't demand proof of who it was that spoke to him. He did ask what he could offer the children of Israel, but God didn't offer proofs, just a name -- a coded name, but just a name. And the elders of Israel didn't really argue too much about it, just complained that it was a hard thing they were being asked to do.

In the case of Pharaoh, that seems to be an exception. God allowed Moses to offer him proofs, but God knew in advance that that particular Pharaoh would harden his heart and refuse to believe no matter how many proofs were offered.

God didn't need to identify or prove Himself to Adam and Eve in the Garden. We can understand that, even though we understand that Eve was deceived. 

But what was Eve deceived about? 

Did the snake fool her into believing he was God? I don't think so. Did the devil fool Eve into believing he was an angel of God? I don't read that from the account, either.

God had commanded Adam and Eve to take responsibility over the Earth.

"Subdue" and "have dominion" -- 

In the cultural semantic we inherit from ages of examples of arbitrary rule by false royalty interspersed by rare examples of royals taking actual responsibility, we tend to read "subdue" and "have dominion" as license to behave arbitrarily. 

But it doesn't take a lot of thought to recognize that God has never told us that we should not behave responsibly. Quite the opposite. Whenever we will stop and consult with our conscience, responsibility is part of the discussion.

How were Adam and Eve supposed to take responsibility for the Earth? They were in the Garden, they were being taught be God, but they were being warned by God that knowledge of good and evil would separate them from God -- would cause them to die both spiritually and physically.

They were naive.

We can't get around that. They were perfect, according to some measure of perfection. But they had not partaken of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. They were inexperienced. 

They were naive.

And not just about sex -- Sex isn't after all, the be-all and end-all of good and evil.

They were naive about about consequences in general. You cannot take responsibility for a stewardship from God in your naive state.

God warns us of the consequences of experience: pain, trouble, death, even separation from the divine spirit of truth.

It's a warning in apparent conflict with the commandment to take responsibility over the earth.

He gave Adam and Eve the choice of which course to take, and he gives us the choice.

If Eve was deceived, she was deceived about timing. At some point, God Himself would have had to explain the choice in detail, and told them it was time to choose. 

Continue in your innocent state and never die, or risk making life-changing decisions.

That's a terrible dilemma!

Perhaps it's the original dilemma.

And that is the state we are in.

What proof do I need of that?

The Greeks wrote many tragedies about the consequences of choice -- the tragic consequences of choice. That's why they are called tragedies.

I think the comedies were intended to be about deliverance from tragic consequences, but I would be hard pressed to prove it. We have a different understanding of comedy today.

God knew that there would be some mistakes we would make that would make it difficult to listen to our conscience and turn ourselves back from the train-wreck courses we so often choose. He planned for that. 

He would send us someone to save us from ourselves.

If we only have one piece of paper, and no eraser, we can't afford to practice our sums because we know we're going to make mistakes. 

It's a weak analogy, but you've faced that worry about some decisions. 

Everyone has. Everyone does.

By sending the Savior -- the Christ, God provides us access to an eraser, and even sometimes to a clean sheet of paper, so to speak.

Of course I'm not talking literally about sums and differences. Our mathematics is one of our inventions that is ideal but not perfect, so even if our teachers have a ruler ready to swat our hands every mistaken sum we write, well, God can save us from that kind of abuse. Can save the teacher, too, if the teacher will. If we will.

If we had the complete record, we would know that God sent angels to teach Adam and Eve and their children about the plan, and that the argument Cain had with both Able and with God was precisely about that plan.

And we instinctively have some knowledge of this plan. 

The proof is all around us, if we open up our eyes. 

Riddles about the age of the universe and whether Adam and Eve really were the first humans, etc., are not relevant. 

We are free to choose what to believe, but what we believe then constrains what we do. And we are free to change our choices if we come to believe there were better choices.

Society was not always so. Even now, there are those who do not want us to be free to make wrong choices -- according to somebody's definition of wrong. And there are those who, when we have made wrong choices, want us to continue making those wrong choices because they think they gain some profit when we do, or because they think it causes them inconvenience if we don't.

The society of this world is much like Cain of old -- continually arguing with God because they don't want to have to go back and change their mistakes.

But God said, and continues to say, "If you do well, are you not going to be accepted?"

Are we willing to be accepted on God's terms?

Or, like Cain, are we going to continue to demand to be accepted on our own terms, until we do something that really can't be fixed? Something that can only be forgiven, like Adam and Eve forgave Cain rather than risk further reducing a population that was too small to sustain itself without help from God.

Something that can only be forgiven if we are willing to turn our hearts and minds God-ward.

And this is what repentance is supposed to be about.

Not about being punished. Not about arcane rules of penitence.

About re-pent-ing. Turning away from bad decisions even when it hurts to do so. About turning towards God.

Back to the God we came from.

What proof do we need for this?

A Thought Experiment Including Fermi's Paradox and Religion

I lost my faith in a perfect church and a perfect Church at seven or so, and I was trying to rebel against God for making such an imperfect Church and an imperfect world -- all that stuff about the problem of evil.

 Dad pointed out to me that fighting from the inside was a better proposition than fighting from the outside.

 Mom suggested, if I didn't like God's plan, I should try to work up a better one, but it had to be workable. 

When trying to work out how a better plan could really work -- not just mash this ideal and that ideal and the other ideal all jumbled together, but actually work out something that would be functional, I found myself recreating the world we have -- including much of the stuff I didn't like -- arguments, wars, laws, poverty, crime, etc.

Concerning the "black" races and the priesthood --

Yeah. God allowed His Church to backslide on that --

For several reasons, some of which can be summarized as simply, the best people He had available to make His church/Church with weren't ready for what would have been required to pull that much of a social revolution off among the whites in the US, or in any other culture in any other country or group of countries. The assumption of national/cultural superiority was too much a part of pretty much every country's culture identity.

Any church that contradicted that would have face persecution that would make the persecution the Mormons faced because of polygamy look like a friendly debate.

Consider also the internal conflict the Church had over the issue, delayed as it was.

We are our own worst enemy.

Even those of us who understand that God's actual power looks nothing like the posturing of vain men, we tend to lean too much on the stuff that is easy to see.

I have mentioned this to others, and they have complained that an all-powerful God could have made it so that He would have had the necessary caliber of people. But that begs the question of whether we ourselves would be there or not. 

I don't think it would have left us ordinary creatures the means to be included -- means to be saved.

If the Pearl of Great Price can be trusted, think about how Enoch drew all the people of faith of his day except for Noah's grandparents away into the Zion of that time, so that there really were no people interested in being good people left, for Noah's preaching to have any effect. 

