Chapter I
In the Beginning...
"God is the word that speaks itself."
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In the beginning was the Word and the Word was Yo, and the Word was, "Let there be light." And there was. And Yo saw that It was good. And It was.
And as the light exploded outward, matter, space, and time came into being. According to Saint Stephen
If the density of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion, the universe would have re-collapsed after 10 years. On the other hand, if the density of the universe at that time had been less by the same amount, the universe would have been essentially empty since it was about 10 years old. (Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time)
As Saint Mike and The ISB sang:
The Holy One, Praised be Yo, saw to it that It was right and good. And It was.
Following the Will of Yo, the light condensed and coalesced according to the sacred formula (E=mc2) discerned by Saint Albert. In Yos hands, inconceivable quantities of pure energy were concentrated to create the stars and planets as matter, for the first time, had mass. Thus the heavens and the earth were formed. All matter obeyed the Will of Yo and both energy and mass followed Yos Dictates, as we have best been able to understand them. We call the Holy One's commandments "forces" and label them the strong and the weak, the gravitational, and the electromagnetic. And Yo saw that It was good. And It was.
According to the Laws of Yo, as discerned by Saint Isaac, the hardened masses of solidified energy were tied for billions of years to orbits around the thermonuclear furnaces we call stars. Thus, the planets were bathed in a steady stream of radiation. The molecules of warmed matter began to interact as the sun's energy animated the lifeless rocks, mud, and water. Complex arrangements of atoms eventually formed that miraculously interacted with other such molecules to create mirror image double helix chains, copies of themselves as discerned by Saints Rosalind, Francis II, and James. Then, according to what Saint Robert II termed "our only scientific theory of creation," following the Will of Yo as first discerned by Saint Charles, the energized mud and water evolved into the myriad forms of life.
Let there be life . . .
Evolution
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life ...; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. (Saint Charles)
The Latin word for "soul" is "anima," from which we get our word, "animate." The Hebrew words for "red earth" are "adm adamá." Yo animated the red earth with solar energy; thus Yo breathed a solar spirit into adm adamá or Adam. There may be many stars, others of which may have generated intelligent life. But there is only one sol, one sun. We could thus say, "The Holy One, Praised be Yo, did give us Yos only sun to bring forth our souls out of the lifeless clay."
As Saint Alan put it, the universe "peopled." Many people in reaction to the false religions that they were taught when they were children have rejected religion altogether and have come to the conclusion that there is no God; that we live in a Fully Automatic Universe. Intelligent life, according to this belief, evolved through a series of accidents out of a stupid universe composed of mindless matter and blind forces. Modern ecologists, however, are beginning to see that this is not the way the universe works: Organisms require and imply environments and environments imply organisms.
Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed . . . (Saint Ralph)
Just as scientists now believe that there is almost surely sentient life somewhere else in the universe, had we had sufficient knowledge of the nature of Matter-Space-Time and been present at the moment of Creation, we could have predicted that Yo would—through the entirely natural process of evolution—shape Yoself into sentient lifeforms. When we listen to Saint Alan's words, we see that there is no magical, teleological thinking in this view. It is just a feature of The Universal Field of Matter-Space-Time, of Yo:
[W]e tend to think of this planet as a life infested rock which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell-infested skeleton. [Yet, contrary to this absurd notion that is implied by the Fully Automatic Model] . . . we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent. If I first see a tree in winter, I might assume that it is not a fruit-tree. But when I return in summer to find it covered with plums, I must exclaim, "Excuse me! You were a fruit-tree after all." Imagine, then, that . . . [five] billion years ago some beings from another part of the galaxy made a tour through the solar system in their flying saucer and found no life. They would dismiss it as "Just a bunch of old rocks!" But if they returned today, they would have to apologize: "Well you were peopling rocks after all!"
