The amazing profundity of being sheep

One of the most endearing Biblical metaphors that describe the relationship of man and God is that of the shepherd and his sheep (Psalm 23, John 10:11).

But as familiar as this image might be, its ultimate profundity goes quite a bit beyond the usual green pastures. Sheep, to start with, are human.

Let me explain

The woolly sheep we are familiar with don't occur in nature. They were bred from feral ancestors in the late Stone Age, along with about a dozen others species (roughly the same amount as there are tribes in Israel).

How precisely this happened isn't clear, but most probably the ancestors of our domesticated friends stood out from other animal species by (1) their innate tendency to bond socially, and (2) their kindness and calm behavior. That initial approachability must have led to their taming, which was followed by their moving in.

Sheep and such may have a bit of a bad rep in modern culture, but since every animal is basically after food and safety, moving in with the humans was the smartest thing they could do. And not all animals could pull it off either. Cows and sheep aren't proverbially dumb, they are proverbially elected on account of their natural agreeable disposition and their ultimate potential.

Rhianna

After their initial taming, humans began to specifically breed their animals into their modern forms, and there's the rub. Modern sheep are living sculptures and as much part of humanity as a song by Rhianna. And just like Rhianna's latest production moves us, so did the presence of domesticated animals help form modern humanity.

Animal husbandry and farming allowed humans to engage in their celebrated cultural evolution, and transcend their natural state and become the epitomes of sophistication and godly glory we are today. We would not have our cities and libraries and academia if our ancestors hadn't adopted kind animals into their own immediate homes.

Modern humanity is a symbiotic collective that comprises humans as well as domesticated animals and plants. And none of them could exists or survive without the other members of that collective.

I'll say that again: there would be no smart-phone carrying, Rhianna-listening human beings if there were no sheep, pigs, cows, rice, potatoes and corn. You can't have one without the other. There is no division between domesticated animals and the humans that depend on them. We are one with them, and together we are humanity.

Why humans "invented" husbandry

In archaeological circles it's considered a bit of a mystery why humans began to domesticate animals and plants, because quite frankly, the ultimate effect (libraries, french fries, Rhianna) is not at all evident when the first wild mouflon wanders into one's Stone Age village and doesn't seem to want to leave.

The first appealing results of selective breeding become evident after hundreds of generations, so visions of the ultimate result may not have been the reason why our ancestors began doing it. It appears that humans began to domesticate animals because from some deep level they were driven to. How deep was that level? Well, the urge to enter into a symbiotic partnership with other animals may very well have stemmed from the atomic level.

Nature is a giant fractal, in which the same shape repeats at different levels of complexity. There are three main levels, which the Bible lovingly calls water, blood and spirit (1 John 5:8), or matter, life and society. All three levels have their basic building block, and all three building blocks have the same basic form, namely that of a nucleus that contains all information to run the building block and a larger body that (1) acts according to the information stored in the nucleus, and (2) interacts with neighboring building blocks in order to create structures.

The Household Set dictates that matter, life and society consist of self-similar basic building blocks

Water 
At the level of matter we have the atom, of which the nucleic information determines the quality and characteristics of the atom. Depending on the kind of atoms, atoms can cluster into molecules and huge objects.

Blood
At the level of life we have the living cell, with again the genetic information that determines the qualities and characteristics of the cell. Cells can cluster up into colonies and even multi-cellular creatures.

Spirit
At the level of society we have the household, with the house-father as nucleus and the members of his household and the range of their economic activities as body.

Husbandry too occurs on all three levels.

Husbandry at water level
Atoms started out as simple hydrogen atoms. They have one proton for a nucleus, one electron zipping around it and a photonic force field that binds the two together. But all hydrogen atoms can do is huddle up and drift through space as a cloud. They can't bind together to make rocks and planets. And so they drift together until they are plentiful enough to collapse under their own gravity and form a star. Within that star a process called fission begins to occur, and that comes down to protons absorbing electrons to make a whole new symbiotic whole: the neutron.

Husbandry at the atomic level

The neutron is really a proton and an electron living as one, and an unbound neutron will in roughly a quarter of an hour fall apart into again a proton and an electron. But with neutrons as glue, neutrons and protons can stick together into colossal nuclei, which attract swarms of electrons and form all the elements of the periodic table. Contrary to their hydrogenic ancestors, these guys are able to bond with each other and form majestic molecules and objects. And finally cells.

Husbandry at the blood level

Husbandry at the cellular level

Cells too started out simple and virtually unable to create complex colonies. The earliest cells are called prokaryotes, and all they can do is just swarm about. Things changed when certain complicated prokaryotes opened their doors for a certain kind of simple bacterium and, in stead of digesting it, adopted it into its very own body. These bacteria kept their own autonomous DNA and became mitochondria, also known as the power-houses of the cell, and cells became eukaryotes. Contrary to their prokaryotic ancestors, these super-powered eukaryotes were able to create specialized colonies and finally multi-cellular creatures.

So why did humans finally took up husbandry? Every atom and every cell in their body was telling them to. Humans had existed in hydrogen-slash-prokaryotic form, but somehow (most likely to do with population density) an urge occurred to tame and domesticate other animals the way protons domesticated electrons and prokaryotes domesticated bacteria.

Who are God's sheep?

According to John the Revelator, humanity will breach into two kinds. One will populate the earth, and the other will populate the New Jerusalem, where it will govern the earth together with God. That obviously follows the same general principle that gave the world its neutrons, eukaryotes and Rhianna, and besides demonstrating that the ancients were a whole lot better informed than we give them credit for, it also invites contemporary humans to contemplate which of the modern human expressions might be deemed worthy to be absorbed into the House of Divinity. Certainly all available philosophies and religions claim that they're the one, but claiming and being is not the same thing.

Husbandry at the Divine level

All human mentalities will claim that they are the pinnacle of existence, just like every bear and lion will gladly submit that they are the best animals ever to roam the earth. But when our ancestors began to look for animals to take into their home and treat like family members, they weren't looking for superior prowess but rather for compatibility. Likewise the humanities that God targets to bring into His home are not necessarily those excelling in certain traits.

Here at Abarim Publications we guess that the realm of humanity is as psycho-diverse as the biosphere is bio-diverse, and that nature is producing this diversity deliberately (that is to say: in order to satisfy a natural law, such as the second law of thermodynamics).

In other words: in our world today there are humanities (philosophies, religions, -isms and schools of thought) that relate to the rest of mankind the way, say, bears and wolves relate to the whole of the biosphere. And the biosphere appears to be geared to grow towards a situation in which a group of separate creatures can unite to form a symbiotic super-creature.