If I were to find fault with God, it would be to wonder why He would let Enoch draw all the good people away, but, then again, if He hadn't, this world would not be what we have now.

God is an engineer of the best sort. Because He makes stuff that seems imperfect to us, we have opportunities to learn and grow and change our natures to become more like Him, or less like Him, as we choose.

For the record, many who think they are saved in the church will be surprised at who they find waiting for them when they finally get into kingdoms of glory.

Why do I find it so easy to accept the existence of God?

At the age of seven, I still remembered bits and pieces of things from before I was born. In particular, I remembered my irritation at God for always being right, and for, as I saw it back then, using His power to make all the rules. 

This was something like the first time since I was about four that I had considered that maybe God was right for a reason, and that He wasn't just making up rules to show how much more powerful He was than everyone else.

So, yeah, I have a problem with eliminating God from my worldviews. Short version of the story is I've been carrying a running argument with Him since I was pretty young.

I am aware that many people cannot accept the internal discussions they have with themselves to include a Holy Spirit. But we all have some semblance of a conscience, and that is precisely the beginning of how the Holy Spirit manifests (Him/Her/It)self to us.

The fact that there are unholy spirits that influence us as well should not surprise us, nor should we conflate unholy spirits with holy. Unholy spirits will definitely claim to be holy in attempt to confuse us. But if we are honest with ourselves, we can tell a difference.

One of the differences is that unholy spirits will try to convince us to impose our own vanities on others. The Holy Spirit encourages us to be patient, instead.

Yeah, even that can become confusing when we let false humility become our vanity. I've been there, done that, it's hard to untangle. But if we believe and are patient with ourselves and God, we can even untangle that one. Takes a lot of talking things out with God, which is not an evil thing.

Mind you, I have been surprised at a number of things the church/Church teaches about God. Too many of us drag in strange ideas from the places we and our family, ancestors, and friends come from.

Let me propose a thought experiment.

For context, up until about twenty years ago, it was still sort-of current, both in religious and non-religious contexts, to talk about this world as unique in the universe, and about the human race as the only intelligent life in the known universe, and how precious our world and civilization was.

The James Webb telescope is finding lots of planetary companions to stellar objects close to us, and from the data it gives, we should expect practically every stellar-class object in the universe have planetary companions, many of them in what we call the habitable belt for their stellar primary.

Given what we think we know of the age of the universe, it is becoming more and more accepted that Fermi was correct in proposing his paradox:

Where is everyone else?

If we as a society survive the next hundred years without a total reset of the scale and type that scriptures assert in Noah's time, what directions should we expect our society to take? Is stagnation possible for us as a race?

What about technology? Should we not expect technology in the next thousand years to advance so far that it would be as indistinguishable from magic (See Clarke, et. al.) to us as much of what we have would have been indistinguishable from magic to people on our world living just a thousand years ago?

Breakover in Hydrogen fusion? Death? Poverty? The causes of war?

Extend that to ten thousand years -- a million years.

Where is everyone else? They have to be there somewhere. They have to be doing something to keep themselves occupied. What would that be? 

Where are they? What are they doing?

 

---

This was from a couple of replies I made to a FB friend's nicely done poem about some problems within the church.

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

Title/Preface/TOC

Genesis 1: in the Beginning ...

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2

... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

 

Sometimes I think the entire known history of our race on this world is encompassed in the seventh day or phase of the creation, and I think maybe the Gods are now resting and mostly letting their plans play out.

Sometimes. Maybe.

No, there are problems with that idea, especially if taken too literally. But,

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

There are certain senses in which things were not finished, particularly if we insist on wrapping all the stuff in chapter 1 up in six distinct intervals that are all past and gone when we start chapter 2.

Anyway, we can say that the plans and preparation were mostly finished over the course of the six days or phases, and God rested. And God says rest after work is a good thing. 

How long that seventh phase lasted is another question, and whether Adam and Eve were created within the seventh phase or after, is also not really clear.

Oh, and verse 4 contains a case where a day is most definitely not a 24 hour period, or even a single rotation of any planet:

... in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ...

If that were "in the days" it would fit more easily into an interpretation of six literal days, but day here is singular. 

I have heard that the word for day here in the original language -- or, rather in the language closest to original that we have -- is different from the word for the six days of chapter 1. But we're getting distracted.

(4) These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Look at verse 5:

And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: ...

Here it is.

What can that be that was done in the six days, but talking about laying out blueprints and such? 

Plans. The first six days were planning sessions.

Maybe. It sort-of works for me, although I do have the impression that primitive plants and animals were physically created during the planning sessions. 

Why?

... and there was not a man to till the ground.

I can interpret this to mean that what grew in chapter 1 was wild, and that the plants in chapter 2 are more of the class of plants that might benefit from human attention. 

Maybe.

I'm not sure what the

... for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, ...

is supposed to indicate. Whether the first six days were all 24 hours or not, it doesn't make sense that there had been no rains of any form during the process. Particularly, when the waters below the firmament were separated from the waters above, precipitation of some sort had to have occurred.

So this is a question I put on the shelf. If the time comes that I need to know, I'm going to trust God to reveal it to me. 

But God causes a mist to cover the ground, ...

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

This verse is one of the places were we can see the usage of the word soul to indicate the spirit and body of man as a single entity.

Dust of the ground?

Carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iron, .... These are elements from which our bodies are made. They are also prominent among the elements found in the dust of the earth.

Water, air, and the dust of the earth. What else would we be made of, if we were going to live on the earth and have bodies? Plants grow out of the ground, animals eat the plants and grow bodies out of the elements of the dust of the earth. We eat some of the plants, too, and sometimes we eat some of the animals. Our bodies also are made of the dust of the earth -- indirectly, but of the dust of the ground.

It has been suggested by certain people that the Gods ate of the plants that were growing and then made Adam the same way we make children. I'm not sure I should believe that, but I'm not sure I should not.

We are not Golem, of course.

Consequent to making Adam, they planted a garden of less primitive plants, including plants that produce edible, nutritious, and delicious parts, put Adam in the garden, and let him tend it. Two of the trees mentioned in particular are the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Adam was told not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because doing so would make him subject to death.

Certain of our religious philosophers tend to talk about our coming from the presence of God to be born into this world, and they speak as if we were in some state of perfection before we were born. We also talk about the Garden of Eden as if it were a state of perfection.

Some people insist there is only one perfection. Is the absolute perfection of God the only perfection? Or are there lesser perfections?

A number of ancient philosophers and astronomers (astrologers, at the time) perfected a geocentric model that was perfectly self-consistent. It proved not to match the real solar system very well, but it was perfectly self-consistent. 

