Reality 101: (Facts That Can Change Your Life)

By Lloyd Harrison Whitling

Reality 101 takes you on a young man's trip into adulthood while he struggles to incorporate his fundamentalist indoctrination into an understanding of science's discoveries and teaching. His failure to get things to add up, his insistence that they must, and discoveries made while learning about computers take him to a fascinating view of reality and the human way of understanding it. Reality 101 is meant to be an introduction and companion to his self-published WHITLING'S DAEMONOLOGY, available at http://lloydwhitling.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 28, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469757872

Lloyd Harrison Whitling

Born in Oil City, PA, a coal-miner's oldest son, Lloyd's excursion away from fundamentalism took him on a lifelong journey which culminates with his DAEMONOLOGY and this companion book, and others you will find on iUniverse and his own website.

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All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Lloyd H. Whitling

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

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www.iuniverse.com

Science from a poet’s point-of-view.

ISBN: 0-595-21834-2

ISBN: 978-1-4697-5787-2 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Religion 101

Sinners, All: How to Understand Reality and Find Your Place in it

Reality 101

Natural Reality

Artificial Reality

The Nature of Natural Reality

Living Under Natural Reality

The Nature of Time

The Philosophical and Sociological Aspects

The Philosophical and Social Implications

Personal Implications

The Nature of Human Intelligence

Esoteric aspects of Natural Reality

Reality 101

Bibliography and References

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Winners compare their achievements with their goals, while losers compare their achievements with those of other people.

—Nido Qubein

In real life, we hardly ever isolate our reasons–no more than we ever really know when one thing ends and another begins. We’re involved in a continuum. —Nuala O’Faolain, quoted by Lauren Byrne in The Writer

Evil is real, and it must be opposed.

—George W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 29, 2001 In that same speech Mister Bush also mentioned that thousands of acts of human decency and kindness would serve to help negate the evil actions done by terrorists.

Religion 101

What religion really taught me, and how.

Religion, most people agree, is the answer. Sigmund Freud, in many of his writings, as did many learned persons who followed him, looked upon religion as being a problem. Remembering my childhood, it seems as though many religious folks also agree with that, in their own ways. I found it to be a great detriment to advancing a career as a Casanova. Since the quandary seemed always to evade resolution wherever I’d be looking, I soon gave up searching for answers and began taking an interest in the problem itself.

Books and studies can be found about religion, and classes can be taken where one can learn about all the religions in the world. You can learn all the historical data your mind can hold about the various religious doctrines, but seldom see anything portrayed in a developmental fashion. Pursuits in that direction leave religion behind and take you into various fields of science, such as psychology, sociology, cosmology…So, why, I’d wonder, is that called ‘science’, and the other ‘religion’? The answer lies directly in one’s willingness to experiment, and to find ways to demonstrate whatever has been learned. Religion must be about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, science about ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’.

It was because of science that my folks first took their arguments away from the house. Instead of waiting for visitors to come and get their ears burned, my folks went to the school I attended, their vocal torches poised for action. I knew they felt angry, it had something to do with science class, and it brought me my first knowledge that science and religion do not coexist.

I remember telling Mom about the lessons we had learned in Mister Stone’s class, about how the Universe took a form that slowly developed until people came into existence. Mom’s face turned a concrete gray while I told her I had finally found a subject in school that I liked, asked her about all the paleolithic-and-neanderthal-whatchamacallems and wondered why nobody had told me these things before. I rambled on and on, until she stayed up to wait for my dad to come home from his second shift factory job. We got little sleep that night while she paced the floor, muttered to herself, played the piano as loudly as she could, and otherwise gave us the impression she had gone mad and intended to torture her children. Somehow, we all knew it was my fault.

Dad also got little sleep that night. It seemed they had found something powerful to agree about, and had decided to go to war next day against a world that had attacked and defiled their little boy with the Devil’s own words. Dad suddenly became her ‘good guy’. Mom worried aloud they had lost me. I knew I had brought myself trouble, and vowed that night to never say another word to either of them about anything to do with school. I had learned my first hard lesson about religion:

If you disagree,

Do it silently!

Religion 101 contradicted a lesson our church had tried to teach me to bear in mind: That I should strive to emulate the Master, Jesus, in every deed I’d do. I had been given profound examples of a Jesus never afraid to voice his opinions and beliefs, never afraid to follow through with action when others disagreed, always ready to get into trouble in order to prove a point. That part, I could do okay. I had Mom and Dad for working examples. The magical stuff, I couldn’t make work at all. I would command Heal! like the TV Preacher, and people would fall ill.

At the time of acquiring my primary education, separation of church and state did not exist in our schools. Religious Education classes took place on a weekly basis, when we’d form lines according to the church of our (parents’) choice, be marched to that church by the several teachers assigned that significant duty, and learn how to incorporate the materials we’d acquired at school into our religious upbringing. My folks had attended none of those classes, and (as an aside) no one ever mentioned to them about the number of times I tried slipping into the Catholic line just to see why that’s where all the pretty girls went.

I feel sad this practice ended along with the banishment of prayer in school. It seems obvious to me such banishment is closely akin to all the reasons for the misery in our school systems nowadays. The government took away the only comparison available to another way of gaining an education, so that kids nowadays remain unaware of the many ways things could get worse. There is a place to go to learn, where you are required to rely on the teachers’ word; that facts are presented to be ingested with no demonstrations or proofs; that questions, especially relative to any alternative viewpoints, are forbidden; that says things like the Earth is three-thousand years old, when you learned in science class it should be millions; and where, if you don’t stay quiet and go along with the program, you get called names, and you become convinced the names are true about you: Sinner! Evil-Doer! Heathen! Nasty Little Boy! followed up with questions like: Don’t your parents teach you anything at home?

Sure, they do: I learned how to pitch down hay and milk cows by hand. I learned how to trim trees and mark out logs. I learned how to drive a loaded log truck across a field without getting it stuck or turning it over. I could harness up a horse as good as anybody I knew. I knew how to get along with all the cantankerous mechanical devices my dad had to work with. I learned a lot of things from my parents.

Mom and Dad had a reputation to defend! So, off to school they went to do that.

Most of us enjoyed wearing our science and history teachers down by making them struggle to find safe ways to prove the correctness of their lessons. You will find few who would question the extent of our interest, even after we had decided (with much help from our parents) they were all a bunch of liars who should be banished from their positions.

Melding the teachings of the two educational institutions together, as I had been required to do, had taught me how to make things squish into slots they had never been intended to fit. I had long before resolved all kinds of rifts between my parochial and state-conferred educations. The gap between Creation and Evolution seemed less of a challenge than many. God had created the heavens and the firmament, I had decided, so he’d have no problem at all creating Evolution. Problem solved, let’s get on with our lives...

Not so fast, young man!

The problem with squishing things so they’ll fit logically together in your mind is, they ooze out of place. That, or someone who squished differently from you is going to complain about the blood seeping out of yours.