Perhaps that's just a little bit artful, don't you think, Wayne? <g>. The captain tells the squaddies they're taking too long to paint the barracks. Reply: "Captain, sir, that's how long it takes when you do it the way we're doing it!".
Heh. That's pretty funny. And no, that's not how I meant it. It's like the Anthropic Principal. Why are things the way they are? Because if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to ask. God made the universe the way he made it. When making it that way, it takes some time for things to be ready for the formation of life, and once life forms it takes more time for it to evolve to the state where it can ask, "What took so long?" Time is just a dimension. Why does it take 2 hours to watch a movie? The whole film exists in the VCR tape and you can look at the whole tape in an instant, but it takes a couple hours to watch it. Why so long? Because that's how long it takes when you watch it that way. If you confine yourself to the watching of each frame at a certain number of frames per second, you experience the film in two hours. If you step outside the film and look at it in the VCR cassette, you see the whole thing in the time it takes for the light to bounce off the cassette, hit your retinas, and get translated by your brain.
You did, for example, go to a school that had a daily religious service and gave lessons about religion, didn't you?
I did? That's news to me. I was raised in an atheist family. Why would they send me to a religious school? I went to public school where religion was practically banned. The school board was so scared of getting sued for violating the separation of church and state that a classmate got suspended once for prayer. That caused a big hoopla, but me and most of my classmates were just confused as to why somebody would make such a big deal just because they weren't allowed to talk to themselves.
I was as likely to attribute an experience to God as I was to attribute .... well, I thought about this simile for a while and couldn't think of anything as preposterous as the idea of attributing something to God was to me at the time.
I recognize now that the experience I had was due to brain chemistry and that module being activated, but I heard the voice and felt the presence. It didn't matter that I could see I was alone in the room. I knew, knew as well as I know I'm sitting here, that an inconceivably powerful persona was there. Whether you want to call it God or call it Squiggy doesn't matter: When that part of your brain lights up, you can't help but know that you are dust.
Is it conceivable that it lit up for no apparent reason? Sure. I'll admit that possibility. (I only wish that others would be so honest as to admit the other possibility.) However, as I said, I was on no drugs and there was no apparent trigger of any kind. A seizure effecting that part of the brain? Perhaps. But it came with a coherent message in a voice that didn't sound like my own (as most hallucinated voices do), and it was never repeated as you would expect if it was a seizure.
It was at least a year before I finally admitted to myself that it must have really been something other than me going crazy. A couple years after this incident I hit my head and went to the hospital with a concussion. They gave me a couple MRI's and a few CT Scans and more than a few EKG's as I healed. None of these tests showed any abnormailites at all, anywhere in the brain, other than in the very localized region of my concussion. All the bleeding (and there wasn't a lot) was at the back of the brain and was affecting my vision more than anything else. The God Module is located on the left side, towards the center, and there was nothing wrong anywhere near there. (At the time, the God Module hadn't been discovered or I would have asked them to check that area specifically. As it is, I just have the information that they looked at the whole brain seeking any tumors or other damage and found nothing other than in the right occipital lobe.
Knowing that I apparently had no cause of seizure or mental illness, I soon started looking at various religions to see if I was missing anything in my life. Eventually I met a Catholic Priest who had previously been a true "Man of Science" and had made that conversion. He had no conflicts between science and religion, and he taught me a lot about both. Catholicism, when viewed properly and not through the eyes of a Fundamentalist, fits everything I know.
w
