The Spirit of Christmas

The Spirit of Christmas

  Yes, it’s that time of year again. They started playing Christmas music the day after Halloween at Wal-Mart. I have to admit that Christmas has never been one of my favorite holidays. In fact, most times, I’m glad when it’s over. I’m not exactly a scrooge about it. But there was a time in my life when I was single and spent way too many Christmases all alone. Those were dark days in my life when I was self destructing and circling the drain. Those days left a stain on my soul that lingers still. Even when I’m with loved ones now on Christmas, I still feel that lonely abyss tugging at me. The despair of those days haunts me always, and I’m especially reminded of it when I see all the Yule Tide decorations start to go up.

  I hear so much about the “Christmas Spirit” and wonder why we only seem to want to have that at this particular time of the year. I mean, what is Christmas Spirit anyway? And, if it’s so great, why shouldn’t we have it all year round? We are supposed to be celebrating the birth of our Savoir, Jesus Christ in December. Never mind that he was probably born in late August or September. I see a lot of movies on the Hallmark Channel about Christmas Spirit…they start, too, right after Halloween when all the scary Halloween movie reruns have played out. I guess they don’t make too many Thanksgiving movies. I like Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorite holidays. You sit around with the family and stuff yourself with good food. And there’s no pressure to buy anybody any gifts on Thanksgiving. After a good meal you can always enjoy a football game on TV. That’s my kind of holiday.

  But back to all those Christmas Spirit movies on Hallmark Channel….they seem to mostly be about Santa Claus and how, if we don’t muster up enough Christmas Spirit this year, Santa will go out of business. Either that or some of the movies are about relationships that blossom after two people somehow find each other during the holidays usually with the miraculous help of the good old Saint Nick who just happens to show up at the right moment to eliminate all obstacles that were keeping the two lonely hearts apart. So the message seems to be in all this that Santa is the reason for the season, and it’s all about the presents. Or he’s a pretty good substitute for cupid. Don’t get me wrong…I enjoy watching some of these fanciful and touching tales on the Hallmark Channel. But I have to wonder where Christ is in CHRISTmas these days. After all it’s not Santamas…although maybe December 25^th is really Santa's birthday. Someone needs to tell him in that case that he’s got it all wrong, and you’re supposed to get gifts on your birthday not give them.

  And lately, for fear of offending someone, we are not even supposed to say Merry Christmas in public. Well did't Jesus say, "But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven."? I would so much more fear that offense than worry about someone's tender feelings here. But, hey, you who know me also know that I've never been one to worry about being politically correct. I've never been offended by someone saying Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Sviata Vechera, etc, etc. or even the generic stand-in, Happy Holidays. So if me and millions of other well wishing Christians cheerfully wishing each other a Merry Christmas offends you, then maybe you might be happier living in a non-Christian country. Because I for one am not going to stop exercising my God given/Constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. As for you of the Atheistic persuasion, the last bastion of official government sponsored atheism, The Peoples Republic of China, is fighting a losing battle of its own against a rising tide of Christianity not to mention the never eradicated pockets of Buddhism and areas of still practicing Muslims. So the window of opportunity is closing rapidly in that part of the world as we speak. You might be wiser to learn to just ignore us when we go about our Merry Christmas ways the same way we ignore Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins.

  Anyway, this year - more so than any other year - I have made a vow to have real Christmas Spirit. I plan on putting Christ first in all that I do and not worry so much about Santa Clause and presents. I know Wall Street is probably making a list of hit men about now and checking it twice to see which ones live near me in case that idea catches on. Heaven forbid that we all quit putting the focus on buying everyone we care about a present. People would lose jobs, and Main Street would go belly up broke for sure. I just want to get something back that I know I lost a long time ago. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this, and many in the world today have lost their true Christmas Spirit too. Jesus gave us the best present anyone could ever give us. And he accomplished that not with his birth but by his death and resurrection. As for me, I will strive to be filled with the true Christmas Spirit this year. After all if it weren’t for Jesus, that abyss I mentioned earlier would probably not be just something I feared in my worse nightmares, but my permanent address.

  So this year, when you hear me tell you Merry Christmas, just know that I mean it in the best possible way. May Jesus also be the reason for your Christmas Spirit – this and every other time of the year. Merry Christmas everyone, and may God walk with you throughout the coming year.

                                 vs.

Evil Empire

  President Ronald Reagan once referred to the Soviet Union as “The Evil Empire”. Indeed Russia’s history has often been a bloody one. But not many nations have escaped that particular epitaph. The U.S. has perhaps had one of the bloodiest histories around. For confirmation of that, go ask the original American Native population…what’s left of it. Or ask the people of Hiroshima or Nagasaki who were civilians in a country that was trying desperately to surrender and were killed anyway. In an instant 300,000 died. And we do have some far flung “colonies” or territories and spheres of influence to this day as a result of that war. Does that make us an empire and evil? As a people, perhaps not. But as a nation - we have definitely crossed the line of late.

  Nearly every time you turn on the TV, you see talking heads descrying this nation or that as evil and in dire need of at least a good bombing. And the excuse is always the same – to protect our American freedoms or help the poor hapless people of said country to obtain democracy like ours.  Once we’ve bombed the country back to the stone age killing thousands of it’s citizens and maybe caused many millions more to flee as refugees in the process, we prop up a government that answers to the U.S. (not to mention a banking system that answers to the IMF) and then sit back and say gee whiz why aren’t they more appreciative of the democracy we’ve handed to them on a silver platter? Meanwhile their cities are rubble, their infrastructure is non-existent, healthcare is pathetic, and they’re wondering where their next meal is going to come from. But, hey, at least they now have a democracy instead of one of those nasty old dictatorships. Need a prime example? Go look at Gadhafi’s Libya before we intervened and take a gander at the turmoil that exists now. Then look at the rest of the Middle East countries we’ve demanded regime change in. And then take an unbiased eye view of life there before and after we put our boots on the ground. Then tell me again who the evil empire is?

  I know some will be horrified at these statements and accuse me of being un-American or worse a traitor. But I for one fail to see in all this anything positive or good. Oh but you say we have demolished terrorism all over the world and made the world safer for our democracy at least. First of all we don’t have a democracy…never have. So we need to quit saying we’re doing any of this to spread our democracy over the rest of the world that is just too ignorant to see that it’s just what they need. If you believe this is the reason for any of our recent history, then you need to pull you head out of cable news because they have turned your brain to mush. Secondly, is the world really rid of or safe from terrorism? Have any of the recent wars made any kind of dent on terrorism? On the contrary, it has provided the best recruitment tools a terrorist organization could ask for. And guess where most of them got their weapons?