There are many things that are perfect in a limited sense, even though they do not match reality.

In a similar way, it is my understanding that we each attain a limited, self-consistent sort of perfection as spirits before we are born into this world. It's a limited sort of perfection precisely because we don't have a physical body that can experience the things that would push us past our limits.

As I understand it, the tree of knowledge of good and evil was both a real tree with real fruit, and a physical symbol of what experience does to our limited perfections.

After Adam is placed in the Garden, the less primitive animals are created and brought to Adam, and Adam gives them names. But animals don't provide the company that Adam needs, and the Gods borrow some genetic material from Adam, remove one of the genes (a "rib" in the genetic structure, as I see, but that may be just me) in Adams genetic makeup, and make Eve with the full set of genes. 

This was part of the plan in the first place, but it was also part of what Adam had to experience, perhaps so we could understand how united the spousal union should be -- not just "one flesh", but entirely one in purpose. 

Okay, I really can't justify the genetic theory about the rib business, but I'm pretty sure no one can prove me wrong. Heh.

Again, the record doesn't say how long this takes. For all we know, Adam and Eve might have been in the Garden of Eden for hundreds of millions of years, and plants from the Garden itself might have spread over much of the surface of the earth.

Wait. Can plants spread without dying? Does it matter, outside philosophies derived from the interpretations of mortal humans of limited perfection?

On the other hand, if death truly was not part of the world until after Adam and Eve were sent away from the garden, time in such a world would simply not have the same meaning it has in ours, and attempts to measure geological ages would result in meaningless measurements. 

More to the point, time measured without a mortal observer is still different from time measured by mortals such as we are.

Chapter 2 has something that looks like a discussion of geography, but it does not match any geography I know of, unless, perhaps, the rivers mentioned became oceans after the flood, when the continents split apart. If that were the case, Adam would have been in the Garden of Eden in geologically very ancient times. 

And why not? He was helping with the work of getting the earth ready for us to live on, too.

What Eden was eastward of is something I have not particularly figured out. Perhaps Moses was simply telling the Camp of Israel that Eden was not in Egypt, the wilderness, or Canaan. Someday, I will be able to ask God what the geography of the world before the flood was, and why it mattered to Moses and the people of Israel, and I suppose then I'll get better understanding.

There's something we might miss in the last verse, if we are not too distracted -- Adam and Eve were clearly in a state of innocence. That's important to remember.

Genesis 3:

---

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 -- In the Beginning ...

Title/Preface/TOC 

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is the first chapter of

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

that we are looking at. (That's the title, as given in the Bible.) 

Reading along with me will help keep track of what I'm talking about. It'll will also give you a chance to figure out where you might agree with me and where you might not, and why.

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (explain the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading the Bible a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And at least part of the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping, any more than the gods of the land they had just left.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't, and people do like to admire things. I don't think we consider the world they were living in carefully enough. It was a harsh world, not nearly as much eye candy as we have in our world. And it's always really tempting to let admiration go beyond admiration as works of art.

So, where they came from.

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously, but where they came from. 

The beginning relative to them, and us. 

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the almost, but not quite identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as that it was created all at the same time. 

Also, I don't see any reason not to see it as Moses retelling what was shown him, the creation as relevant to him in the world where he was living. 

This is about God (and us), not about the universe. It seems to me that Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were instead created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

As I understand it, Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was. He was trying to give the people of the Camp something of the vision he had. But the language he had available was just missing vocabulary and phrasing for a lot of important concepts. 

It helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it as best he could, with words and language he thought they could understand.

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. I guess Peter does mention this to a certain extent when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8,

... one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

I don't think "as a thousand years" must be read as literally "equal to". What we can say is that a day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. Hard to see the kind of day and night we're familiar with in that kind of environment. It's kind of hard for me to say that first day must be a literal 24 hours or a thousand years, or even any specific time period. And if the first day was not exactly twenty-four hours or exactly one thousand years, what of the next five days?

Words for day are also used in most languages to mean some period of time, rather than some definite interval. For example, in English, we often say, "in my day" to refer to a time in the past relevant to ourselves.

With God, all things are possible. The earth and the solar system might have been made in a couple of 24 hour days, and the plants, animals, and man in a few more. Or it might have been several thousand years, six days plus a day of rest according to the planet on which God resides. 

Or the earth may have been initially tidally locked to the sun, like the moon is to the earth, developing an actual rotation period as it developed form, so that the first day was much longer than the second, and much longer than a thousand years.

Or the six phases of the creation might have taken four billion years, plus or minus, as scientists say nowadays, and Moses, not having the language to deal with such long intervals of time, might have just been using night and day as a metaphor for the passage of time, to delineate the phases of creation.

In the first day or phase, the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water in most of our languages. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe.  

Spirit?

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality. 

This is something that I have found in scripture. Physical fact often becomes metaphor for physical fact when principles in one context act similarly toprinciples in another, especially when directly connected to them. The Spirit of God communicates with us through our conscience. The Spirit of God communicates with the planets and other celestial bodies through gravity, or, in other words, gravity is one expression of the Spirit of God. 

From a different point of view, the initial or pre-existing parameters that physicists speak of in the theory of the big bang creation are the mind of God, and the forces which derive therefrom are the way the Spirit of God works in the natural world.

So gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night, and one phase is delineated. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

Firmament? 

What was the word for atmosphere back then? Did they have one?

The rocks at the center of the huge clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day or phase, the waters (hydrogen) under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the waters (hydrogen) above by the primitive atmosphere, by the firmament or sky. 

And the primitive atmosphere is very dense, hardly letting light through at all.

Huge clump of dirt. Huge clump of earth. Bigger than the biggest mountain you've seen. Bigger than thousands of mountains. Bigger than Moses could describe in the language he had available to explain it to the members of the camp. 

So huge you can't explore the surface of it all in a single day, or a year, or, really, in a lifetime. Big enough to be so heavy that it holds you to the surface and makes the surface feel (relatively) flat.

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, as I understand it, helping in various ways.

What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. As Job notes (jumping way ahead in the Bible), we rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in. (At least, when I read God asking Job where he was, I read it as God reminding Job that he was there, rejoicing, too.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

And time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started emerging from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) developing on the land, and therefore, I must assume, in the continental shelf area under the water, by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars became visible in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. The other planets in our solar system would be in the process of formation, and they would become visible, too. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth phase, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth phase, further driving the process we would call, in our modern language, terraforming. But maybe it just became visible.

In the fifth phase, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth phase, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. 

Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by sequences of reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success. Maybe watching actually was helping.

