The Ball Shell Walls: Awaken Your Mind to New Spiritual Realities, Discover New Spiritual Truths, Seek and Ye Shall Find

By Joseph Kantor Higgins

Is the Christian dogma really true? Why isnt the world a happier place? Why is life so fragile? These questions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the discussion of religion and the myths, allegories, and fables that surround it. In The Ball Shell Walls, author Joseph Kantor Higgins addresses a host of issues facing religion and Christianity and attempts to bring to light new truths about religion.

Through a series of essays, Higgins takes a critical look at religion and what it means to people worldwide. Using a host of resources, citing Scripture, and quoting a range of famous historical figures, he discusses a broad spectrum of themesevolution, the Old Testament, Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus and the Jewish God, the worlds sixteen crucified saviors, the New Testament, the afterlife, the Mystery of prayer, and the dimensional metamorphic transport phenomenon.

The Ball Shells Walls seeks to tell the truth and provide a realistic look at the God of our traditions and open our eyes to what may be a new reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475984903

Joseph Kantor Higgins

The Author has been deeply involved with the church .For more than 35 years he has served as a church officer, lay speaker, fund raiser, and regional convention delegate. He remains a member of the United Methodist Church. Joseph Kantor Higgins served in the US Navy and also attended San Diego Community College, Arizona State at Phoenix, and Youngstown State at Youngstown, Ohio. Higgins has worked as a writer, department store manager, business owner, and Modifying and repairing Military Aircraft. He and his wife live in the Midwest. Working and playing and enjoying their large family.

Book preview

CONTENTS

My Biographical Highlights

Several Years Passed

Introduction

The Infancy Of Humanity

The Value Of Observation

Looking At Religion

Understanding Evolution

Nothing Is Permanent Except Change

The Old Testament (The Pentateuch)

Beyond The Pentateuch

Looking At Jesus

The Gospel Of Thomas

More Thoughts About Jesus And The Jewish God

The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors

Did Jesus Really Die On The Cross?

Looking At The New Testament

The First Organized Christians

The Dance Of Death

The Ball Shell Walls

What About Life After Life?

Dimensional Metamorphic Transport Phenomenon

The Mystery Of Personal Prayer

Conclusion

Additional Reading Suggestions

To all of the historical quasi-sons of God, messiahs, genuine saints, philosophers of charitable stripes, and teachers of justice, love, and compassion. These great minds have struggled throughout history in an attempt to lead mankind away from barbarism and into human civility. I also dedicate this book to the unseen, unknown, enigmatic universal God and to all his areas of majestic domain.

MY BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS

I had debated whether I should include the highlights of my life in this book. After much thought, I decided it is pertinent to the whole picture of the presentation.

I was born in the Midwest during the Great Depression. It was a time of fear and hopelessness for millions of Americans. It was my introduction into the world of the early 1930s.

When I was about three, we moved closer to my father’s work, which amounted to only about two days per week—if we were lucky. The place was an old roadhouse that had been closed for a number of years. Prohibition had ended just twenty months earlier, but bootlegging still existed because many people had established businesses and a liquor license was hard to come by. Money and politics played a part in trying to obtain a legal license. Hence, even after we moved into this old roadhouse, people would stop by and ask for a drink.

The place was austere at best. We had no carpets, inside toilets, hot water, wall coverings, or a lawn. That old roadhouse sign remained on the canopy that loomed large in the front of the building. In large, faded letters, it read, Acorn Inn.

We had running water and electricity. Mother put great effort and a lot of love into making the place livable; Dad put in a really nice lawn and flowerbeds. Later he built a windmill, which was somewhat unusual at that time.

Our family’s biggest problem was always money. It was extremely difficult to get enough money to pay our living expenses. We never had money for recreation or obtaining any extras. Our only entertainment was listening to an old Philco radio that Dad had purchased from a friend who rebuilt used radios. As I remember, he paid eight dollars for it. That represented a day’s work. Dad was an honest and gentle man, although he did exhibit a hot temper. He never got violent. His main problem was his drinking. Sometimes, he would miss work and spend desperately needed cash.

Mother struggled to keep things together; she would go into a tirade, especially when Dad would lose work because of a lost weekend. She would curse him, slap his face, and begin to cry. Dad never raised a hand to her. He would apologize repeatedly and really try to stop his drinking. Many times we thought it was over, but then Dad would show up at home drunk and the trouble would start all over again. My older brother would run and hide under the bed when the fighting started. Once when they were arguing, Mom threw a hot coffeepot at Dad. The pot struck the back door and ran down to the faded linoleum on the kitchen floor. My brother was scared to death under the bed. After a failed attempt to comfort him, I cleaned up the mess.

