Three Simple Words

By John Odom

This book is an attempt to examine the similarities between science and religion instead of focusing on the perceived differences. It attempts to demonstrate the similarities by looking at common goals and challenging the dogmatic positions on both sides by concentrating on what the author considers to be "reasonable" possibilities considering where we are in history. It is intentionally brief in an attempt to keep it interesting and entertaining while challenging the readers to open their minds to the possibilities presented. It also includes episodes from the author's personal experience where he has seen the possibilities presented at work in his own life and feels many of the readers will recognize those feelings as well. Life can seem very complicated, yet the author contends the basic foundation for living a contended life can be summed up in Three Simple Words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644680636

Book preview

A Brief Disclaimer

(Tongue in Cheek)

Have you ever felt like someone plagiarized your ideas before you even had the opportunity to think of them? It is a quite normal experience. In the book of Ecclesiastes, David, the aging king of Israel, opens his discourse lamenting that he has spent a great deal of his life pursuing wisdom only to realize that he has had no original thoughts. He concluded that any time someone thinks he or she thinks they have an original thought, they will find that someone in the past has already thought of it. Even more perplexing is, in the future, someone else is going to think of it again and believe he or she has come up with something new. Even in the fields of technology, there are enough mysteries in the relics of the past to make one wonder if we are ever going to catch up to what once was.

In my own experience, I have had ideas that seemed to me to be original. Some were so remote from my teachings that I would not even dare express them for fear of being ridiculed or thought a heretic or a fool. Some were the result of reading, some from observation, and many just popped into my head for no apparent reason.

Then, as I started some exploratory reading, I found that someone I did not even know had stolen my ideas. The really weird thing was, they had stolen them a hundred years (often more) before I was born and wrote them down. In order to protect themselves from lawsuits, they would include some new stuff (probably stolen from another original thinker), but I am pretty sure the bulk of the material was taken from me. There is of course no logical conclusion to how this could happen except time travel and hypnosis. They came into my bedroom from the past, put me into a deep hypnotic trance, dumped my brain onto their laptop using some advance thought-reading technology from the future (or past), and then scooted back to the past where they wrote the ideas down on a piece of parchment with a bird quill and some homemade ink.

What I want to convey is, as you read this book, you may think I have stolen your ideas. I did not intentionally do that. I have tried time travel, hypnosis, and out-of-body experiments, but I could never get them to work (I still think they should.), so your original thoughts are safe from me. There are many sources of information that have led to the conclusions presented: some I can identify, and some I cannot. I had a neighbor once who claimed he was a stuff knower. He believed that some people just know stuff for no apparent reason. At times, I think I might be one of those people. Actually, I believe we all are at times. Yet there are other things I think I will never grasp, like flying jumbo jets and floating super tankers.

No Offense Intended

As I meander through both science and religion and attempt to demonstrate that there is no reason for the two disciplines to be in conflict, I am almost certain to offend folks in both camps or neither camp.

I started this journey as a fairly dogmatic believer in the Christian faith. More specifically, a small town Southern Baptist version of that faith that bordered on what a lot of folks in the 1940s and the 1950s would refer to as hard shell or primitive Baptists.

Even though I try not to be offensive in my comments, some people will feel I have offended their sensitivities. It is the nature of the subject itself. As I began organizing the materials, I found that I even offended myself at times, so I am relatively certain that someone else may also be offended.

Here is an example of an unintended offense from my own experience.

A neighbor, whose church was having a revival of sorts (more a study series in numerology), came to my home one day with a copy of the book they were studying and asked if I would read it. I accepted the challenge with my thanks.

A couple of days later, the neighbor came back and asked if I had read any from the book. I said that I had read some of it but was discouraged from continuing after a position the author had taken early in the book. The neighbor was somewhat taken aback and asked what I was referring to. The position I found untenable was the author’s system of numerology, which was supposed to be a path to hidden prophecies in the Bible, only worked using the King James Version of the Bible.

My position was the King James translation was not the most accurate available and any theory based on the number of letters in words in a specific translation could not be dependable. If such a hidden code existed, I felt it would have