My Beliefs
Now that I have told you some stories of the experiences that I have had during my life I believe that it is important for me to tell you what I believe about this life, how and why events happen and life's ultimate meaning. I also believe that it's important for me to tell you what factors led me to have this belief system. My belief system is made from three fundamental factors – religion, science and a particular experience I had when I was thirteen years old.
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Every culture that has existed on Earth has in some way attempted to define who its people were and why they existed. The smaller and more cut off from other influences a culture may be the simpler its views of life seem to be. The large complex societies develop complex, multiple views of the self and what its purpose is.
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Every person who attempts to define who he is and why he exists comes to the point of definition with a set of suppositions. It is a case of, “I believe this because I believe that.” It is the nature of philosophical thought. I come with a complete set of presuppositions and I believe that as best I can I should share them with you so you can better evaluate the conclusions that I come to.
In this section I will be telling you about three central themes.
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The first is my early church experience and what a deep impact it has had on my life and my beliefs.
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The second is my search into quantum physics and the deep impact on my belief system this has had.
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And finally I will tell you about an experience that I had when I was 13 that is the basis for why I believe what I do.
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Then I will conclude by giving an explanation of what I believe about various aspects of this life and why I believe them.
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The Central Influence on My Early Life
To set the stage of what I believe and why I believe it, I think I need to give you some background about my early church experience and how its dominate force controlled the first 35 years of my life. I am talking about it first because it was such a predominate force in my mental and emotional growth that it still has a responsibility for who I am today.
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I was raised in a very strict fundamentalist, evangelical, protestant family. Our church was the Church of God, headquarters in Anderson, Indiana. While each local church was totally independent of the others, there was a bond between the churches that was as strong as in any protestant denomination. However, we were not a protestant denomination, and even the word “denomination” was looked down on. We were a “movement” within the Christian church. We were the only true Christian believers. We were not a cult, but we were very close to it.
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There were church services on Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday nights and my family always attended all of them. We also had revivals at least twice a year. This was an eight day event (from Sunday to Sunday) with the emphasis on saving the "lost."
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The Church of God was started by Daniel S. Warner in the 1880’s when in the middle of a Wednesday night prayer meeting he stood up and proclaimed, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,” a passage from Matthew Chapter 5 verse 48. And Warner literally stomped out of the service.
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He then went on to start the Church of God and it grew to become a small “movement” (about 1,10,000 worldwide in 2017) within protestant Christianity. The central theological principle that controlled the church was "the doctrine of perfection." However, the style or method in which this core doctrine was interpreted depended a great deal on the particular church you attended. And, it varied greatly. The reason for this was because there was a very wide span in the education of its ministers. It had ministers who had barely made it through Bible college with a three year Bachelor of Theology degree, and those who had doctorates from Ivy league colleges or prominent seminaries.
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My maternal grandmother’s family was one of the prominent “founding families” in Denver, Colorado. The family even has a couch to this day that has the distinction of, “the couch that D.S. Warner slept on when he was in Denver.” One of my mother’s cousin’s family members owns it at this time.
When I was eighteen I decided to go to the church's Pacific Bible College in Portland, Oregon to find out the truth about life and the hereafter. I enrolled and was a Vocal Music major for the first two years and then I switched to a Biblical Literature major with a Theology minor. I not only attended classes on campus, but I was a member of the college staff and worked full time on campus. There were times when I didn’t leave the campus for a week. During my first year the college went through an accreditation process and became a four-year liberal arts college. The name was changed to Warner Pacific College. It is now Warner Pacific University.
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It wasn’t until I took Systematic Theology that I understood what the doctrine of perfection was and its far reaching implications. Stated simply, the doctrine of perfection says that you must be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. However, Church of God doctrine said that because we are born in a sin-prone state we will continue to sin. Therefore, even after we are saved we will continue to sin, and continue to need to ask God’s forgiveness.
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The most widely used vehicle for getting this on-going salvation was the altar call. At the end of each sermon, the pastor would ask those who have sinned to come to the altar at the front of the church and ask God’s forgiveness. The Roman Catholic church has a very similar doctrine, but it allows the “sinners” to confess their sins to a priest who can never tell anyone what was said in the confessional. In the Church of God you had to go in front of the entire church and kneel at the altar and confess your sins. Some churches required that the sinners openly confess their sins to the entire congregation. What an emotional sledgehammer this is to those who are in power.
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In this environment, God was not the God of love Jesus talked about but a god to be feared and one who would punish you for your sins here and now - and for eternity.
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I graduated from Warner Pacific College in 1965 and went on to serve two churches as an associate pastor before I decided that this was not my calling. I could not, in good conscience, conduct an altar call.
