Believe It or Not

When you don’t yet know the truth—or don’t yet know the future—what should you believe? I’ve tried to be mainly realistic, in my life. If I’m prepared for something close to accurate, I’m better off than when something horrible hits me unawares. Pollyanna isn’t really my role model.

That’s what I thought about myself. But I’m beginning to change that assessment. I think I’m actually more open to believe in a positive outcome than I realized. I may be more open to the positive than the average person, or maybe even than most people. (My 5-traits assessment puts me as more open than 96% of the population, actually.)

image from here

Pascal’s Wager Applied to the Election

There’s what is referred to as Pascal’s Wager, concerning belief in God. In short, if you believe in God without proof and you’re wrong, you haven’t lost much, and you might be living a better life than you would have otherwise. But if you’re right, you’ve gained heaven. If you choose not to believe in God without proof and you’re wrong, you lose heaven; if you’re right, you go ahead with a meaningless life, so no gain there.

Wikipedia provides this table: 

Pascal's Wager summary table from Wikipedia

I’m looking at our country’s current circumstances. Mostly I’m looking at the, hopefully temporary, separation between me and a number of Constitution-loving patriots I have enjoyed following and listening to. But right now I’m tuning them out. By choice.

They are on the side of, “Well, sure there was probably some fraud, but there’s not going to be enough proof to overcome the outcome, so we might as well gear up for a Biden presidency.”

I think the people in this category are more concerned about fear of being wrong, or duped, than they are about truth. (I have a theory that fear of being duped blocks a lot of people from belief in God, and the subsequent experiences with God that follow those who believe. That’s a topic for another day.)

I could be wrong about how things are going to turn out in the next couple of months. But what do I have to lose by continuing to believe what I do? (I laid out what I think is happening here, here, here, here, and here.)

If I’m wrong but I keep holding on until all legal challenges are complete, electoral votes are cast, and a new administration is sworn in, I have been hopeful and cheerful through the holiday season before having to face inevitable misery.

If I’m wrong, but I have been honest in presenting what I know and what I believe, does that ruin my reputation? I don’t think so. Being less than honest to protect a reputation doesn’t seem logical; that would put me out of integrity.

If I’m right, I’m on track to understand what’s happening, at least a bit better, when/if the corruption in our government is taken out. If I’m right and keep holding on, I witness a great miracle—the saving of our constitutional republic.

It seems to me, if I’m right, I’m on God’s side in the great war against evil. If I’m wrong, I’m still on God’s side in that great war, just sadly at the losing end of a key battle.

 

Occam’s Razor Applied to the Election

Occam's Razor illustration found here

There’s another traditional belief that I think backs me up in my current stance on the election. Occam’s razor. It’s a problem-solving tool, which essentially says, “The simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

We could do this exercise (and many have) concerning belief in God as an explanation of why we are here, on a planet that supports life, and that complex life exists, with us humans being the ultimate example. Is it more plausible to believe that we have a divine Creator than that all such things happened by chance?

But, related to the election question today, the simplest explanation is that Joe Biden did not win a majority of legal votes.

There’s a lot you’d have to take on faith, without a decent explanation, to believe that he won.

 

The Campaign

First, there’s Biden’s lack of draw as a candidate.

·         He was a deeply flawed candidate all the previous times he ran and failed—including the plagiarism that took him out the first time—and he did nothing in his years in the Senate or as VP to overcome or compensate for those flaws.

