Matchsticks Contemplating Eternity

Life, Death, and Faith in What Is

Gregory W. Brown

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781666734089
  9781666729566
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666729573
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

These essays invite the reader to join the author's quest for meaning and wonder in the natural world. After the journey out of evangelical fundamentalism recorded in Unified Field Theology, the journey continues. Through years with more darkness than anticipated, the light shines through. And darkness turns out to be the best place for discerning faint and distant lights. The natural forces studied in the search for the unified theory reveal that the creative sustaining power of the universe is real and observable through science. Humility and wonder are found responding to the size of the cosmos. The strangeness of the quanta invites us to mystery and things beyond rational comprehension accompanied by the assurance that our most basic level is as eternal as the universe. Significance appears in caring for each other, a trait which is now found in both the animal and plant world as well. Returning to traditional sources of faith, the Bible remains an amazing library of voices revealing one people's evolution of understanding of the ultimate. Like practices of other cultures, it invites us to be still and know. Life is indeed good. We are here, together, choosing how we respond to a very real God.

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Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• A Sermon I’ve Never Heard
• Single Prayer Saints?
• Water Images for Crossing Over
• No Pattern Is the Pattern
• Is Dirt Better Than a Primate?
• The Disruptive Power of a Real God
• Achieving the Heights
• An Unorthodox Contemplation of Paul
• Impossible Images
• The Church of the American Commercials
• Three Years on the Journey
• Bangs, Gods, and Freedom
• Elders in a Self-Contained World
• God Is Love
• Experiencing God
• The Tower of Babel
• The Example of Jesus’s Life
• Pushing Water
• Consumption Reigns
• Is the Arc of the Universe Good?
• A Threefold Approach
• Everybody Knows—Or Do We?
• An Attempt at Brevity
• We Worship a God We Do Not Know
• The Inadequacy of Equations
• Why Theology?
• If You Kick a Bear
• The Continuing Evolution of Consciousness
• How does UFT Deal with Forgiveness of Sin?
• Was Jesus God?
• Unbelief and UFT
• God in Schrödinger’s Box
• The Second Commandment
• When Life Won’t Stop
• Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?
• Is Eternal Life a Dangerous Error?
• The Universal Power to Be
• E = MC² in World Religions
• Space and Time
• Is US Christianity the Religion of Paul?
• Things from Math that Do Not Exist in Nature
• The Present as a Koan
• The Observable Works of God Are the Powers of Nature
• Free Will
• The Probability of Specific Humans
• What I Miss about Church
• Song Lyrics and Copyrights
• A Matter of Names and Perspectives
• Connections Across Space-Time
• When the Right Answer Is the Wrong Argument
• Something Was Conceived
• Waiting on the Light
• The Advent of Snow
• Advent as Solidarity
• Advent as Practice for Democracy
• Waiting to Be
• What God Would Not Do
• A New Year
• I Know Why Old Men Stop Talking
• Gratitude
• The Location of Consciousness
• Death
• Expanding Universe
• What I Would Tell My Younger Self
• Greed and Eternal Life
• Further Thoughts on Death
• Humans as Particles
• Proposing a Human Uncertainty Principle
• Human Particles and Thermodynamics
• Particles that Think
• This World Is a Scary Place
• Why Does Religion Emphasize Sex?
• Accepting the Impossible as a Sign of Faith
• Corona Capitalism
• The Plague
• Human Strength in a Scary World
• Is There a Fall in UFT?
• Humans Being
• Falling Short of the Glory
• Growing Up with a Christian Witch
• Religion Abhors a Vacuum
• Normal
• “It Is Finished?”145
• Life in Prism150
• Antisemitism and the “Old Testament”
• A Different Reading of Genesis 3
• Quantum Reality of All Things
• The Blood
• Why I Write About Hope
• Life After Life
• The Trinity and Unified Field Theology
• Predicting What God Will Do
• For a Twelve-Year-Old Granddaughter
• A Momentary Vision
• It Is the Living Who Die
• Approaching the Bible
• Unexamined Relativism Devalues Factual Research
• My 2020 Declaration
• Rocks of Fire
• Sympathy for the One
• Movement in a Field
• Fall as Revelation
• When Science Is Wrong
• Approaching the Bible as Music
• Crimson and Gold
• Who Fears the Deep State?
• Weep
• Just War
• Infinity Plus One
• Intolerable Dark and a Lack of Advent
• Places Too Holy
• What We Think We See
• Life
• When Humans Choose Destruction
• The Denial of Death and Pascal’s Wager
• The Final Illusion
• The Universe Knows
• Death and the Circle of Life
• Matchsticks Contemplating Eternity
• Bibliography