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The Elephant Book Trilogy

  • The Curious Elephant

    TCE iconEditorial Preview:

    The Curious Elephant completes the elephant book trilogy, which includes The Blind Man’s Elephant and The Hijacked Elephant. In all three, the elephant is a metaphor for Christianity.

    Pastors of religious organizations claim the US and the other Christian nations are not in end-time prophecies, but nothing could be further from the truth. Lacking a clear understanding of the relevance of the covenants to Christianity, however, we‘ve lost our understanding of the gospel Christ actually delivered in the first century. Christians were intended to be followers individually, not denominationally, of Christ. Twenty-first century Christianity has been rendered irrelevant for many people by organized “churchianity.”

    Each chapter in the book has the related verses from the Biblical record bracketed for easy reference. Every sufficiently curious reader, therefore, can discover directly from the Biblical record how significantly different first century Christianity delivered by Christ and the apostles is compared to what has evolved to become our 21st century version, including our place in end-time prophecies.

    A flow chart at the end of the book diagrams all the key characters and historical events making it easy to follow the big picture from Genesis to Revelation. In the end, we discover the answer to the extremely pertinent question, “Twenty centuries later, why is first century Christianity more relevant than ever?”

    Ed. Note: The Curious Elephant was published at the time when it was decided to switch to a digital format going forward rather than a print format. Thus, the chapters in The Curious Elephant were used to "seed" the first iteration of the redshoe.com website. The website contains all the chapters found in the book, although they have been expanded upon over the intervening years. The other two books are available in PDF format at the bottom of the Home page.

  • The Hijacked Elephant

    altEditorial Preview:

    The Hijacked Elephant takes up where The Blind Man’s Elephant left off. While the two books are different, they complete each other.

    The Biblical record is one story written about and for the same people. The characters in Genesis are there at the end in the Book of Revelation. In between the bookend creations of the heavens and Earth in Genesis and the new heavens and Earth in Revelation, our story unfolds. Its characters, circumstances and duality of sub-plots flow like a river; sometimes east, sometimes west, sometimes calm, other times raging and roaring over rocks and falls. What may appear as different rivers in hindsight to each generation of participants who ride its waters, it is one vibrant river making its way to journey’s end.

    When we allow the Biblical record to interpret itself, rather than injecting our personal prejudices, it tell us its story. In the case of The Hijacked Elephant, we discover that every major theological event found in the New Testament is the fulfillment of the archetypical high holy days found in the Old Testament. The apocalypse, the second coming of Christ and others are waters that flow from our past into our future.

  • The Blind Man's Elephant

    BookCover icon2Editorial Preview:

    Christianity in the first century, we discover, is much different than the Christianity we experience today. The single message delivered by Christ and the apostles has fractured into more than 30,000 recognized denominations. What we perceive to be basic tenets of Christianity now, are dramatically different than what was first taught by Christ. When we add scientific fact into the spiritual mix along with our expanding awareness of the quantum world, many tenets of which we surprisingly find written in the pages of the Biblical record 3000 years ago, we re-discover the relevancy of the message of Christ to our daily lives. It is an amazing revelation, the astounding secret of Christianity hidden in plain sight, a glimpse into a lost 4000 year old mystery with Christ at its fulcrum completely changing the roles of the players with incredible implications for us in the 21st century.

    Miller has laid out the arguments and logically addressed each point using the historical Biblical record and scientific fact in an adventurous style that uncovers many surprises for all readers, none more so than chapter six, The Genesis Birthright.

    "So oft in theologic wars, The disputants I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance,
    Of what each other mean, And prate about an elephant, Not one of them had seen." -- John Godfrey Saxe, 1881

     

Insider Quotes

 

Michael J. Miller, The Blind Man’s Elephant

BookCover
  
© copyrighted material. No copying or reproduction is allowed without written permission of the publisher 
 
 

Insider Quotes

 
"We’d have to classify the Christianity we experience today as a different species of elephant compared to our first century predecessor.”

“If we can’t explain the reasons for our beliefs, we don’t have any beliefs. We have someone else’s beliefs.”

“Metabolism rates are singular to the organism. That is, an independent life will have its own metabolism rate that is dependent on its size. An adult elephant will never have the metabolism rate of a man, a dog or a mouse for example. If the fetus has a wholly separate life of its own beginning at conception, its metabolism rate would never be the same as the mother’s and would not significantly change at birth. ”

“Ultimately, though, our unchallenged fears bully us, making our lives smaller. They garner control shrinking our world imperceptibly until we end up cloistered in dark cubbyholes fearing even the faintest hint of unfamiliar light.”