·         He was more deeply flawed this time:

o   He has difficulty putting together a coherent sentence, leading many to assume he is in cognitive decline, based on age or some other physical/mental malady. Many voters assume he could not last long as president and would need to be replaced by his VP, who was deeply disliked during the primaries, not even staying in the race until Iowa.

o   His years as VP tie him to policies the US has soundly rejected, because of their detriment to the economy and to our international standing, and because of their divisiveness among us.

o   He is tied to corruption in Ukraine and China that, barring the media outright lying for him, would have made him both unelectable and imprisoned. Would people have changed their vote from Biden if the news media hadn’t blocked the story? Likely yes.

o   Rumors and evidence from just creepiness to outright sexual assault continue to dog him.

o   Lies that he has told resurface repeatedly, such as his lie about the truck driver being drunk when his wife and child were killed in a car crash (not true, but he gratuitously maligns that man, who was neither drunk nor at fault in the accident), or the lie about when he met his current wife (in reality, she was married, and her affair with Biden broke up the marriage).

·         He practically didn’t campaign. He rarely left his room at home and spoke words prepared for him on teleprompter, badly.

o   There was no excitement for him as a candidate. The few rallies he held were sparsely attended, without fanfare, or even people standing in excitement.

o   It’s hard to find a Biden voter who voted for Biden, rather than against President Trump. Interviews with Biden voters, before and after, show an inability to articulate a pro-Biden reason for their vote.

o   He frequently showed a lack of knowledge about where he was or what was going on in a given appearance.

o   The few media appearances were carefully controlled, giving him no challenging or voter-enlightening questions. This tactic may have been designed to avoid showing obvious flaws, but it also prevented voters from connecting with him or his message, whatever that may have been.

Meanwhile, President Trump drew tremendous, excited crowds of people. His love of America was reflected in the crowds. His record of successes in his first term converted many who didn’t support him in his first campaign (including me). His record on economics, foreign relations, and the judiciary were exemplary. Could his handling of the pandemic have been better? Maybe. But Biden’s only difference would have been more lockdowns and more mask wearing.

So you would have to believe that campaigns don’t matter.

 

The Down Ballot

There’s the down ballot. You’d have to believe that a complete sweep of contested House races, plus extras (an increase of 12 seats at this writing) meant voters went more Republican but less Trump than in 2016.

And you’d have to believe that it makes perfect sense for Biden to have earned 36% more votes than either Obama or Hillary Clinton in already highly Democrat areas. There was also evidence that blacks and Hispanics moved toward Trump in record numbers, so where did those historic numbers for Biden come from?

 

The Fraud

You’d have to believe there was no fraud even though:

·         Observers were prevented from observing the count.

·         Potentially thousands of dead people voted.

·         Thousands of ineligible voters voted.

·         In multiple states where there are questions about the counts, changes in voter rules were put in place to get more mail-in ballots while handling them less securely.

·         Mail-in ballots, which don’t have a chain of custody, which are usually rejected at a rate of 2-4% were about 25 times less likely to be rejected this year, despite their much greater prevalence.

·         Several states, and counties within states, refused to check ballot signatures on mail-in ballots.

·         Multiple swing states where Trump was leading almost simultaneously paused vote counting for hours, and when they came back online, leads shifted dramatically—mathematically impossibly—to Biden, in all of them.

·         Batches of ballots were counted multiple times, according to eyewitnesses.

·         After it was announced that all votes had arrived for counting, trucks arrived with boxes of additional ballots in the middle of the night.

·         In multiple counties in swing states, more votes were counted than there were registered voters.

·         On-screen live news broadcasts showed vote counts for Trump going down from one update to another.

·          One county found that vote switching had happened and performed a hand recount, giving back 6,000 votes to Trump that had been wrongly given to Biden. It was called a software “glitch.”

·         Some vote totals include partial votes, counts with decimals, indicating that some votes were allotted more or less than 1 vote per vote.

Rudy Giuliani has said all along that, just dealing with known voter fraud and changing of laws without legislatures is enough to change the outcome of the election.

Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis of the President's legal team
screenshot from Nov. 19, 2020, press conference

Attorney Lin Wood has a lawsuit in Georgia, where he resides and has standing, that he believes will throw out the election there. Mail-in ballots did not require proof of ID, as in-person voters were required to provide; that is a constitutional issue. And laws were changed there without the legislature, which is also unconstitutional. He also says that any in-person voter in Georgia can file a similar suit.