Which creatures or humanities that will ultimately be depends not so much on the gloriousness of each separate creature, but much rather on how the whole bunch operates together. After all, to herd sheep you need a sheep-dog, not a whale.

You can't have humans reading books without cows, sheep, dogs and pigs. And you can't have those without first having aurochs, mouflon, wolves and boar. And you can't have those without also having ants and tigers and octopuses. And that explains the biosphere.

But one thing is abundantly clear: the House of Divinity that the Creator is compiling according to wholly natural processes is not just for fun. It has a job. And that job is to govern creation and make it run the way the Creator wants it run.

Here at Abarim Publications we bet that tribe of the Scientific Method stands an excellent chance of being included. The tribe of the scud missile, not so. Tolerance will surely be incorporated, but corporate fascism probably not.

We'll see. The New Jerusalem will be peopled with domesticated humanities. And the earth will be peopled with humanities that are useful even though they can't be domesticated. And there will be quite a few humanities that will die out on account of their worthlessness.

"And I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever"

Psalm 23 - The Lord is my Shepherd

Crop circles, pyramids, the Ark and the Bible

There is a phenomenon going on on earth that only very few people recognize, and that by itself it highly remarkable. 

Most of us have heard of crop circles, which are intricate works of art that are formed in grain fields, usually by bending areas of grain into patterns, and usually anonymous.



Enthusiasts ascribe these wonderful formations to the handiwork of extraterrestrials, and some go as far as to forward elaborate schemes involving mother-ships, distant galaxies and interstellar councils, or else the moaning and groaning of mother earth, glowing ley lines and vibrating energies that combined produce instances of higher math (with which the observer has to resonate in order ascend into the fifth dimension, and so on).

Take me to your dealer

Mainstream commentators, however, are sure that all of them are man-made. Some feel confident that all these formations can be reproduced by regular humans with regular human skills, while others derive their confidence from reduction and elimination, being equally sure that any movement towards the alternative would constitute the narrow end of the wedge that will separate humanity from its most practical beliefs, which in turn would lead to collective psychosis, anarchy and ultimately collapse and annihilation.

Some farmers are eager to know the perpetrators so that they can sue them for the damage, while others note with hardly suppressed glee that the affected grain was not at all destroyed but remained alive and in a far better condition than the grain that wasn't touched (longer stems, fuller heads; all that).

More to the point, however

But crop circles is not the phenomenon I want to talk about. Imagine that it was you who one day woke up with the idea of placing the whopping double triskelion in a field near Milk Hill in England.

This perfectly executed Catherine Wheel consists of 409 circles of varying sizes, laid out in a pattern that is 240 meters across (yes, that's people in the central circle below).

The whopping Milk Hill Catherine Wheel

How do you get from waking up that one morning to sitting atop Milk Hill at sunrise on 14 August 2001, undiscovered and gloating over you creation?

You would first have to be rather fanatic, that goes without saying. Then you would have to have considerable mathematical skills in addition to knowing that the Celts had a thing for triskelions, and then, for some reason, come up with the desire to make it even more difficult for everybody and create a double one.

You would have to engineer a way to print your design onto the grain, and that would take a trick or two. The greater form would have to be created at once because stamping out the circles consecutively would certainly result in misalignment. The smaller ones might be added later, but still, not a single error is permitted. I've been an engineer for three decades, and I would have to think very long and very hard for a way to pull this off. It takes a rare set of highly developed skills, and I humbly submit that I can't even think of a way to replicate this, let alone come up with it in the first place.

The colossal Oregon Sri Yantra geoglyph and the Nazca Monkey are anonymous. So is the portrait of John Williams that appeared in August 2014, just off the Old Town side of the Branko Bridge in Belgrade, Serbia.

You would probably realize right soon that you would not be able to design the whole process by yourself, let alone execute it. So you would have to recruit others, and that would take yet another trick or two.

Covert operations are nothing new in our world, but to set one up out of the blue without the benefit of an existing organization (such as the military or some secret club that is really secret) or without a formidable incentive (believable threats or lots of money) is nearly undoable. Trying to get your band together would inevitably lead to someone spilling the beans either before or after the operation.

And there's the rub, there is the phenomenon I wanted to talk about. If you were the one who designed the Milk Hill Catherine Wheel, produced it overnight AND kept everything secret, even after all the media coverage, please contact the Abarim Publications Recruitment Center because we would like to hire you.

Mum's the word

Certain companies actually have realized the commercial appeal of crop formations and their monetary injection has produced certain formations that are obviously not extraterrestrial in origin, but why are there groups of people (or aliens) who go to great lengths to anonymously produce great work of art, which won't last beyond the day of the harvest? Or, to expand the scope of the question: what explains the phenomenon of anonymous art in which the anonymity of the artist(s) is part of the final work?

Artists sign their work to be recognized and to be reckoned (and paid) for the entire body of their work. And in case the artist is working on a medium that isn't his or hers (say, graffiti artists who spray paint trains or buildings), they will often sign their work anyway with a signature that is recognizable by the scene but not by the cops. If an artist knows he's doing a one time thing, he might use anonymity as a means to publicity.

Georgia Guide Stones -- anonymous

Take the Georgia Guide Stones for instance, which, had they been commissioned by Ed Koch and erected on Time Square, would have been surely recognized for the pseudo-portentous crap they are. But now that the makers and funders are incisively anonymous, the media was and still is all over them and a disproportional percentage of people have heard of them. 

But most of the crop circles are made by people who don't claim them as their productions, and history has shown that their mere appearance serve the sole purpose of fueling the greater discussion on who were are, where we're going and whether we are alone in the universe.

Sure, some of us find that whole discussion a waste of time, but would those people engineer elaborate pranks just to watch hapless others go alien-crazy over that? There's no good reason to exclude this from the whole pallet of reasons of why people make crop circles, but I'd like to propose that the creating of crop circles ties not into humanity's inherent desire to deceive, but rather in our inherent desire to make wise.

Whichever ancient wisdom tradition we look at, they all consist of several separate exercises or disciplines. Most traditions value scientific examinations of the observable world and subsequent data retention and transmission, but most also value prayer or meditation and periods of rest. The Semitic wisdom traditions additionally utilized a technique that probably also had an entertainment value, namely the posing of riddles, and a Hebrew riddle was not a silly question the audience had to guess the answer of but a problem of which the answer had to be worked out by means of logic and reason (Judges 14, 1 Kings 10:1). The Hebrew word for riddle is hida, which is possibly related to the verb hadad, which means to be sharp, keen or swift. 