Why do I say it was being prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created. If we understand the first six phases of creation as preparatory, those verses make more sense.

Some people go as far as to think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights mentioned were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think that planet must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- maybe about 8,300 parsecs away in what is normal space and time to us, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of something like what we call a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however. I only mention it as another example of a possible reading of the days and nights of the creation.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point that they are supposed to understand is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. And the naturalness of the processes is not a good reason to abandon the concept that the God of nature was behind it all, and try to worship the works of our own hands.

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. 

And if it is not true, we have to understand that it is not of God, that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, there were many idols of human invention which people tried to treat as if they were God. In many cases, mortal humans tried to pattern their idols after their understanding and misunderstandings of the real God, but in the end the invented gods are not God. 

In the time since then, humans have repeatedly tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. Same old thing.

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding of this sort of thing in the past.

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating the human race, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The specific creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

Responsibility.

We have changed the meaning of dominion so that we can try to ignore responsibility and convince ourselves that dominion can be arbitrary -- can allow us to do what we please. 

But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, along with the requirement that we report to God on our efforts at the end of the day, and at the end of our assignments in mortality, and receive and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also all made clear elsewhere, as are the justice and mercy of God that we can look forward to in the evaluation.) 

Dominion is responsibility, not privilege. (Not just privilege? In our present world, it may be better to deny privilege entirely. In a few years, because of changes in the general public dialog, we may need to recognize the privilege aspect again, as part of it, along with the responsibility. So much of communicating correctly depends on context.)

God is creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that chapter 1 is describing some kind of preparatory creation -- including planning, perhaps including giving us our assignments of what we should do in mortality.

As potential support for the interpretation as six phases in planning, I offer that the last verse of the chapter talks about God seeing that everything was very good. Given that God is not subject to time the way we are as mortals, Moses could be telling us that He was seeing the future relative to us, that His plans would work out very well.

Oh, yeah. He.

He created us in His image. Male and female.

Male and female are also concepts that have been altered in our language; misinterpretations of what it means to be male or female have been woven into our language for millennia, and we have to weed through those, as well.

The name of God is sometimes given as (Latinized to) Jehovah -- or Yahweh. It is also sometimes given as Elohim. Elohim is a plural form. So is Adonai, another name for God found in the Bible. These plural forms are usually explained away as royal plural. This explanation is one of those traditions that we might ought to set aside. No. We really need to set it aside.

Until very recently, the neutral gender pronoun in English was formed by putting the masculine pronoun to double use. We have traditionally semantically overloaded the male forms.

The worship of Asherah and other female gods was often associated with a number of idolatrous practices that are best not to follow, and even now it is well to be careful when talking about a female God. 

But it would make sense that, if the text says "male and female after the image" of God, it is because there are principles of maleness and femaleness in the principle of Godliness.

Might we need to believe that God the Father is a true hermaphrodite? That was a possibility I considered when I was younger. 

I think I prefer to understand that God takes the singular form because neither Father nor Mother are subject to the egoism that would have them competing with each other for superiority and precedence. They would be in such perfect unity that, if one did something, it would be no different than if the other had done it. And it would be such perfect unity that the true worship of the one is identical to the true worship of the other. Thus, one united God.

-- which is quite clearly not the case in the ancient myths about Asherah and Baal, and their Greek and Roman counterparts, or other similar religions which claim both male and female gods but continually put them in competition with each other.

Again, there are other possible interpretations, and, before I forget, I should again point out that these are my interpretations. I don't have time to touch on all my beliefs in relation to Genesis 1, either, and I shouldn't. My understanding won't save you.

Scripture study is about developing your own understanding. It is when we understand the scriptures in our own context that they develop the power to help us, to take us to the next context in our several journeys.

The above is not binding on anyone, and I reserve the right to re-think my understanding. The above ideas should be understood to be personal opinions presented to provoke you to thought and study, and not considered doctrinal.

 Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

---

 An earlier version of this can be found at https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html.

Thoughts on the Bible: Genesis 1

[This also just is not working. 

(See https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html for a previous attempt that didn't work very well.)

(Better yet, see https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/bible-uncommentary-titleprefacetoc.html for what I hope is going to work.)]

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading it a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods that of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't.

So, where they came from. 

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously.

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are somewhat influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the nearly identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as all at once. 

This is about God, not about the universe. Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were rather created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

But Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was, and how it helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it.  

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. Peter mentions this when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8, that a day for God is like a thousand years for us. Not equal, like. A day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. It's kind of hard to say that first day was a literal 24 hours, or even any specific time period. 

The Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe. 

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality.

Gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

But the rocks at the center of the clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day, the waters under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the hydrogen above by the primitive atmosphere, the "sky".

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, and, as I understand it, helping in various ways. What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. We rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in.

And a long time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started appearing from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) on the land, and therefore, we must assume, in continental shelf area under the water by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars appeared in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth period, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth period, further driving the process we would call in our modern language, terraforming.

In the fifth period, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth period, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success.

Why do I way prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created.

Some people think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think it must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- about 8,300 parsecs away, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. 

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. If it is not true, we have to understand that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, the idols were of human invention, and humans tried to pattern their idols after what they understood of the real God. 

In the time since then, humans have tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. 

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding in the past.

Why do I say that we were there?

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating man, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

We have changed the meaning of dominion to believe that dominion can be arbitrary. But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, and the requirement that we will report to God on our efforts at the end of our assignments in mortality, and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also made clear elsewhere.)

Creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that this was some kind of preparatory creation -- planning, maybe, maybe giving us our assignments. We still did not have physical bodies with which we could physically till the ground.

Before I forget, I should point out that these are my interpretations. They are not binding on anyone besides me, and I reserve the right to re-think things next time. These interpretations should be considered to be personal opinions and not considered doctrinal.

Dialog About God, part A

(Two primary grade teachers preparing lessons at neighboring desks.)

 J: How can people even believe in God?

M: (Says nothing.)

J: I mean, what proof do they have?

M: I've always known God exists.

J: (Frowns.)

M: (Keeps working.)

J: So are you saying you've seen God or something?

M: What if I say I have? Would you believe?

J: No. 

M: You would accuse me of deluding myself, or of being duplicitous, would you not?

J: Proof is proof. What kind of proof do you have?

M: I have no proof I can offer you.

J: But you've always believed.

M: I didn't say that.

J: (Shakes her head.) You just said that you've always believed in God.

M: I said I have always known that God exists.

J: So you've always believed.

M: I didn't say that.

J: I hate talking to you about anything. It always ends up going in circles.

M: Conversation should be two-way, shouldn't it?

J: So tell me.