Attorney Sidney Powell was not fired from the Trump legal team; she was separate all along (see near the beginning of this Crossroads episode).  The team distanced itself from her, creating a larger separation between the “traditional” voter fraud issues and the technical issues related to Dominion, Scytl, and whatever other companies come up in those issues. Some people say it’s because they don’t think she can provide the proof she has said she has. I don’t have any inside information, but I think the fact that the servers were actually seized in Frankfurt, Germany, says it’s more likely that she has it than that she doesn’t.

 

My Conclusions

I find believing that voter fraud will be proven and that Donald Trump will remain as President for a second term is both logical and better on the psyche than believing otherwise.

There are people who believe there was voter fraud, maybe even in significant amounts, as I do, but they still don’t believe Donald Trump will remain as President. It’s because they have seen so much corruption go unpunished for so long, they can’t muster what it takes to get over the cynicism. I understand that. These people are not our enemies. They are just making a different belief choice than I am at this time while the future is unknown. The only way to resolve differences in belief about the near future is to wait and see how things play out.

But, in the meantime, I’m tuning them out. I don’t have energy to expend on a possible near-term future that includes evil winning out over good.

In this week’s reading for Church, we read these verses, aimed at our day, from Ether chapter 8:

24 Wherefore, the Lord commandeth you, when ye shall see these things come among you that ye shall awake to a sense of your awful situation, because of this secret combination [collusion and corruption] which shall be among you….

25 For it cometh to pass that whoso buildeth it up seeketh to overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries; and it bringeth to pass the destruction of all people, for it is built up by the devil, who is the father of all lies….

This warning from centuries ago certainly appears to be aimed at our time. But, if we were not going to have a chance to root it out, why warn us?

My theory is that this election was evidence that people chose good instead of evil—and evil, in a last-ditch effort to keep their plans from being thwarted, pulled out all the stops to place their puppet in the seat of power over us. I think the win for Donald Trump was so decisive that they had to take desperate measures that were bound to be discovered.

There are people with more elaborate theories. I’ve been exposed to them. I don’t yet know what to think about them. Some seem far-fetched. And yet, look at the corruption we know about already. Practically anything seems in the realm of possibility this year. So I’ll link a few of those for you at the bottom. Maybe with your sense of discernment, you’ll find what is true and what is not.

As we watch what plays out, during our upcoming holiday season, I continue to trust that, whatever happens, God is in heaven and is aware of our plight. I have prayed that the truth will be known. That every incidence of voter fraud will become visible. And, further, that all the secret combinations—all the corruption, in government, in media, in large corporations—will be revealed and rooted out, that we may return to the freedom, prosperity, and civilization this blessed nation was set up to provide as a refuge to the world.

Some Sources I Believed

·         “John Zmirak Shares His Personal Knowledge of the ‘Authenticity’ Of Sidney Powell's Investigation,” Erik Metaxas Show, Nov. 20, 2020. 

·         “I Know Sidney Powell. She Is Telling the Truth” by John Zmirak for The Stream, Nov 19, 2020. 

·         “Follow the Money: Attorney Lin Wood Explains His Lawsuit Against Georgia’s Secretary of State” by Julie Carr for The Tennessee Star, Nov. 17, 2020.  

·         “Lin Wood Outlines Case for Rampant Voter Fraud, GA Vote Corruption; GA Election will Be Nullified” John Fredericks Show, Nov. 16, 2020. 

·         “Gohmert Talks to Charlie Kirk about Voter Fraud Issues” GohmertTX01 channel, Nov. 16, 2020. 

·         “Live Q&A: Sidney Powell Removed; Trump Legal Team Prepares Evidence” Crossroads with Joshua Philipp, Nov. 22, 2020. 