The various religions of our earth have managed to whittle the ancient wisdom traditions down to a skeleton, like a rock band that slipped further and further away from its original purpose and kept losing its founding members to the wish to go solo. Science has always been a major part of theology, but when religion began to dictate what's true or not, science broke away and pursued its whopping solo-career. Mystery, on the other hand, broke away from religion but never made it much further than silly game shows and TV quizzes. Some writers speak of a "God-shaped hole" in people who don't believe, but I'm sure it's not that simple. I'm guessing that mankind has a natural need for mystery; to be in awe of the unimaginable or to be flabbergasted by the inexplicable.

I bet that religion's failure to provide mankind with proper mystery is the reason that groups of people go out into fields and painstakingly create phenomenally mysterious images without damaging a farmer's crop.

The ear-deafening silence

Everybody knows that the Ark of the Covenant has gone missing some time after king Solomon placed it in the Temple, and over the years a generous plethora of theories have been proposed to explain its disappearance. But what theorists rarely recognize is the distinctive silence of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the fate of the Ark. This silence is so loud even, that observant readers of the Bible recognize it as an actual character of the story.

In other words: the very fact that no Hebrew author (save for perhaps the author of 2 Maccabees) spends a single word discussing the fate of the Ark, which was the reason why the Temple was built and the very item that kept Israel together, very strongly suggests that the disappearance of the Ark was part of its proper function. Nothing unexpected happened to the Ark, and it's not "lost" at all. 

And what about the great pyramids of Giza? Their origin and ultimate purpose is much debated, but why does no ancient Egyptian text talk about the actual building of them or purpose they might have? The Egyptians were great masons, but why is there not a single carving anywhere on these mysterious monuments that would make them a little less mysterious? The only answer, again, is that their mystery is part of their function. Whatever they might have been for in the ancient past, their function now is that we ponder them and subsequently doubt whatever theory is presently peddled as truth. It's almost as if these monuments are monuments to the gift of doubt, because doubt leads to renewal and renewal leads to truth. 

In recent years, a slowly growing body of scholars is advocating the idea that the Bible isn't what we always thought it was. It doesn't work they way we figured, nor does it tell the story we shoehorned into it. The familiar titles of the Books of the Bible aren't part of them and were mostly added later, and only recently have scholars mustered up the courage to admit that we have no idea who wrote the Bible, or even when or where. This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the Bible came to pass via a hugely complex process that probably involved hundreds (thousands?) of poets, scientists, scribes, compilers, editors, redactors and proof readers. This is highly remarkable by itself, but what is even more so is that this process is nowhere referred to in the Bible, and its complexity has only in recent times been recognized.

So who wrote the Bible, built the pyramids, hid the Ark and created the crop circles? Well, here at Abarim Publications we believe that humans did all of it, but we also believe that these humans were either specifically or else generally inspired by greater forces than the usual selfish claim to fame.

And whether these greater forces are mother-ships, fifth dimensions or the angels of the Most High God, well as the prophet formerly known as Isaiah says: "Come now, and let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18).

Come now, and let us reason together" -- Isaiah 1:18

Why the sons of Abraham are not religious

In English, the words "father" and "son" primarily denote two people who are biologically related, and when we use these words in a figurative sense we ask our audience to apply the familiar bond between a father and his son to two not related people (or items) of which we would like the audience to understand that these are closely familiar or similar.

In Hebrew this works precisely the other way around.

In Hebrew the idea of "father and child" comes from something even more fundamental

The primary idea behind the words for father ('ab) and son (ben) is: the performing of the commands, skills or defining character of one person (the 'ab, or father) by other persons (the benim, or sons).

Sometimes this 'ab is indeed one living person (Isaiah 22:21, 2 Kings 2:12) but quite often the 'ab is the instigator of a guild (hence the "father of all who play flute"; Genesis 4:21) or even the guild itself (hence "son of the prophets"; 2 Kings 9:1). The word ben, in turn, probably comes from the verb bana, meaning to build (such as a "house").

In other words: when in Hebrew we call a flute-player a "son of Jubal" we're not deploying a metaphor but the primary meaning of the word "son". Specifically talking about physical descent requires additional contexts.

So shall your descendants be (Genesis 15:5)

Both Paul and Jesus paid quite some attention to explaining that being a son of Abraham has nothing to do with physical descent and everything with one particular state of mind. It's said that Jesus fulfilled the covenant which God began in Abraham, and Abraham's defining characteristic is that he believed the Lord and was subsequently reckoned righteous (Genesis 15:6, Romans 4:3, Galatians 3:6).

The key-verb is 'aman, which does not convey a pliant compliance or a gullible acceptance, but primarily means to confirm or uphold, even to demonstrate and thereby prove (hence the familiar word Amen). Abraham's believing YHWH has nothing to do with Abraham being religious, or nationalistic, or adhering to a particular school of thought, or being somehow in the know, or obedient to some formal code of conduct. It means precisely the opposite; it means that he was free of all that.

On the "mountain" of human mentality Abraham represents that level of complexity at which a person no longer identifies with one particular box but with the whole of creation and everybody in it.

It begins where someone takes leave from any category (Abraham) and results in complete freedom (Jesus Christ). Despite the noisy claims of many, both Abraham and Jesus Christ have per definition nothing to do with any formal religion. Formal religions are political creatures; they serve to identify and separate groups of tax payers and have nothing to do with serving the Creator. The Creator is served by freedom; His only law is natural law, His only temple is creation.

Sons of the free market

Whoever perpetuates the will of the Lord of Life is a son of Abraham. Hence not just Abraham's physical sons were circumcised, but also all the hundreds of men who were part of his operation; men who were either bought or born of bought people (Genesis 17:10-14, compare with 14:14). Abraham basically gave them their freedom.


When folks returned from the Babylonian exile, heavily funded and protected by the Persian king in order to rebuild the temple of YHWH (Ezra 7:11-26), it became for once in history attractive for everybody to claim Jewish descent.

Subsequently it became important for the Jews to exclude people who had no proof that they indeed belonged to Israel and could well be freeloaders looking for a handout (Ezra 2:59-62).

These rejected folks peopled Samaria and the folks who had proof of their Israelite roots peopled Jerusalem.