Saint Neil on Life and The Fundamental Structure of the Universe:
Yes, through the process of Natural Selection—along a path fraught with dangers so severe that, in our line, only our direct ancestors made it through—did Yo, with an outstretched arm and a mighty hand, bring forth man and woman out of sun warmed mud, air, and water.
And they turned away From The Face of Yo . . .
Unfortunately, the true story of our own Glorious Creation then took some rather bad turns; many terrible things began to happen. Many people cannot bear to think about these horrible things. Others cannot believe that a world with such horrors could be the manifestation of an Infinite Divine Mystery, and so, like Saint Richard, they insist that there is no "God." They often even conclude that there is no Infinite Mystery, no Yo, nothing beyond what we experience. But, in fact, Yo has taken on the form—become the Reality—that must be, even though horror is real.
You see, in order to create a peopling universe, gravity was necessary to hold the earth near the sun where it could be warmed. But I was there when that same gravity caused a 17-year-old boy to plunge to his death when he leaned over a cliff to break off a branch he was trying to gather for firewood. His friend's anguished cries for help brought us to the top of the cliff where we stared at the boy's dead body lying face down on the rocky beach far below us. What was the shaking, terrified kid standing next to me going to tell his friend's mother? "Mrs. Jones, I know you thought we were only camping out, but Billy's dead. God's gravity killed him when he slipped while gathering wood."
Why does the structure of Reality not spare the innocent wood gatherers and punish the truly guilty? Here is where humans "blaspheme," so to speak. Rather than seeing the miracle of creation and the holy wonder of the precise form of Yos manifestation as a peopling universe, we see the pain inherent in that universe and angrily blame "God" for being an inadequate mommy or daddy.
"Why did You not make the ground soft, O Lord? We don't like Your world of the strong and the weak, the electromagnetic, and the gravitational. We want a magical world in which the falling are caught by the arms of a Superman from the planet Krypton, a world where ultimately the evil ones are punished and the good are rewarded, where our deepest wishes always come true in the end, and a world where our worst terrors and most heartrending sorrows are merely bad dreams from which we will awaken. We want this so badly that we will pretend it is true."
And so we did. We created fairy tales, childhood fantasies, to give us comfort against the awful pain of catastrophe, disease, death, and evil. As Saint Sigmund described, we projected magical parents into the sky and pretended that some Man-God, Daddy-Mommy was watching over us, listening to our cries, and answering our prayers that beg for magical abrogation of the Will of Yo as represented in Yos Laws themselves. Saint John II was right: Such a God, "is a concept by which we measure our pain."
Childhood's End: An Explanation of Traditional Religion for Children
Metaphorically speaking, these magical fantasies "anger" Yo. They lead to the worst evils of all. Through "meme replication," as described by Saint Richard, these fantastic tales spread from one psyche to another. These "infectious" meme systems were then instrumental in bringing about the greatest horrors in human history. The most grotesque forms of Human Inhumanity always flow from the Path of Untruth, the path followed by all the religions of make-believe that are remnants of humanity's childhood. These "meme systems" comprise the beliefs most often called "religion." They are followed by the well-intentioned misguided as well as by the evil ones—the often deluded power mongers among us—whenever they use human ignorance and desperate hope to work their megalomaniacal ends of dominance and glory.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. (Saint Steven)
Four hundred years ago, after eons of killing and ignorance guided by such destructive but effectively infectious meme systems, there was a revolution that offered hope that we could leave the Age of Darkness and enter the Enlightenment. Saint Francis outlined a clear way to study the Universe, to study Reality, and to come to know "the Body, Mind, and Will of Yo." He told us to forget received wisdom from authorities who use rigid systems of belief to enslave the human spirit. Rather, when you open your eyes and see, your ears to hear, all your senses to sensibility, your can leave the delusional world of religious dogma behind.
