Listen to the “still small voice” in your heart. In reality it’s a sense of peace, not words or a voice. Here’s how you get there.

Read verses 8, 9, and 10 from the second chapter of Ephesians. Verse ten promises that there are things for you to do. It provides no slightest clue about what they are – just the promise of their being placed in you life.

Knowing that GOD has plans for you, it’s a good first step to realize that with seven billion people, there’s no need for seven billion powerful preachers. Rather, there are humpty-dumpty billion interpersonal encounters every day, some of which involve you. Masons, master plumbers, MBA’s, mechanics, millwrights, mothers, and a multitude of other jobs are essential for everyone to live in a well functioning environment – so do your job.

Do it conscientiously, without complaint.

Pray daily, and ask for GOD to forgive what you’ve messed up. We all mess up, and it’s important to reach the point where you come to prayer “with a broken and contrite heart” – not that you messed up the quarterly report or took too long to fix a leak, but that like every other human your ability to love your fellow human has holes in it.

You’ll seldom have a precognition; you’ll frequently see a need and respond to it. The best examples are where you develop a friendship and, once the bond is solid, share understandings about life and fate. One you’ve heard out your friend, THEN you can anticipate getting a question in return; that’s your opportunity to witness your own faith.

Later on people will remind you of critical, supportive, blessing-level things you’ve done that you have forgotten about, and at the time thought of as trivial. Those represent times when you walked in the steps GOD placed in your path, from before you were born.

Hope this helps.

GOD is love, to a degree a created human cannot comprehend. Consider the intensity of a GOD capable of speaking the universe into existence; consider the degree of, well, intelligence to invent particle physics such that stars would form, planets coalesce, higher elements in the Table form (the top of the table only seems to form when neutron stars collide – we’re more than star dust, we’re neutron star dust) – and then for that table of elements to support carbon-based life to the degree it does.

Then to wait almost 13 billion of our years for the sliver of a moment, the hundred-thousand-year window (one part in 130,000) for homo sapiens to reach fruition against carefully placed environmental challenges.

THEN to place astronomical events – constellations and planetary conjunctions, etc. – such that scholars remaining in Babylon, five hundred years after Cyrus set the Jews free to rebuild Jerusalem, could decipher prophecies to the point that they set out to find the Messiah, about the time HE was to be born. That story is very well covered in The Star of Bethlehem, a 60 minute DVD available on the web.

Love? Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for a friend. GOD showed that on a divine scale when Jesus, the Word (who made all things that were made, e.g. two hundred sextillion stars) allowed HIMself to suffer human death on the cross, to atone for our sin.

GOD is love; I don’t gainsay HIM anything, don’t quibble timing (billions of years) or technique (evolution) with HIM – his handiwork is written in the heavens, which speak to us just how long HE has waited for us to appear. Those who in this life ask for forgiveness have their impurity erased or washed away, to enter into the utter holiness and utter love of GOD once their time here is complete.

And Scripture tells us that GOD loves to hear our prayers.

I would feel like my ears were being tickled by a moronic notion of GOD’s real goodness. GOD does not call His beloved children to lives of ease and plenty; He calls them to lives of service to others where self, self-interest, etc. prosper in the warm glow of making others’ lives better.

GOD’s children come to Him with contrite, broken hearts to confess their imperfect natures. To these He gives mercy, and invites them to an afterlife of joy we can’t comprehend on this earth.

Joy we can comprehend on this earth, in material form, distracts us completely from what GOD has set out for us to do. Paul expresses this idea with brilliance and clarity in his letter to the church in Ephesus:

(v. 8) For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—

(v.9) not by works, so that no one can boast.

(v.10) For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Running after an overflowing storehouse is hardly going to do any of that. The storehouse in question isn’t full of gold and wheat, it’s full of love and mercy.

Every ‘original’ culture, e.g. original tribes on this continent, and on every other continent, all told stories about how the world came to be, where people came from, what basis there was for their moral standards, and so forth.

A thousand years before Abraham one of those stories was committed to writing (The Gilgamesh Epic), because writing had been invented. Abraham had his own take on Gilgamesh, which became Genesis. That’s the short form of the tale.

GOD did in fact create the universe, and HE wrote HIMself into the Jewish scripture. Its basis for morality, its definitions of right and wrong behavior, and most specifically its understanding that all humans are essentially fallen (which is why the Garden of Eden is part of the narrative) HIS patience and endless love, make it GOD’s own work.