By the time of Jesus, the phrase "son of Abraham" had acquired a meaning it never had before, namely that of physical descent or religious-political affiliation; a label of segregation rather than a blessing for all the families of the earth. Jesus offered these "believers" the freedom of Abraham, and they responded by stating that they had never been enslaved (John 8:33). This probably caused a roar of laughter from both local bystanders and the Roman legionaries who kept an eye on them.

Jesus said that if they were indeed the sons of Abraham, they would do the deeds of Abraham (John 8:39), and not perpetuate a blatant and ridiculous lie. They subsequently responded by calling Him a Samaritan (8:48).

More significantly, however, is that the "believers" declared Abraham dead and buried (John 8:53-54) while Jesus declared him alive and well (Matthew 22:32, Luke 20:38).

The camel is the 'unit' of international trade,
and in the Bible mostly associated with Abraham

Most commentators will piously explain this by stating that Abraham is alive in heaven (Luke 16:22) but that may only satisfy the most theoretically inclined readers.

Seekers of earthly reality might surmise that the name Abraham didn't stop to cover something real and earthly with the death of the historical figure called Abram, just like the name Israel didn't begin to denote something dead when Jacob died.

On the "mountain" of human cultural evolution, the tower of Babel denotes the complexity level of national hoarding and Abraham denotes the level of international trade -- also read our article on the word gamal, meaning either camel or 'unit of investment'.

Although the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), the free, voluntary and unthwarted exchange of any kind of wealth gives life to human culture, quite like electrons give life to matter. This free currency of ideas again follows the second law of thermodynamics; a divine law that feels like freedom simply because it's a law we're designed to operate on.

Why Nobel Prize winners are so often Jewish

So why is such a disproportionally large portion of Nobel Prize laureates Jewish?

Jews comprise 0.2% of the world's population and 2% of the American population. Yet 22% of Nobel Prize recipients world-wide have been Jews and 36% of all US recipients were Jews. Women score even better: 33% and 50% of women recipients, worldwide and American respectively, were Jews.

Jews are not inherently more intelligent than non-Jews (and intelligence is only a factor of success in science) and conspiracy theories aside, there shouldn't be any reason why Jews do better science. Or should there...?

Shalom

An often neglected requirement of good stewardship is an understanding of what's going on. In my nearly three decades as a professional engineer, I've seen great numbers of well-willing morons destroy things simply because their actions were sanctioned by a complete lack of applicable knowledge.

Here at Abarim Publications we understand that good stewardship of the earth goes hand in hand with a proper scientific knowledge of Creation. Even theology should be permeated by the principles of natural law, since no less than the very character and attributes of the Creator are manifested in nature (Romans 1:20).

Paul speaks twice of the renewing of one's mind (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23) and although that's often explained to mean that a renewed mind is a pious and unquestioning mind, but there's no real reason to conclude that a new mind isn't one that resonates with the rings of creation. Here at Abarim Publications we're pretty sure that where an old mind is riddled with superstitious nonsense, a renewed mind is a scientific mind.

At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus addressed His disciples and "opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45). Since creation and revelation are God's two witnesses, the two should (1) work the same way, and (2) explain each other, and that's where the Nobel Prizes come in.

People who have been exposed since early childhood to the fabric and workings of Biblical Scriptures have in effect been exposed to the very workings of creation. They have more familiarity with it and thus a slight advantage over people who find themselves looking at wholly new things.

Just like a child that grows up in a household of violin players might some day have a demonstrable advantage in piano class, so does a Jewish kid who's been steeped in Hebrew Scriptures have an measurable advantage in the scientific arena over people who grew up watching Barney the Dinosaur and MacGyver.

In case you haven't seen Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, you really should. And if you thought that Close Encounters was about people having telepathic hunches about spaceships, you really should watch it again. Steven Spielberg is one of those Jewish story tellers and particularly his earlier work is deeply steeped in natural and Torahic principles.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Exodus 19:16-17)

The Hebrew word for light is 'or and the word for lamp is nahar. Those two words don't look much alike transliterated into Latin script but in Hebrew they are so similar that one could pass for a conjugated form of the other so that the word for lamp literally means 'lighting' in the sense of 'illuminating'.

Calling a lamp an illuminator isn't such a big deal, but the deal gets a whole lot bigger when we look at the regular Hebrew word for river: nahar, which is identical to the word for lamp. This noun comes from the identical verb nahar, which means to flow. The regular Hebrew word for Nile is ye'or, which also comes from the word for light, 'or, and means something like 'it shall illuminate'.

Guess who

Imagine being six years old, and hearing the old stories. Wouldn't you wonder why rivers would be known by a word that also means lamp or illuminator? Why is the word that describes the flowing of water the same as the word that describes what light does?

Most ancient cultures sprung up around rivers, so the link between a river and a tribe's central fire may seem obvious apart from the paradox of calling water after a word for fire (in the old world, all light came either from flames or celestial bodies). But still, on the mental desktop of a Hebrew six year old, the icon for river was the same as the icon for lamp, whether intentional or not.

Light, we know now, travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometer per second, which is geek-speak for saying that light is either there or it isn't and you don't see it coming or going. It's too fast; you can't see it move. Light does not visibly travel, and the fact that it travels should not have been known to the ancients. It's therefor a mystery why the Hebrews would associate light with water, but this association is both anti-intuitive and spot on.

What nobody in the ancient world was supposed to know is that light propagates, that it is substantial and obeys the laws of gravity, precisely like water. As Max Planck spectacularly discovered in the early 1900's, light, like water, is not as continuous as it seems but consists of droplets called photons. But light, like water, also comes in waves.

There is absolutely no intuitive connection between matter and light, but everybody now knows that matter is polarized light. Yet the Hebrews calmly maintained that dry land arises from water (Genesis 1:9). The fundamental natural force of electromagnetism is carried by photons, and this same force is what keeps atoms together. That means that light indeed comes before all things, and indeed holds all things together (Colossians 1:17).

Imagine being a six year old, reviewing all these things. And then ending up working in some dusty patent office, wondering why your life is slipping away like sand through stretched fingers. And then you wonder if there isn't more to reality than meets the eye. And then you remember that in Hebrew the word for eye, 'ayin, is the same as the word for fountain.

Wouldn't that make you glad that you never heard of MacGyver?

Abraham & The Standard Model of Elementary Particles

"And I will make your descendants a the dust of the earth, so that if anyone can number the dust of the earth, then your descendants can also be numbered" (Genesis 13:16).

In Genesis 13:16 God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the dust of the earth, so that if the dust of the earth could be numbered, so could his descendants be.