 

The Possible Rabbit Holes

Some of the, um, more sensational resources I’ve encountered, that, if true, will one day make a great movie:

·         “Scott McKay: Military 2020 Election Sting Leading to Trump 2nd Term Landslide” Forbidden Knowledge TV

·         “Post Election Update #4: US Military 2020 Election Sting Operation Leading 2 Trump 2nd Term Landslide” Scott McKay for Tipping Point Radio, Nov. 19, 2020. 

·         “Sidney Powell’s ‘Kraken’ Is DOD Cyber Warfare Program! We Are at War!” by Dianne Marshall, The Marshall Report, Nov. 22, 2020.  

·         “Army Releases The Kraken To Protect Foreign Fire Bases; ‘I’d Like To See The Taliban Try To Attack This Place’” by David Axe for Breaking Defense, April 29, 2013. 

·         “Huge Breaking News!!!! Federal Circuit Courts Have Been Reassigned Today” Jeremy Herrell, Hip Hop Patriot Here We Go Facebook Live, Nov. 21, 2020  

·         “Breaking! Live From America! Trump Team WINS 3 times today!” Jeremy Herrell, Hip Hop Patriot Here We Go Facebook Live, Nov. 23, 2020. 

    

 

Seeing Miracles

Little miracles are going on. But you have to pay attention. And choose to notice.

Meme found on Facebook

I say this even as “murder hornets” were added to the "you survived April; welcome to level May" of Jumani memes over the weekend. And hurricane season is predicted to be bigger than usual.

Nevertheless.

I came across a very good description of faith and choice recently. I finally finished Brandon Sanderson’s Hero of Ages.  I mentioned this book in a post in March, while I was in the middle of it, before I ended up waiting six more weeks to get it back and finish it. (Pay attention when electronic media from the library shows up on your devices, or you might run out of time—is the moral of that story.)

I want to highlight chapter 75, out of 82 chapters plus epilogue, in this third and final part of the original Mistborn trilogy. There’s a character named Sazed, who is a Terrisman, in this magical fantasy world. I’ll try not to include spoilers—other than this small one: Sazed figures out his religious questions.

One of the tropes, the rules, of fantasy literature is that you can’t have the God of the universe show up and manipulate things. Sanderson knows this well. But he manages to talk about religious concepts nevertheless, which is important, since fantasy literature is a way for us to look at humanity from a different perspective.

Sazed--fan art
from Mistborn Wiki

Sazed is a keeper from among the people of Terris. Keepers have the assignment of preserving all knowledge, particularly from before the world changed a thousand years earlier. They specialize in different areas of study, and Sazed’s specialty is religion. He has dutifully gathered and retained information on every single religion ever believed in his world, by every people—except his own, which knowledge has been lost to them.

In a previous book, he lost someone he loved, Tindwyl. And that loss caused a faith crisis for him. He realized that, while he had often shared with others the religious beliefs that he thought might help and comfort them, he didn’t actually believe those teachings himself. With his personal grief, he wants to be assured that there is an afterlife, that he will be able to see her again. That would help him have hope—and even a reason for hoping—to forestall the apparently imminent destruction of the world.

One of the things he has done is run through every single religion, to find one that doesn’t have fallacies or contradictions that prevent him from believing. He has done this systematically, getting down to the last few. And as he completes that research, he’s quite despairing. He finds nothing. But he wants to know: Is there a real God, watching over them? Is there life after death?

At this point of giving in to despair, a character name TenSoon shows up, a non-human. TenSoon needs Sazed to go to his people, the Kandra, and convince them to help the world. And—the Kandra are in a way immortal, and their First Generation were alive before the changes to the world—they hold the knowledge about Sazed’s religion. So Sazed makes the journey to that previously hidden place. He has recently arrived there, and has studied and learned all they have to share with him, as we get to chapter 75.[i]

Here’s what he finds:

The Terris religion, as one might have expected, focused heavily on knowledge and scholarship. The “worldbringers”—their word for “keepers,” were holy men and women who imparted knowledge but also wrote of their god, Terr. It was the ancient Terris word for “to preserve.” A central focus of the religion had been the histories of how Preservation, or Terr, and Ruin had interacted. And these included various prophecies about the Hero of Ages, who was seen as a successor to Preservation.

