I think the differences in a linguistic, cultural and theological framework of the Names of the Living God produce a major reason for the existence of different major religious heritages. Each group and tradition shapes its own religious belief system ethos based on singular or pluralistic approach to the Living Godhead.
According to many religious scholars, the vocalization of the Divine Names can increase the flow of grace and the experience of reverence connected with the meaning of a personal relationship with God and the avoidance of distance and vagueness.
At the same time, we think the Holy Names can also be used as a common ground for dialogue between people of faith. The greater use of the power and resonance behind each of the Names of God is a blessing for all. In short, the purpose behind their use is to understand the connection wth the Living Creator and the continuation of a living Creation.
Praise be to You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive, preserved us and enabled us to arrive at this greater Understanding. Hurtak Facebook Contact Us. The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.
Black Friday Weekend! Shop Now. Home The God Code. The God Code. Replication - Replication of the double helix through the steroid molecules is shown, along with error correction procedures, and genetic rearrangement.
This research book is intended for the individual who wants to know about the origins of life. Among his many eye-popping statements: "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps be- cause of, the lack of evidence. Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion. Among this community, comments from the late Henry Morris, a leader of the creationist movement, stand out: "Evolution's lie permeates and dominates modern thought in every field.
That being the case, it follows inevitably that evolutionary thought is basically responsible for the lethally ominous political developments, and the chaotic moral and so- cial disintegrations that have been accelerating everywhere.. When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misin- terpreted its data.
Reasonable peo- ple conclude that they are forced to choose between these two unappetizing extremes, neither of which offers much comfort. Disillusioned by the stridency of both perspectives, many choose to reject both the trustworthiness of scientific conclu- sions and the value of organized religion, slipping instead into various forms of antiscientific thinking, shallow spirituality, or simple apathy.
Others decide to accept the value of both sci- ence and spirit, but compartmentalize these parts of their spiri- tual and material existence to avoid any uneasiness about apparent conflicts. Along these lines, the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould advocated that science and faith should occupy sepa- rate, "non-overlapping magisterial But this, too, is potentially unsatisfying.
It inspires internal conflict, and deprives people of the chance to embrace either science or spirit in a fully realized way. Science's domain is to explore nature. God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be ex- amined with the heart, the mind, and the soul—and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms. I will argue that these perspectives not only can coexist within one person, but can do so in a fashion that enriches and enlightens the human experience.
Science is the only reliable way to understand the natural world, and its tools when prop- erly utilized can generate profound insights into material exis- tence. But science is powerless to answer questions such as "Why did the universe come into being?
The goal of this book is to ex- plore a pathway toward a sober and intellectually honest inte- gration of these views. The consideration of such weighty matters can be unset- tling. Whether we call it by name or not, all of us have arrived at a certain worldview. It helps us make sense of the world around us, provides us with an ethical framework, and guides our decisions about the future. Anyone who tinkers with that worldview should not do it lightly. But we humans seem to possess a deep- seated longing to find the truth, even though that longing is easily suppressed by the mundane details of daily life.
Those distractions combine with a desire to avoid considering our own mortality, so that days, weeks, months, or even years can easily pass where no serious consideration is given to the eter- nal questions of human existence. This book is only a small an- tidote to that circumstance, but will perhaps provide an opportunity for self-reflection, and a desire to look deeper. First, I should explain how a scientist who studies genetics came to be a believer in a God who is unlimited by time and space, and who takes personal interest in human beings.
Some will assume that this must have come about by rigorous reli- gious upbringing, deeply instilled by family and culture, and thus inescapable in later life. But that's not really my story. I was raised on a dirt farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Vir- ginia. The farm had no running water, and few other physical amenities. Yet these things were more than compensated for by the stimulating mix of experiences and opportunities that were available to me in the remarkable culture of ideas created by my parents.
But other advisers in the Roosevelt administration had other ideas, and the funding soon dried up. The ultimate dis- mantling of the Arthurdale community on the basis of backbit- ing Washington politics left my parents with a lifelong suspicion of the government. There, presented with the wild and beautiful folk culture of the rural South, my father be- came a folksong collector, traveling through the hills and hol- lows and convincing reticent North Carolinians to sing into his Presto recorder.