In the course of the twentieth century the dust of the earth was indeed numbered and organized in what became known as the Standard Model of Elementary Particles (for more details, see our celebrated Introduction to Quantum Mechanics).

Here it is:

Dust of the earth	Abraham's family
The universe expands	Collapse of the tower and dispersal of man and language
Mater-antimatter	Peleg; the "earth" is divided
Primordeal black holes; the blueprint for all later structures	Haran
Matter polarizes:	The promised land:
12 quarks, which hold most of the universe's space curving mass	12 sons of the archer Ishmael (Abraham's son)
12 leptons, including the electron	12 sons of Israel (Abraham's grandson), including Judah
12 bosons that convey forces: 8 strong gluons and 4 electroweak bosons	12 sons of Nahor (means force; Abraham's brother): 8 with wife Milcah and 4 with concubine Reumah
In the early universe most quarks and leptons died out due to decreasing energy density and collisions.	During the kingdom years, most tribes were lost to famine and wars
Of the quarks, only the Up and Down quarks survived and formed today's atomic nuclei	Nebaioth and Kedar were mentioned among the surviving Ishmaelite tribes who will be gathered up into the eternal kingdom (Isaiah 60:7)
Of the leptons, only the electron and its invisible e-neutrino survived	Only Judah survived, as did those members of Simeon and Levi who had settled within the region of Judah
Quarks formed free-flying nuclei but when the energy density sank below a critical level, suddenly the electrons bound to the nuclei by means of electromagnetism (light)	From Judah came Jesus of Nazareth. His death, resurrection and spreading of the gospel through the Roman empire ensued; the Jewish gospel quite literally grabbed the wealth of pagan science and skills
The universe became transparent, matter became alive and stable, and larger objects became possible	To the people living in darkness, a great light began to shine; people obtained eternal life

However, as overly reported of in the news lately, the Standard Model appears to be not wholly complete. And the family of Abraham also lacks some representation, namely the six sons of Keturah, Abraham's second wife (Genesis 25:1-2).

As we here at Abarim Publications predicted as much as twenty years ago, there should in addition to the particles presented in the Standard Model, be six additional Fermionic particles that possibly have leptonic properties (as Keturah was a wife like Sarah, not a concubine like Hagar).

Probably most significant is Keturah's son Midian, who initially provided Moses with his wife Zipporah and her socially smart father Jethro, but who later became one of Israel's proverbial enemies. All this seems to suggest that Midian represents a particle (a form of cosmic radiation) that has been instrumental in forming DNA.

Abraham the instigator; the first of a lot of things

International trade arose from curiosity

When the beginning of global trade is discussed, scholars commonly emphasize the exchange of goods and violence, and neglect to mention that the exchange of ideas, skills and knowledge (and even DNA) did most of the shaping of humanity's early cultural world.

Various crafts emerged simultaneously all over the Eurasian landmass, which nowadays is admitted to be caused by a huge prehistoric network of blather. Sensational history telling has us believe that the people of the old world were continuously at war with each other, but that is as illogical as far from the truth.

Fighting is a supremely inefficient means to get by, and population densities were so low that very little competition resulted in very little friction and very little wars. Even in today's overcrowded day and age, most violent conflicts happen on TV and not outdoors.

It takes some getting used to but Biblical time is not the same as historical time. It's rather a schedule in complexity, somewhat similar to the "four years" of high school which actually takes you six years of historical time to complete. Hence, when we discuss Biblical history, the word "first" marks a level of complexity not a particular point in time.

As such, Abraham is the "first" character in the Bible who properly itinerates and even circulates (and read our article on the name Hebrew for a look at the typical inquisitive nature of Abraham's journey), the first to be rich (in cattle and precious metals; Genesis 13:2), the first to compete and to establish a peaceful economic pact (with Lot; 13:6-12), the first to view the entire world as his oyster (13:14-15) and to whom the sky was the limit (15:5).

Abraham was the first to pay property tax, namely 10% (to Melchizedek; Genesis 14:20), and this was adopted into Israel's national policy (Genesis 28:22, Numbers 18:26, Hebrews 7:5). The first time the Bible speaks of a commercial purchase is in Genesis 17, where circumcision is instituted as sign of the great covenant, and YHWH orders Abraham to include the men he had acquired via purchase (miqna, which is related to the name Cain).

The first monetary transaction occurs as restitution for Sarah's disgrace by Abimelech (Genesis 20:16; because Abraham was also the first to pimp off his wife, twice: Genesis 20 and 12:11-20).

A first century Shekel

The first actual purchase with money described in the Bible is Abraham's flamboyantly negotiated acquisition of the cave of Machpelah from Ephron, son of Zohar of Heth. Abraham wanted that cave and wanted to pay for it in order to properly burry Sarah (Genesis 23). He paid 400 shekels for it (23:16), according to the "passing of trade" ('aber lasahar, from the same root as the name Hebrew).

The shekel probably started out as a standard weight (proper monetary coinage was probably invented by the Lydians in the 8th century BC), although it's a mystery how this standard was obtained or maintained. Still, a commercial standard based on the common usage of a unit of wealth demonstrates an advanced level of social sophistication.

Abraham the camel man

A somewhat more hairy unit of wealth was the camel, but where the English word "camel" is solely reserved for that humped beast of burden, the Hebrew cognate gamal, meaning camel, comes from the identical verb gamal, which means to trade or invest. In other words: the Hebrew noun gamal does not denote a specific biological genus, it describes a particular economic function, namely that of investing and long-distance trading.

The unit of long distance trade

The camel too gets its Biblical introduction in the Abraham cycle, namely when the Egyptian Pharaoh reimburses Abram for the Sarai incident with sheep, cattle, donkeys, servants and camels (12:16).

The next time Abraham's proverbial camels are mentioned is when Abraham sends his chief of staff (probably Eliezer) north to his family's land with "ten" camels and the whole of Abraham's wealth in his hand (24:10), in order to obtain a wife for Isaac (and note the emphasis on the personal freedom upon which all trade is based: 24:5-8).

The first time the verb gamal is used, surprisingly enough, is in the statement, "The child grew and was weaned (or more literally: invested in during its startup period), and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned" (21:8).

Since the name Isaac means joy or fun, this statement also explains that the result of international trade is play, leisure and entertainment.

Fun with Abraham and Zarathustra

Very few modern commentators will deny that the story of Jesus was told in such a way that besides convey absolute truth, it also responded to the hippest beliefs in the Greco-Roman world.