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In 1974 my wife Ruth and I talked about the church and the nature of its beliefs on our way home from church one Sunday. We did not want to put our children through the emotional wringer that we had been forced to endure. We decided that we would find another church to attend. One that fit our own beliefs better. As it turned out neither Ruth nor I had really accepted the church’s radical theology, even as children. So we attended other churches and finally decided to join the United Method Church in Anaheim, California. It was a very good move.
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I have started with the explanation of the Church of God because the doctrine of perfection was the underlying principle that guided everything my family, and my church family did. My family was very deeply involved in the church and it (the church) ruled our lives. To this day many of my cousins and my wife’s sister's and cousins still let it run their lives. But Ruth and I and our children are free from this constant influence. Ruth and I believe we have psychological scars from the years of emotional extortion we endured. We are no longer involved in any church.
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The Experience
Before I tell you about an experience I had that has deeply affected my belief system I must give you a qualifier. I believe what Thomas Paine believed regarding revelation. In his paper, “ Age of Reason,” Paine writes:
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No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
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So I do not define the following recount of my experience as a revelation that you must believe. It is something that I pass along to you as an experience that I had. I believe that it was a revelation to me and it has been a critical element of the construction of my basic belief system.
As I have said, I spent the summer of 1951 and 1952 at my mother’s aunt and uncle’s ranch in Beavercreek, Oregon that is about 10 miles south of Oregon City, Oregon. In 1952 my uncle (great uncle) Ross and I were hauling hay from the field into the barn. To get to the barn we had to cross a fenced barnyard.
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When we got to the barnyard gate I jumped down from the hay wagon and went to open the gate into the barnyard. When I touched the fence something happened to me. I was taken somewhere else. I heard beautiful music and saw colors that were far more vibrant than anything I’d ever seen before in my life. And I knew everything. I understood what this life was about and how it related to our true existence.
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I also heard a voice in my mind. The voice said five words, “there will be a judgment.” In my early life I had lived through hundreds of hell fire and brimstone sermons and the call for me to confess my sins and be saved. With this in mind those words should have brought fear and terror into my mind. But the opposite happened. I understood what the words meant and I remember feeling wonderful.
The whole experience could not have lasted more than a minute (if that long) because Ross yelled at me, “are you going to open the gate or just stand there.” This brought me out of my euphoria and back to the moment. I opened the gate and we went about the business of unloading and stacking the hay bales in the barn.
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For the next two weeks, when I was alone, I could say the five words, “there will be a judgment” in my mind and I could relive the feeling of those few seconds that I had been …well, I don’t know where I had been.
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But the one thing I could recreate during those two weeks after the experience when I said the five words was a complete understanding of how this life related to our true being and that to die was simply to walk through a door into another room. That was what I actually saw in my mind. I had the same feeling of understanding and I knew that life was merely a room that we would leave by simply stepping through a door into the next room. This understanding was more real than anything I have ever experienced – except for the actual experience at the barnyard gate. The experience at the barnyard gate was the most genuine experience that I have had in my entire life. It has made everything since seem more like a dream than reality.
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But as time passed I could no longer create the feeling and the knowing by repeating the five words. It just faded away and I was left with memories.
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I don’t know to this day where I had gone. I had no one I could talk to about the incident, I had no literature I could read about it until one day twenty-three years later I was reading Dr. Raymond Moody’s new best seller, “Life After Life.”
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Dr. Moody had conducted a study of patients who had clinically died on the operating table. He had interviewed these people and had received the same story from an overwhelming number. They all had seen the lights, heard the music and had been drawn to a bright light where they had met a person that told them this was not there time to die and that they must go back.
In my experience over twenty years before I had not been drawn to a bright light, but I had only had a few seconds of the experience. I had only experienced the first two steps that everyone who had the near death experience, as Dr. Moody called it, had experienced. There was one big difference between my experience and theirs, I had not died.
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I have spent over fifty years trying to recreate the experience. I got into self-hypnosis thinking that I could use it to do the recreation. Nothing I have done to date has allowed me to recreate the experience. I have now stopped trying to recreate it and am now trying to understand it and its meaning in my life. I do think that I have finally come to understand what the experience was meant to achieve.
The experience in 1952 has been the driving force (and this has been the primary underlying driving forces in my life,) in my life to find the truth about this life and what it is. I don’t think I have the final answer. In fact my position today is that I can’t discover the answer because in doing so it would damage my ability to do what I came here to accomplish. So now I just live each day and enjoy the situations that life gives me. I believe that what I saw that day was the moment of death each of us must face. As I said it has been the most wonderful experience I have ever experienced. And I believe that I will experience the same thing the instant that I die.