There is no basis to ask, e.g. “Is every sentence in the Bible as true as every other sentence?” The Judaeo-Christian bible is thoroughly human. What makes it GOD’s word is that HE made it different from all other origin stories by showing us HIS willingness to re-accept HIS fallen people time after time.

And finally HIS promised Son, Jesus. The New Testament is a first-hand narrative, written by first-hand witnesses, with deep theological teachings delivered by Paul, presumably due to spending three years “in the desert” before beginning his own mission. Paul looks back into the Hebrew bible and finds (think of 20–20 hindsight) myriad promises and prophecies regarding Jesus, what He would do, why He would do it, the need for the crucifixion, and His resurrection. It’s all there.

In short, GOD chose a \“stubborn, stiff-necked” people – not a bad idea, given what they wound up enduring – and wrote HIMself into their literature, history, hymns, and prophecies.

Looking back at the first part of the Bible, it’s fair to question whether in fact a real Abraham, Joseph, and twelve tribes are more historically precise than King Arthur of fifth-Century England. Don’t blow a gasket here – their value as moral instruction is immense.

GOD structured the Bible in HIS ways for HIS reasons. A BEING capable of speaking the universe into existence, with its particle physics exquisitely tuned to generate a table of elements, itself exquisitely tuned such that DNA more or less leapt into being (life-bio-chem scientists are learning more and more about exactly that) – GOD is utterly beyond our little mind-games.

Our three-pound wet computer with its trillions of synapses may let us do some impressive stuff, but one primary effect of the book of JOB is to alert us to the fact that we cannot chop logic with GOD. Do we struggle with evolution? With a planet that congealed 5 billion years ago, I think there has been time for a chain of life to develop that produced homo sapiens. Do we struggle with billions of years? GOD tells us that in HIS ‘eyes’ a thousand years are like a day, yet a day is like a thousand years.

Pseudo-science? Mythology? Prior to the Renaissance and the birth of the scientific method, the logical answers to all of the why and how questions tended to be supernatural. Today science has displaced GOD as the primary answer to those questions, and like throwing the baby out with the bath water, we try to write GOD off. We no longer need HIS comfort, because we believe that there is no comfort in the first place.

In ages past, faith and belief were bedrock. Your mileage may vary, but today faith and belief are mocked for pushing their way in front of scientific knowledge, and the devout folks who regard Genesis as GOD’s Ted Talk about how HE went about making the universe aren’t doing anybody any favors. Why no favors? Because GOD is real, HE did create the universe, HE did send his Son (the WORD, who made all things that were made, e.g. two hundred sextillion stars [2 followed buy twenty-three 0’s] – please check out a copy of *Star of Bethlehem *to see why there is very clear evidence that GOD spoke to us all through the Scriptures, and we do have forgiveness through Jesus self-sacrifice.

Consider something vastly  more complex than, say, the latest intel super chip – multiple cores, many megabytes of of on-chip RAM, on-board superspeed communications capability via laser transceivers, yada, and yada, and – – – –

We already make things this complex – and with great skill the engineers who made it can make the next one better, faster, stronger, yada, and yada, and – – – –

We’re up in the multiple billions of “devices” on each silicon chip, where a device is a transistor, resistor, capacitor, – mostly transistors. Each RAM bit is a very specialized transistor. Now, suppose you are a brilliant engineer who has learned to navigate the entire design of this chip. Your boss comes up, smiles at you, pats you on the back, and says, “Valued contributor and fave employee, you are going to head up a new design team to make a completely new chip, using the same circuit technology but executing a brand new internal machine micro-language and a brand new external compiler-generated machine language, to do something that the chip you’re familiar with was never considered useful for.”

Gulp.

The above fanciful construction is apt, but far smaller, orders of magnitude smaller, than the job of “writing” the DNA for a whole new species, much less a “new life form.”

Science has been digging into the DNA on hand, and at present has dozens (? – I need to ask my daughter Angela, who is involved in the user interface software of the Genome Project, working out of U C Santa Cruz) – at least dozens of species of major animal, much less viruses, plants, single cell bacteria, molds, fungi, and more. Much more.

It’s like someone looking at an acre of combed lint, trying to deduce what this bit of silicon does. “Acre of combed lint?” – that is one way to conceptualize expanding the image of the latest CPU super chip to a point where the naked eye can distinguish each connecting trace, each transistor, etc. An acre of combed lint.

Fortunately DNA is linear, and has a lot more structure we can parse out than just diving into an acre of combed lint and trying to find a path through the maze. But we have designed CPU chips for so long that it only looks like combed lint to the naked eye, when in fact it is elegant and purposeful to the chip designer.