For instance, the signature Christian phrases "Savior of the World," "King of Kings" and even "Son of God" were not coined by Paul as is commonly thought, but came straight out of the Roman Imperial cult, and see our article on the name Homer for a lengthy look at Greek legacy in the New Testament.

Though doubtlessly conveyed from a very ancient past, the story of Abraham was written in its present form during the Babylonian exile and at that time, Babylon was wholly Zarathustrian in precisely the same way that the world in Jesus' time was totally Greco-Roman.

The Hebrew Old Testament is as much as response to its Babylonian world as the Greek New Testament was to its Greco-Roman world

Zarathustrianism, brilliant in its own right, was an intermediate phase between natural polytheism and the monotheism nowadays commonly ascribed to Abraham, and the story of Abraham from Ur (which means Light or Wisdom) of the Chaldeans (an ethnically diverse learned class of Babylon, comparable to the Levites of Israel) most probably came about as both a respectful review of Zarathustrianism and a formal objection to some of its tenets.

It's not clear to which extend the literary Zarathustra represents an actual historical individual, but it's altogether quite probable that the function of the literary character of Zarathustra in the Avesta marks a level of complexity, just like Abraham in the Torah, namely the level associated with an unrestricted global currency of ideas. As we made clear in our article on the name Abraham, the world-wide exchange of ideas pretty much began with the domestication of the camel, which explains why the camel is so important in the Abraham cycle.

In the name Zarathustra

Zarathustra, the celebrated
inventor of monotheism

It's not wholly clear what the name Zarathustra means but scholars generally agree that it consists of two parts and that the second part means camel. In other words: Like Abraham, Zarathustra too reflects international exchange.

The first part of the name Zarathustra is the mystery bit; we don't even know for sure whether it's "Zarath-" or "Zara-", which means that the second part is either ushtra, meaning camel, or thushtra, which, we can't help notice, has some phonetic similarity to the name Terah, which belongs to Abraham's father but which doesn't seem to mean much in Hebrew.

But Abram and his family were natives of Chaldea and their names may in fact be not Semitic but Indo-European and transliterated into Hebrew in such a way that they seem Semitic (something similar was done to Levite names such as Moses and Aaron, which were most probably originally Egyptian names, made to look Semitic).

The Greeks appear to have thought that the first part of the name Zarathusthra was "Zara-" because they transliterated it as Zoroaster (zoro aster = Gold Star, the second part being similar to the name Esther, also Persian). Whatever the "Zarath-" or "Zara-" part of the name Zarathustra might have meant, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the name Sarah, belonging to Abraham's wife and half sister. Some scholars even believe that the first part of the name Zarathustra contains a Vedic element har, which immediately brings to mind the name of Abraham's brother Haran (the -an part being a very common Hebrew formative extension).

Perhaps the Hebrew authors were bound by historical events and names and all these similarities are coincidences, but probably more likely is that the Hebrew authors reflected the real past of mankind in forms they chose freely. More attractive still is the possibility that these names reflect concepts that stem from very deep antiquity, when language was being formed by the same forces that formed the rest of humanity.

The kinship of Abraham and Zoroastrianism is nevertheless clearly and respectfully demonstrated by Matthew, in whose nativity account the infant Christ was tracked down via the cosmology of Zoroastrian priests long before anybody else had any idea what was going on (Matthew 2:1).

Happy days are here again

The primary symbol of Zarathustrianism is the Faravahar, the famous winged disk that still dominates the symbology of modern Iran. It is thought to depict a fravashi, a person's private spirit, perhaps not unlike the personal angel recognized by the New Testament authors (Matthew 18:10, Acts 12:15).

The Faravahar depicting a depicting a fravashi

It's unclear what the word fravashi precisely means but it's generally considered to derive from the element var-, which may mean to choose (so that fravashi means He Who Chooses), or to cover (so, He Who Covers). That's again significant because (1) the name Lot means precisely that: Covering, and (2) the ab-part of the name Abram means father, which in turn may stem from a verb that means to chose, or rather "having the statutory right to chose".

The Bible also obviously recognizes personal angels of whole nations (Exodus 23:23, Daniel 10:20) and although the origin of the Faravahar is formally obscure, it may very well represent the spirit of free global exchange; the fravashi of Abraham, so to speak.

The meaning and etymology of the name Abraham are obscure and much debated, but one possibility is that is contains the element 'abar, meaning to use wings or feathers (in order to protect), from the majestic root 'br, meaning to be strong or firm. This verb is also the root of the divine name Abir (the Mighty One; Genesis 49:24).

The Faravahar is commonly depicted with a little man sitting in the disk. This is thought to be Asshur, the chief deity of Assyria. It's not clear what idea the divine name Asshur may originally have reflected, but in Hebrew it is nearly identical to the name Asher (son of Jacob with Zilpah, and thus great-grandson of Abraham) and means to go straight (just) or to be happy, as in the statement be'asheri kay asheruny: in my happiness they'll deem me happy (Genesis 30:13). Abraham's son-of-the-promise was named Isaac, meaning joy, which clearly reflects the same or a similar sentiment.

Both Asshur and Isaac possibly reflect the insight that comedy is a very safe vault to store wisdom in. Had the wisdom of the Hebrews been stored in any other medium than the riveting stories of Abraham, Moses and David, but, say in mathematical symbology or long lists of statements, it would have not survived. In that sense the Ark of the Covenant is as important as the Covenant itself.

Fun with the name Abraham

Abraham, the father of all believers
 (Galatians 3:29)

The etymology of the name Abraham is an admitted enigma; the Jewish Encyclopedia even laments that "the form 'Abraham' yields no sense in Hebrew," which is a bit curt and if anything demonstrative of a failing imagination. But it's true that no degree of imaginativeness can render the name Abraham the meaning of Father Of Many Nations.

When the Lord changed Abram's name to Abraham (by apparently inserting the letter he before the final mem) He said, "For I will make you the father of a multitude of nations" ('ab hamon goyim; "father of a multitude of nations" -- Genesis 17:4-5) and for millennia people have concluded that Abraham must mean Father Of A Multitude.

In recent times we've recognized that this is nonsense. When we name our dog Charlie because that seems a good idea at the time, it's by no means insinuated that Charlie means "good idea at the time." The name Abraham isn't remotely similar to the phrase 'ab hamon goyim.

The 'ab- part of our name Abraham is traditionally thought to correspond to the Hebrew word 'ab (meaning "father" as used in our phrase 'ab hamon goyim), but that too is without any base. The original name Abram could indeed be construed to be 'ab plus rum and translated with Father of Elevation, but if the new name Abraham starts with 'ab, we're left with rhm, which doesn't occur elsewhere in the Bible.

