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Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Bigfoot and a Lost God

In highschool, many of us rebel and start to question everything. I was no exception. I don’t know if it is hormones or just a cultural thing or a combination, but how I viewed the world changed. I became sceptical about just about everything. I used to believe in extraterrestrial UFO’s, ghosts, bigfoot, heck, God, even the Loch Ness monster. There were two parts to this transformation:

This a time of adolescence and puberty. Your brain and mind changes significantly during your teen years.1 It is the transformation of changing your viewpoint of the world from a child view to an adult view. As a 41 year old adult, I recognize that much of who I was as a child is still there, but, just as with the general trend of evolution adding new parts to old, my mind is an overlay of an adult mind over my child mind. Heck, even the people who wrote the Bible said it well and recognized this universal truth:

1 Corinthians 13:11, NIV translation

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. “

This, ironically, is how I feel about UFO’s, bigfoot, ghosts, and god(s). As as child, I believed, but as an adult, I put aside childhood things. In this case; belief in an invisible, unknowable, undetectable entity that had nothing to do with start of the universe, the origin and evolution of life on earth, the origin of the earth. With how much we know about the origin of the universe, earth, life, and evolution, the concept of a universal creator god is just plain childish. I will detail why it is a childish and simple concept later.

The second change element was my first biology class in highschool and the book Cosmos. I went to a public high school, and they teach actual science in schools. They was a one sentence acknowledgment of ancient beliefs and the idea that the world was created by a creator god. It then immediately went into abiogenesis, including the Miller experiments and accepted, at this point in 1989, we do not know exactly how life started, but we know it did and approximately when. The biology book then moved onto how organisms work and how evolution works. I remember keeping fruit flies and seeing how variation works and was even able to breed characteristics (like red eyes) and see in just a few weeks how artificial selection, and by proxy, natural selection works. It works. You can try it yourself. It requires no faith or belief. It just works, every time. That is when I decided the whole childish concept of a biblical god was just place keeper until science finds out the real answer.

This loss of belief in a good soon spread to all the pseudoscience for me. Bigfoot? Improbable. Ghosts? Impossible. Extraterrestrial aliens visiting earth in flying saucers? Umm, yeah, next to impossible. These world starting making sense. Why is there ‘evil’? Well, the universe just does not care. What is my transcendental purpose? There is none. Just be the best person you can be and not worry about it. You are an ape, a mammal, a living creature that shares your DNA with all the rest of lif on this planet. It is amazing how much more connected you feel with the world, your fellow humans, and all life on earth. It made me happy, and I did not need any deeper introspection for many years. It is healthy to question your beliefs from time to time. Was I wrong? Could I be wrong? Well, I decided to go and read the Bible, just to set what all the hubbub is about. Wow, that is all I can say. Follow my journey in the next chapter.

1 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/surviving-your-childs-adolescence/201004/adolescence-and-the-problems-puberty

 

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