CHAPTER 1
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
— Author uncertain, possibly Benjamin Disraeli, but popularized by Mark Twain
Introduction
What is the truth, and how do we know it? We have heard many purported facts since childhood, but many have been misleading, distorted, or outright lies. Over the years, many of these "facts" have been debunked, discredited, or shown to be the antithesis of what was supposed to be the truth. For years, the tobacco industry lobbied Congress and claimed that smoking cigarettes had no ill effect on people's health. We now know that smoking is the most common cause of lung cancer and the number-one cause of all cancer deaths in the United States. During the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, cigarette smoking was glorified in and encouraged by both television and radio advertisements. I remember such classic ads as one that said "I'd walk a mile for a Camel," one that featured the long-legged dancing pack of Chesterfields, and one with the grammatically incorrect slogan, "Pall Mall travels the smoke." (The word travels is an intransitive verb that does not take a direct object such as smoke). Then there was the rugged-looking, vein-popping cowboy sitting on his horse while smoking a cigarette who every wannabe he-man wished to emulate, the "Marlboro Man." But this was not enough for the tobacco companies; a whole new audience was waiting to be seduced. This was the female population of the United States., which promptly embraced this deleterious and meretricious deception with much alacrity. Virginia Slims cigarettes were introduced to make women look not only sophisticated but also sexy (Figure 2). These cigarettes were designed for women and gave them something to celebrate that was different from the traditional man's cigarette. Now, indeed, there was true equality for women, which they unfortunately wholeheartedly embraced. This gave women their own identity separate from that displayed in the bawdy ads for male smokers.
Cigarette ads in the 1950s even portrayed doctors recommending certain cigarettes. If doctors endorsed cigarette smoking, how bad could it be for your health? But there was a growing body of information proving the contrary. The famous saying for promoting Camel cigarettes, even endorsed by doctors was, "I'd walk a mile for a Camel." Doctors would have been better off walking the mile and forget about smoking that darn cigarette. I remember sitting (and practically choking) in smoke-filled meeting rooms during hospital conferences and national medical meetings in the late 1960s. This made it very difficult for all of us nonsmokers in the room to grasp any medical knowledge, especially when our eyes were tearing up and we were choking and gasping for fresh air.
Soon the incidence of lung cancer and its mortality rate rose exponentially, especially when women embraced cigarette smoking. A provision in the Fairness Act in 1967 required one antismoking advertisement for every three cigarette ads. The war on smoking began. On April 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed legislation banning all tobacco-related ads from TV and the radio.
Later in the 1970s, smoking was banned at all medical conferences (thank God!), and we were all able to breathe clean air while learning. New anticigarette ads in the 1970s indicated that sixty-five thousand doctors had quit smoking. Unfortunately, there was a lesser response from nurses. "Thank you for not smoking" signs cropped up everywhere, which all nonsmokers applauded. Consequently, the death rate from smoking began to decrease, but it did so faster for men than for women. Women, in general, seem to have a more difficult time in quitting this habit than men. I personally suspect that this is the result of the stronger emotional center of the limbic system in women. There seems to be a difference in the wiring of the limbic system in females as compared to males, especially involving the amygdala. But this is the way God made us. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
It seems that every smoker feels immune from developing lung cancer and delights in citing anecdotes of some smokers who live into their nineties. They are only deluding themselves. Lung cancer has one of the highest mortality rates of all cancers in both men and women. Lung cancer is the cause of 28 percent of all cancer deaths in men and 26 percent of all cancer deaths in women. These statistics do not include smoking-related cancer of the urinary bladder or of the head and neck. I refer the readers to an article that appeared in the Annual Report: U. S. Cancer Death Rates Decline, but Disparities Remain (date June 17, 2011, by Stacy Simon, American Cancer Society, found in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.)
I remember that when I was a young teenager, my father said that if he caught me smoking, he would break my legs. My father, being an exsmoker and a mortician, knew the evils of smoking long before they were popularized in the media. I know he did not mean what he said, but he was so passionate against smoking that he did not want me to smoke. He also reiterated on numerous occasions, "Smoking will stunt your growth!"
Well, since Dad was only five-foot, five-and-one-half inches tall, I wasn't taking any chances. That was all Dad had to say to keep me from becoming a habitual smoker. At least I made it to five-foot, nine inches tall — not quite six feet as Dad and I had hoped for, but better than what could have been.
