I remember clearly sometime around when I was ten years old, maybe younger, I thought to myself that I wanted to know as much as God must know. I can't remember a time that I doubted that 1) God is a "person," i.e., he is contactable as "A Being," 2) God is omniscient, which means He has a mind as I do, and 3) God is infinite "Being," which means He has an impersonal aspect, like energy or nature itself. Similar to the narrations of Jonah and Abraham of the Old Testament Bible, who received messages from God (and somehow recognized it was God speaking), I never doubted that communication is a two-way personal circuit with God; and any person could take advantage of this capability. I was also enough of a secularist (or maybe skeptic is a better designation) to be disabused that any intercourse with God would come by way of sound waves or perhaps mental telepathy. I have since modified that perspective based upon a fuller reading of Julian Jaynes theory of the bicameral mind, or more appropriate, the bicameral brain.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, I was mostly instructed through its brand of theology via a focus on the New Testament and the "Catechism," which is the teaching of Catholic Christian doctrine and dogma. This focus on the New Testament precluded any cognitive dissonance between the character of God in the Old Testament and that of the New that, upon reflecting in later years, I determined would most decidedly have confused me. I don't know if that was an intended reason, or merely a result of time constraints, but Jesus' portrayal of the personality of his Father is surely very different from the one that deals with Jonah's whale and Abraham's potential sacrifice of his son Isaac. The differences however, did continue to increase my desire to understand God's true nature and how he really prosecutes his infinite plans in our finite lives. Should I completely eschew the Old Testament? If the Bible is so dissonant about God, is even the New Testament a true depiction of how Jesus illustrated the Father to first century humans?

// Bob Debold Fairfax, VA, September 2024