A Freethinker's Exploration of Religion, Science, and the Mind

Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been

Truckin’, by the Grateful Dead

For many years I felt “the light was all shining on me” through the patterns I saw in the Bible. They seemed so obvious and incontrovertible I could not help but describe them as “blazing like the noontime sun in a cloudless sky.” I had no shadow of doubt. I believed the Bible Wheel was literally “perfect” and could withstand any criticism. It was to me the “Divine Seal and Capstone of Holy Scripture” designed by God himself and that’s what I boldly declared on the banner of the original version of this site:

That banner stood over about a thousand pages of “evidence” I had laboriously collected over a period of about fifteen years. It was all I could think about. It was all I talked about. It was my calling from God. I was a true believer. I thought the Bible Wheel fulfilled two passages from Zechariah which I called the Capstone Prophecies. Here are my opening words from that article:

Divine Revelation is True Light. When the Spirit of God illuminates His Word, we know His Truth with the same certainty a blind man would have if he received sight. Everything suddenly comes into focus with perfect clarity. We can walk without stumbling in the Daylight of God’s Word. All the pieces effortlessly fit together with supernatural grace when the vision of the Whole is received. Ten thousand witnesses lift their voices in unison to confirm God’s Word. There is no perplexing doubt, no confusion. Scripture super-abundantly conforms to its own reiterative command that “every word” must be established “in the mouth of two or three witnesses” (Deut 19:15, Mat 18:16, 2 Cor 13:1). There is nothing but light, Light, LIGHT that drives out any shadow of darkness. The Gates of Heaven are thrust open; the Divine Perfection of the Holy Word shines like the noontime sun in a cloudless sky for all to see. This is the overwhelming power of God’s prophetic Capstone. Enigmatic clouds that have shrouded the self-reflective prophecies of God’s Word given within the Word itself, such as Ezekiel’s Wheels and Zechariah’s Stone, simply evaporate in the light of its blazing glory.

The Bible Wheel, the Object of my Fascination

Those words accurately represented what I believed when I wrote them. At the time, I thought they were based on objective evidence. Now I see them as produced by a mind that had utterly hypnotized itself with an amazing “Alphabetic Wheel” of “God’s Word” – a kind of “decoder ring” on supernatural steroids, a coded set of circles within circles encompassing the entire Bible from Aleph to Tav, from beginning to end, in imitation of its own description of the Creator as the Alpha and Omega. It is hard to imagine a more mesmerizing object. It transfixed my mind for over a decade.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I expressed the essence of my self-induced hypnotic fixation when I said “Everything suddenly comes into focus with perfect clarity. All the pieces effortlessly fit together with supernatural grace when the vision of the Whole is received.” That is how it felt to me. That is the subjective experience of a “true believer.” There is no room for doubt when all available attention is focused on The Pattern (and the carefully selected set of facts that confirm it). Read More »