DNA-based life has, no matter your opinion on Creator etc. more-than-full equivalents of elegance and purposefulness. But since humans didn’t develop the engineering behind how DNA works, to us it really did start out as combed lint. We struggle to understand things like how a protein (a specific combination of (mostly) amino acids, folds in 3-D. The DNA is legible, but part of the reason for that DNA sequence is that the protein it creates happens to fold right, to form a particular 3-D structure which acts in a particular way. [[ Note to the curious – analogies to wrenches, screw drivers, and so forth do appear to explain some proteins’ functions. ]]

Computers currently have TWO layers of “machine” language. Define ‘clock’ – a five gigahertz chip uses a frequency generator that pulses five billion times a second, thus has a five gigahertz clock. Deep inside, microcode directs each of the tiny single-clock steps necessary to perform the very powerful, very complex sequence of steps of an ‘exterior’ machine instruction such as ‘multiply a times b and store the result in c: “Read one word either from a machine register or from the RAM memory location addressed by the contents of a machine register, possibly offset by the contents of the Program Counter register, plus a given 32-bit offset, then multiply that by one of [ literal value, contents of some register, some other location in RAM, …] and then place the result in one of [some register or some other location in RAM …]

A compiler is a program which takes FORTRAN or C or C# or CNET etc. as input and derives an output consisting of pre-defined RAM contents (starting raw data) and exterior machine instructions such as the above ‘multiply’. If you’ve never had a look inside a computer before, the foregoing is probably dry as dirt and somewhat less important. It doesn’t move you. Sorry about that. But DNA is equivalent to a microcode orders of magnitude more subtle, and the entire DNA/microcode sequence obeys, as exterior machine code, the environment containing the nucleus.

DNA is ALL microcode. A computer has from a fraction of a million bytes to a million or more bytes of microcode. DNA is, for a human, one billion six-bit codons(*), or about 750 million bytes.

Anyone care to start writing in DNA microcode? Even given that we do understand some of what we see there, the full mystery is at best decades into the future, and with the help of super-computers. A million bytes to run our “acre of combed lint” CPU chip vs 500 or more times that much, to operate one copy of homo sapiens – that is some kind of complexity!

(*) – each DNA ‘bit’ is one of four letters, G A T C – or two binary bits of information. Each codon appears to be three DNA letters, so six bits, or three-quarters of a byte.

Look at it this way: governments serve people in varying ways with varying success rates. Our taxes build bridges and sewage plants, lay sewers and highways, and many etc.’s. We ignore these background details. I’m not aware of graft and corruption, although I ran into an example as a youth [another time; enough to prove it exists.]

America and Australia are frontier nations; we expanded into a large area populated, if at all, by stone age peoples. That experience dulled our consciences but also molded our expectations. All of South America, Central America, and Canada are on the same list, and we’re all different. So calling ourselves Americans emphasizes those differences. Not that they are good or bad – they define us, full stop.

Our medical industry involves insurers and providers,with varying mixes. On the one hand are medical insurance companies; in the middle are HMOs which act as both insurer and provider; and on the other side there are doctors and hospitals, clinics, etc. who provide care but on a cash basis.

The rest of the free world has decided to bureaucratize provision of health care, and let the tax system handle the cash elements. Everyone pays some sort of tax, and everyone gets care.

Here in America we have a phobia against bureaucratizing medicine. All we need to do about that is invert the incentive structure.

What’s wrong with our current incentives? Insurance companies have no incentive to court you if you’re going to cost them money. After one year, if you’re expensive, you wind up “in a pool” with other expensive people, and your premium reflects the expected cost of your pool. This lets the insurance companies focus on you one year at a time. Every birthday you become an official stranger.

The nut to crack is how to make you more attractive, not less, as time goes by. Here’s one idea.

Look at all medical payouts to doctors, dentists, chiropractors, hospitals, nurses, surgeons, clinics, – – – look at all medical payouts as a POOL. The total POOL in the rest of the free world is, call it, TEN. Per citizen and after correcting for cost differences in different economies, we pay somewhere between THIRTEEN and FIFTEEN.

So – rearrange the Medicare income tax and the Medicaid state expenditures and the amounts that major employers spend on health insurance so that all of it winds up in a “Medical Account” or POOL. Then encourage every employer of actuaries who estimate your probable health cost for the coming year to send their crew to a month-long vacation somewhere boring. Let them confer and bring their laptops, databases, etc. Have them draw up a table each year which has a thousand (pick your own number – mine is just to enable a discussion) diagnoses.

