Visits From A Man Named Nobody 51

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“That’s a different problem, but repenting before God is only the highest form of repentance. You sought forgiveness from Stacy, which, apparently, she gave, at least to some degree.”

The car continued along the freeway as Paul considered what his mother said. Was that what he was after? He didn’t think so. “I wasn’t after forgiveness, Mom.”

“You were probably trying to be punished because you know what you did was wrong.” Her already normally soft voice was whisper quiet. She was sad about something. It was probably because Paul wanted punishment.

“I think people should pay for what they do,” Paul said. “I think they should get what they deserve.”

“I sincerely hope not,” his mother replied. “I want to give mercy, and I want to receive mercy. I know exactly what I deserve, and that’s why mercy is so wonderful.”

“You deserve to be happy!” The comment came out in a sort of muttered growl.

“And I don’t deserve to be punished for letting your father do what he did to us?” Paul’s head jerked at the question, which came out much more like an accusation.

“You were the victim!”

“And yet I let him do as much to you.”

Paul shut his eyes and took a deep breath. He hadn’t forgotten how he’d treated her as a child. He did whatever he wanted and expected her to let him. Then he got angry at her for giving him exactly what he wanted. It never made any sense. It only got better when he and Jordan became friends. 

“That’s not the same,” Paul said.

“It can’t be both ways, Paul. We either all get everything we deserve, or we all need mercy. But I’m of the opinion that if everyone got exactly what they deserve, we’d all be in a great deal of agony. And before you make some crass extreme counterargument, I acknowledge that some people are far more evil than others, but that’s not my point.”

“There is no one who is good,” Paul said.

“That’s,” she paused in shock. “That’s exactly right. Have you been reading the Bible?”

He’d never even considered telling her before this moment. It never came up. “I read the whole thing around the time he was arrested.” Paul refused to speak his name, and he’d die a million times over before he acknowledged that man as his father. 

Not that it worked. He was literally just like him, and he deserved exactly what that man got. 

A memory flashed in Paul’s mind. It was the night of Nobody’s first visit. The bastard had passed out drunk, and a bottle had tipped over. Paul set it right to be positive the alcoholic wouldn’t trip and hurt himself.

“Paul, are you there?” He’d been years away in the past and hadn’t heard his mother.

“Sorry,” he said. “I zoned out for a second.”

“I was asking why you read the Bible then?” 

That answer would lead to a lot of other questions. Paul had eluded to Nobody once or twice, but he’d never told the whole story. As he thought, he figured he should have lied to his mother, saying he’d read the Bible after he got close to Bill, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie to his mother or about Bill.

“I was looking for answers.” That was at least a part of the truth. “I didn’t find any. I read the whole thing. I think I’ve read it two or three times, but I don’t believe any of it.”

“Because of what happened to Bill.” She said it as gently as she could given her tone, but talking about Bill was always a way to get Paul angry. 

“Yes.” Maybe by being curt, she’d know to change the subject.

“We can’t accept just part of the Word,” she emphasized the capital. “It’s all true. It’s true that he’s sovereign. It’s true that he’s loving. It’s true that he’s the righteous judge, and it’s true that he calls us when it’s our time. We don’t get to pick when, and, to be honest, I don’t know that we’d ever accept the explanation even if he bothered to give it to us.”

“That part is for certain,” Paul muttered. 

“I’m going to ask about this girl now to shift the subject.”

Paul laughed. She could have just done it.

“I’m not doing it because I’m afraid or unwilling to debate or discuss this with you,” she explained. “I doing it because I’m trying to be patient. You’ve been patient, hearing what I’ve had to say. I think any more on this subject would just be an argument neither of us wants.”

“Yeah,” Paul admitted.

“I imagine Stacy is willing to allow you this chance to change,” his mother said. 

“But why? If I’m capable of doing what I did tonight, what else am I capable of?” And there it was. The last part of his question came out in whine of agony. He was a monster. He should be locked up before he hurt anyone. He wouldn’t be sorry if a bolt of lightning struck him down.  He needed to be punished. He needed to be stopped before he became that man.