I will admit that I did try smoking cigarettes for fun a few times, but I never inhaled (just like President Clinton). When I was in college, I occasionally smoked a pipe because I liked the aroma and I thought it made me look studious, but who was I kidding? I think I spent more time lighting that darn pipe than I did studying. Besides, it gave me a bad taste in my mouth. That was the end of that. I don't smoke cigars because they give me heartburn, and I never had the inkling to smoke marijuana. If I want to get high, I do meditation. I keep thinking of the rotund comedian Louie Anderson, who says something like, Just give me something made from fried dough with confectionary sugar and you can keep your drugs. (I paraphrased his statement.) I agree with his contention, especially if you fill it with custard or jelly.
There have been many other myths, scams, and deceptions perpetrated on the American people, even to this day. So how do we recognize these falsehoods and know the truth? What is truth? The Declaration of Independence states,
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.
These truths are based on the natural law that flows from a higher power, that objectively distinguishes right from wrong, and from which are derived the laws of humanity. According to this universal natural law, the Founding Fathers indicated that we are all created equally and that no one has rights that supersede those of anyone else. We are born with these rights and certainly do not derive them from any government. All the rights and powers of the government are given by the governed — "We the People." Thus, the framers of the Declaration of Independence enumerated the moral foundations of our government and our Constitution based upon the laws of a higher power and not those foisted upon a society by a dictatorship or any despotic government.
But not all answers are based upon the natural law. So in everyday life, how do we recognize truth? Swami Sada Shiva Tirtha writes in his text The Ayurveda Encyclopedia that truth is (1) what we read in the ancient holy scriptures (Vedas, Upanishads), (2) what your guru or spiritual guide says, and (3) what you learn from your own personal experience. But I have taken some literary license in certa in order to make the narrative a little more interesting. Much of what I have written about is what I have experienced; only some of the names have been changed and a few have been modified.
I have often wondered what the world was all about, like the ancient philosophers who looked up at the night sky and wondered about the pinpoint lights and their meanings. I am sure they pondered the origin and existence of the universe of which we are an integral part. Since then humankind has garnered a great deal of knowledge about the formation of the visible universe and how stars are born and die and then reborn.
When I was a youngster in grammar school, I became intrigued by astronomy and the night sky with all of its stars and constellations, the moon, and the planets. Also, I have been an amateur astronomer all of my life. I remember that while we were still in grammar school, my good friend and classmate Matt Malkowicz and I peered through his father's three-inch reflector telescope for the first time and saw the craters on the moon. I was stunned. What an awesome sight! I also remember vividly the night of July 20, 1969, when we were all riveted to the TV, and we saw Neil Armstrong climb down the ladder from the lunar module, the Eagle, and step onto the moon's surface, uttering, "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind." At that moment, science fiction became reality.
We have also learned about mysterious cosmic black holes. Black holes are not seen, but their existence is manifested (inferred) by their immense gravitational energy. Apparently, a black hole is present in the center of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. They are like giant vacuum cleaners that suck up all matter in their vicinity. We can also think of them as gigantic Pac-Men that gobble up everything that comes near them, including stars. Because they are so dense, they have an unfathomable gravitational force that nothing can escape, not even a photon (ray) of light. But light is not matter; it belongs to the electromagnetic spectrum, that is, energy waves that travel (you guessed it) at the speed of light, approximately 186,000 miles per second, or 3 x 107 meters per second. If light is energy, then why cannot light energy escape a black hole? I believe the answer is in Einstein's formula, E = mc2. Energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared. Energy and mass are interchangeable. Mass is made up of energy, and energy is converted into mass. This is the basis of the wave – particle duality of light.
Light is a small snippet of the electromagnetic spectrum. For instance, the atomic bomb gets its destructive power from splitting a uranium atom into multiple smaller molecules, but that split causes the loss of a tiny part of matter that is converted into massive amounts of energy that are released in the form of nuclear energy. Light rays, gamma rays, cosmic rays, and X-rays are energy photons or rays that also behave like bundles or packets of energy because they inherently possess or are converted into miniscule packets of mass, according to Einstein's formula. These radiations are thought to exhibit frequencies and wavelengths, depending upon their energies, which are determined at the site of origin. Photons are actually considered fundamental particles in quantum physics and are carried by electromagnetic forces, as will later be discussed. This was part of the electromagnetic spectrum that prevents light from escaping the massive gravitational pull of the black hole since the mass of light and other radiations is so infinitesimally small compared to the mass of the black hole in keeping with wave – particle duality.