What goes into a diagnosis? – age, gender, prior history, DNA, height, weight, and all of those odd things doctors have written about you over the course of your life. When the table is complete, you John Doe wind up as Diagnosis 739; mine as Joe Blow is 148. Do we care what that number is? Of course not.

And when we show up at an Urgent Care, or our doctor’s office, or a hospital ER, or need an ambulance ride, one of two things happens, both good. A – we already have an insurer who gets the money associated with our diagnosis, like 148 for me, and pull out a one-year policy cost. They pay the bills. They sweat about keeping us so healthy that they are money ahead at the end of the year. OR B – we don’t yet have an insurer, and either (B1) name one, or (B2) draw one out of a hat. In either case, said insurer gets access to your Diagnosis’s predicted annual cost, and you get care.

Our POOL isn’t going to be the whole FIFTEEN – but a lot of the cash we spend to reach FIFTEEN is likely to fade away. We build palacial doctor’s offices and hospitals to attract patients. We pay huge fees to the best doctors. Those elements of the FIFTEEN pie aren’t going to decline soon, but the idea is to avoid excesses. The rest of the free world does so by telling them, “WE get all the patients, and WE employ you to treat them, and HERE is what you’ll get paid.”

No Americal likes that kind of bureaucracy mucking up a merit-based system, so our FIFTEEN isn’t going to get all that much closer to TEN – so for now let’s accept the idea that we haven’t solved the whole problem.

But look at the new picture. For one, insurers are going to compete for the highest-cost Diagnoses. The ability to manage that huge sum will mean that the sickest will get the most attention, rich or poor or indifferent. They will mean a big cash outlay from the POOL, even if they happen to be indigent.

For another thing, gym memberships will be open to all. Just show up, and your insurer will happily dump five bucks into the gym’s account. Because (those actuaries again, the folks who estimate cost and return) understand that you’re likely to cost them six dollars less in care for each visit to the gym. Will gym memberships be free? Likely not – but they’ll compete hard for your subsidized patronage. The insurer is happy, the gym is happy, and you’re healthier. No plan is foolproof, but something like this is bound to occur.

Whose taxes build up the POOL? Employer medicare expands to what a current employer now pays for your medical coverage. The medical insurers won’t starve – instead, they will receive your Diagnosis from the POOL. Their sales staff will find other things to sell, but disruption will occur, which also means that opposition to such a huge change will be loud and aggressive. So, tough. Go forward.

Copays? White collar workers’ medicare taxes might have two tiers – low meaning copays exist, and high meaning they don’t. Low-wage workers’ copays will be nominal. Necessary (another discussion) but small.

Freelance doctors (cosmetic, special sports treatments, you-name-it) will have a market presence. Their compensation won’t be “out-of-system” because the insurer-provider combination will disappear. Too many horror stories come from folks today with low cost HMO coverage (yet another discussion.)

All doctors and all hospitals will get a fee-for-result (fee-for-service in specific cases) and the Beverly Hills MD’s will be able to tack on their own fees, and insurers will doubtless allow clients to pay extra up-front for that, because “it’s a free country.”

The thing to do is to meld market participants with government funding, such that there are no government employees making any critical decisions. My apologies to folks who are civil servants.

Most of you work hard and do a specialized job. But pulling medical care away from private hands and turning it over to new hires wearing federal and state hats is just not going to sell well.

Laws do not have to create bureaucracies, and the ones that already constitute the private market have task masters driving toward an efficient outcome.

Technology? Having built this universe, I hear an assumption that ‘technology’ encompasses more than simply speaking the universe into existence: “In the beginning GOD said, ‘Let there be light.’” Whatever is meant by “a new heaven and a new earth” it appears unlikely to require something out of the fifth dimension. I doubt the reference to a new heaven and a new earth require belief in a whole new universe as well,.

Although that could be HIS answer. But when forgiven souls enter into HIS joy, the whole concept will be moot.

Rather, prepare yourself for standing face to face with holiness such as humans have never seen except in the person of Jesus Christ. We all are sinful, from birth. In fact we wouldn’t survive without demanding that our needs be met. What baby can repay her parents other than by being utterly adorable and smiling. Well, that may work for parents, but in the abstract that is a working definition of an unequal bargain.

Enough of this – it’s a mine field. But we are born without any idea of how to care for or love others; we learn that from our parents. In time we may become fairly good at it, but at no time ever is any regular human perfect.