M: So listen.

J: Okay, so what is this "always"?

M: (Looks up and meets J's questioning gaze.)

J: I mean, always means back in high school? middle school? grade school?

M: Before grade school. Way before.

J: How can a kid that young understand God?

M: (Goes back to work.) I don't know any adults who understand God very well.

J: (Also returns to work.) Just you, huh?

M: Did I say that?

J: But that's what you mean.

M: What's what I mean?

J: Going around in circles again?

M: I'm guessing I'm going to have to guess at what you are asking. When I say I don't know any adults who understand God well, I include myself.

J: But not really. 

M: No. Really.

J: But you understand God better than me.

(Both work in silence for a few minutes.)

J: You do think you understand God better than me.

M: Is that what it boils down to, a question of pride?

J: So I'm supposed to be humble, but you're not?

M: (Stops working and turns to face J.)

J: (Keeps working.)

M: You're better at teaching math than I am.

J: True.

M: You help me when I ask.

J: Of course.

M: I don't complain when I have to ask you for help, do I?

J: Sometimes.

M: (Thinks for a moment, then nods his head.) Okay, maybe I do. (Returns to working.)

(Both work in silence for a minute or two.)

J: But you've always believed in God.

M: How many of the children that you teach know that one plus one makes two?

J: There are a couple of kids who can't always seem to remember it, but what's that got to do with anything?

M: How many actually believe it?

J: (Laughs.) Good point. More than half don't really believe it means anything. They're just good at memorizing and repeating the arithmetic.

M: How many understand the full implications of addition and subtraction of integers?

J: (Thinks for a moment.) Actually, I have a couple of students who seems to get the concept of a ring, and of a series within a ring.

M: The students all have different understanding of what numbers are, right? And yet most of your students can do basic addition and subtraction.

J: They all can, most of the time.

M: Does that mean that any student is any smarter than any other?

J: Smarter at math.

M: Smarter at one part of math, maybe not at other parts.

(Again they both work in silence for a half a minute.)

J: So I'm too dumb to do basic theology.

M: Theology is man's study of God. It often has little-to-nothing to do with God, as I understand God.

J: So you know more than the experts.

M: Well, for my purposes, I guess I know more than most of the so-called experts. For their purposes, I don't think I do, and I'm not sure I care. They have different purposes from me.

J: And you just generally don't trust experts anyway.

M: Especially about religion.

J: So that makes you the expert.

M: No, but I do know more about what I know than the experts know about what I know.

J: What does that have to do with God? You don't own God.

M: Excellent question.

J: (Thinks for a moment.) But now it sounds like you're saying that whatever you believe is just fine.

M: (Doesn't say anything.)

J: But you can't really be saying that. 

M: You -- (Stops and starts over.) People have to start with what they know and what they can believe.

J: What if we don't want to start going that direction?

M: Then you don't.

J: And that's fine?

M: Well, yes.

J: You're lying.

M: Not (Pauses.) telling the whole truth, but not telling lies.  

J: So what's the whole truth?

M: Everybody dies eventually.

J: And that's the end.

M: Of this life. Not of the soul.

J: And, according to you, I have to face the justice of God when I die, so I'd better be a good little girl in this world.

M: Did I say that?

J: You were going to.

M: Let me ask you, what does it mean to be a good little girl?

J: Follow your rules.

M: Not my rules.

J: Your God's rules.

M: (Thinks for a moment.) My God or your God?

J: I have no God. I don't believe.

M: Because you don't want to give me a chance to say you have to obey my rules?

J: No. Because there is no God. (Looks up at the wall clock.) I've got to get to my class.

M: Ah. Me, too.

How I Understand the Church's 1st Article of Faith

Here's how I read the First Article of Faith of the Church of context here:

1: We beleive in God the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.

In the current milieu, it is easy to read this simple statement as saying something almost diametrically opposed to what I understand Joseph Smith to have meant when he penned the words a hundred some-odd years ago. So I'm going to offer my unofficial rephrase, using words that I hope will be more understandable in modern English:

We believe in the Prime Paradigm -- the Eternal Progenitor -- and in the pre-eminent Child thereof, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Essence.

Except that that has just as many issues of interpretation as the original, probably more, even if they are different issues. 

Well, it's a thought. I'll leave it up there as a decoy while I ask you to allow me room to explain how I understand the principle terms of the original wording. 

(The point is, when I talk about God, I'm not talking about what certain other people say I'm talking about. Please set aside all the assumptions, images and preconceptions that people have thrown at you about God and religion, claiming to be either for or against.) 

God:

1. That which a person sets at highest priority;
2. The source of the universe around us.
   

 

Eternal:

• Existing outside the bounds of what we attempt to describe in our physical laws of thermodynamics, ergo, not bound by entropy or by its corollary, time.

 

Father/Parent:

• Progenitor, or archetype from which children are generated.

 

Son/Child:

• That which is generated or pro-created by the Parent, thus, capable of growth.
  
  1. Capable, when fully grown, of standing independent.
  2. Capable, when fully grown according to the pattern of the Parent, of standing in proxy for the Parent.

 

Jesus:

• Name which can be interpreted as "God is help." Points us to the concept that God does care, after all.

 

Christ:

• Title indicating the necessity of choice.

 

Holy:

• Not profane. In particular, not made profane by the pursuit of power, authority, fame, influence, monetary gain, or such.

 

Spirit:

• The essence of those things which we perceive by our five senses,
  
  1. somewhat corollary to the mathematical concept of automata,
  2. also somewhat corollary to software in programmed systems.
• All things have spirit.
  

Note, relevant to the current arguments concerning gender, that none of this mentions gender, other than indirectly by the implicit reference to engendering.

Note also that, none of this references an angry god-image ready to punish to the fullest all who dare breach any of his dictates. In fact, such an image simply does not fit in this concept of Progenitor, and does not match at all with the meaning of the name, Jesus.

Does God Exist? Defining God.

As with everything I write, I do not intend this to be accepted as authoritative, only as a (hopefully) reasoned opinion.

Ground work first:

Doctrine & Covenants 93: 10 God was in the beginning, all things were made by God.

 -- vs. 23, 24 We were also in the beginning, our spirits, the core of truth that is the individual.

 -- v. 26 The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of God

 -- v. 29 Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

 -- v. 30 All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

If I understand this correctly, we are of the same stuff as God. But so are the animals, plants, and rocks, and so are the atoms and subatomic particles.

In fact, so are our engineering constructs, scientific theories, and mathematical automata, to the extent they are functional. So are our thoughts and ideas themselves, to the extent they are true.