On the History Channel, Dr. Michio Katu quipped that a black hole could gobble up our entire solar system, including our sun, without "even letting out a burp." Dr. Katu is a brilliant physicist with a wonderful sense of humor. I truly enjoy reading his mind-stimulating books.
But where did the moon and the earth come from? What was the origin of the universe? How did humankind start? Did life start de novo on earth? Did a small sea creature crawl out of the primordial slime and develop into Homo sapiens? Did a Martian rock hit the earth carrying our DNA? Are we the feared Martians? Or did a comet from deep space carrying DNA from another world crash into earth and cause life to develop on this planet? Was this the basis for the primordial "seed of life"? Did different life forms evolve from a variety of asteroids containing various DNA that struck the earth over the millennia, or did all earth life forms evolve from the same primordial seed of life? Did God create the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden, a biblical story that ignores the evolutionists' belief in the natural selection of humanity? Did God or some ancient astronauts infuse their DNA into early man, thus forming Homo sapiens? Where do we find these elusive answers? Is it even possible to find them? I will attempt to answer this question and other perplexing questions in the ensuing chapters.
A little girl asks, "Daddy, where did I come from?" The father very awkwardly starts to describe the birds and the bees. He tries to explain that a tiny cell comes from mommy's ovary and combines with a tiny cell from Daddy, and this combination grows in mommy's tummy until a baby is born.
"No! No!" the little girl cries. "Mommy told me all that stuff. But Sally came from New York, Mindy came from Pennsylvania, and Maria came from Puerto Rico!"
Kids ask the darndest questions!
Art Linkletter use to say, "Out of the mouths of babes oftimes come gems," but others say, "Out of the mouths of babes oftimes come things we should not have said in the first place."
CHAPTER 2
The fool wonders, the wise man asks.
— Benjamin Disraeli
Imponderable Questions
When I was a youngster, I remember asking my father, "What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? Do I have a purpose for living?" I couldn't help badgering him with these questions. Since he was a mature adult, I thought he would have insight into these questions.
Dad said he was not sure he could answer all of my questions. "Maybe it is the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be good and help others," my father awkwardly responded.
I thought that my father, being a funeral director, would know a lot about life and death. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed by his answer.
I remember when I was in the first grade at St. Leo's grammar school; Sister Boniface was our teacher for that year. Sister was a very young woman, but her brown and white habit covered her entire head and body, except for her attractive, radiant, young face. Her beauty was eclipsed only by her loving kindness and the caring she showed to all the children. Needless to say, at six years old, I was captivated by this kind, young teacher. I remember that some of the boys, including myself, would frequently volunteer to stay after school to clean the chalkboard and erasers for her.
I began to remember her standing in front of the class and asking the catechism questions. All of the students sat in their seats and focused their attention on the questions with their catechisms open.
Sister asked, "Who made the world?" The class answered, "God made the world."
God must be pretty powerful to make all of this, I thought. But where did God come from? Who made God?
The next question was, "Who is God?" The class answered, "God is the Creator of heaven and earth and all things." I remembered thinking that God sounded even better than Santa Claus because He could make a lot of great toys.
Then Sister asked, "Where is God?" The answer was, "God is everywhere." Just when I thought I could accept these answers, this answer really confounded me. I originally thought that God was an old man with a long, white beard sitting on a big throne in heaven, wherever that was, made of gold and bedazzling jewels. But how could God be everywhere?
I remember thinking, Even Santa Claus isn't everywhere, but somehow he knows if you have been bad or good. These memories of Santa Claus make me chuckle to myself now that I am no longer a child. I remember questioning Sister about God's being everywhere. She smiled and said, "Because God made everything and is in everything." I reluctantly acquiesced but wondered, What? Is that the answer?
Things got even more confusing with the next question: "Why did God make me?" I thought that my parents made me. But the answer was, "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next." How can you know somebody, much less love somebody, if you cannot see or talk with that person? I thought then as a youngster about that answer. Do I have to love God more than my parents? How do you serve God? Do you bring Him things? I thought I wanted to be with God in heaven since the alternative was very scary — even scarier now that I am an adult. I wanted to be happy with God in heaven but wondered if my family could be there with me. Do we play games in heaven? Is everyone happy, and why is there no sickness or dying?
As a child, I had to accept everything as I was instructed, but as I got a little older, I began to question what I had been told as a young child. Now I wanted to know what this all meant since I did not fully understand what I had been taught in the early grades.
