The questions have been with us since the dim, dark dusk of early humanity. Who are we? How did we get here? Who is in charge? In The Discovery of Everything, the Creation of Nothing, author Jim Robert Bader communicates his personal philosophy on these age-old enigmas as they apply to modern society. Intended as a primer for the mind of the layman, The Discovery of Everything, the Creation of Nothing presents a manifesto of the soul that insists the truth is not only out there, but easily accessible to anyone. Based on years of research and observation, Bader distills the complexities and addresses relevant topics from an "everyman" perspective by pondering the nature of the universe. He reflects on the thoughts and discoveries of others to bring knowledge to the common man. In The Discovery of Everything, the Creation of Nothing, Bader offers a new way of understanding the world. He confronts old assumptions, and he challenges the traditional way of thinking to better cope with and comprehend the nature of the world around us.
The Discovery of Everything, The Creation of Nothing
A Layman's ManifestoBy Jim Robert BaderiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Jim Robert Bader
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-3890-9Contents
Acknowledgment............................................................viiForward...................................................................ixChapter One Who the Heck am I?............................................1Chapter Two What the Heck do I know?......................................18Chapter Three No Fear but Fear Itself.....................................51Chapter Four Words and Symbols............................................76Chapter Five A Very Taxing Subject........................................88Chapter Six To Each Their Own.............................................117Chapter Seven Feelings and Emotions.......................................129Chapter Eight Mister Spock Will Save the Universe (?).....................147Chapter Nine The Perfection of Perfection.................................159Chapter Ten The Appalling Apostle.........................................184Chapter Eleven The Meaning of Life in a Nutshell..........................211Chapter Twelve The Devil You Say!.........................................234Chapter Thirteen That is Sooo Takei!......................................260Chapter Fourteen Hey, Hey, I'm a Monkey!..................................282Chapter Fifteen The Discovery of Everything...............................310Chapter Sixteen The Creation of Nothing...................................331Chapter Seventeen No Prophet to It........................................349Chapter Eighteen The Devil Went Down to Homestead.........................375Chapter Nineteen The God Who Never Was....................................397Chapter Twenty The Repugnant Party........................................424Chapter Twenty-One It's Just About Business...............................462Chapter Twenty-Two The Root of all Evil...................................485Chapter Twenty-Three The Belief in the Irrational.........................511Chapter Twenty-Four It Is All About Politics..............................529Chapter Twenty-Five The Wrath of the Conned...............................549Bibliography and Footnotes................................................583
Chapter One
Who the Heck am I?
My name is Jim Robert Bader. That is, Jim = James, which is based on the Jewish word Jacob (more properly: Yakob), which means 'Supplanted.' I have often taken my name to mean that I was born to supplant things, to uproot what is old and replace it with what is new, much as a farmer harvests weeds to clear them out of his garden in order to grow nutritious stuff that the weeds would otherwise choke to death. I have taken my name to be my life's mission.
Robert is, of course, a Celtic name originating in Scotland, and it means, "Famous in Council" (or at least it did in that book on baby names that I looked it up many years ago). "Robert the Bruce" is a famous Scottish Hero-King who once fought for and won Scottish independence.
Bader is a German word for 'bath' or 'Bather.' I believe it had something to do with either leather tanning or else wine making, one of the two. Since Germans are better known for leather rather than wine, I am inclined to think the former and not the latter. From all of this I translate my own name as meaning: Supplant + Council + Bath = Baptize. With language it is really not all that hard to make this sort of progression.
Only I am not a Baptist. I was born a Methodist to Methodist parents, who themselves came from Methodist Immigrant families. As a matter of fact, my grandfather on my filial side was a Methodist minister, and I have heard quite a few stories about him, such as the time he insulted a group of Masons who were major donors to his church parish, all because he thought Freemasons were "the spawn of the Devil."
In fact my grandfather seems to have set a rather poor example of Methodism in the minds of both of my parents. My father recalled endless squabbles and religious battles in the house where he grew up waged between himself, his sisters and brothers against their dictatorial patriarch, which resulted in most of them renouncing Methodism altogether when each one came of age.
My mother, on the other hand, accused my grandfather of mistreating his wife, of beating or cheating on her, one of the two (or both), I don't really know. And all of this I never knew about until years after he had passed away.
What I do know is that my parents made a formal decision to switch from the Methodist church to join the Unitarian movement, and at the age of nine I was yanked out of one Sunday school and planted firmly in another. I did not understand the issues in conflict at the time, of course, but I did know one thing that stood out rather firmly in my memories.
It was that I loved that Unitarian church. It was so very different from the stern teachings to which I was accustomed in my old Sunday school classes. For one thing they did not try to indoctrinate us or force us to think a given way. Rather they made information available to me and other children and let us form our own conclusions from the basis of that information. And I ate it up like it was holy wafers!