“We’re all capable of horrible things, Paul,” his mother said. He couldn’t know for certain without activating the holographic feature of his PID, but he thought he heard a smile in her voice. “But you’re every bit as capable of becoming a kind, loving, patient man. If she’s ever willing to talk to you, maybe ask her why she was so willing to give you such precious gift as her own body. Why was she willing to be your girlfriend? I imagine it’s because she saw the man you could be, the other man you could be. I just wish you’d focus on becoming that man instead of avoiding the other.”

Paul glanced out the window as he ran a hand down his face to dry his tears. He caught the exit to his school from the corner of his eye, but he needed to admit something to his mother. “I’m so afraid of being him.”

“But if you focus on him, so that’s your target,” she said. “You have so many better options to focus on.” 

“Bill is the only better option I have, maybe Jordan or his dad,” Paul said. “I don’t know about so many other options.”

“I do,” his mother replied. “You’ve read the Bible. You have Enoch and Noah, Moses and David, the apostles and, most importantly, Jesus.”

“I thought you were changing the subject.” Paul muttered.

“I did, for an entire minute.” She sounded pleased at her quip. “And before you argue about it for the sake of arguing, go back and look at just one of those people. Would it really be so bad to be like them?”

Paul opened his mouth to say, “yes,” but that lie wouldn’t form on his lips either.

“Then there’s Paul,” his mother said. “Now there’s a case I think you could study. You could ask yourself why he called himself the foremost sinner, and yet he was still chosen to be an apostle to the Gentiles.”

Paul didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t either start an argument or get more Bible references. His contemplative moment turned into a period of silence.

“I’ll leave you to think on it now, but I hope you will,” his mother said. “We didn’t name you after the apostle, but you seem to focus on the punishments people deserved. It would do you some good to see the value of what mercy can do.”

“Ok,” Paul said.

“Thank you.”

Wait? Did she take that as a promise to look into it? “Mom —”

“I’m sure you’re near the school now, and you should see if Stacy is willing to talk to you,” his mother said.

“Mom, I —”

“I’ll talk to you later. I love you always, my son.”

She hung up. That was a dirty trick! She hung up before he could explain he was only acknowledging that he’d heard her. He shook his head. He didn’t actually promise her anything, and she knew it. He wasn’t obligated to study any of that stuff.

The car indeed pulled off the exit and started to pull around to one of the campus’s entrances. 

… to be continued …

Musings on Christianity 37

Did We Really Descend From Adam And Eve

One of the biggest questions and most difficult concepts to wrap my head around was the concept of Adam and Eve. There are a lot of theories out there that seek to reconcile the Genesis account with modern science.

Scientifically, one should evaluate the facts. When someone uses science to debunk anything rather than learn, they’re not using science the right way. We learn from experimentation. We look at the facts and try to understand what they tell us. We may start with a hypothesis and test it, but we don’t alter the test or conditions to get to our hypothesis; we test the hypothesis and reconsider that hypothesis if it fails the test. Only through constant testing under the most controlled settings can we truly gain the most valuable information. The difficulty comes from the fact that history is not a controlled setting. We can no more effectively evaluate the genetic integrity of the most ancient human corpses than we can use the genetic integrity of someone born tomorrow to determine the integrity of those ancient corpses.

We don’t know the rate of degradation, and even if we determined that rate now, we don’t know that it is constant.

I mention these things because the effects of incest are clear in this time, generations after the Genesis account.

Of all the questions about religion, this is the one I feel the most confident in discussing. I’m not a scientist at all, but I am a journalist, and so I know a thing or two about research. 

What I’d like to share with you is an interesting piece of information I came upon, and how people reacted to it.

About six years ago, I was doing research for a book I was writing. I wanted to base one of the characters on Genghis Khan, and I learned that as of that year, 16 million people were descended form Genghis Khan. That information was from National Geographic.

I posted the information on social media. The post, like a lot of my social media posts, got about six likes and three comments. Here’s the interesting thing, all three comments didn’t dispute the fact that 16 million people descended from one human being. Instead, they said it should be higher!

