Beyond This

The Beginning

This seems an appropriate place to start. God, by whatever name you know him or her, is agreed to be the Creator of all things. None of us were around back then, so it doesn’t really matter how he accomplished this wonderful feat.

Every major religion preaches a similar set of ‘rules’ or commandments for living a proper and blessed life. If we simply follow those teachings, living for each other, how can we go wrong?

Arguments arise; indeed wars have been fought, over the variations in interpreting the origins and outcomes of our being. My take on the whole discussion is that we need not struggle for exactness. Does it matter how the universe came about? Does it really matter if it all was created in seven days? Does God have a chosen people?

The Bible, the Qumran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, and many other Holy Books were not written by God but by followers. There are similarities among all of them. The messages that come from them are so alike that we could compare them to the differences among translations or transcripts of any texts that have been reproduced for centuries by scribes and scholars.

I believe that what God did was create the set of rules and conditions that made all things possible. In fact, by doing so, he didn’t need to make an actual event take place. His rules set the correct measurements of all the various elements, (some that we know nothing about) and things began to happen.

Look around you or just think about it. Even atheists can try this one. Everything that exists anywhere does so in an exact, precise way. It is all so mathematically perfect and faultless time after time. Grass, flowers, insects, birds, fish, mammals, clouds, wind, and the sea, all exist and have existed in perfect harmony for longer than any can remember.

There is NOTHING random in the Universe. Nothing at all! Scientists have measured and tested, theorized, and discovered many amazing things. The thing that is so amazing is the perfect predictability of the Universe.

If the right conditions exist something happens, good or bad. Hurricanes and tidal waves, earthquakes, and disease all happen because very specific conditions and/or elements are present or absent.

Our Universe is not unfair. In fact, it is extremely fair and chooses no favourites. The laws of the Universe, as created by God, leave nothing to chance. Miracles DO happen! They happen every second of every day and in every place, you can imagine. One miracle is in the immensity of the Plan. God’s Plan for the Universe works at every level from the tiniest neutrino to the largest black hole in outer space.

What of the stories of The Beginning as written in the Holy Books? To answer that question, I take you back in time to a period and places without newspapers, television, Internet, radio, or even schooling for the masses. It doesn’t matter whether we go to Galilee, India, China, Africa, or ancient Egypt. The ‘conditions’ were ripe for stories of explanation.

People wanted to know where they came from, where they were going, and why things happened the way they did. Before there was an educated populace, information was obtained from government and clerics. There were also travelling storytellers and, of course, rumour.

This was a time before it was fashionable to question the government and clerics. Superstition, idol worship, and left-over religious rites from centuries past all co-mingled in a soup from which the ordinary man had to take nourishment for his soul.

I think Man has always wanted to know more than he does. He also wanted to explain why things happen. A frequent question from the youngest of our species is ‘why’. We don’t always answer fully, or truthfully. This is due to our knowledge of the limited ability to understand of a child.

One day I was walking in a park and came abreast of the playground. A little boy came running up to me and told me rather sternly “Go fix the swing.” His mom came to round him up and explained that she had told him that the swing was broken and a man would have to come and fix it. To the little boy, I was a man and therefore I should fix the swing. He was too young to differentiate one man from another.

The earliest religions had numerous Gods, each responsible for an important aspect of life. It was easier to assign single entities for responsibility, mirroring the society in which early Man lived.

Connecting it all into an inter-related, all-encompassing power was too much to comprehend. Simple Man wanted simple answers.

It is hardly feasible that these primitive beings would accept much of what we today know as ‘scientific theory’. There is no way they could have believed that Earth was born in a BIG BANG and it continues into infinity. Indeed, an explosion of any kind was beyond their experience.

Remember too that people didn’t travel much in the early days. Cultures existed separately and so too did languages. Each culture developed its religious doctrine, in its own language. Isn’t it an amazing thing that the great religions of today have spread across so many different cultural, linguistic, and geographic barriers? This might also explain the similarities among the many interpretations of God’s existence.

It is a scientific theory that Man didn’t exist in the time of the dinosaurs, but came about sometime after that. This is all based on dated evidence found in the form of bones, tools, and so on. None has been found from dino days.

Sixty-five million years from now how many human bones from the present will be in evidence? Millenniums of weather and geographic changes will ensure that very few, if any, will be found. In addition, much of what we have built and made will be gone. My personal jury is still out on whether our garbage dumps, with all that plastic, will be the source of academic study.

Does it really matter? I say no. I don’t care if Man was running from the T-Rex or not. Like you, I care about my life and what is taking place in the here and now. I do wonder about it though.

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was just that, a story. It was told to simple people who could grasp and accept that simplistic idea as real. This is not blasphemy. There are other stories of creation, in other religions, that explain our beginnings in simple terms and fantasies that the superstitious and uneducated masses could believe.

This does not mean that I do not believe that God has a special plan for us. It means that I do believe and that we could not even begin to understand the complexity of His plan.

Do I believe in Jesus? Yes, but not that He came only to the Jews in Palestine. I believe He was God’s manifestation to mankind and as such, it had to be made to all races and nations, or at least on all continents. Would it not be unrealistic to believe that God’s love for us is racial?

The good word from all the good books is that there is a PLAN. Remember, nothing is random in God’s Universe. Everything that happens does so for a reason when the proper conditions and elements are present, or absent. We too are caught up in that never-ending cycle of life, not just on Earth, but everywhere in His Universe.

Did you know that nothing ever ends? We drink water, juices, milk, and other liquids that probably have been drunk before. All the water on Earth is the same water that has always been here. It just cycles.