This means either that Abraham is the father of something that nobody in the Bible ever mentions, or that rhm isn't a Hebrew word. The latter option is much more probable, and strongly suggests that the first part of the name Abraham is not Hebrew either, and certainly not 'ab, meaning father.

The second word of our phrase 'ab hamon goyim is the noun hamon, which does not express simply a large number of people or nations, but the rain-like noise that emerges from a unified but seething throng. The third word is the plural of goy, meaning nation, tribe or any culturally distinct entity.

The phrase 'ab hamon goyim positively does not mean that Abraham would be the biological ancestor of the horde of conflicting political nations we recognize today, but rather the bee-busy mentality from which all global exchange stems. Both the words 'ab and hamon demonstrate not a multifariousness but a unitedness, and the whole phrase much rather reflects convergence and unification than expansion and divergence. The phrase 'ab hamon goyim should be understood as a sanctified (that is natural and organic) alternative to the rejected (that is artificial and mechanic) tower of Babel.

Abraham is not a border-maker; he is a border-breaker, the embodiment of the second law of thermodynamics, the world-wide free exchange of knowledge and skills. His patriarchy is one of consilience; in him are summed up the peacemakers of which Jesus said they would be called Sons Of God (Matthew 5:9).

Read our article on the familiar Hebrew word shalom for a look at the actual, fundamental meaning of the often misunderstood Biblical concept of peace. Abraham was famously considered righteous and he met the King of Righteousness (Melchizedek) at Salem (from the same root as shalom, which is no coincidence; Genesis 14:18).

More fun with the name Abraham

As stated above, the original name Abram could be construed as purely Semitic and consist of 'ab, meaning father, and rum meaning elevation. But Abram originated in Chaldea, and although Chaldea was Semitic, it was situated on the border with the Indo-European realm: Persia, where Zoroastrianism came from. The root rum was widely attested of all over the Semitic language area, and there is some indication that it was used in Persia as well. The 'ab-part may therefore be Zoroastrian as well and since Abram was called Hebrew, which literally denotes someone who wades through and arrives on the dry side, what readily jumps to mind is the word Abas.

Abas is the Avestan word for "the waters" which in Zoroasterianism clearly corresponds to the Torahic waters of the first three days of creation. This word Abas comes from a proto-Indo-Iranian stem ap- meaning water, and the name Abram, all together, might have been designed to specifically remind of the two, later three, great water walks of the Bible:

• The Spirit of God hovering over the prime ordeal waters (Genesis 1:2), 
• Noah and company floating on the great flood (Genesis 7:17), 
• Jesus' walk on water (as obvious fulfillment of the previous two; Matthew 14:25).

The name Abraham, therefore, may be not merely an extended version of Abram, but rather a completely different name, a semi-similar sounding Semitic answer to an Indo-European original, as different as Bart and Burt (Bart is Aramaic, short for Bartholomew, means Son Of Talmai; Burt is the old English word "beorht" meaning bright and is related to Robert).

Still, in all its mystery, the name Abraham clearly contains a marvelous wink to the Hebrew sensitivity for word play. As noted above, to a creative audience, the first part of the name Abraham could be construed to be similar to Abir, meaning "strength" and the final bit could be taken for the personal pronoun ham, meaning "their".

In Genesis 17:4-5 God says (liberally paraphrased): "My covenant (berit) is with you, and you will manifest international exchange. No longer will you manifest Self-Enrichment, but you will be Their Strength; because I have made you the manifestation of international exchange."

Also noted above, the literal difference between the names Abram and Abraham is the insertion of the letter he in between the R and the M. This same letter occurs twice in the Lord's personal Name, YHWH, as if the Lord poured His own Spirit into the heart of Abram when He made him Abraham.

But it gets better.

The first letter of the name Abraham is the 'aleph, which sometimes serves as a mere cosmetic addition to a word without essentially changing it. The final letter of our name is the mem, which at the end of a word also often serves to mark a grammatical construction without essentially altering the meaning.

When we drop the 'aleph at the beginning and the mem at the end, what's left is the root brh, from whence comes the noun berit, meaning covenant.

In other words: the meaning of the name Abraham is generally listed to be obscure, but that's not because we have no ideas. Rather the opposite...

Why I believe in God

Our good friend Neil Degrasse Tyson,
always charming, not always without fallacy

Once upon a time, people believed that the earth was flat, and although enlightened moderns now heartily laugh at that idea, many embrace with equal ignorance the idea that the universe is a sphere. It isn't, of course.

It takes some getting used to, but the universe has four dimensions.

According to the accepted scientific model, it started out as a very small dot but then expanded. That's often thought of as something exploding, but that's really not what's going on.

The universe has no outside, so it can't get any bigger, and in stead of exploding, the universe is imploding.

On the grapevine

Imagine being duct-taped to the ceiling of an elevator shaft, and the carriage is parked all the way up, an inch from your nose. Now imagine that the carriage starts to move down and away from you.









You'll see the top of the carriage getting smaller and smaller, while the outside of the elevator shaft isn't changing. You'll see space being formed between you and the top of the carriage, but you don't see the shaft getting any wider.

Here's the crux: when you look at a star, you are looking down a long shaft to the top of an elevator carriage (the star).

Please let that sink it: a star does not simply sit in flat space, it curves space so that you are looking down a long chute, and the star sits at the bottom of that chute.

When there are two stars relatively close together, space will be curved in a bit of a fork. The two stars will have a joined main chute but each star will sit at the bottom of their own end, kind of like a tree branch that branches in two at the end.

Light from a star travels up its chute into open space, precisely like the juices within a tree branch do.

Stars that run out of nuclear fuel collapse under their own gravity and form a black hole (as it's romantically called).

Black holes sit at the bottom of enormous chutes but you can't see them because they radiate no light. They are surrounded by a so-called event horizon that does allow energy to travel from space into the hole but not the other way around (Hawking Radiation, in case you're wondering, doesn't violate the horizon).



All this energy stacks up at the singularity at the heart of the black hole, and because of relativity, time inside the black hole stands still relative to the rest of the universe. That means that any hypothetical observer inside the black hole would see the rest of the universe unfold in the blink of an eye. Or in other words: all about the universe outside the black hole is instantaneously projected upon the black hole's central singularity like a slide on a screen.

Galaxies of black holes are precisely like clusters of grapes, with pits that contain all the genetic information of the entire vine. And the blossoms from which grapes grow are precisely like stars. We can't judge what the outside of space looks, but inside it looks precisely like the inside of a grapevine.