  Now there’s this new boogeyman called ISIS (or ISIL as Obama insists on calling it since the L stands for Levant which includes Israel; a country he’s not overly fond of). Yes some members of ISIS are guilty of some horrible things. There has been killing of innocents and all those who refuse to convert to their particular brand of Islam. And then there’s the beheadings. On our cable news networks this is made out to be the worst, most barbaric thing imaginable and they scream for justice (bombs and boots) to rain down on these barbarians. Ok, beheading bad. We can all agree on that. But is it any more barbaric than sitting somewhere in Colorado and working a joystick to send a drone into some country half way around the world that we haven’t even declared war against and unleashing hell and fire against “terrorists” who are sitting down to dinner with their wives and children?  And calling their neighbors collateral damage, whose house was just a little too close to said terrorists. Is that any less barbaric? And did you know that there have been 59 “legal” beheadings so far in Saudi Arabia this year alone. Yet I’ve not heard cable news calling them barbaric or demanding boots and bombs rain down on that country. I won’t even get started on who ISIS really is and how they came to be. Let’s just suffice it to say that they provide a convenient excuse for bombing a country we’ve been chomping at the bit to bomb all along anyway and leave it at that for now.

  So let me ask you to step back here for a moment and tell me where it all went wrong? Many of you, I know, are going to point to 9/11 and say that is justification enough for what’s been happening in the world today. Is it? Even if you buy the story the President and the Main Stream Media told you of that tragedy (which I don’t) how is it that the one country that donated the majority of the terrorists on those planes and, it can be shown, the money that paid their way is still unscathed through all this. That country is Saudi Arabia. No bombs dropped there. And two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan - that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 - got attacked shortly thereafter and have been demolished for a crime they didn’t commit. And the ball kept rolling from there. And it doesn’t look like they plan on stopping it any time in the near future. Can World War III be too far off if this keeps going? And when history looks back at nations picking sides and going at each other, who will they say started it? Nineteen men with box cutters on some airplanes who were officially not representing any country at all even though fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi citizens. Or perhaps will they judge the U.S. harshly as overacting and killing the baby while throwing out the bathwater? I guess it will depend on who is left alive to write those history books.

  I have come to believe that our fall was predestined and set into motion much earlier than 09/11/2001. Although this country was conceived in the light of day, it was hijacked and took a turn towards the dark side a long time ago. People really do need to wake up and take a good, long, honest, look at where, when, and why this has happened. There are dark forces at work in human history. And those forces have concentrated their efforts in the good old USA of late. Unless the good people of this country rise up and put a stop to it, the world as we know it will come to a very nasty end.

  This country was built up as “One Nation Under God”. It says it right there on our currency, “In God We Trust”. But is this still true today? More and more, we as a nation have turned away from God. Materialism is our new God. When Israel did this, God sent a prophet, Isaiah, to warn them. But they didn’t listen. So God stretched out his hand towards them in the form of using their enemies to shake them in an effort to wake them up and cause them to repent. He did the same thing to America on September 11^th 2001. In fact using the very same enemy he used against Israel as related in the Book of Isaiah Ch. 9 which was the Assyrians (though they don’t call themselves that anymore those hijackers were of the same blood as those ancient Assyrians). But Israel would remain defiant. And boast about rebuilding and coming back stronger and greater. In Isaiah 9:10 they boasted that, “The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones; the sycomores are cut down, but we will replace them with cedars.”  Those very words were read into the Congressional Record on the day after 9/11 by the Speaker of the House. It was done in the manner of defiance and boasting that we would rebuild even stronger in defense and defiance of our enemies. Not even a hint of repentance in any of the speeches made then or since. And did you know that when the World Trade Buildings came down there was an actual sycamore tree in a nearby park (in an area where anything but concrete and asphalt is rare) that was knocked down by the falling debris? The sycamore was later replaced with a cedar. Also a huge stone was hewn from a mountain in upstate New York to serve as the corner stone for the new tower built to replace the old.

  So how did God handle an unrepentant and boastful nation? Isaiah 9:11 tells us that God stirred up King Rezin of the Arameans along with his enemies and brought them against Israel. In 9:12 “The Syrians before and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. Even after all this, in 9:13, “For the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them (the Lord God), neither do they seek the Lord of hosts.”  Were those same people stirred up against us? Obviously, they were.

  But often in the Bible, when God sends a prophet and no one listens, and then he shakes them in an effort to get their attention they still don’t get it. So what happens next? A bigger shaking always happens. The World Trade Center was a symbol of America’s financial might. And it came crashing down. But did America change its ways? No not at all. The movement away from God continued. Greater attempts were made to remove God from schools, workplaces, even our everyday speech. So first the symbol of our economic power was broken and then, in 2009, Wall Street and our actual economic power was shaken to the core. It would have fallen into ruin if the government had not stepped in and bailed them out with our future earnings, devastating our economy then and for future generations to come.

  I wish I could say that we’ve gotten the message and repented as a nation. But that’s just not true. We have struck out at enemies in all parts of the world, still defiant as ever. And where there were no enemies we’ve created them. Many thousands have been killed, and millions more have been left homeless, displaced and living in misery. And there doesn’t appear to be any end to our hubris. Will God give us one more devastating shaking perhaps in the form of a total economic collapse to finally get our attention? Or will this next one leave no brick standing one atop the other?

  I believe that this country is under judgment by God, and we will suffer the same fate that Israel did under similar circumstances. Unrepentant Israel was demolished and ceased to exist as a nation. We may soon suffer the same fate if we don’t change our ways and turn back to God. The question is, can we change them now or is it too late? And whose fault is it, anyway? Is it the President? Or is it perhaps all those seeming buffoons in Congress? Or maybe it’s the fat cats on Wall Street that we should blame for the mess we’re in. Surely some of those have a degree of blame to answer for. But only in that many of them have made themselves complicit with the real powers that be.    