Aside from the prophecies, however, the worldbringers had taught temperance, faith, and understanding to their people. They had taught that it was better to build than to destroy, a principle at the core of their teachings. Of course, there had been rituals, rites, initiations, and traditions. There were also lesser religious leaders, required offerings, and codes of conduct.

It all seemed good, but hardly original. Even the focus on scholarship was something shared by several dozen other religions Sazed had studied. That, for some reason, depressed him. It was just another religion. What had he expected? Some astounding doctrine that would prove to him once and for all that there was a God?

He felt like a fool. Yet he also felt betrayed. This was what he had ridden across the empire, feeling elated and anticipatory to discover? This is what he’d expected to save them? These were just more words. Pleasant ones, like most in his portfolio, but hardly compelling. Was he supposed to believe just because it was the religion his people had followed?

There were no promises here that Tindwyl still lived. Why was it that people had followed this or any of the religions?

Sazed character concept found here

Instead of giving up at this point, though, he dives back into the research on the many religions. He goes through letters, journals, papers—everything. And this time, instead of looking at the doctrines, he looks at the people who believed. He expects to find evidence that the believers were fools, that they just hadn’t asked the deep questions about their beliefs. “Surely they would have seen the flaws and inconsistencies, if they’d just taken the time to be rational and discerning.” But that is not what he finds. “The people did not seem like fools to him.” He begins to see something important:

In the abstract, those religions were stale. However, as he read the words of the people—really read them—he began to see patterns.

Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign: a loved one recovering from a disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long-lost friend. It wasn’t the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men; it was the simple magic in the world around them.

It reminds him of Vin, another character’s, learning to trust the crew they had all belonged to—even after her childhood had taught her never to trust anyone. Trust was necessary in order to work together to accomplish their mutual purpose. Vin had to act on trust, and then the evidence of their trustworthiness became evident to her. For Sazed it was “Trusting that somebody was watching, that somebody would make it all right in the end, even though things looked terrible at the moment.” But how could he trust when he didn’t know whether he could trust? How could he believe when he didn’t believe?

To believe, it seemed, one had to want to believe. It was a conundrum, one Sazed had wrestled with. He wanted some one, some thing, to force him to have faith. He wanted to have to believe because of the proof shown to him. Yet the believers whose words now filled his mind would have said he already had proof. Had he not, in his moment of despair, received an answer? As he had been about to give up, TenSoon had spoken. Sazed had begged for a sign and received it.

Was it chance? Was it providence? In the end, apparently, it was up to him to decide.

This is interesting to me, as a believer. I’ve often been puzzled at nonbelievers who claim there’s no proof. But to me, what they’re ignoring is all the evidence of my personal experience. Because they don’t believe, they don’t see. Because I believe, I see. And I see more and more.

Sazed goes about putting the information away into storage, and is startled by some realizations.

He slowly returned the letters and journals to his metal minds, leaving his specific memory of them empty, yet retaining the feelings they had prompted in him. Which would he be? Believer or skeptic? At that moment, neither seemed a patently foolish path.

“I do want to believe,” he thought. “That’s why I’ve spent so much time searching. I can’t have it both ways. I simply have to decide.”

Which would it be? He sat for a few moments, thinking, feeling, and, most important, remembering.

“I sought help,” Sazed thought. “And something answered.”

Sazed smiled, and everything seemed a little bit brighter.

He realizes he has suddenly become a believer. After a lifetime of searching.

He would believe. Not because something had been proven to him beyond his ability to deny, but because he chose to.