Even though we are currently experiencing a severe slowdown in our nation’s economy, it’s difficult to understand how desperate things were in America during those times. The rent on the roadhouse was twelve dollars per month. Our electric bill was only six dollars per month. The milk bill was $1.50 per week. Gasoline was twelve cents per gallon. A newspaper delivered to your house was three cents per day, and the Sunday edition was ten cents. It’s hard to believe that we could go to the movies to see a double feature and a serial for just five cents. Sometimes they would include an animated cartoon. We could ride the Greyhound bus six miles to the nearest city for five cents. It cost another nickel to go twelve miles to the big city. Yet these prices were usually out of reach or could only be had once in a while with a lot of effort.

Dad had high morals generally although he was an agnostic. He never forgave Ingrid Bergman for deserting her husband. Mom was a God-fearing woman, but neither of them attended church. Both would, from time to time, quote things from the Bible—usually when my brother and I needed correction.

On the other hand, a neighbor of ours was an avid Christian. After getting permission from Mom, the neighbor began to take us to church. The church was a Protestant New Testament church. This marked the real beginning of my Christian experience. We learned how God had sacrificed his only begotten son to save us for our sins. All we had to do was accept Christ as or Lord and savior. Of course, otherwise we would burn in everlasting fire. We learned how God loved us and how we should put our faith in him. We learned that things of this world were of no importance. We were instructed to learn how we could build up our treasures in heaven.

Our Sunday school teacher was a saintly woman who wore an old black dress that had once been an elegant piece of clothing. Her hat looked like an Easter bonnet that she had treasured for years. She had three children, and her family was dirt poor. Her children took a cold baked potato and a butter sandwich to school for lunch. In spite of this, she would take money from her own meager income to buy construction paper and crayons for her Sunday school class. She was a wonderful person.

I felt guilty about Dad’s drinking. At times, the family felt like a burden for him. I felt guilty about being a drain on the family budget. I felt guilty about not meeting my teacher’s expectations and about Jesus having to die for my sins. It bothered me that I would have thoughts of smoking, stealing, and—especially as I got older—sex. I felt bad because Dad didn’t know Jesus. Surely if Dad knew Jesus, he would not only be saved, but he would also stop drinking. It’s little wonder that I began to lean heavily on Jesus. Prayer almost became a compulsion that helped me get through the days and weeks.

One day when I was with a group of friends, I began to silently pray while playing. I wasn’t aware that anyone noticed my lips moving until a competitive friend noticed my behavior. He blurted out, What are you doing—praying?

All of my friends began to snicker and laugh. I ran away in embarrassment and vowed not to move my lips or roll my eyes up to heaven ever again. I stayed close to God, but I never prayed openly like that again.

SEVERAL YEARS PASSED

The years passed quickly, and everyone forgot about my exhibition. I stayed close to God, was baptized, and learned about forgiveness, kindness, brotherly love, the Ten Commandments, and being helpful to others, especially those who had less than I had (which wasn’t much.) I learned about the teachings of Christ and the heroes in the Old Testament; I read the Bible over and over.

As time went on, things got better and the economy picked up. This was partly because the United States was supplying war materials and other things to England and other friends who had jumped into the war against the Nazis. Dad started working steadily in the steel industry, and Mother got a job that paid pretty well and had good benefits. I had many friends and took a job delivering newspapers. I loved fishing and spending time in the woodlands. I learned to play the ukulele and did a lot of playing and singing. I was doing better in school. Best of all, Dad was going to AA and completely stopping his drinking. Years later, we found out that the main cause of Dad’s drinking was hypoglycemia, a blood condition that screwed up his body chemistry and made him feel tired and run-down. When he drank, it gave him relief from the discomfort of the disease. Unfortunately, when the liquor wore off, he was worse off than he had been before he started drinking. This caused him to severely crash, making him sicker than a normal person would become after the same ingestion.

The other great change that took place just before the war ended was moving out of the old roadhouse. We had managed to live there for about ten years. We moved only about a quarter of a mile down the road from where we had been. We essentially lived in the country, but it was not too far out of town. It was great. We had an inside toilet, dining room, a big front porch, a nice yard, our own bedrooms, and even a telephone. We had a modern furnace with wonderful steam heat.

We had lived through cold winters where the old roadhouse furnace would burn eighteen or nineteen tons of high-priced coal. We suffered winters with the flu and scarlet fever (my brother almost perished). We had the mumps, chicken pox, measles, ear infections, whooping cough, and cold nights that froze the chamber pot. We lived through hot, humid summers with toothaches, ringworm, hay fever, poison ivy, and glass and nail punctures in our bare feet. We tried to run through hard coal ashes and clinkers in our bare feet in the early spring. I guess we probably didn’t know any better.