What does this mean? It means, in the New Testament, that we must approach Christ “with a broken and contrite heart” because we realize that we’re not perfect. We ask the ONE who was perfect for forgiveness, and HE gives it. Time and time again – but first the “ask” has to arise from a “broken and contrite heart.”

When we understand the technology behind Christ’s Grace, we may have a clue about the ‘technology’ of Heaven.

The original Roe v Wade decision fell across competing interests of the state. The first was unspoken because the need to protect the vulnerable is a truism. But, argue the victors, WHO exactly is vulnerable here?

Cue violins, because that question seldom has a clear answer unless you define terms, such as ‘There is no ‘who’ other than the woman until an infant draws breath and continues to do so as a viable organism. How’s that for a careful statement which considers values on their own merits?

Too many cases exist where a third-trimester abortion winds up with a “non-viable” infant due to “measures taken.” After all, the idea was to abort, so not many will quibble with the attending physician’s decision to crush the infant’s skull while it’s still in the birth canal. After that it becomes difficult, and moot, to argue that the infant was going to be viable.

On the other side of the question we reach “allow.” This is a free country. Denying an action requires a strong definition of the harm involved, and here wed run up against the legal definition which a) requires that a living, breathing, already-viable human receives harm, and b) makes a command decision that, until a being is fully determined to be both detached from the umbilicus and breathing well, It Just Ain’t A Person.

Viable fetus? Third paragraph above is a truck-sized loophole. Allowed? The legal system declares that no actual person has received an injury. Another truck-sized loophole.

And all because the fourth amendment trumped the humanity of the unborn, for the simple, practical reason that IT COULD. You can’t tell if a woman is pregnant without some kind of search. Cue trumpets.

Huh?

A few christians realize that the term “Allah” was originally the name of a sixth-seventh Century pagan Arab moon goddess. It was appropriated at about the mid-point of the recitals which were gathered into the Muslim Scripture, as the name of Almighty GOD. Muslims go so far as to allege that this exact name was in use during Abraham’s time.

Christians know that GOD created the universe, not just planet earth or the local solar system. Jews and Christians know that GOD’s name was – is – basically “I AM” – such that when Jesus used that term to refer to himself, “Verily verily I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM,” the Jewish high priesthood considered that blasphemy, because He had just declared Himself divine.

Noting here, Muslims demote him to “next-to-last prophet.”

Yes GOD did send Christ, but calling GOD “Allah” offends  Christians.

Ah, monotheism: to suppose that GOD, who invented particle physics and spoke the universe into being (Genesis 1:3, “And GOD said, ‘Let there be light.’”) cannot have a second aspect as WORD – John 1:3 “All things that were made were made by the Word.” The Gospel of John in the prior two verses identifies the WORD as both divine and having taken on a human existence as Jesus. To someone with an axe to grind, it may be useful to wave away the idea of the trinity – to dismiss it without discussion as a violation of the idea that GOD is one.

To which one can offer the example of a group of earthworms considering a heel and five toes pressed into the earth. One  worm says they’re all aspects of one SUPREME BEING and gets laughed at. For the purpose of this illustration, folks who dismiss the idea of a single GOD as incapable of also being triune is someone I’d liken to a too-simplistic earthworm. Sorry for the dis, but it seems like a useful comparison.

I would ask Him why He hadn’t said so during His time here on earth. Why wasn’t that as important to Him, then, as it is to some very uptight people today? I can think of three, count them three, relevant passages. Maybe four, if Paul said something twice. Paul was adamant, but also confessed at least once that what he had to say didn’t come from GOD. So that puts a dent in something he said that Jesus didn’t.

The other two are in the Old Testament. When Abraham visited nephew Lot one night in Sodom, all of Lot’s neighbors wanted (Abraham? some male figure) to come out where he could be ritually humiliated via anal rape. The sin in that case wan’t the sex, it was the forcible humiliation of a visiting stranger. That was a very serious offense in that day and age.

The other is among a list of killing offenses. Included in the list are cross-dressing and mixing fibers when weaving cloth. Today we celebrate blending wool / cotton / polyester / lycra / nylon – – – death, anyone?

The furor over homosexuality, as though it is a flip-the-coin choice in the first place, which it absolutely isn’t, is a huge impediment to Christians winning souls away from loss and toward the eternal Grace Christ gives to those who ask. That being the case, I’d ask Jesus whether he thought it was April first. But only after getting on my knees and showing Him a broken and contrite heart.