"After putting a wrap on Galveston Futures, I started to work on An Open Mind gain. The next chapter is titled "The Actors," and based on the title and the topic, it seemed logical to put together a table comparing different religious views of God. I called this table, 'The Gods of Mankind," a reduced copy is below, and an expanded copy comes up if you click on the image:
In addition there is a pdf version available at http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets/2007/images/Table_3a-f_Gods_of_Mankind.pdf. Note that the colors provide a possible correlation across the various cultures. Red shows the main gods, yellow secondary gods, orange tertiary gods, green are gods representing natural processes, violet are gods related to death and the underworld, and brown are men who have progressed to become perfect.
As I say on the chart, note that there are only two lines of text for each entry in the table, typically with only 3 to 5 words per line, to describe each "god." I expect there will be experts from each religion, including my own, who will disagree with the way I have put this chart together. However, a case can be made for how it is put together. It took a lot of time to put the "Gods of Mankind" table together. And yet I already have acknowledged that it is incorrect and incomplete, especially in the eyes of adherents of the various religious beliefs.
I think it is fascinating. I have thought for years there is a correlation between major religious beliefs, including ancient Pagan practices. I think the chart illustrates how spirituality has sought truth in all different places and cultures. There is an interesting correlation between Judism and Islam. I'm sure most Jews will be very angry at my depiction they have two Gods. And their scriptures support this interpretation, as documented on the chart. I think the correlation between Catholicism and the church is also interesting. Maybe someone should put out a film about the Catholics called "The God Makers." Just kidding.
One of the most fun parts of putting together this table of "The Gods of Mankind" was doing the research, and identifying the correlations. I did not know much about the Sumerians nor the Celts before doing this project. It has been a long time since I looked at anything regarding Egyptian, Greek, or Roman mythology. The study helped me put my trips to India and discussions with Hindus and Jains in perspective. Jain and Sikhism are like Confucianism and Buddhism, in that they are Dharmic religions, more a philosophy than following of a God. I did not include any of the 28 Buddhas, even though they are certainly treated as gods. I selected Maya, Hopi, and Navajo to represent the very ancient, ancient, and modern American Indian traditions, with the Mauri of New Zealand to represent the South Pacific Island Religions. Hopefully this project will catch on and the chart will eventually be expanded to include hundreds of different Indian tribes all across both American continents, as well as various other places around the world.
The intention is not to create a scriptural bash about whose interpretation or understanding of God is correct (I like my Jewish or Islam or Hindu or Catholic or Presbyterian or Methodist or Evangelical or other friends already know our perception is correct), rather it is to get the basic framework of who the players are out there so everyone can start to understand different viewpoints. Like the science-religion matrix in the first chapter (see http://www.walden3d.com/openmind/figures/matrix_excel.png and http://www.walden3d.com/openmind/figures/science-religion_matrix_html.png), I consider this chart a worthwhile contribution. It will be very interesting to see if this proves to be true over time, or it turns out to be the fact that no one cares about any of this stuff. Hopefully I'll live long enough to get the material distributed widely enough to be able to answer this question.
In the meantime, I will keep working on my projects, keep learning a little bit here and a little bit there, and maybe someday I will know enough to answer someone's question about some of this stuff which interests me at such a fundamental level. And maybe 20% of you will find an interest in some of these ideas, and pick up and carry the ball after I'm gone. And in the meantime, I will keep fitting my weekly life in between my intellectual and spiritual pursuits, like building a table of "The Gods of Mankind."