Unitarianism taught me to see the world in larger ways, to embrace a wider view of the world than that which I had known as a Methodist. My Sunday school class dealt with subjects that might have seemed mature for the time, such as sexual education and drug use, both of which urged restraint and which I took to be very serious after seeing the effects of Venereal diseases, one reason among many that I did not have sex until my mid-twenties. But I regarded it as education and not indoctrination and it was part of a gradual evolution of my consciousness that helped me to see things in new ways that were broader and more open to possibilities than was available to me in Methodism.
I had a lot of issues in my mind at the age of nine, and problems in school due to the fact that I was diagnosed as Hyperkinetic. These days they would call it 'Attention Deficit Disorder,' a fancy way of saying that my mind was racing faster than I could manage and that little things could distract me. I had acute short-term memory problems with a handicap for staying focused on more than one thing at a time. Kids used to pick fights with me in class, which I would get blamed for having started since I was viewed as a disruptive element at that time, after getting in one too many fights, I got sent home on suspension and spent the last semester of my fourth grade year getting tutored by home schooling.
And yet I learned more at home in that one quarter than I had the previous three quarters in a class environment, having been separated from all of my usual distractions. A teacher come for one hour a day and giving me class assignments that I could study at my own pace because at home I could focus on my books rather than the teasing of my classmates.
This was before I learned better coping methods for dealing with tension and anxiety, and of cultivating better relations with my teachers, as I previously mentioned. I got to be something of a bookworm at a very tender age and even though I still do not to this very day wear reading glasses I was the stereotypical image of a 'Nerd' around my neighborhood.
I haunted libraries during my off-hours and they became my sanctuary and shrine, my Temple to private study. I read books that were several years ahead of my age group, and I loved to hang about my mother's own personal library as this was about the same age where I stopped using her books as play toys and building blocks and actually started to read them.
I loved mythology as a kid and delved into the stories about the Greek and Norse Gods, and even though, at the time I had the typical Western conceit of seeing these stories as inferior to the more accepted works of the Bible I admired their moral compass as being fit for an age when men lived at the total mercy to the elements of nature. I later on came to appreciate the thinking that went behind the theology of these legends and I began to understand that the people who worshiped their Gods were not so different from ourselves save that they had an appreciation for life and the things that Christians teach their own followers to disdain.
Like joy and sexual rapture and the imperfections of human nature.
My mother encouraged me to read, but she was properly chastened, even horrified when, around the age of nine, I discovered my second great love.
Comic books.
Comics are a greatly undervalued medium due to the popular misconception that lithographic stories are "just for kids." They are, in a sense, the world's oldest form of storytelling to judge by the lithographic cave paintings discovered in France. Here in America we seem to encourage the strange notion that comic books as pictographic illustrations are a less valid medium than books, television or movies. This even though, at one time, the circulation for comics numbered in the millions, and the books published back then in the 1930s-40s would go for a cool sum today if not for the number of parents who threw those comic books away without recognizing their collective value.
What attracts me to Comic Books is that they are a perfect blend of written and visual medium where pictures are used to enhance the impact of words, like visual illustrations. Four-Color comics carry out grandiose themes of a fantastic nature that are often beyond the reach of other media, and for that reason ordinary non-comic readers may have difficulty appreciating them as an art form. Comic books can illustrate an extraordinary world of mythological space were ordinary people are granted god-like abilities and often use their gifts to fight a never-ending battle between the forces of 'light' and ultimate 'evil.'
How Biblical can you get?
But that is, of course, a highly simplistic misreading of what a comic book can actually do as the Japanese have amply illustrated with their own version of the comic book, known popularly over there as Manga. Their titles often range from the fantastic to the merely ordinary. Comic Books in both Japan and Europe are appreciated as a literary art form read by millions, both adults and kids, and older readers are very much the majority of their fan base. The same, to a lesser degree, is also true here in America, and yet still the vast majority of Americans do not read comic books but rather consider the medium both gross and juvenile, which is a reflection of how reading itself is undervalued in our so-called 'culture.'
Indeed, many Americans do not even pick up a newspaper, nor do they read a non-fiction book unless it is on a subject to which they feel an emotional attraction. Many came out of school from that "rote learning" method that I denigrate so much thinking that books are a trial to be endured rather than enjoyed, and that the greatest advantage of being an adult is never having to hold a book in your hands ever again.
A pity really since that means that far too many people get their information from other dubious and far less reliable sources, and far less and fact-check-able, than the printed format.
But I digress.
The fact is, for me, Comics opened up a world of understanding that went beyond the simple knowledge of a regular book whose images were conjured up entirely from my own imagination. I started to wonder about a great many things that I had been taught as a 'given' in my youth. And when I contrasted the ideas presented in a comic book with the learning experience of a classroom many of the arm-chair theories of my youth came into question, and I came away realizing that I did not know enough of what was real to make blanket assumptions about anything.
