Was God Trying to Tell Me Something?

I had a interesting experience a while ago, and I'd like to know what you think about it.

It was last winter when I met a wicked cool girl.

We started dating, and I fell in love.

She was a Pentecostal Christian.  I had never heard about people like her.

She told me her story about her conversion.

One day after a long month of loneliness and sadness, she lay on the floor in her room looking up at the ceiling when it struck her.  She realized that God existed!  From then on, her life was good.

I was an atheist, but I found her story so compelling that I wanted to learn more.

While I was trying to figure out what I believed, something very odd happened.

I became severely depressed.  I hated school, feared people, and didn't think my life had any meaning.

On top of that, I couldn't communicate with God.  I prayed.  I read the bible.  I asked others to pray for me, but nothing happened.

One night, I prayed in my truck.  I said, "God, please give me a sign.  Show me that you're real."  I thought the rain dripping down on the windshield was an appropriate symbolic expression of the inner sadness I felt.

But again, nothing happened.

The next day, I was sitting outside of class at school.  I had a Bible I rented from the library in my hand and was reading it when a lady approached me.

"Is that The Good Book?" she said.

"Yeah," I responded.

"What version?"

"I don't know.  It's not mine.  I got it from the library," I said.

She looked at the book, then into my face.  She walked over to her purse and grabbed her bible and brought it over to me.

"Here, have this."

"Really?"  I said.

"Take it.  It's the best thing you'll ever read."

"God speaks to us in strange ways," she said. "My daughter passed away two years ago, and I don't know where I'd be without this.  You look like you could use it."

We talked for a bit more, then she went off.

I walked down to the basement of the building and began to cry.  I couldn't understand what was going on.

Did God really speak to me?  Is this him returning my prayers? Or was it all just wishful thinking? 

Why me?  Why would she give it to me?

She loved this bible.  She used it often.  There were flowers, feathers, notes, and underlines in it.

I am so appreciative to this woman for giving me this book.

I still have it.  It's sitting on my bureau.

Now, my question for the reader is this: How should I interpret what happened?

First Star Photo Shoot

With some help from my friend Kurt.  I made these pictures.  

Stay Tuned!!!

Death

I was at work the other day, and my friend and I were talking when all of a sudden his jaw dropped, and he said, "What is that!?"

He pointed to the top of my head.

"What?" I said.

"You have a grey hair!"

We went under some good lighting and another friend came over to see.

"Pull it out," I said.

My friend then grabbed the hair and plucked it from my head and gave it to me.  I stood there with it in my hand and looked at it.

Grey already, I thought.

"You should write a blog post about the ephemeral nature of life," my friend said looking at my astonishment.

So here it is:

We are all going to die.  Every human ever to walk the face of this earth has died or will die.  All life dies.  Bees die. Plants and trees die.  Elephants, mushrooms, and dogs and cats all die.  I am going to die, and one day you will too.  That's a pretty intense thing to think about.

How do we cope with that thought?

Some of us keep ourselves busy with hobbies, work, and friends.  Others, the majority, think that our bodies will die, but our soul will live on in heaven.  Others think that when we die our spirit is transmitted to another physical body.  Maybe when I die I will become a frog or a prince or a frog-prince.

I take the skeptic perspective: I simply just don't know what happens when we die.

Many people think differently.  I'd be interested to hear what you think about what happens after death.

Your body may be gone, I'm gonnna carry you in. 
In my head, in my heart, in my soul.
And maybe we'll get lucky and we'll both live again.
Well I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Don't think so.  

-T

Natural Selection: Grilled Chicken with a Side of T-Rex

I went to the museum with my friend Lianne and learned something wicked cool.

That's Lianne

Dinosaurs are still alive!  They're not walking around like the big flesh-eating, lizard-monsters that they once were.  Rather, they're flying around in the sky, building nests, and laying eggs for human consumption. That's right, birds are the descendants of the great dinos!

You might say, "Travis, there is no way that my tasty grilled-chicken sandwich is the great, great....granddaughter of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park."  I'm here to tell you that this is the case!

When Dinosaurs first came on the scene some 230 million years ago, they were very different from other species.  They had holes in their hip bones that allowed their legs to extend under their bodies, not out to the side like crocodiles.  

Birds inherited this characteristic hip bone and other anatomical features from the Dinos, placing them in the same evolutionary family-tree.

In 1859, Darwin wrote a book called, On the Origin of Species, in which he outlined the theory of evolution by natural selection.  This theory explains how we get from a massive Godzilla-type creature to a Rhode Island Red.