Sunday evening our ward choir sang "Christ Hath A Garden" at the Stake Easter Concert. The words the the first verse really touched me:
| 'Christ hat a garden walled around' | I thought of our back yard. |
| 'A paradise of fruitful ground' | I thought of all of the aloe vera that have grown from Dad's kitchen plant. |
| 'Chosen by love and fenced by grace' | I thought of Ken's paintings and all the years in the house. |
| 'From out the world wide wilderness.' | I thought of the world wide web, and it's encroachment on the back yard. |
| 'Like trees of spice his servants stand' | I thought of the Lemon Tree Andrea just planted. |
| 'There planted by his mighty hand' | I thought about how the house was bought based on an idea planted in my mind that became Landmark Graphics. |
| 'By Eden's gracious streams that flow' | I thought of the pool. |
| 'To feed their beauty, where they grow' | I thought of talking to the birds while I raked the lawn. |
I brought the music home from our 4:10 PM practice to write out these words for this Thoughtlet. We went back to the Stake Center at about 6:30 for the concert. The Katy Stake Easter Concert was nice, and I felt like it was dominated by Nottingham Country Ward (maybe it was just our turn to be in charge), as shown by the program:
| Katy Stake Easter Concert | |||
| March 25, 2007 | |||
| HE IS RISEN! | |||
| Conducting: | Greg Branning | ||
| Narrator: | Michael Kennerson | ||
| Chorister: | Trudy Sarrls | ||
| Pianist: | Robbyn Branning | ||
| Opening Hymn: | Christ the Lord Is Risen Today | #200 | |
| Invocation: | By Invitation | ||
| Christ Hath a Garden | Nottingham Country Ward | ||
| If Not for Mercy | Naomi Durant Franz Velasquez, pianist | ||
| Easter Medley | Bear Creek First Ward Choir | ||
| Gethsemane | John Mock Susan Wyatt, pianist | ||
| When Jesus Wept | Stake Youth Choir | ||
| I come to Him | Stake Youth Choir | ||
| Congregational Hymn: | All Creatures of Our God and King | #62 | |
| I Stand All Amazed | Sam Sarrls Gary Jones, pianist | ||
| If Ye Have Loved | Westlake Ward Choir join 3rd verse, #199 | ||
| Benediction: | By Invitation |
Monday I called Melanie because I was worried about a comment Paul had made in an offhand way when he called Sunday night. As with most of my concerns, there was no reason to worry, and I need to learn to let go of all of you. I miss talking to each of you, and yet I still think it is right that if you miss talking to me, you have an opportunity to call and act on those feelings. Monday evening, I finished Thoughtlet about The Millionaire Next Door (0712.html).
Tuesday morning I called Jan Miller, who is in Europe, and asked for Nena Madonia. Then I called back after I got home, and stayed on the phone for about a half-hour in order to be able to talk to Nena for the third time. We talked for almost a half-an-hour. The focus group went well, and they keep the results confidential. She went on and on about being sick and that was why she has not called back for six weeks. She said she hopes to get the go ahead on my project when Jan returns from Europe. There will be a simple boiler plate agreement, and it could happen within a week. Typically it takes between 8 and 18 months to get a book published, and because of the complexities, she expects mine to take the longer time. She had to cut the conversation off to get on another conference call, and agreed we will talk within a week. I'm excited.
John Gillooley stopped by my office and talked to me for the first time in several weeks. He had an agenda. He described how good the GDC portion of Geokinetics is going to do this year, saying he expects $10 million in revenue, up from about $5 million last year. Like ASI, there was no profit last year, and it will be interesting to see if there is any this year. John went on to describe how the sales folks get a 2% commission on all of their sales, and to tell me about all of my contacts and that I could be earning that commission. I think picking velocities is orders of magnitude better than selling seismic processing, and I was not quite so blunt with John. His point that I need to tell Mike Schoemann what I want to do in order for Mike to be able to more optimally use me makes some sense. However, in another way, it is just another way of passing the buck. Later in the day Mike Dunn came in, and we talked about the conversation with John. Mike wants to raise some money for an oil company, and then have the oil company purchase GDC to provide dedicated services. Makes sense to me, since I've been talking about this for several years. If I could only get Dynamic Resources funded. Oh well!
