What We Believe

Yesterday the Internet streaming from The Crossing church service included, “What is your favorite Bible verse?” There are many Bible verses to pick from.

The first that came to me is, “I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, he who believes in Me has eternal life.” John 6:47

Another is, “Truly I say to you, whoever does not accept and receive and welcome the kingdom of God like a little child shall not in any way enter it. Luke 18:17

And another is, “Jesus answered him. I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, unless a person is born again he cannot ever see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3

Some 2000 years have passed since that was written. It is as valid today as it was when written, but we know a lot more about God’s ever developing playground: earth, and the creatures living there, and their manners of writing that now replace oral traditions. 

Powerful computer analyses now help set dates and facts in the Old Testament that can be confirmed by archeological digs. See, The Minds of the Bible Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness by Rabbi James Cohn, 2014, in ebook locations 542-566. [My first ebook!]

One of the first things I did, when teaching the new campus computer system to do useful things for me, was to teach it to help score sets of 120 single page biology class essays. On pass one, it chewed each essay into a pile of single word phrases. It now knew the vocabulary.

On the next set of passes it collected phrases containing more than 3-5 words in each essay. It now knew relationships (the very very beginning of understanding). It now has 120 sets of relationship phrases. 

The computer next compared the vocabulary and relationships from the first essay, with the remaining 119 essays. This almost exceeded the capacity of the computer.

The computer then read the essays and printed a ranking, created from the sum of common phrases, at the end of each sentence. The first essay was compared to the other 119 essays. The second essay was compared with the remaining 118, and so on. 

I then read the essays with the duplicates flagged. The same long phrase found in only two of the 120 essays indicates a lack of originality.

Students were puzzled by how their scrambling of sentences and of paragraphs  was still detected as duplicates. The computer had no sense of a time line or place, just a pile of phrases from each essay;it was not limited by time or place. Computer analyses of the Old Testament do include time and archeological space.

My work ended when students discovered they only needed to include about three misspelled words to set each essay apart from the others. Spell check had not been invented.

But the program became very useful in summarizing Margaret’s advanced degree in education questionnaires. It told us what nurses were thinking about and the relationship between their concerns and staff positions. Preadaptive evolution is for a structure coming into being for one purpose (that may or may not continue) that then goes on to serve another.

My own analysis of the Bible started when I was about 10 years old. It took most of one summer to read. The Old Testament is very blood thirsty. The New Testament puzzled me in that what is written and how people acted seemed at odds.

Our little Methodist church split over a scandal that I no longer remember (if I ever knew) shortly after a very clear memory of batting another child over the head with a sand box screener. My parents did not belong to the group that held on to the building.

Little kids do not understand but do pick up on feelings. My mom commented one day to the effect that the churchwomen doing the bizarre thought nothing of asking her to furnish a number of dressed chickens ready for baking. Besides the birds were free since we raised them and did not have to buy them at the meat market.

My amateur missionary work in the Air Force came to an end when my leader wanted to save all the Japanese he could, but since they killed his brother, he wanted them to burn in hell, a bit anyway. Nor was I into speaking in tongues. Our off base Methodist minister was dismissed because he opposed one-arm bandits being newly installed in open storefronts.

Visits to churches, temples and shrines in Japan, Philippines, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and India ended my calling to the ministry when my enlistment was up, at the age of 24. I enrolled in two summer courses at MU: psychology and chemistry in 1955. Chemistry won out.

I wanted an education and a job. How do we explain, understand, the world we live in? Margaret and I met at the First Baptist Church where she was in charge of the college age group and I was a church mouse the last two years before graduating and marrying.

It is with this background that I now try to make sense out of the past by combining several different views from within and outside traditional groups of believers. If I have learned one thing, "leading" theologians and prophets, in general, are associated with people with sufficient wealth (time and money) to live isolated lives. [They are not the unknown and forgotten millions who only leave behind "folk traditions" and children.]

I can say the same thing about my 30 years associated with NWMSU. I was in the middle of things that had important consequences that I was mostly unaware of. Time, monarch butterflies, and friends at Provision Living are now changing that.