Those recordings, along with an even larger set from Alan Lomax, make up a significant fraction of the Library of Congress collection of American folksongs. When World War II arrived, such musical endeavors were forced to take a backseat to more urgent matters of national defense, and my father went to work helping to build bombers for the war effort, ultimately ending up as a supervisor in an aircraft factory in Long Island.
At the end of the war, my parents concluded that the high- pressure life of business was not for them. Being ahead of their time, they did the "sixties thing" in the s: they moved to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, bought a ninety-five-acre farm, and set about trying to create a simple agricultural lifestyle without use of farm machinery.
Discovering after only a few months that this was not going to feed their two adolescent sons and soon another brother and I would arrive , my father landed a job teaching drama at the local women's college. Faced with complaints about the long and boring hiatus in the summer, my father and mother founded a summer theater in a grove of oak trees above our farmhouse.
The Oak Grove Theater continues in uninterrupted and delight- ful operation more than fifty years later. I was born into this happy mix of pastoral beauty, hard farmwork, summer theater, and music, and thrived in it.
As the youngest of four boys, I could not get into too many scrapes that were not already familiar to my parents. I grew up with the general sense that you had to be responsible for your own be- havior and your choices, as no one else was going to step in and take care of them for you.
Like my older brothers, I was home-schooled by my mother, a remarkably talented teacher. Those early years con- ferred on me the priceless gift of the joy of learning. While my mother had no organized class schedule or lesson plans, she was incredibly perceptive in identifying topics that would in- trigue a young mind, pursuing them with great intensity to a natural stopping point, and then switching to something new and equally exciting. Learning was never something you did because you had to, it was something you did because you loved it.
Faith was not an important part of my childhood. I was vaguely aware of the concept of God, but my own interactions with Him were limited to occasional childish moments of bar- gaining about something that I really wanted Him to do for me. Sure enough, the rains held off, and I never took up the habit. Earlier, when I was five, my parents decided to send me and my next oldest brother to become members of the boys choir at the local Episcopal church. They made it clear that it would be a great way to learn music, but that the theology should not be taken too seriously.
I followed those instructions, learning the glories of harmony and counterpoint but letting the theological concepts being preached from the pulpit wash over me without leaving any discernible residue.
When I was ten, we moved in town to be with my ailing grandmother, and I entered the public schools. At fourteen, my eyes were opened to the wonderfully exciting and powerful methods of science. Inspired by a charismatic chemistry teacher who could write the same information on the blackboard with both hands simultaneously, I discovered for the first time the in- tense satisfaction of the ordered nature of the universe.
The fact that all matter was constructed of atoms and molecules that followed mathematical principles was an unexpected revela- tion, and the ability to use the tools of science to discover new things about nature struck me at once as something of which I wanted to be a part. With the enthusiasm of a new convert, I decided my goal in life would be to become a chemist.
Never mind that I knew relatively little about the other sciences, this first puppy love seemed life-changing. In contrast, my encounters with biology left me completely cold.
I really wasn't that interested in memorizing the parts of the crayfish, nor in trying to figure out the difference between a phylum, a class, and an order. The overwhelming complexity of life led me to the con- clusion that biology was rather like existential philosophy: it just didn't make sense. For my budding reductionist mind, there was not nearly enough logic in it to be appealing.
Graduating at sixteen, I went on to the University of Virginia, determined to major in chemistry and pursue a scientific career. Like most college freshmen, I found this new environment invigorating, with so many ideas bouncing off the classroom walls and in the dorm rooms late at night.
Some of those questions invariably turned to the existence of God. In my early teens I had had oc- casional moments of the experience of longing for something outside myself, often associated with the beauty of nature or a particularly profound musical experience.
Nevertheless, my sense of the spiritual was very undeveloped and easily chal- lenged by the one or two aggressive atheists one finds in al- most every college dormitory. By a few months into my college career, I became convinced that while many religious faiths had inspired interesting traditions of art and culture, they held no foundational truth.