Now I didn’t really think about this until my social media kindly reminded me about the post. I have a different set of eyes, a new heart, and a new mind after those years. I, like humanity, have evolved.

I can’t help but wonder: Why is it no one blinks at a National Geographic post saying at lest 16 million people descended from one man, but there are several people who then want to state it’s impossible for humanity to descend from one person?

This isn’t a scientific argument. It’s an argument of reasonability. It’s an argument that I present to you based on consistency. If you can accept that up to one percent of the world descended from one man, then I’d argue you have to at least consider that the world as a whole did indeed descend from one man. Especially if one argues that this singular heritage from a descendant about 800 years ago doesn’t result in any genetic degradation that would be likely today.

Now, one may argue, “but that’s only one percent.”

That percentage must only increase as we travel back in time. All of Khans brothers and sisters (I know of seven) descended from his father. The brothers and sisters of that man all descended from his father.

When my mother died, I looked at how many children descended just from her, and I was amazed. She had several sisters and a brother. The further back you go, the more narrow the family tree becomes.

Seeing this made the concept of humanity descending from Adam much more plausible to me that it was years ago. I lack the scientific expertise and acumen to prove this or demonstrate its plausibility in a technical manner, so instead I looked at it through a scope I’m more comfortable and experienced with.

If we accept that 16 million people descended from one man. Then we must also remember how a family tree works. The more children a pairing has, the more potential (not every woman born gives birth, and not every man born sires a child) there is for an exponential increase.

I found that report in 2004, and it was a year old. Today, as I typed this, I found another report from discovermagazine.com, published in 2010, that expanded on this information and went into detail about something called “super-Y” lineages. These are lineages that have a significant number of people descending from one father. The Y chromosome passes from father to son, so using that chromosome allows one to accurately track from father to father.

I understand this isn’t definitive proof by any stretch of the imagination. That’s not my goal. My goal is to help readers at least avoid immediately rejecting the Biblical account while simultaneously accepting a trend that at least shows a significant number of people can indeed descend from a single father.

Another important thing to note about the historical record is that while we all descended from Adam and Eve, the Bible records an extinction event that reduced humanity to Noah and his family. That’s significant because it shows something that current science has discovered and is working to understand. 

While spending some time researching the concept of humans and their evolution, I found a very interesting bit of research. A study by Mark Stoeckle of Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler of the University of Basel in Switzerland published an article in Human Evolution, and it reveals a mitochondrial history leading back to, you guessed it, one original pair.

Now, news sites are debating what that really means and even its conclusions, because that’s how news and science work. They look at the data and test it. While this study shows a single couple did indeed produce the world as we know it, it says that couple existed about 200,000 years ago, which doesn’t align with the Genesis record either. The dating of information is sketchy at best though. Some dispute the mitochondrial data. Again, I’m probably not going to prove anything to readers definitively. However, I hope this at least opens your mind to the possibility.

Where most of this book looks at how I use the Bible to analyze my actions and thoughts, I felt compelled to veer a bit. The necessity arises from the concept of racism in the world. The most baffling thought to me is the idea of racism at all. We are the human race. This data indicates that at some point along the line of human history (however you measure and track it) we’re born of one mother and father. The evolutionary changes (and those were incredibly small, I promise) that caused our skin colors to darken or lighten or our eyes to narrow or widen are effects of environment that would, given the same amount of time in the same environment, absolutely change your physical appearance as well.

The Bible doesn’t just teach us to love every man as we want to be loved, it shows us that these are our biological relatives in some respect. We are one race. And as a member of that race, I strive to focus on that truth and obey the command to love others as I love myself. This chapter was just another way to look at that command and understand how it helps humanity.

For our panel: This chapter was based on research from a journalistic standpoint. Do you have access to more scientific studies that help explain the genesis account? Why are people so ready to accept genetic information about one historical figure, but so against the Bible as a historical record? Is there a good place people of scientific minds can go to obtain data for themselves? Is there a divide between faith and science? If there isn’t why are science and faith often put at odds? If there is a divide, how does a person with a scientific mind come to accept the Word?