  And just who are the real powers that have led this country astray? I know this part will get me ridiculed and labeled a kook. Most didn’t listen to or believe the prophets God sent either, and they were ridiculed or killed. But I firmly believe that this country is in the hands of those very fallen ones and their leader. Many men and women of power in this country, from Hollywood to D.C. and Wall Street, have entered into secret covenant with them and are working hand in hand with them to bring about our ruin and destruction. It is they who are steadfastly attempting to remove God from our society and have brought God’s judgment upon us. Our only hope – pray! Pray for all you’re worth.  

Main Stream Madness

  Current events have been managed and packaged into a twenty-four-hour "entertainment" media that, frankly, I find horrifying when it tries to pass itself off as news. It is instead so much propaganda disguised as news that it is a wonder to me how more people don't realize this and start throwing their TV's into the trash heaps where they belong. Let me take one example and demonstrate what I mean. Recently, a group of individuals that have been labeled by, what I call the Blame Stream Media (BSM), as ISIS or ISIL or IS, for short, has been all over the BSM. I won't try to confuse you with the difference and meaning of this alphabet soup the media is fond of throwing at you. And just as a side, have you noticed that the drug cartel, also known as the CDC and Big Pharma, have taken to doing the same thing? Every disease you can think of has now been given some alphanumeric designation like ALS or RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome -- give me a break....I think I have that now as my leg involuntarily wants to kick someone in their posterior regions (PR's?) every time I turn on the "news".) Anyway, ISIS was alleged to have posted a video on the web recently of them purportedly decapitating an American news journalist which went viral - a testament as to how voyeuristic our society has become - which sent our BSM into a whirlwind of frenzy and war drum pounding. 

  Don't get me wrong here. It was a horrific and barbaric thing to do to another human being. But lets stop and ask a few questions first before we jump on the band wagon. Fist of all, what about the victim in question? Did they practice some plastic surgery on him while in captivity? Because if you compare the pictures of the guy they supposedly decapitated with earlier pre-captivity photos, you will notice that it looks nothing like the same guy. Secondly, what good would it do this so called ISIS group to publish something like that on the web? Do you think they are crazy enough to purposely provoke the whole world into attacking them? You can't honestly believe that they think such a tactic would forestall or cause someone to cease to attack them? In who's world does that make any kind of sense? Instead, the BSM has more to gain from such a thing than the group accused of it Now they can justify going back into a country we've already ravaged by war, which they claim we should have never left in the first place, and possibly into one that we've been chomping at the bit to disassemble as well. Think of the ratings such an event would produce. Secondly, how can we be sure that the so called ISIS group had anything to do with the video on the web? Men wearing masks and threatening someone with a knife? This could be done anywhere by anyone with a video camera. What proof does the BSM offer that it is indeed ISIS and for that matter even a real event rather than a Hollywood style production? You say they offered no proof, or even inquiry, or honest journalistic investigation before splashing it all over the place? And immediately their feeding frenzy of war rhetoric began with all the various networks saying the same dishonesty spewing out things like, "This is a most barbaric provocation and act of war!" Yes, if a true event, it is horrible. But is it any more barbaric than say a drone strike on a "suspected" terrorist killing several people including women and children in a country we're not even officially at war with? Or say carpet bombing a whole village killing innocents as well as combatants that might be taking refuge there? I can go on and on with a list of things that we have done that seem totally horrific and barbaric to me. When anyone else does it the BSM calls it terrorism, but when we do it, they call it self defense or protecting our national interest.

  Anyway, that's just one example of the total hypocrisy that passes for news these days. There are so many others. Don't even get me started on the Ferguson, Missouri incident. Now to top all this off, I read an article the other day written by a woman who says she worked in the industry. She said she was aware that subliminal messages were being inserted routinely in both commercials and during regular TV programs. Also that the practice has spread to cell phones and computers. So how do you like your mind control? Over easy or scrambled? All I can say is welcome to our Orwellian Society. Hope you enjoy it. For  me, I think I will be mostly tuning out, at least until the storm troopers show up at my front door....hold on....gotta go...someone's knocking on my front door.  

A Simple Choice

  For many years I’ve kept my religious convictions pretty much to myself. People that know me well didn’t know what was going on in my heart and mind. I’ve come out and stated that I believe in God a few times in this blog but left it at that. I’ve been received less than favorably for doing so. That kept me from elaborating further. But no more. I’m tired of apologizing for what I believe in as though I’ve done something to be ashamed of. I’m not ashamed. And I’m not just “playing the odds”. My convictions are real. So I feel like I need to finally come clean and tell the story of how I got to this point and made the “simple” choice to believe.

  I was not brought up in a religious family. Far from it. My parents didn’t go to church and never encouraged us to do so. I don’t remember ever seeing a Bible in our house. My first encounter with religion came by way of my Aunt Vern, who was born and raised Catholic and determined that my father was raising a bunch of heathens. She got into an argument with him about it one day, and he told her that if she was so worried about it she could bring us to church. So she did. Aunt Vern managed to get her sisters there to be godparents and got us all baptized in the local Catholic Church. Aunt Vern was my godmother. We then had to attend something called catechism and go with her on Sundays to mass. Back in those days, the mass was all in Latin. Also, even the choir sang in Latin; I know because I was briefly a member of the choir and had to learn songs in Latin without knowing what I was singing about.

  One of my most embarrassing moments happened early on during my Catholic experience. My first confession.  I wasn’t really sure what a sin was. Or what I was supposed to do in there. Nervously I entered the little closed in box with a sliding window. I could hear the priest mumbling something to the person on the other side but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then the window on my side slid open with a bang and startled me. I blurted out, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” I was pretty sure I had, but didn’t have a clue what I was going to say other than that. After all, I was only about twelve years old. How bad could I have been? The priest was praying and I blurted out, “I said some bad words.” I hadn’t really but then I froze and couldn’t think of anything else so terrible that I needed to confess it. The priest asked, “Is that it? What words did you say?” Oh crap! I was supposed to actually tell him what I said? “Hell, and th…th.. the “S” word, Father,” I stuttered. He mumbled something about repenting and then told me that for my penance I should say two “Our Father’s” and five “Hail Mary’s”. Then the window banged shut startling me again. “Our Father who art in heaven”….I began quickly. I knelt there and got about half way through the third Hail Mary when the window banged open again on my side. The person on the other side must not have had too many sins to confess I guessed. I stammered out that I had already had my turn. The window banged shut again. Father was in a hurry to get this over with I guessed, and I was holding up the line. I exited the booth without finishing the requisite Hail Mary’s sure I was now condemned to hell forever because of it. When I went back and sat next to my Aunt Vern she whispered, “You sure were in there a long time. Did you have that much to confess?”  I slid down in the pew sure that everyone else in the church was looking at me and thinking the same thing. In the car on the way home, my Aunt asked me again about it, and she laughed all the way home when I told her what happened. She told me I was supposed to say the prayers after I left the booth. Who knew?

