Is there a God? And life’s many other questions
“Well shut my mouth!” A lot of people would like to do that but few have been successful.
My wife just hates it when we are dining and I butt into someone else’s conversation at another table just because I find their chatter interesting. It is a bad habit, I admit, but I have made a lot of friends that way and perhaps a few enemies.
Just the other day, on one of my many many visits to various doctors, a charming young lady in the waiting room decided to ask me if I believed in God.
Being the extremely honest and and outgoing type, I answered in the best way I know how — by being perfectly honest with the fact that I don’t believe in a supreme being.
I went on at some length in offering my reasons for this including the many books that I have read by various authors and scientists such as Neil der Grasse Tyson and Michio Kaku, Carl Sagan and others and the countless hours I spend watching television regarding shows about the origins of our universe.
I recently watched a show that presented the fact that as big and complex as our own Milky Way galaxy is there are literally millions of similar galaxies in space, most of which we have yet to see. Just this last week a new planet, Ross 128b, was discovered which has almost the identical climate to our earth, is a satellite of a different sun and may well support life similar to ours here on earth. Just imagine that and it is only 11 light years away. Its star is 7 billion years old.
Believe me it would be much simpler for me to accept the “let there be light” philosophy as opposed to trying to figure out exactly how it all began.
This woman, by the way, was a Jehovah’s Witness — not the ideal audience for me. I did tell her that I always invite the Witnesses into my home for a chat when they are canvasing the neighborhood, but I am sure they are happy to leave once I am through talking.
I have the good fortune to have a friend who is a professor of biology, genetics, and a whole bunch of other stuff with lots of initials after his name, which I wish I had. I brought him in to an argument that a bunch of us were having on the tennis court about how everything got started and his simple answer was, “an accident.” Imagine this coming from a professor. When you study our origins in detail there is an excellent book by Tyson who breaks everything down into nanoseconds starting with the “Big Bang” and a few seconds later expanding into the multi-universe system in which we live. It is really hard to comprehend but easier than picturing a big man in the sky wearing white robes and simply announcing what he would like to see happen.
Actually there is nothing really wrong in believing this way except for the fact that since time began people have been killing one another based on how they worship this man in the sky, something I sincerely doubt he would like to see happening in his name.
Of course as I get older and nearer the time that I must go visit wherever it is that this man comes from, I begin to have different thoughts about eternity. Of course I expect it will be rather dark and lonely in that big mahogany box that they will place me in, but that doesn’t seem right for all the contributions that I have made to this planet.
I actually planted a couple of trees at one time which have since been blown away, I guess by the man upstairs.
A strange thing has happened to this crazy mind of mine recently and that is that I began thinking of my parents and all of my brothers and sisters — now gone —and wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were waiting up there for me (or possibly down there). Believe it or not, on occasion, as I sit on my front patio and look up at the sky, I watch these magnificent clouds rolling by and imagine that perhaps they could be the members of my family that I miss so much.
I am actually able to see shapes of faces, etc. in the clouds and begin talking to them as though they were sitting next to me. I know that would sound foolish to any agnostic or atheist and it indeed does sound foolish to me, but I simply cannot deny that that is what I do.
I feel the same way about my children and grandchildren, and would love to be able to speak to them from on high and see how successful they have become over the years, what type of families they have raised and all the things that parents and grandparents look forward to.
Maybe someday they will be looking up to the clouds and see me — please, God! You see as hard as I tried to be realistic, there are times that reality just doesn’t make it.
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