That's The Guy 

Darwin's basic idea is this:

Creatures need to reproduce. When a creature reproduces, it passes along traits to its offspring.  (I've got blue eyes from my dad.) Traits that help the creature find a mate and copulate are passed along to the next generation.  Traits that make it difficult to  'get jiggy with it' are less likely to be passed along.

Over time traits change from one clearly distinguishable thing into something completely different.  There is an impressive body of evidence suggesting a link between the scale-like skin of the ancient dinos and the feathers of modern birds.

This means that feathers evolved from scales! It's as if one thing magically turned into an other.

Now, what's this got to do with "Mind, self, and belief..."?

The tree in your backyard, the squirrel climbing on the tree, the termites within the dead wood of the tree; your dog, your cat, your hamster, walruses and humpback wales were all shaped by natural selection.  Each living creature on this planet is the distant relative of every other living thing, and we all have one great, great....grandmother who lived over four billion years ago. The trick for us humans is to realize our place in the grand scheme of things and understand what the heck life is all about.    

The word Psychology means 'study of the soul.'  The best way to study the soul is to look at the soul's origin, look at the mind's origin.   There wasn't any mind 3 billion years ago, when life was just bacteria in a swamp, but now there is.  Why?

Attacking Psychological problems from an Evolutionary standpoint bears great fruit.  This is the bedrock perspective that I adopt in my research.  

In the next episode, I will talk about the Psychologist's Fallacy and tell you two stories about my life.  I am telling these stories because I need advice.  I need to know whether or not a significant life event that I had was caused by God, fate, chance, or something else.

In the episode after that, I will present the reader with a outline of my research project.

Keep it real, Everyone

Sources

This video is inappropriate.  Viewers beware.

Zap!

Went to the museum   Took some pictures.  Here's one.

How Would You Like to Become World Famous?

Hi Everyone.

I hope you've enjoyed the stuff on my blog.  I'm having so much fun writing for everybody, and now I'm asking you to be apart of the fun too!

I've got lots of friends and lots of stuff to write about, so why not include my friends in the stuff I write about?

My good friend Kelvin appeared in my first blog post, and that was a success.  I got at least three more views than I normally would have gotten.

So, here's the deal.  Shoot me a message, or leave me a comment below, and you may very well appear in an upcoming entry.  I will use your name, a picture (of your choosing), and something about you that makes you unique to either explain a tough idea or simply make a funny joke.  I am also open to suggestions about how to format my page.  All friendly critiques about writing, grammar, content, etc. are welcome.  I want to get good.  In order to do that, I need to get good advice.  

Best wishes!


Facebook: Travis Nelson Dumais

Email: tdumais3@gmail.com


ps. I should have a separate page up soon dedicated to my photography.  Stay tuned!

Image

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/fight-club/images/13119094/title/want-fight-club-fanart

Theory of Mind: What the Heck is it?

I went on a run today and figured out how to explain this idea to everybody.  I will ask you three questions that will force you to use your own Theory of Mind (ToM), and then I will explain what ToM is.

(1) When you see your best friend crying, what emotion are they feeling?

(2) When you give someone you love a red heart-shaped box, what types of things would they expect to find inside?

(3) When Shaquille O'Neal stands at the free throw line with a basketball in his hands, what does he intend to do?

These are not trick questions!  Your gut response to each one was right.

For the first one, perhaps you said that your crying friend was sad.  Or, if you have a friend who cries often -as I myself am prone to do- then maybe he was experiencing something sublime.

For the second question, someone you love would most likely think that there were chocolate candies inside the heart shaped box.

And, for the third question, we would guess that Shaquille intended to shoot the ball into the hoop so that he could get a point for his team.

When we think about other people's feelings (Question #1), we use our ToM. When we think about other people's beliefs (Q #2), we use ToM.  And, you guessed it, when we predict the next thing someone is going to do (Q #3), we use ToM!

We use ToM all the time, but we barely notice that we're doing it.  We don't notice it because our brains were designed to detect minds with ease in the same way that our brains were designed to easily detect the difference between blue and green.

See that little circled part?  That's called the Temporal-Parietal Junction, and it is the part of the brain that  'turns on' when we think about other people's mental states.*

In the next installment, I will explain how Mother Nature endowed us with this mind-reading ability. Down the road, I hope to address a wicked big question using Theory of Mind.

The wicked big question is this: how do we think about what God is thinking about?

*It's more like a network of neurons that 'fire' in a specific, globalized pattern; but to keep the explanation simple, I refer to the TPj as a 'part' rather than a complex neural network.