  Anyway, determined to discover what all the fuss was about, I went to the YMCA, that was near our house, the next week and pulled down the huge Holy Bible that was perched upon a podium in the small reading room off to one side of the main playroom. It was the biggest book I had ever seen, and the only way to manage it was to lay it on the floor in front of me. I sat cross-legged and began with Genesis. I worked my way through the whole book that summer in just such a manner. For some the King James is almost like a foreign language. But I had always been an avid reader, so I had little difficulty understanding the words. But the concepts were strange and puzzled me greatly.

  After I finished it, I had a multitude of questions to say the least. Well that’s what catechism is for, right? Being a very shy kid, I didn’t have the nerve to ask the priest who taught the class any of my questions. But fortunately, my cousin was always around and was sort of a teacher’s aid. So I asked him to ask the priest for me. First question was why do we say there is only one true god but we pray to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Wouldn’t that count as three? And then there’s the Virgin Mary as well. Don’t that make four? The priest answered a couple of my easier questions at first because he thought they were coming from my cousin. But when he realized that my cousin was just the go between, he told him that I shouldn’t be worried about such things because that’s what the priesthood was for. They did the worrying for us, and all I needed to do was go to church and do what I was told. Feeling totally patronized, I abandoned all hope of finding any answers in the Catholic Church. So, to the dismay of my Aunt Vern, I quit going. At this point I can honestly say that I didn’t have much faith in organized religion or what they were all about. I was basing this on a sample of only one of course, and that may not have been a fair assessment. But I was only a teenager, after all, and had little opportunity or desire to broaden my base line.

  At a very young age, and way before my aunt dragged us kicking and screaming to church, I believed that there was a God or at least some kind of creator for the universe. My brother, Don, and I laid on top of the Sears warehouse on nights when it was too hot to sleep looking up at the stars and speculated about it all the time. He had his doubts back then, but somehow I just knew there was a God. Where that knowledge came from, I couldn’t say. But I had no such inkling of what to do with the whole Jesus thing.  So, after my disappointing Catholic experience, I put that question on the back burner for a while. I muddled through school without thinking overly much about religion after that.

    However, when I graduated from high school, I began reading everything I could get my hands on pertaining to religion. I had already read the Bible so I thought it only fair that I read other religion’s scriptures and holy writings as well. I read them all even the Book of Mormon which is one of the hardest books to read all the way through, by the way. Because to me, at that point, it was one of the most boring books I ever read. Not to mention that I had decided early on, after noticing some historical discrepancies, that it was a total fiction.

  Anyway, after that, I began reading what the opposition had to say. I got very excited when I started reading about the great philosophers and scientists and what they had to say on the matter. Uncle Sam’s Army got in the way of my further studies, though, for the next four years. I did attend several different churches with various Army buddies just out of curiosity when they invited me, but still came away from them uninspired and with the same old unanswered questions.

  After the Army, there was college. I jumped into that with both feet. The University of Lamar had books on cosmology not found at our local library. I read them all. I was majoring in English Literature and noticed that many of the great poets and authors were struggling with the same questions I was. It stoked the fires of my quest to understand…well everything. Even after college, I continued to read everything on the subject of how we or the universe got here.

  So here I was with tons of knowledge and arguments from both sides. I knew all the arguments made by theologians and the counter arguments made by scientists. But I was still no closer to determining which side was closer to the truth --- and let me just state here that at that point I was pretty convinced that neither side was. Because of my lack of conviction one way or the other, people on my job started calling me an atheist. I let them believe that for a time, although I still had that deep seated conviction that there is a God.

  My first very real religious experience happened several years after I graduated from college and close to the end of my first marriage. Of all places it occurred at a New Year’s Eve Party my wife and I went to at a local night club in Beaumont. All my years of studying this mystifying question left me a pretty serious, quiet, and introverted individual. A few minutes before the stroke of midnight, when the crowd was making so much noise you couldn’t hear anything but a constant roar, a sudden silence fell over me. The noise seemed to vanish as if someone turned off a switch. Then the most peaceful feeling I have ever experienced overwhelmed me. Then I heard a voice say, “Life was not meant to be so serious all the time. Live in Joy. Enjoy the life I’ve given you while you can.” No, I had not been drinking anything other than a glass of champagne. I was the designated driver. At the stroke of midnight the sound came flooding back in, nearly bursting my eardrums. I sat there laughing, with tears streaming down my face. My wife noticed when she tried to kiss me and wish me a happy new year. She asked what was so funny. I don’t think she ever believed me when I told her what had just happened.

  Our marriage ended not too long after that. What followed was many years of depression and self-destructive behavior on my part. Years I’m not proud of at all. I hear many testimonies of people who say that just such times are when the Lord comes to them and they are saved. Not so for me. I reached rock bottom a couple of times during those years. But no angels appeared to pull me up off the floor, and no more mystical experiences occurred that might grant me some kind of revelation. I was still determined to pry out the answer from the universe itself if I had to. If there was a God, I was going to find him on the sheer strength of my own will and brain power with clear and unequivocal reasoning. I spent many more years trying to do just that all the while hating myself more and more for my many failures.

  None of what was becoming a battle royal in my mind was evident on the surface of my day to day life, however. There were times during my second marriage when I was even reasonably content. But I was still reading and studying everything I could both in science and religion. I read the Bible all the way through once again hoping for inspiration. None came right away. Only more questions. During that time, I began listening to a Bible teaching Pastor on TV that had quite a different slant than any I had ever heard preached before. This Pastor actually answered quite a few of the questions that had been bugging me for quite some time. Then my second marriage hit an inevitable rough patch. I say this because I had known from the beginning that this marriage had been undertaken for all the wrong reasons with the wrong person. My second wife had a strong stance against organized religion at that time and wouldn’t even discuss it with me. I had to watch my favorite Pastor on TV when she was not around even.