"Let me sing now for my well-Beloved, a song of my Beloved concerning His vineyard..." ( Isaiah 5:1)
Ian C Whitworth photography

People have long wondered why life produces the shapes it does. In less enlightened times people thought that it all happened by blind accident and that we might as well have evolved into bricks. Now, with the help of science, we can understand that life evolves toward a kind of biological equivalent of maximum entropy.

Life does not evolve as away from an explosion, it grows towards an attractor. It tries to imitate what brought it forth in the same sense in which a roulette ball "tries" to roll off the ledge and onto the spinning number crown below. Simply because that takes less energy.

Once upon a time

When people talk about the evolution of the universe beginning with the Big Bang, they usually take you back in time, from the universe's present size to when it was smaller, and smaller and smaller, until you finally end up in the singularity from which everything came.

But looking at the change of the size of something is only interesting when something is added to that something; when it actually grows (like money on a bank account). The universe isn't growing in that sense; it doesn't get bigger because something gets added.

All the energy that is now part of the universe has been part of the universe since the beginning. Going back in time has no influence on the amount of energy you see, and even when you hit the singularity, all the energy is still there and isn't going to just disappear.

There you have it: the universe is shaped like a condom

I'm pretty sure that my audience consists largely of theists, which is why I'd like to stress that my objections against the Hot Big Bang Inflation Model aren't religious. My covenant is with the truth and my objective mind sees a universe of only phase transitions and no spontaneous generation. If on our trek back in time all energy compacts into a point of such unimaginable qualities, a point of such rage and withdrawal that nothing (including space and time) can exist, and then, somehow stops being just that, it should transform into something and not simply vanish into the howling absence of anything.

The universe today is as far removed from zipping spontaneously out of existence as when we would go back in time, and the whole trek back is a mere smoke screen. Packing all energy in one point doesn't make the universe more likely to disappear. To a universe in which energy conservation is a primary law, "nothing" is a very big word, and I dare say that the myth of spontaneous generation is right up there with alchemy, the ethereal universe and the Trinitarian dogma.

The hypothesis that the universe expands can be readily verified with a big telescope. But the notion that the universe came into existence out of nothing is blasphemy against common sense.

Sure, gravity is negative energy while the strongelectroweak force is positive and that neatly cancels things out, but then in reverse: why would "nothing" spontaneously beget an enormous amount of energy? Why that, and in that specific form? People worry about intelligent design, but I would like to know where the rawest of raw material came from, and what determined what its many baffling and precisely calibrated qualities would be and what it could be turned into and how and why.

Or in the hallowed words of Stephen Hawking:

"What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?"

Chicken or egg?

Time is a tricky thing, and up until Einstein people figured that the whole of the universe sat within time like an island in a river.

But since Einstein we know that within the universe there exist situations at which time stops (namely inside the extreme gravity fields of black holes, whilst traveling at the speed of light, whilst waiting for one's beer to be served), which means that time sits within the universe in stead of the other way around.

The universe is the river and time is the island. The universe did not start at some point in time; time started at some point in the universe.

Time, essentially, has to do with data preservation. Without it, you can't have a past, present and future. To preserve data, you need particles that follow certain rules and that in some way relate to each other, and since particles arose within the universe, time did too. But not all causality is a function of time, or else time itself could not arise "for some reason" within the universe, and the universe could not even have started from whatever preceded it.

In other words: only when the universe produced particles that could bind into atoms (that's called matter-radiation decoupling), time and space as we know it commenced. Prior to that there was a kind of proto-causality during which the universe was not transparent and had no events going on inside of it.

If anything, that process reminds me not of spontaneous generation but of sexual progeneration. That, you see, happens all the time, all over the place, and according to the same very precise and fundamental principle:

Parturition is a fundamental principle of creation
(and Biblical too: think Exodus out of Egypt)

There are two main lessons to be learned from all this. First: the biggest tree may start out as the smallest seed, but that smallest seed has always contained the whole and complete genetic information to bring about the mature tree entirely. Size, you see, doesn't matter; what matters is the seed-part (Matthew 13:31-32, 17:20).

To seeds, its the information that matters. It must be complete or else it doesn't work, and when it works, the information doesn't change, grow or evolve. All that evolves or grows is the situation in which that information happens to be. It's the result of the information that changes over time, not the information itself. The information contains the change, just like the universe contains time. Not the other way around.

Secondly, everything that has a parent begins its life with its own future adult form fully represented within, and that adult form must closely resemble the parent. What I'm saying is that the Creator is not only the cause of the universe (what everybody is always so hung up about), He is much more significantly the spitting image of what the universe must eventually turn into.

We are not accidentally evolving away from bacteria, we are deliberately growing toward divinity. That means that relatively novel biological principles, such as sexual reproduction, should be expected to closer resemble both the evolutionary attractor and the creative principle.

The implied duality, in which one precedes the other, does not exist; the chicken is the egg

We are persons because our Parent is. We are  conscious and concerned because He is conscious and concerned. Consciousness -- and particularly social consciousness, or rather the consciousness of society as a collective entity -- is not some accidental icing on the cake of the material universe but rather the fruit that the tree was programmed to bring forth from since before it was a seed.

I would bet that there are levels of primitivity beyond the Grand Unification, and that the energetic singularity from which the universe is proposed to have sprang will be shown to have arisen out of the confluence of countless parental agents. I bet that the singularity came about out of a structure that closely resembles our black-hole filled universe.

I bet that some day, personal and social consciousness will be shown to be like gravity in that it arises as the culmination of the countless proto-consciousnesses of all separate cells of one's body. And that these in turn derive from a fundamental quality of atoms. (My God, I never thought I would sound like Deepak, but there it is.)

Decades before gravity waves were shown to exist, Abarim Publications made the prediction that rotating black holes make a Chladni pattern of gravity waves, that acts as the null of the universe. Atoms would want to settle according to that null, and hence form DNA, after the Word of God that has existed from before the beginning.

That Word of which the ancients spoke is living information, and He exists in the realm in which our Parent exists, before there is anywhere else to exist -- so do the math (John 1). He existed before all thing, He is the image of our Parent, and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17).

I personally love watching interviews with eloquent and intelligent Atheists, because the competition never ceases to inspire me. But all the time I hear people like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins say that Atheism isn't dogma and that they would gladly believe in something that would make more sense. Well, I am not dogmatic either and I would surely be an Atheist if this chicken model wouldn't be much more consistent and plenary. And more fun too.