We also played in the woods. We hunted rabbits and squirrels and observed beautiful goldfinches, orioles, blue jays, red-breasted robins, and a host of others. I wore the rubber on the wheels of my scooter down to the steel rims. We’d play kick the can, tag, baseball, football, and basketball with the neighbor kids. We ran through woods in the autumn moonlight, swam for hours in the nearby creek, ice-skated in the winter, and chased butterflies. Much of the time, life was good.

After the war, things were really good. There were jobs everywhere. By the time I turned seventeen, I had a beautiful girlfriend, worked in the mills making a man’s wage while I finished high school, and purchased a 1932 Chevy. It was my pride and joy. I believed that Jesus had blessed me. But as it is many times in life when everything seems to be going right, something unexpected happened.

Before the incident, I found myself drifting away from the church. I was getting more interested in girls, especially mine, rather than in God. Mother told me it was because I was keeping the wrong company. As a matter of fact, two of my best friends chided me for my interest in religion. To make me angry, they’d yell, Jesus lover, Jesus lover. They mocked me and laughed at me.

I had the same blood disorder as Dad, but I handled it differently. However, I would get depressed and down. My best friend Charles spent a lot of time with me. On this occasion, I was really feeling down. Charles suggested that I was working and studying too hard—and I needed to have more fun. He said we should take our guns over to the city dump to shoot some rats. This was before any landfills existed in our area; everyone from the village took their trash and garbage to the city dump outside of town. The five-or six-acre area was infested with rats as large as rabbits, and it was considered a sport to shoot them and keep the population from infesting the whole town. That’s where we went.

One of the best vantage points at the dump was up high. We used high-powered flashlights to spot our prey while they were darting across cans, paper, and spoiled food. We usually hunted the rats at night because they were not active during the day. Charles had his older brother’s pistol, and I was using his brother’s semiautomatic .22 rifle.

After shooting for about a half hour, we became bored. We were both good shots, and it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Charles spotted a campfire off in the distance. A long, deep hollow ran just east of the dump. We had hunted and had gone there to sleigh ride in the winter.

Let’s go see what’s over there, Charles said.

It’s probably one of the guys spending the night in the woods, I replied. We young folks did it all the time.

We walked for about twenty minutes and looked down at the campsite from a railroad track high above the hollow. All we could make out was the fire. Our flashlights worked well, but the fire was too far away. The lights could not penetrate the darkness at that distance.

Charles and I had been raised country. We were part of the gun culture and had been trained in the use of firearms. It was a father-to-son thing. We understood how dangerous guns could be. Some of our city friends who lacked experience and common sense had been involved in shooting accidents. My brother and I had dodged their bullets several times when they were foolishly shooting through the trees while we were walking in our woods. They were not thinking of anyone else being nearby.

We were seventeen-year-old boys looking for some innocent fun. Charles loaded his .22 pistol and yelled, Hey! Who the hell is down there? He repeated it several times, but he got no answer.

I was ready to start shooting. I ran about five rounds through the trees on the upper part of the east hill before my gun jammed.

Charles was shooting at the fire, and the sparks were dancing in the dark night. The shots echoed through the hollow. I handed my rifle to my friend and told him I was having a hard time getting the gun unjammed. He holstered his pistol and began fiddling with the rifle. It didn’t take him long to fix the rifle. He pointed the gun up into the sky and ran off about five or six shots. They also echoed through the dark night. As I took the gun back, I moved about seven or eight feet to the left of Charlie. We didn’t discuss it, but with all the commotion, we assumed that whoever had made the fire was long gone. I raised the rifle and took a random shot at the fire. With a loud penetrating crack, the shot echoed through the hollow.

A terror-filled scream filled the woods and a blood-draining clarity echoed through the hollow. We stood there frozen as our worst fears raced through our minds.

Hey, Charles shouted after he gained his composure. Anybody down there? This time it was louder and clearer, but there was still no reply. We paused in a long moment of silence. It was unnerving.

We better go down and check, I said, hoping Charlie wouldn’t want to go.

Forget it, Charlie said fearfully. Let’s wait and go down in the morning.

On the way home, we tried to convince ourselves that it was probably one of our friends playing a prank or perhaps an animal. Charles slept at my house that night, which wasn’t that unusual. We bedded down without much conversation.

I was up early the next morning. Without much hesitation, I reached over to Charlie and said, "We better go