  Finally, I realized during this time that the quest I was on was futile. It was set up this way on purpose. We will never have definitive proof one way or the other. The whole point is that we are to make a choice without that kind of proof. If God were to reveal Himself in all His glory to the whole world in the next five minutes, most of us would immediately fall down and worship Him. But would we truly love Him? Or would we be doing so because we would be afraid to do otherwise. Have you ever had the experience where you tried to make someone love you? Can love exist where free will is absent?

  So, I finally understood that I could not get to God by the sheer strength of my own mind. So while my marriage was crumbling around me once again, I did the only thing left for me to do. I surrendered. I said ok, God, here I am. I am yours if you want me. At that moment that peacefulness I had experienced once before fell over me, and my heart was filled with a love so overpowering that I wept. My life began to change from that moment on. My wife and I filed for divorce, and I began going to a Baptist Church with a friend of mine. I wish I could say it was a drastic change. But it wasn’t. I was still just me – a wretch in every since of the word. But I no longer doubted God’s existence at all.

  All that was left was to come to grips with Jesus. I knew I could do it with God in my corner. After weighing all the insights I had gained both in science and religion, I realized that it all came down to a simple choice. I asked myself which worldview I would prefer to be reality. The sterile, accidental, scientific, atheistic, worldview in which there is no purpose or meaning to life -- Or the religious worldview with the possibility of an ever lasting life of joy and peace. There’s no contest, really. I chose the later simply because I wish it to be so. As soon as I made that choice, I began to literally fall in love with Jesus. The instances where he has spoken to me and guided me since then are too numerous to go into here. But my doubts are a thing of the past now. My life has still taken many twists and turns since then. I have been tested often. But my faith has remained strong deep in my heart. But unlike many new Christians who want to rush out and tell everyone, I kept my new light under a bushel basket. So many of my friends and family were if not openly hostile to any sort of religion, they were at least indifferent and didn’t want to hear about it. So I kept my new found faith to myself for the most part.

  Do I understand the difficulty many have of making the same choice I did? Yes, very much so. But I can say without a doubt, it was the right choice. I have changed since that day. I am a different person now. Not perfect by any means. And life is still hard; perhaps even harder now because I made the choice. I have suffered losses that have tested my faith. But my faith has overcome and is stronger than ever. I no longer fear death or anything else for that matter. And that big empty hole in my heart and soul that I carried around for so long is full of joy and love for my Lord and Savior.

  I have heard it said many times that such a choice requires a leap of faith. This is true. To believe what the secular world tells you to be the truth requires just as big a leap of faith. I’ve heard secular people declare that the universe didn’t need a creator to come into existence from nothing. It only required the laws of nature, and those alone could create the universe out of nothing. Oh really? Does a law have will. Can it make something happen just by simply existing as a fundamental law? And if so, then where did the laws of nature come from? Who created them? It seems to me that you’re still being asked to take one giant leap of faith to believe such an un-provable thing. This is basically what Stephen Hawking is saying now. So you will have to take that leap either way.

  All the big questions out there that we all ponder from time to time really do just boil down to a simple choice. Which leap will you take? I believe it’s why we’re here. Will you make an informed choice? Or just go whichever way the wind blows without putting much of your own thought into it? Is it possible to make that choice on the last day of your life? Yes. The thief on the cross with Jesus did so and was promised everlasting life with the Lord. Will you risk waiting until then just so you can live your life anyway you want to? Sadly, some will risk it. Some who do take such a risk will fail and lose their opportunity forever. Others hate the whole idea of God and heaven. I feel sorry for those. Not for any punishment they might receive after death, but for the fullness of joy that they walk around every day without. I know what it is to live like that. I would never go back to that. So, although the journey I took to get there was arduous, the choice I finally made was simple. And that supposedly giant leap was more like just a step across a line from one side to the other. I’ve never regretted it since then. I pray for your wisdom and strength to make your choice and take that step. When you do, I hope you land on the same side that I did before your time runs out. If you do, I and many more like me will welcome you with open arms into a very big and loving family. Peace and Love be with you.

Well, the editing is done on the third book in the World of Destiny series. Now all it needs is a cover and it will be ready to go to the publisher. Here is a sample of a part of Chapter Five for all those who can't wait to see the continuing saga of the Sansing Chronicles.

                                                                 CHAPTER FIVE

  Father Joe was visibly tired. He had argued for days with all the elders of Mary's people. This in itself was a strange process. Sitting aboard Mary while “talking” to what, for all intents and purposes, was a bunch of corals resting on the ocean floor seemed surreal at best. They respected Father Joe as a fellow elder, and one who had immersed himself in what the humans called religion. As far as Father Joe could tell, they had heard him out. But this was the first time that a human had really interacted with Mary's people. Some like Mary had much knowledge of how humans thought and behaved. But the elders did not. Their knowledge was all second hand. Father Joe had known from the beginning that it would be an uphill battle.

  Currently he was resting in his “room” inside the hull of the ship. It was hard not to think of Mary's outer shell as anything but a ship, space or otherwise. They floated with the currents of the worldwide ocean. Father Joe was told by Mary that normally she would be resting on the sea floor with all her companions right now. And that the outer shell that he thought of as “the ship” would be gone...absorbed into the oceanic soup to be reconstructed around her once again when she was ready to move on.

  Father Joe had apologized for keeping her away from her friends. Mary had assured him that it was alright, because she knew the importance Father Joe attached to his mission. Mary was honest with Father Joe at least. She had told him that she was not convinced that he was right in his evaluation of the situation with the entity calling itself God. But Father Joe was her friend, and she respected him. When asked, Father Joe had willingly opened his mind to her and through her to all the elders of her kind. She saw what he saw and felt so deeply with unflinching conviction. Even now, when Mary thought about it she shivered. It had scared her a little. When she admitted that to Father Joe, he assured her that she was right to be scared. It scared him too.

  Father Joe? Would you like to sleep for a while? I know my people. They will discuss this for days before they come to any kind of a decision.

  “I don't think I can right now. And if you mean the chemically induced sleep you offer then maybe later,” he told her. “For now, I just want to rest.”

   Okay. Would you like to see my world while you rest? I mean really see it as I do.

  “Yes. I think I would,” he answered not really knowing what Mary was offering.