Huxley to indicate someone who simply does not know whether or not God exists. I was definitely in the latter cate- gory. In fact, my assertion of "I don't know" was really more along the lines of "I don't want to know.
I practiced a thought and behavior pattern referred to as "willful blindness" by the noted scholar and writer C. After graduation, I went on to a Ph. My intellectual life was immersed in quantum mechanics and second-order differential equations, and my heroes were the giants of physics—Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac.
Reading the biography of Albert Einstein, and discovering that despite his strong Zionist position after World War II, he did not believe in Yahweh, the God of the Jewish people, only rein- forced my conclusion that no thinking scientist could seriously entertain the possibility of God without committing some sort of intellectual suicide.
And so I gradually shifted from agnosticism to atheism. I felt quite comfortable challenging the spiritual beliefs of anyone who mentioned them in my presence, and discounted such per- spectives as sentimentality and outmoded superstition. Two years into this Ph. Despite the daily pleasures of pursuing my dissertation research on theoretical quantum me- chanics, I began to doubt whether this would be a life- sustaining pathway for me.
It seemed that most of the major advances in quantum theory had occurred fifty years earlier, and most of my career was likely to be spent in applying suc- cessive simplifications and approximations to render certain el- egant but unsolvable equations just a tiny bit more tractable.
More practically, it seemed that my path would lead inexorably to a professor's life of delivering an interminable series of lec- tures on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, presented to class after class of undergraduates who were either bored or terrified by those subjects. At about that same time, in an effort to broaden my hori- zons, I signed up for a course in biochemistry, finally investigat- ing the life sciences that I had so carefully avoided in the past.
The course was nothing short of astounding. The principles of DNA, RNA, and protein, never previously apparent to me, were laid out in all of their satisfying digital glory. The ability to apply rigorous intellectual principles to understanding biology, some- thing I had assumed impossible, was bursting forth with the revelation of the genetic code. With the advent of new methods for splicing different DNA fragments together at will recombi- nant DNA , the possibility of applying all of this knowledge for human benefit seemed quite real.
I was astounded. Biology has mathematical elegance after all. Life makes sense. At the same time, now only twenty-two but married with a bright and inquisitive daughter, I was becoming more social. I had often preferred to be alone when I was younger. Putting all of these sud- den revelations together, I questioned everything about my pre- vious choices, including whether I was really cut out to do science or carry out independent research.
I was just about to complete my Ph. With a carefully practiced speech, I attempted to convince admissions committees that this turn of events was actually a natural pathway for the training of one of our nation's future doctors. Inside I was not so sure. After all, wasn't I the guy who had hated biology because you had to memorize things?
Could any field of study require more memo- rization than medicine? But something was different now: this was about humanity, not crayfish; there were principles under- lying the details; and this could ultimately make a difference in the lives of real people. I was accepted at the University of North Carolina.
Within a few weeks I knew medical school was the right place for me. I loved the intellectual stimulation, the ethical challenges, the human element, and the amazing complexity of the human body. In December of that first year I found out how to combine this new love of medicine with my old love of mathematics.
An austere and somewhat unapproachable pediatrician, who taught a grand total of six hours of lectures on medical genetics to the first-year medical student class, showed me my future. He brought patients to class with sickle cell anemia, galac- tosemia an often-fatal inability to tolerate milk products , and Down syndrome, all caused by glitches in the genome, some as subtle as a single letter gone awry. Though the potential to actually do anything to help very many of those afflicted by such genetic diseases seemed far away, I was immediately drawn to this dis- cipline.
While at that point no shadow of possibility of anything as grand and consequential as the Human Genome Project had entered a single human mind, the path I started on in December of turned out fortuitously to lead directly into participation in one of the most historic undertakings of humankind.
This path also led me by the third year of medical school into intense experiences involving the care of patients. As physicians in training, medical students are thrust into some of the most intimate relationships imaginable with individuals who had been complete strangers until their experience of ill- ness.