There’s a line in one of our hymns, “God will force no man to heaven.”[ii] What Sazed had been looking for was to be forced—by the sheer weight of incontrovertible evidence—to believe. But what happens when a person has that much evidence and still refuses to act according to God’s known will? Even Satan knows God is real.

What God wants from us is to choose to believe. And with that, to choose God and all His Goodness. In order to make the choice, we need to act on faith, before we have total knowledge.

So, how does that apply to us in our trying times?

If we’re believers, we’re seeing an accumulation of miracles, instead of just an accumulation of hardships.

Here are a few I’ve seen.

·        My husband timed his broken ankle to coincide with the stay-at-home order, which actually made healing less inconvenient, and somewhat eased his usual desire to be out and about.

·        We had a lot of food storage on hand, without any panic buying needed, because our Church has been teaching us my whole life to have food storage for self-reliance.

·        The fresh food I’ve needed (and practically everything I can eat is fresh food) has mostly been available, with only some temporary missing pieces.

·        My husband already had a Zoom account for his business, which has been a great way to have little reunions with our kids. We like this so much, the plan is to keep it up every other Sunday indefinitely.

·        Most of my life our Church has emphasized home-centered, Church-supported gospel learning. But a year ago January our Church started a program that made that more understandable and harder to ignore. And we had a year to practice it. Then, this January, we cut our Sunday meetings from three hours to two—so the learning that would have been covered in weekly classes is expected to be done at home and just enhanced in the twice-a-month Sunday School. So when we were asked in mid-March to do home church during the pandemic, we were prepared and practiced at it already.

·        Because of these crazy times, people are turning to God. This has included a number of new convert baptisms locally (following all the rules to make those happen). And the Facebook group that started with the Worldwide Fast April 10, now called Worldwide Unified, is full of outpourings of little miracles, as well as calls for special prayers for many many reasons, followed by additional outpourings of love and support. Many people have talked about coming back to faith after years away.

·        I’ve had time for gardening—which I’d never really done much before, because Mr. Spherical Model always did that. I love seeing my little seeds grow.

·        I’ve had time for more music here at home, even though I miss playing with my usual group. We’re doing things online to stay connected and to keep playing some of the same music, separately together. And a year ago I learned how to use the software to write tablature, so I'm arranging a number of hymns and other pieces for the mountain dulcimer.

·         My usual fear of getting sick—because a regular cold can hit me pretty hard—is somewhat lessened, because everyone all around is being so careful. And Mr. Spherical Model isn’t going out to get any illnesses to bring home, so I’m actually feeling more safely healthy for the time being.

·        Doctors are making progress at finding treatments, with several promising drugs and procedures quickly making their way through trials. 

·        Researchers have concluded that young children do not spread the virus to adults. That’s pretty remarkable, if accurate. 

There are more, certainly. And plenty more I’m still praying for.

Maybe none of these looks like evidence to a nonbeliever. But at some point we will be able to look back, and I believe we will see the hand of the Lord more clearly in what is happening in His world, and under His control. At least those of us with eyes to see[iii] will see His hand.

---

[i] While all quotes are from the book Hero of Ages, I had an audiobook version. So I transcribed this portion. That means I may not have reproduced the punctuation and paragraph structure that Sanderson wrote in the book. But I believe I have been faithful in reproducing the words.

[ii] “Know This That Every Soul Is Free,” hymn 240, found here. 

[iii] Matthew 13:15-16. 

Perceiving What Is Real

Sunday morning, while I was getting ready for church, I had BYU Radio playing, and there was a short clip of a 2014 talk by Dieter F. Uchtdorf. I looked up the whole thing later, but here’s the transcript of the clip I heard[i]:

It was less than a century ago that most astronomers assumed that our Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy in the universe.[ii] They supposed all that lay beyond our galaxy was an immense nothingness, an infinite void—empty, cold, and devoid of stars, light, and life.

screenshot from here

As telescopes became more sophisticated—including telescopes that could be launched into space—astronomers began to grasp a spectacular, almost incomprehensible truth: the universe is mind-bogglingly bigger than anyone had previously believed, and the heavens are filled with numberless galaxies, unimaginably far away from us, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.[iii]

In a very short period of time, our understanding of the universe changed forever.