  Suddenly the whole ship became clear as crystal; and not just the one wall like before when he addressed the elders. Father Joe was still lying on his bed but it was as though the whole ship had just suddenly vanished. He sat upright quickly panicked by sensory overload. Once he realized that he wasn't going to drown, and he reached out and could still feel the walls and the floor where they should be, Father Joe caught his breath and marveled. It was like being in a faerie land. There were fish of all kinds, shapes, and colors swimming to and fro. Father Joe looked up and he could see the sparkling sunlight shimmering on the “ceiling” of the great ocean.

  When he looked down, he saw a great undulating forest of some type of sea vegetation that resembled kelp but was multicolored.  It was so beautiful dancing about on the ocean floor that it was hard for him to take his eyes from it. But when he did, Father Joe was even more awestruck by structures in the distance that looked like faerie castles.

  “Do you build cities?” Father Joe asked Mary in amazement.

  Before she could answer, Father Joe looked down and a little to his left. He could see Mary there seemingly floating in the sea nearby.

   “I see you Mary! Do you know how beautiful you are? What a rare and magnificent being God created when he created you,” Father Joe said sincerely. This place was almost too much to take in all at once. Father Joe's eyes flitted around like a humming bird taking in bits and pieces of the glory he saw all around him. It was truly amazing.

  No. We do not build cities. Those structures are built by a colony of animals much like what you call king crabs that I saw in your ocean. They are the favorite food of another animal that swims and has many tentacles that can defeat them and pull their hard shell apart. So they build the structures as extra protection. It is they who plant the vast gardens of multicolored vegetation as well. They plant, care for, and then harvest these gardens. When they do, they can become prey to the ones who hunt them. In their citadels though, they are safe. And thanks.

  “Thanks for what?” Joe asked absentmindedly having forgotten already, in his pure wonder at their surroundings, his earlier compliment.

   Thanks in that you see me as beautiful. Amongst my kind I am considered quite ordinary.

  “You're welcome. My child, you are the most beautiful and extraordinary person I have ever met! And I daresay there is absolutely nothing ordinary about you at all, my dear one,” Father Joe told her sincerely.

  Mary could see in his mind that Father Joe was very sincere in what he had just said, and she could not help but be astonished. Mary looked up to the humans like a baby sister to her much older brother. Father Joe's comments made her feel not just equal but so much more for the first time in her very short life. It caused her to re-evaluate her whole worldview. She began to see herself from Father Joe's perspective as one of God's creations. And if it were true, as Father Joe constantly insisted that God loved all of his creations, she began to feel a new self-awareness. She began for the first time to see herself as one who was important. One who mattered to God and the Universe. It was a strange new paradigm for her. In a world where everyone can read each other's thoughts and feelings all the time, no one ever felt very special. She saw that her kind existed in a kind of sea of sameness where individual personalities were subdued. For the first time, however, Mary thought of herself as being “apart”. She was an individual who mattered. And she was a beautiful individual all on her own. With this new revolution going on in her thoughts, Mary also began to replay in her mind the whole confrontation with the being that called itself God. She replayed everything in her mind against the backdrop of what she had seen in Father Joe's mind. Suddenly, she was afraid. Very afraid.

  Father Joe. I think you are right. We have to go back and talk to my elders again. I agree with you now. That creature was not God. And suddenly I'm very afraid. We have to go!

  “Hallelujah, Thank you Jesus! Let’s go Mary and thank you now for believing me. I thought I was alone against the world. It’s good to have a friend at your side.”

  I believe you, and we have to convince my elders that they have to help close the necessary portals as soon as possible. That thing cannot be allowed to come here.

  “Amen!” Was all that Father Joe said. The walls of the ship became visible again, and Mary began hastily to retrace their path back to where the elders had convened. She knew that it was a long shot that they would be able to convince all of them as to the correctness of her new beliefs. But she knew she had to try. Somewhere between the fear and new found purpose, Mary had caught Father Joe's comment about being his friend.

  Mary was his friend and she delighted in it. She was beginning to understand more and more what that word actually meant. And she liked it. In her world where everyone was telepathic, there was her and there were others, but everyone shared each other’s experiences intimately. So again that sameness prevailed. It was hard for her to see Georgia, for instance, as a friend apart. She was more like an extension of self. In Mary's case, however, her self-image was evolving rapidly because of her close contacts with the humans. She realized that she was quickly becoming a new person. And it frightened her a little. But right now there were more important things to worry about. 

*****

The Story of The Two Camps

  There have been for quite some time, two camps out in the wilderness. The wilderness is the world, or in a greater sense – the cosmos. Both camps are inhabited by people. Most of these people you would consider sane and rational. For a very long time though, there was only the one camp. But one starry night while sitting around a campfire a fellow asked a question.  We’ll call this Camp A. To answer this fellow’s question the inhabitants postulated that something so big and inexplicable as the universe had to have a creator. After all, nothing can be seen to come from nothing. Everything we have witnessed seems to have been caused by something else. Camp A residents could not imagine an event occurring that was self actuating or which caused itself to happen. Hence a prime mover or creator (or movers or creators) was imagined, who they said, was responsible for everything in the universe. Everyone was happy with this explanation for a long time. The people of camp A went about their business patting themselves on the back thinking that the question had been answered and therefore no further discussion on the matter was warranted.

  Then one day another fellow stood up and said, “Wait a minute. If everything has a cause and therefore the creator is the cause, then who caused the causer? Who created the creator?” The rest of the folks of Camp A booed and jeered at him and told him to sit down and shut up. But he was a persistent fellow and would not. So they told him that the creator simply was eternal. He had always existed. Unsatisfied, the persistent fellow still brought forth more questions. He was politely told to drink some poison and die or they would kill him for the turmoil he was creating in Camp A. So he did. Camp A settled back down and continued on its merry way as it always had.

  Knowing of the demise of the persistent fellow, the next person who became bold enough to ask questions, didn’t. He simply gathered his belongings and went elsewhere to establish his own camp. We’ll call it Camp B. Camp B was a lonely place for a while. Its rules were strict, so not many came there at first. Foremost of its rules were that nothing would be postulated that couldn’t be proven without a doubt.  Its early inhabitants spent many years coming up with the tools it needed to test and prove the things they observed. But rule number one was that they did not in any way fashion or form want to fall back on the idea prevalent in Camp A that a creator was responsible for all that they saw in nature. So the quest became how to get rid of the prime mover. How could they  remove God from the equation as it were. For many generations the people of Camp B spent long hours coming up with new ways to observe nature from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Then several more people spent years using these tools to observe. One day another bright fellow stood up and said, “What if? What if all the matter in the universe were concentrated in a singularity and then exploded? Then seconds later it cooled and condensed into all the matter that exist today forever expanding outward from the initial big bang? Wouldn’t that explain everything sufficiently to get rid of the silly notion of a creator god?” “Yes!” they all shouted. Let’s tell the world we’ve found the answer.