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I believe that there is a creative force that has created all we can see and comprehend. I believe this force is what is commonly called God, and I choose to call it Father as Jesus did. However, I believe that there is far more to the Father than any religion I have studied has attributed to it -- and I have studied all of the major religions and some less known ones. I believe that the Father is so far beyond what the human mind can comprehend that we can only say that there is a Father, but cannot in any way define it. Having said that I must also say that I cannot in any way prove that this is true. I believe that it is impossible to prove that there is or is not a God. It is beyond the capacity of man to prove that the type of being I believe God to be, can and does exist.
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I believe that God exists in what I will call Reality. Reality is all that is. We humans are stuck in a diminutive dimension defined by time and space. The closest glimpse we can get to true Reality is through our understanding of quantum physics. When we start to understand what quantum physics is telling us we can start to understand how small our universe is when compared to Reality. I am not going to explain what quantum physics is here. There are many websites that do that far better than I could. Simply enter “quantum physics” into your search engine and many the website links will appear. But for a start you can go to a site that gives a simple explanation. It is:
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The question would naturally come up, how did I come to believe there is a creative force? Well, it wasn't because I was told there was a God by my Christian teachers. No, it comes from my study of the start of the universe and because of the experience I had at age thirteen.
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It is generally accepted among physicists today that the Big Bang was the start of the universe. That there was a great explosion that caused the universe to come into existence and that bang is still expanding.
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If you probe further into the Big Bang the natural question is what caused it? And what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang? Many quantum physicists have concluded that it is far more likely that there was a creative force that caused the event than that the Big Bang just happen – out of nothing. And I agree. That is why I believe in a creative force that existed before the Big Bang and continues to interact with it. I have a very hard time believing in an event "just happening" with no creative force causing it.
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I have no way of really knowing whether God does indeed interact with the physics of the universe or with us, the creatures of the universe. As a Christian I was told to pray to God and I have prayed many times. Sometimes my prayers actually appeared to have been answered, but on the whole most were not answered, or at least I have had no way of knowing if they were answered or not.
I have said that I believe that God has created and may interact with the perception of true reality. Our senses then give us our interpretation of this true reality. But we must always remember that this is a limited perception because of the time/space restrictions.
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Okay, what I have said so far is that I believe that there is a creative force that has produced a universe and that we are living in a restricted part of that universe. The restriction is that we must have the progression of time to have anything happen in our space.
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I must define what the true “me” is. And it is also the true “you.” It is very simple. It is what we call the soul. The soul has in some way attached itself to this body of mine and yours and it uses its brain to live this life, and others past and future, for us.
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Now let's turn to the questions, where did we come from, what are we doing here and where do we go when our body dies? I believe that we come from the quantum universe that I have chosen to call Reality. We have chosen to come to this time/space reality to experience it. It could be thought of as playing a very sophisticated virtual reality game. I don't mean to be trite, but I use this only as an example to show the relationship between the true, full Reality and our time/space universe. We have come to a much simpler, less complex existence to experience things that cannot occur in full Reality.
I have used the term video game to explain this reality but I might be completely wrong and it might be a universe where we come to learn certain lessons and that this is a university. I don't know which is true and have no way of proving anything along this line of thought. But I believe that we come here for one of two reason: the first is to just experience this limited reality; the second is that we come here to somehow learn and grow in it.
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And where do we go when our body dies? Simple. That part of the person we know here on Earth as our soul has in it the essence, or at least a connection to the essence that is our full self in the quantum or full Reality. And that part simply goes back to where it came from – the real, full Reality – having experienced, or maybe learned, something that will make us better and/or more cultivated or more advanced.
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That's pretty much it. I have believed in a creator God all my life but it wasn't until I started investigating quantum physics and saw the possibility of a larger Reality that I found a relationship between the creator, the creation, and where and how I fit into this relationship.
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The natural question at this point would be how do I know that quantum physics isn't just a bunch of hokum? (For more information on quantum computing I refer you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing ) And that's a very good question. The reason is that quantum physicists have used the mathematics of quantum physics to design quantum computers in this reality that work in the quantum reality. A quantum computer is one that is built in this reality, such as at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory, but functions in quantum space. How do we know that it functions in quantum space? Because a quantum computer functions millions of times faster than our fastest computers. How does it do this? Because in quantum space a particle can be in more than one place at a time and be in more than one state at a time. It's this superpositioning that gives the quantum computer its power. This means that a quantum computer can be working on a million computations at the same time while the silicon-based computers we all use today can only work on one computation per CPU at a time. It may be able to perform over a billion computations a second but they are all sequential, not simultaneous. Physicists have built quantum computers and have tested them, and the computers have functioned as fast as they were projected to function.
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More than one group of scientists around the world have created quantum computers. Major national labs such as Argonne National Laboratory and major corporations such as IBM have done this. Quantum computers function and this proves to me that quantum physics is real and that there is a quantum Reality.
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Well, that’s pretty much what I believe about myself and this existence
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That's all folks. Hope it was interesting.
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