Today we can see some of these distant galaxies.[iv]

screenshot from here

We know that they are there.

They have been there for a very long time.

But before mankind had instruments powerful enough to gather celestial light and bring these galaxies into visibility, we did not believe such a thing was possible.

The immensity of the universe didn’t suddenly change, but our ability to see and understand this truth changed dramatically. And with that greater light, mankind was introduced to glorious vistas we had never before imagined.

He then introduces the main question of his talk:

It seems to be a trait of humanity to assume that we are right even when we are wrong. And if that is the case, what hope is there for any of us? Are we destined to drift aimlessly on an ocean of conflicting information, stranded on a raft we have poorly pieced together from our own biases?

Is it possible to find truth?

He then uses the earlier telescope observation as a metaphor:

Scientists were struggling to understand the breadth of the universe until instruments became sophisticated enough to gather in greater light so they could understand a more complete truth.

The Apostle Paul taught a parallel principle regarding spiritual knowledge. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" [1 Cor. 2:14]

In other words, if you want to recognize spiritual truth, you have to use the right instruments. You can’t come to an understanding of spiritual truth with instruments that are unable to detect it.

That got me thinking. Because I am able to perceive spiritual things even when many in the world don’t—and further, claim that I don’t.

I was thinking of another analogy. We had some books when our children were young, called Magic Eye. There would be a picture of apparently chaotic color. But if you stared at it long enough, and relaxed your eyes a certain way, suddenly a three-dimensional image appeared.

It took some practice. For us,, in our family after we’d figured out how to see the image on one page, we’d get quicker at seeing it on the next.

Not everyone can manage to see the image. But it’s there, whether a person perceives it or not. As an aside, there’s a half-decade-old lecture by Jordan Peterson, called “Reality and the Sacred,” in which he discusses how miraculous it is that we can perceive anything. Sight, for example, is so far impossible for artificial intelligence; there’s too much complexity involved in perceiving and understanding what we see. 

Anyway, it’s hard to explain the process of seeing that extra-dimensional picture exactly. You stare. You relax your eyes a bit, let go. And it happens. That’s not very exact. And it’s not very helpful to those who are struggling to see and cannot.

Those of us who have spiritual experiences, who can see the metaphorical additional-dimension image, encourage the non-see-ers. There are methods and steps that work for many of us:

·        Suspend disbelief and be open to the possibility of something beyond your five senses.

·        Pray.

·        Read spiritual texts that have record others’ spiritual experiences and lead many to have spiritual experiences from reading them.

·        Listen to the thoughts, ideas, impressions, or feelings that come in answer to prayer, or as inspiration even in between prayers.

·        Act on these promptings.

·        Record the promptings and results.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time listening to debates between believers and atheists. The atheists are not persuasive to me, because they dismiss my experience simply because they have not had those experiences. [Writing on this theme is adding up. See here, here, here, and here, for example.] 

I don’t know why they don’t get them and I do. Sometimes it might be due to willful blindness on their part. Sometimes they’re decent people just not looking at things in a way that allows them to see the extra dimension that I see. But their not seeing something I’ve experiences doesn’t convince me that I’m somehow mistaken. The evidence is in my favor.

image from Wikipedia

Remember the children’s story Horton Hears a Who, by Dr. Seuss? This elephant, with enormous ears and excellent hearing, and a kind heart, hears the sounds of the people on a world that exists on a dust speck on a clover. He knows they’re there, and so he protects them. But the non-hearers all around him, while they could simply ignore him and let him do his thing, are determined to stop him from believing he hears something. They threaten, and connive, and work to destroy. Why? Does Horton’s belief (knowledge that they can’t perceive) harm them?