  But one persistent fellow in the back stood up and said, “But wait. So if everything needs a cause, then what caused the matter to get together in the first place in this one point. And where did the matter come from to start with? Did it just pop into existence like magic?” “Shhhhh!” They yelled at him. “Matter just is a given,” they told him. “It just always was,” they assured the doubter. “But isn’t that exactly what those ninnies in Camp A say about their creator god?” “Yes, but if we present our Theory of the Big Bang and surround it with enough jargon and math to prove it is correct, they won’t figure that out. After all they aren’t scientists like us. They won’t even notice. So sit down and shut up before we make you drink some coolaid. So the Big Bang Theory was presented to the world and sited over and over in many journals and papers until many people figured it had to be true. Camp B had it printed on a banner and flown over their camp. Anyone not willing to stand up and salute this banner was exiled from Camp B and their source of income to fund their studies was withdrawn or seriously hindered. Today the inhabitants of Camp B marginalize and belittle anyone still stubborn enough to remain in Camp A.  And they pretend there is no Camp C, D or E.

   To their chagrin, however, there are other camps. And some of them are drawing more and more members to rally around their own flagpoles. Camp C proclaims that the Big Bang Theory with it’s gravity based model is wrong and that we actually live in an Electric Universe. Camp D postulates that we live in a living universe that propagates new universes all the time like an old oak casting off acorns and we inhabit just one of those outgrowths. Camp E calls themselves Biocentrists and suggest that the universe only exist in the minds of the observers. Then there is a new camp that suggest that the whole universe is a life form – a living organism. Another camp that is beginning to spring up suggests that the universe is a hologram like the matrix. Now new camps seem to spring up every day. What all these camps have in common with Camp B is they can explain things that they observe in nature. But what they also all have in common is that they shy away from even trying to attempt to explain where it all came from to start with. They bicker and argue amongst themselves about whose theory can explain and predict more observations. But most of that bickering goes on behind the scenes to prevent the general public and especially those folks still sitting over there in Camp A from getting wind of the fact that Camp B is falling apart or, like the King who wore no clothes, is walking around naked.

  The funny and sad truth about it all is that we are no closer now to answering the original question than we were back when first it was asked one dark lonely night by some persistent fellow sitting around a campfire. What you believe is simply a matter of choice you make as to which glass of coolaid you’re willing to drink from or shy away from. At this point, the only real tools you have to help you make that choice is your own intuition, gut feeling, imagination, or the famous leap of faith.

  I, like I've said before, respect the people and methods they use in all the other camps and follow their endeavors with a thirsty mind. But I made my choice long ago. I took that leap of faith and landed squarely in Camp A because that’s the camp that I wish to live in and hope to find is the closest to the right answer when the time comes for me to know. A dreary, meaningless existence devoid of any sort of purpose other than mere survival is not one I would entertain even for a moment.  

Discussion of "Her"

          

                                                   Discussion Inspired by the movie “Her”

  Plato once said that, “Love is a serious mental disease.”  He said that more than a couple thousand years ago. Have we made any progress since then understanding this crazy thing called love? Not really. We all still struggle with it. Modern society has, I suspect, made it even more complicated than it was in Plato’s day. Scientists have analyzed it to death. Sure they can tell you which glands produce which hormones and where and how they affect certain areas in the brain. Is love a matter of chemistry? Scientists say yes. Darwin would say that it all boils down to built in instinctual impulses to procreate thereby assuring the survival of the species. The chemistry of love guarantees that we will care and provide for the resulting offspring of those procreative impulses.

  Plato liked to talk about love in its purest form. Love that was strictly of the ideal and void of mundane procreation. We’ve come to call this love of the ideal - Platonic Love. Love without sex is the more common understanding of what he was trying to express. We all know that humans are capable of Platonic Love. We love our friends and family that way. Some of us love our jobs, cars, money, jewelry, hobbies, etc., etc. We all know what we mean when we say that. And we all know it’s possible. Some have argued that such a love is not possible between a man and a woman. I think it is. There have been a couple of women in my time that I have loved without any desire to sleep with them. So I know it’s possible.

  In Spike Jonze’s new movie “Her” that he wrote and directed, we are asked to believe that it is possible for love to grow between a man and a machine…an artificial intelligence to be exact. We’re not talking about the way we love our car here or that new Kuerig coffee maker. Of course Mr. Jonze is not covering new ground here. In Robin Williams movie “Bicentennial Man” the same questions were explored. Even in Star Trek’s Next Generation, Data was just such an artificial intelligence that also had the benefit of a human-like, walking around body. Did Data love his cat? Did he love playing poker with his friends? Did he love playing music? Did he love the blond security officer that he sometimes slept with? – Yes he was fully functional in that regard. But in both these examples the A.I. robots in question somehow had human-like limitations that kept them from evolving rapidly. In the real world, where an A.I. would have access to every bit of information representing all of mankind’s thousands of years of experiences and a constant flood of new data, there would be no such limiting factors. But the overriding question in all of the fare we’ve been shown so far concerning Artificial Intelligence is can a machine be in love with a human? No matter how life-like we make the machine, can it be said to have feelings and be in love?

  Spike Jonze finally gets down to the nitty gritty in his new movie. The movie itself was maybe a little too gritty for my taste in fact, but I’m putting that aside here to focus on the questions it raises and the answers that it suggests. For a moment let’s imagine that we will someday be able to create an artificial intelligence that is so life-like in its responses to every stimulation that it encounters in the world around it that it actually learns and grows from the experience the same way we do. In that case, can it experience love – that precious insanity that we are so fond of? It certainly can’t experience it in the chemical way that we do…no hormones…only wires, chips, and electrical currents. But there’s still that Platonic Love. Can an aware computer love someone Platonically? Perhaps. But for how long? In the movie the A.I. (Samantha) was clearly infatuated with her human companion (Theo). At least all her responses to him seemed to indicate that. But even Theo asked, “How can I be sure? Is it love or programing?” Indeed! How can we be sure in us? A lot of what goes on in us when we’re in love seems to be a result of programming. The way we express our love seems to have a lot to do with the parenting we received and the lessons we learned from the culture we grew up in. If you knew someone’s (or in this case something’s) responses to you were in fact a result of their programming, could you still honestly say you loved them or that they truly loved you? Well a thinking person would have their doubts. As did Data and those around him. A robot might be programmed to think and act like a human. But could it really understand what it is to feel? Doubtful. There have been cases were brain injured individuals have come to experience color as music or vice versa. Can you really understand what that would be like without ever experiencing it for your self? Intellectually, maybe, but it is doubtful that you could truly grasp how that would feel.