So like my hero, Socrates (as promoted by Plato) I started to ask questions and look for answers by testing each theory with which I was being presented.
Actually one incident that starkly stands out in my memories came when I was thirteen years old and in the seventh grade of what we then called 'Junior High School,' which later got changed to 'Middle School' for reasons that escape me. There in chemistry class I had my great revelation.
It happened because of a lab partner, a girl assigned to me for a science project, who asked me, with seeming innocence on her part, to what religion I belonged.
Well, proper grammar would be, "To which Denomination of Church do you belong?" But hey, we were both thirteen, and at the time we did not know a dangling participle from the atomic weight of Barium, which is 137.34, in case anyone might care to know that.
My answer, all innocent, was that I considered myself to be a Unitarian.
And then she floored me with the words, "Oh, so you worship the Devil."
Actually she spoke those words with such bland innocence that I doubt that she had the least idea of what she was saying, but at the time I was flabbergasted.
Worship the Devil?
When did I miss that in the service?
Actually we never sacrificed goats or burned unholy incense in a Unitarian church. Nor did we trampled upon the cross or do anything else weird like that. Unitarians, you see, believe that church is a place where you come together with friends to share in the worship of God. But you are not required to worship anyone or anything. There is no dogma, no preferred method by which you may worship, or to whom you may worship, or even a requirement that you worship at all.
Obviously that branded us as fiends from the pit of the deepest hell by someone else's definition of what is 'holy.'
How I would have viewed our religious practices at the time was that we were trying to live consistent with the values that Jesus espoused when He said that we should love our neighbors as we do ourselves, and I did not have the least idea what Satanism was, never having met a practicing Satanist at that time that I could remember. Unitarians, after all, are concerned with the community and believe in doing good by others but have no actual doctrine or dogmatic code to live by save those principles that we as individually hold to be sacred.
Unitarians believe in freedom of belief. So what would a 'Fundamentalist' Unitarian believe?
That you absolutely have a right to your own opinion!
Actually, since that time I have run into a number of people who refer to themselves as "Satanists," and for the most part they seem like really nice people, at least so far as I could tell, which probably says a lot about my judgment regarding other people.
The proper name for the church to which I belonged to was the 'Unitarian Universalist Church,' this because Universalism and Unitarianism actually were once two separate denominations. They were joined together in 1960 because they discovered they had so much in common, and it looked good on the stationary.
Thomas Jefferson (remember him? Wrote the Declaration of Independence?) was a Unitarian. In fact, he even wrote something called the 'Jefferson Bible,' which denied the divinity of Jesus. Jefferson thought that impious priests had added a bunch of supernatural junk into the original Gospels and so he careful excised the portions that he regarded as "Miraculous" and instead he concentrated upon the teachings and sayings of Jesus. Jefferson believed that His wisdom would be a better guide than the special effects and emphasis on 'personal salvation' that had become the focus in other more "mainstream" Christian denominations.
Universalism is the belief that all religions have in common a desire to know the Spiritual nature of reality, that the spirit of God is in all things and that the Universe itself is a part of God or God made Manifest, and that divinity can be found everywhere in all of nature.
This tends to drive the fundamentalists and Evangelists a bit crazy as they insist that the world is "evil" and that it and Jesus are not one and the same thing. The world has "flaws," they argue, and "Jesus/God is Perfection." And never mind that stuff about the world being a reflection of the mind of God, or of Man being made "In God's Image," as that's just flowery prose and of lesser importance than the message of 'Universal Salvation.'
But then again, those guys are a bit crazy by any standards. Just try talking to one and you'll see what I mean.
Various types of Pantheistic beliefs were held by a number of the founding fathers, including Thomas Payne, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Patrick Henry and James Madison. The Founding Fathers, you see, remembered all too vividly the horrors of Europe's sectarian wars and much preferred a 'bygones be bygones' approach where all people could worship as they wanted to without the fear of discrimination.
Needless to say, the girl insulting my religion was herself a Baptist, and shortly after this event my father and I accepted an invitation to attend a Baptist church for services. To say the least it was an eye opening experience that I will always remember.
For one thing there was the sermon of the Baptist minister, which was ... very different from what the Unitarians teach since Unitarians are not obsessed with things like 'Salvation' and 'The End of Times.' Universalism does not advocate one interpretation of the Gospels at the expense of all of the others, and do we not preach our faith but rather keep it "under a bushel." Unitarians do not pray loudly in church but rather encourage people to live their faith as an "example to all nations."
Baptists, on the other hand, insist on loud theatrics, boisterous psalms, make brazen declarations of their piety and insist that you should believe what they believe or else you are doomed to spend all eternity in Hellfire.
(Continues...)
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