The Duckman Project

Where do the answers in this blog come from?

Seven years ago I set out to eliminate the contradictions from my Christian faith. I had enough of the mysteries of God cop-outs, the glaring inconsistencies and the psychological dissociations I had learned in 35 years in the Catholic and Lutheran Churches. I had given the Church adequate time to make its case, including fourteen years of private Catholic education and a thousand Sunday mornings worth of sermons.  

The God I had learned about was a God of asterisks. He was the unconditionally loving*, all-forgiving*, all-merciful* God who built an eternal, inescapable hell for those He didn’t want to love, forgive, or show mercy to. Our fundamentals were fouled up. We were like infielders who never learned to get their glove all the way down into the dirt. Seemingly easy spiritual questions like “Is God love or fear?” went right between our legs.

John the Bible writer says there is no fear in love. James says the same well can’t produce both bitter and sweet water. Yet that’s exactly what I learned in church; God was most certainly love and fear. My pastor was fond of saying God was no kindly grandfather in the sky; He wasn’t afraid to open up a can of whoop-a** on those who messed with him.

So I pushed it all over and started fresh, holding only one idea about God as radically absolute: God is love. An inner guide, Who I call the Holy Spirit, emerged in my life and inspired me to challenge everything I had been taught about God until I understood how this could possibly be true—a nearly inconceivable task in a world of profound suffering, hate and violence. Especially since I came from a faith tradition that clearly taught God regularly used nature to hurt and kill disobedient human beings.

Chuck Heston parts the Red Sea with an AK-47

I can remember watching The Ten Commandments as a small child. While wearing pajamas with feet in them I learned God would kill a child in his sleep. Heck, he would kill a child because he was mad at his parents!

Even the mafia has rules against putting hits on the family members of rivals, unless that member is directly involved in the organized crime business. The God I learned about growing up was less ethical than the mob. This is not so, my inner guide told me. It inspired me to keep pushing and challenging and digging until I knew how God could be love and nothing else. 

More into physics than psychics

I was inspired to study modern physics. I became fascinated by the intersection of science and spirit. I studied the metaphysics of Edgar Cayce for a couple years. I got into Dr. David Hawkins (Author of Power vs. Force and The Eye of the I). I read some Ken Wilber (The Holographic Paradigm and Quantum Questions) and some of the Dalai Lama’s stuff (The Universe in a Single Atom). I studied the teachings of Gandhi.

I also found Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters to be interesting. And I studied the concepts of traditional modern physics. I subscribed to Scientific American and poured over articles on string theory, quantum loop gravitation, cosmology and the likes. I read Brian Greene’s excellent The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. I got into Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell and A Brief History of Time.

And I studied some of the mystics: the Muslim mystic Rumi; the Jewish Kabbalist Yehuda Berg; Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti; Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. And I reviewed at least the basic beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Native American spirituality.

Around all of this book-learning my inner guide was weaving a unifying context. Bits from here and there were brought together and contextualized into a common understanding of God, Heaven, the origin and structure of the physical universe and how they were all interrelated. Behind the how the universe was constructed—which I got from physics—my guide was showing me the why.

A Course in Miracles: initially rejected, later trusted

A year or so into my study a friend recommended the Christian non-dualistic text A Course in Miracles. This text made the audacious claim it was the actual words of Jesus “channeled” through psychologist Helen Schucman and assisted by her associate William Thetford, both Professors of Psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.

As a Christian, I found its claim to be the channeled words of Jesus blasphemous. It didn’t sound anything like the Jesus of the Bible. No short stories and parables. Instead I found it to be impossibly dense, disorganized, repetitious, psycho-babble. Every time I tried to read it I fell asleep. 

And bizarrely, it didn’t contain a single female pronoun, despite being channeled by a female psychologist from New York at the height of the women’s liberation movement. It was as though Jesus himself was denying the existence of women! To top it off, it was frequently written in iambic verse of all things. So to summarize, it was a Shakespeare-wannabe psychologist channeling a sexist Jesus. It was clearly National Enquirer/Bat Boy checkout-line fodder.

So I put A Course in Miracles away and went on with my journey. But the more I learned, and the more context I got from my inner guide, the more I found myself drawn back to A Course in Miracles. After doing all that homework, I found the Course really helped pull it all together. It was truly a masterwork of non-dualistic thinking, in alignment with a great deal of the respected mystical literature. I would study some idea in modern physics then find a parallel reference in A Course in Miracles about the illusory construction of the world.

After spending a couple thousand hours pouring through all kinds of self-contradicting, illogical, inconsistent spiritual texts, I found the Course’s logic to be radically consistent—and refreshing. Soon, it became a trusted source of daily study (even though I would get frustrated with it from time-to-time, and even flamed it online once.) Gary Renard’s Course-based The Disappearance of the Universe and Your Immortal Reality were excellent. 

Many sources, one coherent framework of understanding

So the answers in this blog come from all that stuff. Physics. Mysticism. Global spiritual traditions. The psychological ideas of people like Carl Jung, David Hawkins, Abraham Maslow, Ken Wilber and the perceptual spiritual psychology of A Course in Miracles. Toss in some thinking by scientists Carl Sagan, Wolfgang Pauli, David Bohm and Einstein, and writers Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy) and C.S Lewis (Mere Christianity) and you pretty much have my sources.

They don’t always agree, but with my inner guide, their non-contradictory bits of wisdom were woven into one logical context. I’m sure it still has holes—especially a big, fat one for God’s love, which is beyond intellectual hoo-hah—but my thinking is light-years more rational, reasonable and logical than my old Christian faith.

To this I bring my four decades of Christian perspective and my absolute faith in Jesus Christ. All this work only clarified and deepened my understanding of his sometimes difficult teachings. He is exactly who he said he was and I trust him without exception. On my difficult days when my own self-image was vacillating between real and false, I would simply close my eyes and imagine Jesus sitting in front of me, holding my hands and gently smiling. The fear would pass.

Trust in Jesus and your journey, though difficult, will be one of joy and love.

Scientific atheists tee off on the faithful

Then late in my journey, angry, attacking books written by scientific atheists stormed the book shelves. These books insisted the rational mind of science would be the final coffin nail of God the Delusion. 

These authors’ assertions that science will kill God was the opposite experience of my journey. In the hands of my inner guide, the lessons of science became sacred, shining beacons, literally lifting me from the contradictory sludge of religious ignorance into the pure, shining light of reason. I can see now why the Buddha called Nirvana absolute reason, thanks to science.

In gratitude, this blog is intended to offer some new, common ground for discussion between science and the spiritual community. 

In the end I side with astronomer Carl Sagan who said, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

Amen, brother Carl.