Borrowing, for a moment, from computer science theory, I will use automata as the basis of a model of complexity. (Bear with me, there is reason to this.) Thus:

• Simple levers are an example of your simplest, context-free class of automata. A given input always results in a given output.
  
  Machines that implement such automata are usually fairly easy to design and test, although, if they contain enough levers (or the electronic equivalent, transistors), a thorough brute-force test might require a really long time.
  
  
• Push-on, push-off switches kind of sit at the boundary of the simplest class and the next class. Also, those one-button controls which, by pressing the same button, sequence through a series of selections (for example, bright/dim/night-light/off) are at this boundary.
  
  These can be harder to design and test. A current 64-bit CPU register, for example, cannot be sequenced through every possible combination before we expect our sun to shift out of the main phase. Perhaps I don't need to point this out, but the register itself will fail first.
  
  We generally use some testing strategy other than brute-force in such cases.
  
  
• The next level of complexity is where one or more inputs interact with the current state and the previous state to produce the new state. A laundromat washer controller which allows selection based on the number and kinds of coins and bills inserted to present a set of allowed selections would be an example.
  
  Again, the difficulty of design and testing increases. Even though some of the simpler examples, like the washing machine, can be fairly straightforward, it can be easy to discover failure modes in such machines that prevent further operation and even prevent further testing -- or even cause the machine to self-destruct.
  
  
• The third level of complexity is where you have an ordered memory (memory stack) that allows a machine to try to determine the correct response state by recording input, trying candidate states in some order, comparing them to the input up to a certain point, and backing up to try another if the current candidate state fails. Recursive descent parsers such as those used by computer languages are arch-typical of this class of automaton, although they usually cross over into the next class of complexity because of the complexity of language itself.
  
  For what it's worth, this is the class of automata where testing begins to be really difficult. Thorough testing of these automata generally requires more time than we have -- more than we have time-to-market, longer than we can expect the machine to remain functional, longer than known life of the universe.
  
  So we use test strategies in our designs, and we expect to find failure modes during operation.
  
  
• The fourth level requires multiple ordered memories and other features that can easily become impossible to design correctly, much less test well.
  
  All natural human language is in this class.
  
  If we analyze animals from the point of view of automata, animals are at this level or beyond.
  
  
• We do not know if there are levels beyond the fourth level.
  
  Our mathematicians seem to have proven that two memory stacks should be sufficient for anything we can describe beyond the third level, and we are confident of the math in the proof, but we are not fully confident in the assumptions.
  
  Anyway, we know that we, ourselves, are at the fourth level or beyond.
  
  The solar system, if analyzed from this point of view, is also at the fourth level or beyond. If it's meaningful to analyze the universe as an automaton, for us inside the universe, it is definitely at the fourth level or beyond. I'm leaving out even the high-level description of why we can think this is so, but I am confident of it.
  
  Any God that could exist and be really God must also be capable of behavior beyond our level of complexity, thus at or above the fourth level. Some mathematicians assert, probably in jest, that God must be at a fifth level.
   
• And (drum-roll): laws. The laws which we make to run our society, and the rules we make to live by, tend to start at the lowest level of complexity, and then quickly escalate into the fourth.
  

 

All of that kind of glosses over the differences between ideal automata and real machines, but I think it is enough for the present discussion. 

** Except. I must note here that computers are essentially very large first-level complexity devices into which structures which mimic third- and fourth-level behavior -- within certain limits -- have been constructed. Specifically, they contain memory which can be accessed in an orderly way, allowing stacks and other lists to be constructed. 

They have limits on the sizes of those stacks and lists, but as long as those limits are not exceeded, they can behave at the higher levels.

** Well, I should also note here, that our behavior, human behavior, occurs at all four levels of complexity. What we call deep, multi-dimensional personality is fourth-level complexity.

Put another way, fourth-level complexity tends to express itself as personality. There is a sort-of-equivalence, which I will offer but not prove here -- too much philosophy in one sitting.

** And one more point: Computer languages tend to cross over into fourth-level complexity for a very good reason. Mathematically speaking, there is nothing within the third level of complexity to assign meaning (semantics) to either symbols or language. This is why we can define, if we so choose, a constant called BLACK in a computer program which, when passed to a specific function, paints a white dot on a computer screen.

There is some disagreement about how symbols and semantics get attached, even in the fourth level. Or, rather, we can talk about etymologies, traditions, databases and all sorts of mechanical stuff, but we ultimately are not able, within science or mathematics, to explain why and how words communicate meaning.

In our current milieu, for instance, the word "love" is variously given meanings that range from "lust" to "preference" to  "desire" to specific "desire for another person's happiness". What it means in any specific case is pretty much subject to both the intent of the speaker and the intent of the listener.

** And ,now, there is a question I must ask here:

The first two commandments of Mosaic law forbid the making of any god before God. What is that?

I'm going to leave out a lot more philosophical stuff here, but what we hold as our "gods" are the things we set at top priority in our lives -- the concepts, ideals, physical objects, people, etc., that we use to determine the rules which we choose to operate our lives by.

Hold that thought, okay?

The Devil

No one really likes to associate with habitual liars. Sure, they may be interesting for a while, but eventually you get tired of it.

But we need to know there is such a spirit, because not all spiritual influences are beneficial.

There is an influence that tries to convince us that deceiving others for fun and personal gain is a good thing. Talking about the devil too much is not productive, but it is important to note that that influence is real.

Among the common lies that the deceiver tries to get us to believe is that the devil is red of body, has horns and a tail, carries a pitchfork, and has all the fun. 

Now, professional magicians do not all follow the devil, nor do all accountants, lawyers, and burlesque performers. Some apparently do, but not all. Maybe not even most.

In fact, many self-professed devil worshipers only think they are following the devil, while they are, in fact, not. 

How does this happen?

The devil also has a particular habit of claiming that he is God. Then he might claim that God is like himself in some particular way. Then he might say, "But such a being is [fill-in-the-blank-negation]! It's stupid to believe in such a being. God does not exist!" 

Why would he do this? He is a habitual liar. Apparently, he thinks to make some gain by deceiving us.

I bring this up here because many of the traditional descriptions of God are from the deceiver. I see no need to defend those. Nor to worry about them, once we have accepted that they are wrong.

Why does the devil exist?

The devil does play an important role. Without opposite charge poles, electricity does not flow. Without the gravity well, water does not flow down, nor does evaporated water rise. 

Does that mean that we should pity the devil for taking that role and giving us necessary spiritual opposition? Not if it tempts us to follow the spirit of deception, at any rate.

With that background, here is my understanding of the identity of God:

The Progenitor: 

(Traditionally called The Father in English because of limits inherent in the language more than gender or any other reason I know of.)