As Saint Timothy put it:
Turning away from dogmatic authority and using our own minds and senses, we can come to know Yos manifestation, The Universe, as it truly is. This revolutionary notion shined a beacon of enlightenment that illuminated a new path for humanity to follow. For the first time, it seemed possible that our ancestors would be able to make The Great Escape from the Ages of Darkness. Following Saint Francis and the enlightenment philosophers (the British empiricists, Saints John, David, and George I), astounding leaps in understanding amazed the world. This was the path of Truth followed by Saints Isaac and Galileo.
But our escape was thwarted. The Church was frightened by the rejection of dogmatic doctrine. If humans learned to think for themselves and to know Yos Divine Manifestation directly—if they dared to think with their own senses and minds—then there would be no need for the authority of the Church. So, the Inquisition came to the 70-year-old Galileo and threatened to slowly torture him to death if he did not recant and lie by saying that the sun does go around the earth. After being shown the torture instruments that would be used to kill him, he acquiesced: Galileo acknowledged the greater wisdom of the Church. Despite his recantation, he was forced to spend the last seven years of his life under house arrest. (359 years later, in 1992, the Church had the audacity "to pardon" Galileo!)
This bizarre episode should not surprise us. This is, in fact, completely consistent with the actions of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God. Saint Friedrich mocked the hypocrisy of the Christian virtues of "turning the other cheek," charity, and the notion that "the meek will inherit the earth," as if gentleness and love were, in practice, prime Christian virtues. He pointed out how these meek, loving gentlefolk were promised (by the false Saint Thomas) that one of the sweet benefits of going to heaven was that they would be able to enjoy listening to the suffering screams of the wicked unbelievers being tortured throughout all eternity. In the afterlife (about which, he apparently had detailed knowledge), he claimed
That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica)
In this "Saint's" vision, ideal Christians are like sadistic conquerors, whose joy is enhanced by seeing the eternal, tortured suffering of their vanquished enemies. Contrast Thomas's enticing promise of the eternal delights of voyeuristic sadism with the supposed ideal of meek, humble Christians who "turn the other cheek" and who strive to "love their enemies." In contrast, the loving Jesus of Nazareth, whom many Christians find in the Bible, would be eternally saddened by the endless suffering of those poor souls He loved. Yet, Aquinas is merely a typical example of religion as it is actually practiced.
The Vatican finally accepts birth control and the theory of evolution
Don Yahweh: The "King" of the Universe
Or consider the Christian radio preacher, whom I heard the other day as he exclaimed that the Bible says that, on the Judgment Day, all will bend down before Jesus Christ, some willingly because of love of his appearance.
Others will be brought to their knees by an iron rod that will break their legs. So the preacher pleaded, "Submit willingly or have your legs broken. Either way you will submit!"
Saint Bob captured this in his song,
Oh, God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son."
Abe said, "Man, you must be putting me on."
God said, "No."
Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but the next time you see me comin', you better run."
Well, Abe said, "Where ya want this killin' done?"
God said, "Out on Highway 61."
Yes, amazingly, this does sound like a Mafia protection racket: "Pay tribute to me or I'll break your legs." Or it can be seen as a version of the other nonsensical demand of the incredibly narcissistic and dictatorial god of the childish religions: "Love me freely and with your whole heart or I'll break your body and dance on your windpipe." Yes, these religions tell us to believe in an Almighty Creator, whose ego is so bizarrely fragile and infantile that He forces His own creation—under the threat of eternal torture—to provide Him with a constant stream of adoration, or else He flies into a rage!?! The fact of the matter is that the God of the Bible is a defective God with an overweening need for a constant stream of adoration.
And beyond God's infantile narcissism is the fact that He can't even keep his facts straight. Here's a visual representation of the numerous contradictions in the Bible, the supposed word of an infallible God.
Love God freely with all your heart or He'll kill you and dance on your windpipe.
At Yahweh's Last Press Conference
Angry, Old Testament God vs. Loving, New Testament Jesus: Are they really one and the same?
Before going on to Chapter II, if this depiction of the traditional religions is too jarring, if it sounds too harshly negative to you, consider our discussion of Yoism and The Problem of Criticism.