In the end, Horton is able to convince the Whos down in Whoville, the people on the speck, that they need to rally and make enough noise to be heard. The final addition of one small child is enough to make them heard by the ears of all the others in Horton’s world—similar to the development of telescopes so we could see distant galaxies.

What if the Whos hadn’t been able to muster enough noise? Would they have still been there? Yes, Horton knew it, whether the others knew or not. (It’s fiction, I know, and therefore not actually real. I’m talking within the realm of this story.)

The inability to perceive does not determine whether something exists. This is particularly evident among believers in God and those who don’t.

It is not limited to our day; this has happened many times in history. But today, again, there is a vocal segment of nonbelievers that act like those conniving bullies in the Horton story. If believers commit to live better lives than they otherwise would—more honest, more committed to family, more hardworking, getting rid of corruption and trying to remove evil tendencies from their hearts—why should that garner the ire of nonbelievers?

Yet that’s what is going on when the attack companies like Chick-fil-A, or Hobby Lobby, or small business owners like florist Baronelle Stutzman or baker Jack Phillips.

Then there’s this story about a Christian charter school in Maryland that was eliminated from the voucher program for holding biblical views on sexuality. 

There’s this story about Amazon discontinuing selling books by a Catholic psychologist, with a large body of work spreading over decades, because of pressure from LGBT lobbyists. 

This isn’t confined just to America. Canadians, a supposed freedom of religion nation, just passed a law prohibiting public employees from wearing religious symbols or clothing at work—no Christian crucifix, no Jewish yarmulke, no Sikh turban. 

Further in that same story, the Ontario Court of Appeals has ruled that all doctors must give up their religious beliefs or get out of medicine:

Doctors must abort, euthanize, provide transgender interventions or any other legal medical procedure—or find a doctor who will, called an “effective referral.” In other words, Ontario forces doctors to take human life or provide services he or she might consider mutilating, even if the doctor considers it an egregious sin—either that, or be ghettoized into areas of practice such as podiatry in which no such requests are likely to be made. And if they don’t like that, as one judge put it, they can get out of medicine altogether.

Elsewhere in the world, such as Syria, Christians are persecuted to the brink of extinction, making everything I talk about here seem minor. Still, I believe we need to address the relatively minor attacks while that is what they are.

We mentioned Chick-fil-A above. They’ve been persecuted for years. Recently, during a gay pride parade in New York, a Chick-fil-A restaurant was vandalized, and the vandals ironically accused Chick-fil-A of being the haters. 

There are sparks of goodness, still, because so many people want to be good and are trying to figure that out for themselves. One man tweeted this response to the Chick-fil-A attack: "I’m gay. I eat Chick-Fil-A. I love Chick-Fil-A. They have different beliefs than I do. We can agree to disagree on things. Doesn’t mean I hate them. Not seeing tolerance. Not seeing love."

Another good story is that the near-century-old Bladensburg WWI Veterans Memorial, in the shape of a cross, is being allowed by the Supreme Court to stand.

Bladensburg WWI Veterans Memorial
image from here

The odd question is why there would be so much hatred against a religious symbol in a country that is founded and dedicated on Godly principles—including, and maybe especially, the freedom to believe as we choose.

Like those bullies in the Horton story, I’d like them to stop with their screed long enough to explain why they are so desperate to stamp out the possibility that other people perceive something they have not.

---

[i] The entire talk is here, with both video and transcript. There’s an additional video within the text of a shorter clip, with illustrations, which I used for screenshots.

[ii] See Marcia Bartusiak, The Day We Found the Universe (2009), xii.

[iii] See Moses 1:33,35 in The Pearl of Great Price, and note that this was revealed in June 1830, nearly a century before Edwin Hubble announced his discovery of distant galaxies.

[iv] See, for example, the Hubble Heritage Image Gallery at heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html.