Cultural taboos that normally prevent the exchange of in- tensely private information come tumbling down along with the sensitive physical contact of a doctor and his patients. It is all part of the long-standing and venerated contract between the ill person and the healer. I found the relationships that developed with sick and dying patients almost overwhelming, and I strug- gled to maintain the professional distance and lack of emo- tional involvement that many of my teachers advocated.
What struck me profoundly about my bedside conversa- tions with these good North Carolina people was the spiritual aspect of what many of them were going through. If faith was a psychologi- cal crutch, I concluded, it must be a very powerful one. If it was nothing more than a veneer of cultural tradition, why were these people not shaking their fists at God and demanding that their friends and family stop all this talk about a loving and benevolent supernatural power? My most awkward moment came when an older woman, suffering daily from severe untreatable angina, asked me what I believed.
It was a fair question; we had discussed many other important issues of life and death, and she had shared her own strong Christian beliefs with me. I felt my face flush as I stam- mered out the words "I'm not really sure. That moment haunted me for several days. Did I not consider myself a scientist? Does a scientist draw conclusions without considering the data?
Could there be a more important question in all of human existence than "Is there a God? Suddenly all my arguments seemed very thin, and I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking. This realization was a thoroughly terrifying experience.
After all, if I could no longer rely on the robustness of my atheistic po- sition, would I have to take responsibility for actions that I would prefer to keep unscrutinized? Was I answerable to someone other than myself? The question was now too pressing to avoid. But I determined to have a look at the facts, no matter what the outcome. Thus began a quick and confusing survey through the major religions of the world. Much of what I found in the CliffsNotes versions of different religions I found reading the actual sacred texts much too difficult left me thor- oughly mystified, and I found little reason to be drawn to one or the other of the many possibilities.
I doubted that there was any rational basis for spiritual belief undergirding any of these faiths. However, that soon changed. I went to visit a Methodist minister who lived down the street to ask him whether faith made any logical sense. He listened patiently to my confused and probably blasphemous ramblings, and then took a small book off his shelf and suggested I read it.
The book was Mere Christianity by C. In the next few days, as I turned its pages, struggling to absorb the breadth and depth of the intellectual arguments laid down by this leg- endary Oxford scholar, I realized that all of my own constructs against the plausibility of faith were those of a schoolboy. Clearly I would need to start with a clean slate to consider this most important of all human questions. Lewis seemed to know all of my objections, sometimes even before I had quite formu- lated them.
He invariably addressed them within a page or two. When I learned subsequently that Lewis had himself been an atheist, who had set out to disprove faith on the basis of logical argument, I recognized how he could be so insightful about my path. It had been his path as well. To understand the Moral Law, it is useful to consider, as Lewis did, how it is invoked in hundreds of ways each day with- out the invoker stopping to point out the foundation of his argu- ment.
Disagreements are part of daily life. Some are mundane, as the wife criticizing her husband for not speaking more kindly to a friend, or a child complaining, "It's not fair," when different amounts of ice cream are doled out at a birthday party. Other arguments take on larger significance. In international affairs, for instance, some argue that the United States has a moral ob- ligation to spread democracy throughout the world, even if it requires military force, whereas others say that the aggressive, unilateral use of military and economic force threatens to squander moral authority.
In the area of medicine, furious debates currently surround the question of whether or not it is acceptable to carry out re- search on human embryonic stem cells. Some argue that such research violates the sanctity of human life; others posit that the potential to alleviate human suffering constitutes an ethical mandate to proceed.
This topic and several other dilemmas in bioethics are considered in the Appendix to this book. Notice that in all these examples, each party attempts to appeal to an unstated higher standard. This standard is the Moral Law. What is being debated is whether one action or another is a closer approximation to the demands of that law. Those ac- cused of having fallen short, such as the husband who is insuf- ficiently cordial to his wife's friend, usually respond with a variety of excuses why they should be let off the hook.