This is the generative principle, the set of principles by which the natural universe around us operates -- the Grand Unifying Principles which many physicists and other scientists suspect is there, and some seek to discover. 

I don't know if there was a big bang, but, if there was, this set of principles would be the set of principles that formed the initial conditions at the moment of the big bang.

Does this set of principles have personality? Within the first few moments after the big bang, the universe developed enough structure to act as a collection of multi-stack automata, which puts the universe itself immediately right into that fourth level of complexity. 

So, yes, the universe itself must have a personality, of a sort.

Since we can say that the conditions at the time of the big bang are expressed in the current physical structure of the universe, we can suggest that the nature of the universe is an expression of the personality of God.

Our scientists now have evidence to assert that the universe is probably larger than even a very-long-lived human stuck on earth for as long as the earth exists could ever observe the limits of. And, in fact, if said near-immortal continued to live, but were confined to the remnants of our sun in that far future, tens and hundreds of billions of years forward, the speed limit of light prevents such a person from seeing beyond a certain limit.

If that is true, there is no way any human, nor any institution of man's making, will ever be able to fully comprehend the universe.

And, given the tendency we mortals have to die, and the tendencies of our societies to self-destruct, we must always expect our science to reveal things which we hadn't known before.

Therefore, God is far too great for us to comprehend, and, even if we can say that there is a God who exists as a personage, if we claim to own that God, we claim a false God.

This is very important in the argument about whether God exists, so I'll repeat it:

Any God that a particular mortal person or group of mortal people can claim is uniquely theirs alone is by definition false.

God must be far greater than anything we can imagine or even attempt to define, but that does not mean that God does not exist.

Now, if you are bothered that the idea that the great mean God that your preacher taught was breathing hell-fire at you every time you turned around might actually exist, remember, if your preacher claimed some unique ownership to that God, it was false. 

People get excited when they understand something new, and often forget that other things exists. That's part of the process of backing up on the memory stack and starting down another parse path. Preachers are no exception to this tendency, although some do try hard to remember that they are not yet perfect, as long as they are mortal.

We'll be kind to your preacher and assume it was your preacher's misunderstanding.

In mathematics, two functions which parse the same set of symbols and produce the same results can be considered identical within the context of the specified set of symbols. 

It does not follow in some logical causality, but it does help us understand that, if some immortal being were able to fully develop all of the personality and attributes of the Progenitor, that immortal being could stand in for the Progenitor in any interaction, and nothing would change.

That can't happen within a mortal lifetime, but the eternities are more than just a very long time.

Is there a specific Progenitor, with a personality and all? 

I know a couple of things: One, the universe itself has a personality. And, two, my understanding of the scriptures indicates that there is a specific being that fully has all the personality and attributes of the Progenitor, distinct from the pre-mortal Jesus, with oversight responsibilities for the creation of our solar system and life on this earth. Also, I think I have scriptural basis to identify Jehovah of the Old Testament with the pre-mortal Jesus. Thus, this other being would be, relative to our earth, the Father, the Progenitor.

(And I will point out that Greek and other myths seem to contain a perversion of these ideas. The Father and the Son would not fight each other, because they would be entirely unified in purpose. The Father is not the one in opposition to the Son when the Son is pleading for us before the Father.)

 

The Son:

If there is a progenitor, there is a child. Moreover, the child is able to grow to become like the progenitor, and, if the child does succeed in becoming like the progenitor, the child can fully represent the progenitor. 

Jesus asserted that He ascended to the Father after His death and resurrection. I won't get into the details of all of His teachings here, other than that I have scriptural reason to believe He did, and to believe He was therefore qualified and able to stand in for the set of principles by which this universe runs.

I will note this much of what He teaches -- repentance, or changing one's behavior to learn to be more like the Progenitor, falls rather neatly out of the understanding of the third and fourth levels of complexity. Part of the reason we have memory is so that we can back up and try other paths in our lives. Forgetting may be important, but so is remembering.

Oh, and I will refer you to the Beatitudes, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, or 3rd Nephi 11, 12, 13, and 14. These summarize much of His most important teachings, and are enough to give us confidence in the personality of God.

 

The Holy Spirit:

Remember that I mentioned that computer languages tend to cross over from the third level of complexity to the fourth, and that we still have trouble getting meaning into words.

In the Book of Mormon, 2nd Nephi 33: 1, we find this little morsel of wisdom:

... when a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men.

Since we have Ghostbusters and other jests which abuse the word "ghost", I'll use the word "spirit" instead, here.

This third member of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit, is that which is the medium of communication. Without some spiritual influence, it quickly becomes difficult to communicate. If a negative spirit pervades in a conversation, it can be very difficult to communicate anything positive. 

Turning our own heart towards a positive spirit, towards, for example, a desire for the happiness and well-being of the other person, tends to make it much easier to communicate with positive result.

I'm not going to get too mystical here, but this Holy Spirit also functions at the fourth level of complexity or above, and also fully expresses the personality of the Progenitor principles.

This is what I mean by God, or these three are the Godhead that I worship. These define my intended priorities, and, to the extent that I am successful at implementing my intentions, my actual priorities. To the extent that I understand them, they define my behavior.

I do not own them. If I could, they would not be worth my worship. 

I am trying to learn to be like them, but I am fully aware that I will only see, at best, modest, small successes at that in this life. 

I have faith that, if I learn in this life to keep repenting when I find myself not following God, to keep learning more about God through studying the teachings of the Son, listening to the Holy Spirit, and to keep changing my life, behavior, and heart to conform to the attributes of Godliness to the best of my understanding, I will be able to continue in that path and stand with confidence before them after I die, and join in their work in the world to come. 

If I fail to do that, what I will be able to do after I leave this mortal world will be limited.

I should provide scripture references to each point in the above, but my time is limited. More importantly, I don't want people to think I'm any sort of expert in this philosophy. Everyone needs to develop their own understanding of God, or, if they need to, of cosmology and the purpose of the universe and themselves without a God who has personality.

Why I Believe

People ask me why I believe in God.

Well, it's usually more like, "How can you believe in a God that is/does this and that terrible thing, or whose existence contradicts that famous person's theory of everything.

All too often, I try to answer the complaint instead of the question.

It goes something like this (in the abbreviated version):

Me: "That's not the God I believe in."

Them: "You can't redefine God."

Well, I'm usually not rude enough to say, "Why not? People have been redefining God to give themselves excuses not to believe for, well, most of recorded history." So the conversation stalls.

By the way, I am not redefining God. I am simply taking the scriptures literally.

