The Beginning

The new computer is a dream but there are some issues that have to be ironed out before I can access the Internet and update the website http://timeoftheend-faithandreason.net from the new hard drive I had installed yesterday. It's a 60 Gbyte disk containing Windows XP to allow me to work with files from my old ME version. The technician is working on it, so for now I am hors de combat. The weather is lousy, cold and rainy, and I am in my cozy little place late at night recalling another night, almost thrity-four years ago, when I picked up a Bible for the very first time.
The weather on that night was also lousy but it was a typical Upstate New York snow storm. This part of the state has only two seasons, Winter and August, and this was early February. Snow flakes the size of poker chips were adding to at least a foot of accumulation on the ground, and everything else. Like now, I stayed indoors. Actually I spent a lot of time in the house, a twenty-room mansion on a hillside - the liquor store delivered.
To say that I was a mess at that time would be an understatement; I weighed 260 lbs., had a slight heart problem, high blood pressure, a bad back, brochial asthma, and could break a sweat climbing a flight of stairs. About a month ealier I had stopped drinking after a three-week binge around the holidays. I'm a recovering alcoholic with nearly twenty-seven years free from that curse; today I am in perfect health: I offer this for whatever message it may have for you with regard to the mission I believe was given me on that night. There are typical reasons why people turn to the Bible but mine was the furthest removed from any of these: I was looking for something - one thing, but when I really got into it I found a whole lot than I'd never imagined.

I was watching television that night, lounging on a setee in pajamas and a robe, when something strange happened. It was as though my brain went out of sync; the program I was watching became nothing but a set of figures moving on the screen of which I couldn't make any sense; the dialogue became a garble of unintelligible sounds, yet I wasn't particularly alarmed. 'Maybe I'm tired,' I thought, although I wasn't feeling very tired - but as a fat, sickly blob of organic material I didn't exactly have a spring in my step at any time. I picked up a book and tried to read, but this wasn't working either: though I could recognize individual words, I couldn't knit them together in as little as a sentence that had any meaning. I put the book down and settled back to collect my thoughts. Then it happened!
It wasn't much, just a thought that popped into my mind: the Chariots of the Gods. This was a popular series of books, a television special hosted by Rod Serling, and a movie, suggesting that the world had been visited by travellers from the stars. These presentations captured the minds of millions at the time, around 1973, and then faded into obscurity. I had no opinion on the matter; it was an interesting idea and I could see the possibility of such a thing, but wasn't truly committed to the idea. But there was one aspect that piqued my interest, and that's what made me go to the Bible: the idea that some of the Biblical passages suggested a high technology in those ancient times; Ezekiel's wheels in the sky, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by nuclear weapons, the electrical properties of the Ark of the Covenant, and so on. That was it! I would go through the Bible and see if I could find similar references.
Suddenly my mind was clear, I was focused, and felt a new energy filling me. I started going through the book page by page, beginning with the first book of Genesis. Just having begun, I stopped at the fifth chapter describing the Generations of Adam and wondered at the length of life shown there: people living over nine-hundred years! That's a long time; I wondered about it for a minute or so and decided that we will probably never know what that's all about. I continued reading and ran smack into Genesis 11.
This is where the Generations of Shem are listed. These folks lived a long time, sure enough, but not nearly as long as Adam's list. Shem lives 600 years and the rest of the team shows drastic diminishments of lifespan, down to Terah who dies at the tender age of 205 years.
Ah! Maybe there's a clue here! If this is a trend, then poring over the rest of the Bible should show a continuing diminishment of vital durability later on. Then something else happened.
As I paged through the book, I noticed that I was now able to "snapshot" the text: that is, I could register everything on a page with a single glance! I have never been able to do anything like this, before or since. It got me through the Bible by morning, as I compiled a list of everyone for whom length of life and, if possible, the age at siring . And the list showed exactly what I anticipated, right down to David who lived only seventy years but was old and infirm. As to my enhanced reading ability, it quickly vanished at this point and I wondered if perhaps I'd imagined it.
A few years ago I was listening to the radio and a commercial came on. It was a speed reading course and the man talking said that with this technique one could see the entire contents of a page - at one glance!

Something didn't make sense here. For one thing the decline in longevity depicted here was much too rapid to be party to a close-ordered descendancy. I drew a graph ( can be seen on the website ) and concluded that this couldn't be. Then I drew a second graph, using the third quadrant of an ellipse with a 3% eccentricity, about the same as the Earth's orbit. This graph is also shown on the website, and shows that these personages must have represented dynasties spread over a vast length of time. Again, doubt settled in, as the Generation of Adam would have dated back Four-Million Years!
At the time the earliest man only dated back 500,000 years with Zinghjanthropus. But the graph still showed 4-million years, so I continued on that basis. Since then the presence of homo sapiens has been rolled back to 6-million years. Armed with this indicator I proceeded to re-examine Genesis 1.

To be continued.