Virtually never does the respondent say, "To hell with your concept of right behavior. It thus seems to be a phenomenon approach- ing that of a law, like the law of gravitation or of special relativity. Yet in this instance, it is a law that, if we are honest with ourselves, is broken with astounding regularity.
As best as I can tell, this law appears to apply peculiarly to human beings. Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species' behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal tightness.
It is the awareness of right and wrong, along with the development of language, awareness of self, and the ability to imagine the future, to which scientists generally refer when try- ing to enumerate the special qualities of Homo sapiens.
But is this sense of right and wrong an intrinsic quality of being human, or just a consequence of cultural traditions? Some have argued that cultures have such widely differing norms for behavior that any conclusion about a shared Moral Law is unfounded. If a man will go into a library and spend a few days with the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, he will soon discover the massive unanimity of the practical reason in man.
From the Babylonian Hymn to Samos, from the laws of Manu, the Book of the Dead, the Analects, the Stoics, the Platonists, from Australian aborigines and Redskins, he will collect the same triumphantly monotonous denunciations of oppression, murder, treachery and falsehood; the same injunc- tions of kindness to the aged, the young, and the weak, of almsgiving and impartiality and honesty. Yet when surveyed closely, these apparent aberrations can be seen to arise from strongly held but misguided conclusions about who or what is good or evil.
If you firmly believed that a witch is the personifi- cation of evil on earth, an apostle of the devil himself, would it not then seem justified to take such drastic action? Let me stop here to point out that the conclusion that the Moral Law exists is in serious conflict with the current post- modernist philosophy, which argues that there are no absolute rights or wrongs, and all ethical decisions are relative.
This view, which seems widespread among modern philosophers but which mystifies most members of the general public, faces a series of logical Catchs.
If there is no absolute truth, can postmodernism itself be true? Indeed, if there is no right or wrong, then there is no reason to argue for the discipline of ethics in the first place. Others will object that the Moral Law is simply a conse- quence of evolutionary pressures.
If this argument could be shown to hold up, the interpretation of many of the requirements of the Moral Law as a signpost to God would potentially be in trouble—so it is worth examining this point of view in more detail. Consider a major example of the force we feel from the Moral Law—the altruistic impulse, the voice of conscience call- ing us to help others even if nothing is received in return.
Not all of the requirements of the Moral Law reduce to altruism, of course; for instance, the pang of conscience one feels after a minor distortion of the facts on a tax return can hardly be as- cribed to a sense of having damaged another identifiable human being. First, let's be clear what we're talking about. By altruism I do not mean the "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" kind of behavior that practices benevolence to others in direct ex- pectation of reciprocal benefits.
Altruism is more interesting: the truly selfless giving of oneself to others with absolutely no secondary motives.
When we see that kind of love and generos- ity, we are overcome with awe and reverence. Oskar Schindler placed his life in great danger by sheltering more than a thou- sand Jews from Nazi extermination during World War II, and ul- timately died penniless—and we feel a great rush of admiration for his actions. Mother Teresa has consistently ranked as one of the most admired individuals of the current age, though her self-imposed poverty and selfless giving to the sick and dying of Calcutta is in drastic contrast to the materialistic lifestyle that dominates our current culture.
Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, tells the fol- lowing Sufi story. One morning, finishing her meditation, she saw a scor- pion floating helplessly in the strong current. As the scorpion was pulled closer, it got caught in roots that branched out far into the river. The scorpion struggled frantically to free itself but got more and more entangled.
She immediately reached out to the drowning scorpion, which, as soon as she touched it, stung her. The old woman withdrew her hand but, having regained her balance, once again tried to save the creature. Every time she tried, however, the scorpion's tail stung her so badly that her hands became bloody and her face distorted with pain. A passerby who saw the old woman struggling with the scorpion shouted, "What's wrong with you, fool!
Do you want to kill yourself to save that ugly thing? And if we have actually acted on that impulse, the con- sequence was often a warm sense of "having done the right thing. Lewis, in his remarkable book The Four Loves, further explores the nature of this kind of selfless love, which he calls "agape" pronounced ah-GAH-pay , from the Greek.
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