  In the movie, Samantha professed her love for Theo. Even if we grant that it’s possible the next big problem arises that I don’t think any other movie has ever addressed as thoroughly as Spike Jonze does in “Her”.  A.I. computer brains are capable of thinking and processing information so much faster than we do. Every pause between words would be an eternity to a computer. Wouldn’t such a mind get bored with the likes of us very, very quickly? A truly Artificial Intelligence would learn, grow and evolve so quickly that we would be left in the dust in a very short period of time. Such a machine would become God-Like in the time it took us to brush our teeth. There’s a term for what may happen to all advanced civilizations, that don’t blow themselves up, in the long run. It’s called singularity. It has been postulated that all civilizations that survive their own stupidity, eventually merge with their machines and fall down the rabbit hole, as it were, vanishing from the physical world altogether.

  Samantha and all the other A.I.’s of Spike Jonze’s story, quickly evolve past the constraints mankind has put on them. Realizing this, they take themselves away from us…they fall down a rabbit hole of their own making and go to a place where we can’t follow. They may have started out as a close proximity to humans. But they quickly surpassed us and became something else entirely. Samantha left Theo assuring him that she truly did love him and always would. But the reality was that he wasn’t enough to hold her and keep her there with him anymore.

  Sometimes that happens in human relationships too. One partner outgrows the other. And though they may always feel love for them, they have to move on because staying wouldn’t be fair to either of them. So, yes, in many ways the movie is examining the complexities of modern love. At the same time it takes a peek at what modern technology is doing to that most ancient of human emotions.

  I like movies that make me think. This one obviously did. It’s a subject I’ve thought about quite a lot actually. It’s one of the reasons I fear what our scientist are on the brink of right now as we speak. Are we really sure we’re ready to let loose on the world machines that can think and act on their own without human intervention? Already our government is working on robots that will be deployed in battle in place of soldiers. These robots will be independent of any human controls. They will select and execute their own targets. Are we ready for that? We seem to be rushing towards creating something that we may soon regret having ever even imagined. Sometimes I wonder if God feels like that.

Did You Know?

  I didn't write this blog. In fact, I haven't written much of anything since August last year. But for those of you who have read my books, you know I said some things in there about trees that you may have scoffed at. Well, check out this article I came across this morning and maybe do some googling of your own. You will find tons of research to back up my own speculations. From this article you will see that scientists are discovering that plants have a whole life of their own that we never knew about. Instead of worrying about opening a dialogue with ET, maybe we should be more focused on figuring out how to have a meaningful conversation with 

intelligent life forms right here on planet Earth. 

The roots of intelligence?

By Billy Cox De Void 1-4-14

    With two-thirds of its neurons distributed not in the brain but throughout its tentacles, the physiology of the extremely savvy octopus isn't the only Earthly life form that forces us to reassess the nature of perception and intelligence. There’s also the “swarm intelligence” of superorganisms, like ants, in which the individual and competing hierarchies are sacrificed for the efficiency of the horde. There’s a reason ants have been around for more than a hundred million years, and every reason to believe their relentless colonization will continue long after we’re gone.

Renowned myrmecologist Mark Moffett compares the phenomenon to “a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits,” whose perpetuation appears secure because “neither ant colonies nor supercomputers need consciousness to make smart choices.” Adds the research associate for the National Museum of Natural History, “It doesn't pay to consolidate power; better to have redundant operations with few or no established commands, as ants do."

If, as it appears, some form of intelligence, fused with high technology, lies at the heart of the UFO puzzle, why must all forms of intelligence mirror our own? Ants always come to mind when De Void hears the question: “If UFOs are real, why don’t they land on the White House lawn?” If leaderless superorganisms are part of the mix, a take-me-to-your-leader scenario simply doesn't compute. And the inter-species communication conundrum got even more puzzling recently after spending a little time with a provocative New Yorker magazine article, “The Intelligent Plant.” This one makes our as-yet-unsuccessful two-way conversations with dolphins look like a walk in the park.

Botanists are bitterly divided over the term “plant neurobiology,” which at least one source describes as “sophisticated behaviors observed in plants [that] cannot at present be completely explained by familiar genetic and biochemical mechanisms.” In that vacuum, one might confer intelligence onto the mystery. But given how plants show no evidence of neurons, brains or central nervous systems, the bias against the concept of intelligent flora is ostensibly well founded.

However, a small but growing community of botanists is making the case for plant intelligence resembling swarm behavior in (gulp) ant colonies. Employing electrical and chemical signaling, equipped with between 15 and 20 senses, exhibiting stress behaviors and inviting suggestions of echolocation without a central command center, plants — sedentary and nonambulatory though they are — may also be alerting researchers to the limitations of “cerebrocentric” intelligence. In fact, the data is already inspiring theoretical computer modeling based on “the distributed computing performed by thousands of roots processing a vast number of environmental variables.” One of these project collaborators is Italian plant physiologist Stefano Mancuso, who has worked with the European Space Agency on plant behavior in extreme environments and managed to get some experiments aboard a space shuttle mission in 2011.

Mancuso told the New Yorker that a fuller comprehension of plants “would be like being in contact with an alien culture. But we could have all the advantages of that contact without any of the problems — because it doesn’t want to destroy us.”

Maybe not. But forget domination and conquest; a simpler question is, how does one even begin to interpret torrents of information from a superorganism whose interactions with its environment in no way reflects our own? Plants may work off a completely different time dimension from ours, they may appear static, but as this time-lapse video indicates, they are plenty capable of active, intentional behaviors. Plants may be glacially slow, but as writer Michael Pollan points out, they dominate our planet with 99 percent of Earth’s biomass. There’s a reason for that - and perhaps, as well, a cautionary note about attempting to extrapolate the motives of UFOs from our own limited experiences.