Ongoing Life Experiments, New Format, New Theories, etc.

I decided to change the format of all my blogs for several reasons. I've learned a bit of context style sheets and a bit of graphics image manipulation which gives me an opportunity to improve the look a bit. It is my experience that if people don't like the packaging, they won't even bother to look at the contents.

I hope I don't offend people with the banner image, but the image of God portrayed in the Monty Python film, "The Holy Grail", is not far from the image that I was presented with as a child. That God image involved jealousy, anger, insensitivity, and egotism. The image of God I was brought up with made God some kind of super-human with the emotional maturity of a below average thirteen year old. Most of all, God was external. This seems to be a fairly mainstream view of God still, however, it is no longer my view.

A blog is kind of like a public diary. Because it is intended to be public, I separated my thoughts to some degree and created blogs for different areas of interest. I feared that if I did not do so, my jumble of thoughts would confuse people beyond their ability to follow. However, it creates a problem because of the relatedness of everything.

I am interested in learning as much as I can about the nature of our reality, and I view spiritual paths and scientific paths as both valid avenues. Science and spirituality both have their limitations. Only phenomena that are readily reproducible on demand really lend themselves well to the scientific method of investigation. Spirituality and direct knowledge can teach us personally, but we can't share directly with others. We can know something but when we tell someone else, we can't prove it, unless they also experience it directly.

I have come to believe the following about God; that God is forgiving, loving, and continuously creating. I've come to believe that God is inherent in everything, and that God primarily creates our reality through directed selection of random events.

Let me explain that, evolutionists hold that life evolves by random mutations and natural selection. Religious fundamentalists believe that God created everything in seven days and from that point forward, it is static. I don't believe either theory is complete. Rather, I believe that natural selection isn't mindless, that "intent" of spirit drives the outcome of random events.

In the Bible when it says that in the beginning, there was The Word; it is my belief that what is meant by that is God's intent, and God's intent seems to have been to bring about the creation of a living, loving, conscious universe, of which we are one component.

There are still a lot of aspects that are mysterious to me; in particular why suffering is necessary. Is it necessary to have suffering in order to experience love? Is it a necessary part of our learning experience? Why do we have mortal bodies? I can speculate on these matters but really I don't know.

I do feel though there is a plan, a way that everything fits together harmoniously, and that we all have an inherent feeling when we deviate from that and then things don't fit well, are not harmonious, we have problems relating to each other in the loving manner that was intended.

I heard someone say that we have to be able to make wrong choices in order to make choices, and if we couldn't make choices, didn't have free will, then we couldn't really love. Maybe that's true, but wrong choices and their consequences seem to carry a high price.