More craziness from me. I decided to set this all down in writing as I never have before. Might give people some insight on me. Or not. Depends on how open their mind is. As long as it's not so open their brain falls out.

God. It’s a very tricky subject for me. I don’t talk about it much. People here in the “Bible Belt” tend to reject what I say on the subject so I tend to not say anything. But I’m going to lay it all out now. What I believe to be true. Some will get it, some won’t. Some will, of course, totally reject it and call me an idiot. Whatever. I am simply putting down in writing my beliefs for the first time. Let’s see where it goes, ok?

I was raised Catholic. Up until the age of about 10 I wanted to be a nun. Dedicate my life to the service of God. At the age of 10, I lost my faith. That’s a very hard thing for a child to deal with. It went from “please help me God!” to “please let me die” within the space of a year. I’m not going to discuss what happened. It’s too hard to deal with still. I did continue going through the motions of belief until I was in high school. At that point I couldn’t pretend anymore. I began reading about other religions, other belief systems. I got a really weird reputation my senior year in high school as a Satan worshiper. That was as a result of my changing my mode of dress to exotic skirts and cutting my hair short and bleaching it blond. Plus, I was always carrying around a copy of the Necronomicon or some other esoteric book. I was reading them, not practicing them, ok? I was searching for truth.

As the years wore on I mostly devoted my time to science. I love physics. I also love geology, archaeology, art and crafts. Lots of stuff. I can genuinely say that even though I’m almost 40, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I might never grow up. But the more I looked into physics, the more I was amazed. I began thinking in a theological manner to some extent.

There are people who think the world is only 6,000 years old. This seems daft to me considering the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s because their church has told them this is so. The number is based on a timeline that was drawn up in the 19th century that is based on the timeline given in the bible. Obviously this doesn’t work for me. It’s based on faith, not facts. I began thinking about it though. If God is a being that supposedly knows all, sees all, is all powerful and created the universes then what is a day to a being like this? If the bible is correct in that God created the world (along with the rest of it all) then there WERE no days before this. So again, what is a day to an entity like this? Does the concept of a day make any sense to it? It is more like one of our seconds, kind of a blink of an eye thing? And for that matter, time didn’t exist before either. So how do we hold a puny human timeline against an all powerful entity? The whole notion of God creating the world in seven human days is preposterous. Not that God couldn’t do it, but trying to squeeze it all into seven human days seems really crazy to me.

So where does this leave me? With the thought that a supreme being took time (once it existed) to create the wonders of earth and the rest of the universe. That entity must have created the rules by which everything exists as well. And that the earth is not 6,000 puny human years old. No way no how. Rational thinking is all that is necessary. But that rational thinking began taking me in another direction as well. The soul. What is it and does it exist? If it does exist where is it? Will I continue with a sense of me-ness when I die? Good questions, eh?

The first one to tackle was the whole soul issue. I believe that all living creatures and some things that aren’t living have souls. It’s quite evident. Everything has an energy field around it. Everything. People, pets, plants, trees, rocks, you name it. That field is not only around it but through it. Kirlian photography is a great example of this. Those people who are gifted in knowing how to look can see it. But is this the soul? I think it might be part of it. When you close your eyes and imagine yourself standing in a green meadow, dotted with wildflowers, and feel the breeze moving your hair you don’t seem to be contained to your skull. It’s an interesting thing once you realize it. You can have a mile long stretch of land in your mind but it doesn’t seem to be contained in your physical self. This is when I began thinking that humans might exist in more than three dimensions (I do not consider time to be a dimension, so bear this in mind during my explanation).

I have been certain since about 1985 that there are many other dimensions. I was 17 and had a friend working on his masters in electrical engineering. We used to get high, crawl out onto the roof with wine, cheese and crackers and discuss science. Yeah, I know. I’m weird. From one of these discussions came the idea for my presentation speech in my senior (high school) Speech class. I built a three dimensional representation of what the fourth dimension should be represented as. Oddly enough, in the summer of 1986 my dad was watching CNN and they announced the discovery that there are more dimensions and showed a computer graphic that looked astonishingly like what I had build out of wire and yarn. He flipped. But I’m digressing here. It finally came to me that we simply do not exist in just three dimensions. This could account for the mile long stretch of meadow in a skull that’s not nearly big enough to encompass even a yard of that meadow. Now I know that the human brain does some pretty weird things. But I do think it’s partially the result of an extra dimensional entity looking at the world through a three dimensional interface. I could be wrong, but unless you can prove it to me, I’m sticking with my theory.

So, we have the soul floating around, hooked into our “reality” though what’s basically a husk of flesh. But what happens at death? Do we continue on? Do we disperse and join the universe? I’m still not entirely sure. I am sure of a few things though. I am sure that our energy continues to exist. Why? Easy. The law of conservation of matter and energy. There is a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe. Sometimes matter becomes energy, and energy can become matter, but for all intents and purposes the total amount is always 100% of what it began as. So when we die and that spark of energy that animated our husks of flesh leaves us, it doesn’t disappear. It can’t. It’s against the laws of physics. It HAS to go somewhere. As to where it goes and what happens, I am not sure. I do believe I have lived before; I have odd memories of past times that I know I didn’t read out of a book or something. It’s possible my psyche made it up in an attempt to comfort me and make me feel as if I wouldn’t simply rejoin the universe and loose all sense of me-ness. I have met people who I feel I have known forever and they feel the same about me. This seems to lend some weight to the reincarnation theory. I guess I’ll find out at some point…

So yeah, there are my beliefs. I believe it. I don’t actually FEEL it, but I do believe it. When you have something very traumatic to you happen and you loose your faith, sometimes I think you can’t get it back. I don’t have faith in God to come save me from anything. But I do believe that entity exists. Maybe some of our people commune with the deity. I don’t know for sure. It would be cool if they did.