When I got home on Tuesday Chris Schmidt called and asked me to come over to witness signing of a will at his house. Seemed to talk a long time, and it was nice to be able to help. When I got home I went to Dairy Queen and got a small heath blizzard to celebrate the phone conversation with Nena earlier in the day. The following e-mail message arrived from Melanie regarding The Millionaire Next Door:
Wednesday Andrea picked me up at work and we drove up to the temple to meet Paul. Traffic was very light, and we got there over an hour early. Andrea wanted to get some books at Nauvoo Books, and so we went through all of the new books on their shelves. Paul almost didn't make the session, even though he had been on the road from Clear Lake for 2 hours. He did, we were the witness couple, and it was very nice to have Paul with us. After the endowment session, we met John Walker and Susan Jensen out front and took them out to dinner at a Japanese / Chinese place Andrea and Jana McClain had gone to before. One of Susan's twins just received his mission call to Novosibirsk, and she wanted to grill Paul about what it is going to be like there. My fortune cookie read:
It was a nice evening, even though I learned another Paul story. Turns out Lyle Rowbury told Paul and David Johnson about the time he tied two cats together by the tail and threw the line over a clothes line. Paul said that as he watched Lyle turn shades of red laughing at the memories, he realized Lyle was not as conservative and straight as he had always thought. And of course, Paul and David repeated this torture. Oh well! At least I did not torture the cats I killed at the Byproducts Plant when I was growing up (../0647.html) When we got home there was the following e-mail from Rob:
| sorry I haven't been around, been waiting to get my license back, I get it next week, and my phone is broke... but I wanted to see something... have you ever heard of a theremin? it s an electronic instrument u play without touching anything, here check out the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwqLyeq9OJI also, you need to see the new sim city game, it is called spore, you start out on a microscopic level as an organism and you evolve into an animal and then into a civilization al the way out to exploring the universe complete with blue giantsblack holes and super novas this a slightly long demonstration but it is worth watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8dvMDFOFnA |
I responded with:
| Rob, Good to hear from you. Had dinner with Paul, he told me you are OK, and housebound. I have not heard of a Therimin, and my systems guy has. He recommends you download a virtual one for your PC from http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk/page53g.html. Let me know how it goes. I worked with the guy who invented all the sim stuff once. Sounds neat. It is too late to look at it tonight. Later. Look forward to seeing you, or picking you up and taking you to dinner or whatever. Love, Dad |
I actually started doing some work I enjoyed on Wednesday. It involved interpreting 11 horizons across the 3-D survey I'm doing depth processing on to act as what are called tomography surfaces, which are used to calculate migration velocities. One thing I messed up on this week was I missed an e-mail from Roice, and so I did not make a chess move for almost a week. Friday and Saturday there were a lot of moves made on our chess game. Our standard TV episodes were all new this week: '24' on Monday, 'The Unit" on Tuesday, 'Smallville' on Thursday, and 'Numb3rs' on Friday. When I got home on Friday, Andrea was working in the yard, and so I went out and mowed the lawns. Good thing because it rained hard on Saturday. Andrea left very early on Saturday to go to Salt Lake for Audrey's baby shower. She asked me to say a prayer before she left, and when she got back on Sunday morning the first thing she said was that everything I prayed for came to pass. Wish this happened with all of my prayers. Oh well!
I had spent all spare time all week working on the "God's of Mankind" table. The hardest part of the project was figuring out how to print the funny characters needed for Hopi, Navajo, and Mauri Gods. Saturday morning I started working on the chart at 6:00, took a break from 8:00-9:00 to the church and put out mulch in the rain, then to come home and have a shower, and took breaks for General Conference sessions from 11:00-1:00 and 3:00-5:00 on Saturday and Sunday. Wonderful talks. I wish all of you were diligently watching each session of General Conference, taking notes, and thinking about the wonderful counsel given. Oh well! Andrea back just before conference started on Sunday morning. She brought me a sugar cookie, mints, and chocolate bar with pink wrapper from Audrey's baby shower, with the name and date of 31 March 2007 printed on it. Andrea was very complimentary about the Waldron's new house, about how excited the Waldrons are about their upcoming mission, about how good the trip was, and about how my prayer before she left was completely answered. It was good to have her back home, even if I was still buried in my computer working on an html version of "The Gods of Mankind."