Recently, I thought, well, with all the getting stuck on what God is and what God isn't, maybe I should put up a post about what/who I believe God to be.

That hasn't been working. I keep getting stuck in esoteric stuff -- like what it means to call God our Father.

It occurs to me now, I should answer the first question, instead -- how I came to believe in God.

So I will.

When I was approaching eight, and the question of whether I would get baptized or not was looming, I told my parents that I thought I was smarter than God. I didn't like the program He had set up, I didn't like all the rules, I didn't like going to a church where I couldn't seem to get along with the kids my age, etc.

My dad told me, "You gotta fight from the inside."

My response was something, "Why do I have to fight this fight at all?"

Don't get me wrong, I figured out why pretty soon, but, at the time, it didn't seem reasonable. It was good advice, but for later.

My mom's response?

"Okay, you figure out a better plan. Work it up. Write it down. Then we'll talk about it."

But they did say the decision was mine, whether to get baptized or not.

I kid you not. My mom does not remember telling me this, but she did -- tell a seven-year-old kid to write up a plan to compare with God's plan.

I was not excited about the writing part, but I started thinking about this alternate plan thing. I started actively researching the scriptures instead of just taking what the Sunday School teachers told me at face value.

Don't get me wrong. I did not turn into a scripture scholar or a straight-shirt believer overnight at eight. But I learned how to use the indexes and the concordances, and started learning how to look for meaning.

I discovered two things.

One was that a lot of what the people at church were teaching was not scriptural. These were not evil people, but people are human. And it still happens. When we run out of time, we often fall back on tradition, and tradition is often wrong.

The other was that there were things I didn't like that were in fact scriptural, that, even in my naivety, I could not think of better alternatives to. And I started seeing that could be reasons for those things to be.

Yes, I'm being vague here. The details (the specific things) don't matter. 

Well, one does. This is not a perfect world, not in the way we humans think of perfection. Nor is it ideal. It was not meant to be so. In fact, the very purpose for which this world was made, to be a place where we could learn, would be completely undone if it were perfect or ideal. This was one of the things I learned sometime between the age of eight and nineteen.

This was my first experience with the Holy Spirit.

My second experience with the Holy Spirit was during my early teens. 

I had argued with my parents, apparently about going to something at church, I don't remember what. I ended up walking the two-to-three miles from home to church. The first mile or so was through the back allies, and I was in a rage -- crying and screaming. I'm sure more than one of our neighbors considered calling the police.

Much of my rage was directed at God for letting "this", whatever it was, happen to me.

I recalled one of the teachers at church talking about hearing the Spirit, and I wondered if God was going to reply to my complaints and accusations. And I felt an answer distinctly in my heart. I can't tell you what the answer was, it goes well beyond the power of human language. The general meaning was that my parents were doing what they could for me, and that I would survive, but that's just one prosaic interpretation.

I also heard an answer in my mind. I could tell you what that answer was, but I won't. I've since learned that it was the voice of evil spirits, attempting to hijack my experience with the Holy Spirit. It's a spirit of lying, and there's no need to give the adversary of our souls any further publicity.

Some of my friends and interlocutors will argue that this was all a figment of an overactive adolescent imagination.

Yes, the imagination can, indeed, masquerade as the Spirit. One of the four general sources we can get "spiritual" answers from is, in fact, ourselves. 

No, this was not the case here. It was not an answer I particularly wanted. It was not an answer I could have constructed for myself without help -- it included elements that I did not at the time have the experience necessary to make up for myself, and the conclusion completely exceeds the sort of conclusion I have been able to draw on my own.

(That answer contains, for instance, things that made it a lot easier for me to understand, among other things, calculus and abstract algebra when I encountered those in my academic career years later.)

You may argue that there is, within the human psyche, a function that can produce such epiphanies.

That assumes two things, one that what I experienced was no more than what current researchers describe as epiphany, and, two, that we do not have within us a gift from God that helps us understand truth.

Here, I will be point blank.

One: What current biomedical researchers call epiphany is the biochemical effect, not the cause, of spiritual experience, and what they generally record is from the other three sources I've mentioned above. God usually does not help us with our parlor games.

The other: the human conscience tends to get overlaid with all sorts of things, peer pressure, family expectations, social mores and ethics, tradition. But there is a core to the conscience that is nothing more nor less than a connection to God.

This is where it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. 

I'm not going to argue this point. Every human being has a connection to God within the self.

You can disagree for now if you need to. That's part of the point of being in this world, to experience what it is like to choose things.

Having chosen to recognize the workings of the Spirit, I have since had many experiences that I have recognized and can't deny. I have also had many ambiguous experiences. This does not bother me, because, as I just said, one of the things I learned was that God wants us to be learn how to handle freedom. That requires leaving us room to choose things for ourselves. It requires ambiguities.

This is not the only reason I believe, but it is a primary part of the foundation.

God is -- 神はおられる

Posting some Gospel principles in Japanese and English:
イエス様（いえすさま）の 福音（ふくいん）の 原則（げんそく）の 一部（いちぶ）を 日本語（にほんご）と 英語（えいご）にして 投稿（とうこう） いたします。

There is a God.
神様（かみさま）が おられます。

He exists.
存在（そんざい）して おられます。

He created our spirits.
私達（わたしたち）の 魂（たましい）を 創造（そうぞう）なさいました。

He is our Heavenly Father.
その神様が 私達の 天（てん）の お父様（おとうさま）で ございます。

We are His spirit children.
私達は その霊（れい）の 子供（こども）たちに なります。

He loves us.
私達を 愛（あい）して おられます。

He wants us to be happy.
私達の 幸(しあわ)せを 願(ねが)って おられます。
つまり、私達が 幸せに なって 欲(ほ)しいと 望(のぞ)んで いらしゃいます。

Our Heavenly Father has a body of flesh and bone.
私達の天のお父様は骨肉（こつにく）の体（からだ）を持(も)っておられます。

His body is perfected and glorified.
その御体（みからだ）が完全（かんぜん）になって、栄光（えいこう）に満(み)ちておられます。

He knows our hearts.
私達の 心（こころ）を ご存知（ぞんじ）です。ご理解（りかい）してくださいます。

He knows our suffering and sorrow.
私達の 苦(くる)しみと 悲(かな)しみを ご存知 です。

He weeps with us.
私達と 一緒（いっしょ）に 泣(な)かれます。

He rejoices with us.
私達と 一緒（いっしょ）に お喜(よろこ)びに なって くださいます。

He especially rejoices with us when we do what is right.
特（とく）に、 私達が 正(ただ)しいことを 行(おこな)うとき、 一緒に 喜んで くださいます。