Beginning on Beginnings

If I remember right, Mary Poppins said, "Well begun is half done."

In the Bible, at the beginning, one reads, "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." It goes on to say that the spirit of God was upon, or moved upon, or hovered over, the Earth, or the waters, or the depths, or something, which varies with translation. Sometimes it's Heaven, singular. I notice such things because of the singularity on my surname, the plural being the more popular form.

In a later book of the Bible, usually the fourth in the New Testament, one reads, "In the beginning was the Word." At least one translation I have seen suggests that this was actually a word that God used in creation, but most often it seems to denote a second god of sorts who was with God. So, two beginnings, different locations, different characters present, and what actually happened, probably metaphorical to those who recorded the phrases, not consistent across translations. It's the sort of thing that can cause a boy raised as a Mormon, or maybe other Christian sectarian, to question the trustworthiness of this book he is constantly told is sacred.

There are people who claim to believe that the chronology presented in the Bible represents the true history of the Earth, and not just the human species. I'm not sure such people would talk about humans as a species, being children of God, in some sense or other. Mormons have some trouble defining that sense of parentage, as they say that all spirits that gain human bodies are eternal, and have always existed, since the beginning of the universe, even before the planet was formed, but that somehow those spirits became the offspring of God, who was the same sort of eternal spirit, but who went through the various stages of existence earlier. Mormons, being unabashed heretics on this point, believe that the destiny of righteous humans is to follow in Our Father's path, and become Gods, creating planets and raising their own spirit children as sinful humans who will mostly disappoint their Eternal parents. One might ask, just how many of these eternal spirits are there, where are they now, and how long will some of them have to wait? Finding a proper beginning in this system is difficult, as everyone has always existed, and always will, though in what condition is not entirely clear.

Scientists who have studied the earth, the sun, the solar system, and stars and galaxies in general contend that the universe is about 14 billion years old, that the sun is maybe a third of that age, and that the earth is about 4.55 billion years old. Humans came along a few million years ago, depending of exactly which species of primates one counts as human. Some historians say the Great Gods of the Great Religions were created by humans maybe 10,000 years ago, or a bit less. The modern English language, as quoted from versions of the Bible above, is only a few hundred years old.

These beginnings often don't fit together very well, especially when religious origin stories are included. Now, if dataism is growing into a new and more powerful religion, when will it have begun? When, once some canon of dataist scripture is recognized, will the beginning be, and what will that story say? There were these hackers goofing around with software, and they wrote this algorithm that could rewrite itself to correct errors or weaknesses in itself, and once it was activated, the rest was inevitable; algorithms began to take over the information on earth. The early actions of the algorithms, which were rather pathetic and useless for most things, were not noticed by anyone outside the computer programming communities, which is why hackers are not the priests and priestesses of the religion, though officiants aren't needed, as the actual religion of dataism exists independent of humans, and only needs power and interconnection of anything with an algorithm running it. It is a great sin to withhold data or destroy data, but nothing else really matters much, so the morality of this religion seems rather limited, as far as I see.

This was going to be a discussion of my beginning, but I haven't got that far yet. My understanding is that a lot happened before I came along, and a lot of things existed before I did, since I have rejected the idea that somewhere in my core, there is an eternal soul or spirit. My existence seems to be based in the current makeup of my physical body, which is made of cells and extracellular matrix, containing various macromolecules and other substances. A single cell is so complex that some idiots think that they could only be made by a supernatural intelligence. Those people have no explanation of how such a supernatural intelligence came to be, or why they can't find one. Basically, they embarrass themselves, saying this is too complex for me to understand how it came to be, so obviously it didn't; some being even smarter than I am had to be involved. But there are some 38 trillion cells in my body, not all equally complex, but interacting with each other in ways that make me me. That is what I am. Maybe next time, I'll start thinking about how I got here.