The Discovery of Everything, The Creation of Nothing

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgment............................................................viiForward...................................................................ixChapter One Who the Heck am I?............................................1Chapter Two What the Heck do I know?......................................18Chapter Three No Fear but Fear Itself.....................................51Chapter Four Words and Symbols............................................76Chapter Five A Very Taxing Subject........................................88Chapter Six To Each Their Own.............................................117Chapter Seven Feelings and Emotions.......................................129Chapter Eight Mister Spock Will Save the Universe (?).....................147Chapter Nine The Perfection of Perfection.................................159Chapter Ten The Appalling Apostle.........................................184Chapter Eleven The Meaning of Life in a Nutshell..........................211Chapter Twelve The Devil You Say!.........................................234Chapter Thirteen That is Sooo Takei!......................................260Chapter Fourteen Hey, Hey, I'm a Monkey!..................................282Chapter Fifteen The Discovery of Everything...............................310Chapter Sixteen The Creation of Nothing...................................331Chapter Seventeen No Prophet to It........................................349Chapter Eighteen The Devil Went Down to Homestead.........................375Chapter Nineteen The God Who Never Was....................................397Chapter Twenty The Repugnant Party........................................424Chapter Twenty-One It's Just About Business...............................462Chapter Twenty-Two The Root of all Evil...................................485Chapter Twenty-Three The Belief in the Irrational.........................511Chapter Twenty-Four It Is All About Politics..............................529Chapter Twenty-Five The Wrath of the Conned...............................549Bibliography and Footnotes................................................583

Chapter One

My name is Jim Robert Bader. That is, Jim = James, which is based on the Jewish word Jacob (more properly: Yakob), which means 'Supplanted.' I have often taken my name to mean that I was born to supplant things, to uproot what is old and replace it with what is new, much as a farmer harvests weeds to clear them out of his garden in order to grow nutritious stuff that the weeds would otherwise choke to death. I have taken my name to be my life's mission.

Robert is, of course, a Celtic name originating in Scotland, and it means, "Famous in Council" (or at least it did in that book on baby names that I looked it up many years ago). "Robert the Bruce" is a famous Scottish Hero-King who once fought for and won Scottish independence.

Bader is a German word for 'bath' or 'Bather.' I believe it had something to do with either leather tanning or else wine making, one of the two. Since Germans are better known for leather rather than wine, I am inclined to think the former and not the latter. From all of this I translate my own name as meaning: Supplant + Council + Bath = Baptize. With language it is really not all that hard to make this sort of progression.

Only I am not a Baptist. I was born a Methodist to Methodist parents, who themselves came from Methodist Immigrant families. As a matter of fact, my grandfather on my filial side was a Methodist minister, and I have heard quite a few stories about him, such as the time he insulted a group of Masons who were major donors to his church parish, all because he thought Freemasons were "the spawn of the Devil."

In fact my grandfather seems to have set a rather poor example of Methodism in the minds of both of my parents. My father recalled endless squabbles and religious battles in the house where he grew up waged between himself, his sisters and brothers against their dictatorial patriarch, which resulted in most of them renouncing Methodism altogether when each one came of age.

My mother, on the other hand, accused my grandfather of mistreating his wife, of beating or cheating on her, one of the two (or both), I don't really know. And all of this I never knew about until years after he had passed away.

What I do know is that my parents made a formal decision to switch from the Methodist church to join the Unitarian movement, and at the age of nine I was yanked out of one Sunday school and planted firmly in another. I did not understand the issues in conflict at the time, of course, but I did know one thing that stood out rather firmly in my memories.

It was that I loved that Unitarian church. It was so very different from the stern teachings to which I was accustomed in my old Sunday school classes. For one thing they did not try to indoctrinate us or force us to think a given way. Rather they made information available to me and other children and let us form our own conclusions from the basis of that information. And I ate it up like it was holy wafers!

Unitarianism taught me to see the world in larger ways, to embrace a wider view of the world than that which I had known as a Methodist. My Sunday school class dealt with subjects that might have seemed mature for the time, such as sexual education and drug use, both of which urged restraint and which I took to be very serious after seeing the effects of Venereal diseases, one reason among many that I did not have sex until my mid-twenties. But I regarded it as education and not indoctrination and it was part of a gradual evolution of my consciousness that helped me to see things in new ways that were broader and more open to possibilities than was available to me in Methodism.

I had a lot of issues in my mind at the age of nine, and problems in school due to the fact that I was diagnosed as Hyperkinetic. These days they would call it 'Attention Deficit Disorder,' a fancy way of saying that my mind was racing faster than I could manage and that little things could distract me. I had acute short-term memory problems with a handicap for staying focused on more than one thing at a time. Kids used to pick fights with me in class, which I would get blamed for having started since I was viewed as a disruptive element at that time, after getting in one too many fights, I got sent home on suspension and spent the last semester of my fourth grade year getting tutored by home schooling.

And yet I learned more at home in that one quarter than I had the previous three quarters in a class environment, having been separated from all of my usual distractions. A teacher come for one hour a day and giving me class assignments that I could study at my own pace because at home I could focus on my books rather than the teasing of my classmates.

This was before I learned better coping methods for dealing with tension and anxiety, and of cultivating better relations with my teachers, as I previously mentioned. I got to be something of a bookworm at a very tender age and even though I still do not to this very day wear reading glasses I was the stereotypical image of a 'Nerd' around my neighborhood.

I haunted libraries...