"For the record, there is no contradiction between evolution and creation ... Origin of and change within the species is addressed by evolution. Origin of life is addressed by creation ... Life similarities are of the flesh. Life differences are of the spirit."

“When we look at time’s relativity and it being a singularity, Einstein, Feynman, Hawking and our Biblical non-physicist 3000 years ago have reached the same conclusion about the construction of our universe, but from two different, though, complementary routes.”

“One gets the distinct feeling that today’s concept of heaven is a place no longer inhabited by harp playing angels, but rather by angel chauffeured SUV’s that take you from mall to mall with unlimited credit on your plastic key to heaven.”

“While all the “anti-Christ of the day” sentiment has raged on over the millennia, the real identity, according to the Biblical record, has remained steadfast and unchanged. The events of the apocalypse were set in motion at least four thousand years ago by the very characters involved today.”
 
 
 

Quotes

 

“The key to man’s creation is that God gave adam a different spirit, one that made Adam different from every creature on Earth until that time. This was the second creation, the kingdom of mankind. It set man apart and above the animal kingdom.

Let’s take a prime example. When God said “Let us make man in our image and likeness” in the first chapter of Genesis, a commonly held belief is that he was referring to making man physically in the image of God as opposed to all the cattle and fowl and fish as well as any “caveman” type creature. Many religious people believe the difference between Neanderthals or other hominids and Adam was only a fleshly difference that made man like God in his physical appearance. But, differences are of the spirit not the flesh.”

The Blind Man’s Elephant

Three Creations of Life: A Bridge to Understanding

Copyright © 2007, Michael J. Miller



“…Our physical bodies have evolved over the ages, but it was our minds that were created in the image of God. We’ve been reading the Bible too literally. We learn that God created us in his image, but it’s not our physical bodies that resemble God, it’s our minds.”

The Lost Symbol

Copyright © 2009, Dan Brown

 

 

An excerpt from chapter three

Creation In Six Days, But Who’s Counting?



Science fiction was really big in the ‘50s. Cars were sprouting fins just like rocket ships. Cadillac always had the best fins I thought although Chevy gave them a run for their money with their ’57 Bel-Air. While the sci-fi movies look a bit hokey by our standards today, they were really cool back then. And what made them even cooler to an eleven year old was a trip to the Planetarium. It had to be one of the coolest places for a kid to go. It was a portal to a young mind’s fantasies. We didn’t have game consoles back then in the “old days.” I could hardly believe it the first time I was touching a real meteorite that came from outer space just like the Blob!

Another highlight at the Planetarium was the Tesla Coil demonstration. Huge spidery electric bolts of a million volts would shoot out in a bizarre and scary display of power. The loud crackling, popping sound made it even more impressive and menacing. Eventually one of the Planetarium’s employees, probably the science geek from the local college, would be forced to go into the electrically veined pit to demonstrate that he wouldn’t get electrocuted. That’s a lot of faith in science right there. Disappointingly, the volunteer never once looked like Boris Karloff, the original 1931 movie Frankenstein monster. I used to watch in wide-eyed anticipation, as the guy in the white lab coat just like the ones they wore in the movie laboratories, would step inside with snakes of electricity darting towards him. I was certain one of these times he’d get cooked. He never did. After several trips to the Planetarium, I finally thought it would be cool to do that and brag to the kids in school. But they said it wouldn’t be good PR for the place if they fried a little kid, accidentally or not.

My favorite exhibit was much more mundane to look at, but to me even more astounding. It was a big shiny brass ball weighing over 200 pounds slowly swinging on the end of a strong steel cable hung from high above in the ceiling. Attached to the underside the big brass ball was a metal pointer that skimmed just a couple inches above the floor. On the floor was a giant compass rose showing north, south, east and west as well as points in between. In a large circle on the floor were small, dark rods about the size of a piece of chalk but not quite as long. They had them set up side-by-side around the circle. Every few minutes or so, the big brass ball appeared to move just enough to knock one of them over. This was the Foucault Pendulum. Leon Foucault, the French scientist, first demonstrated it publicly in 1851 in Paris.

As a little kid, I was nearly mesmerized by the methodical swinging of the big brass ball moving ever so slightly with each swing. What was the neatest part was that the brass ball wasn’t changing its angle of swing. It wasn’t changing direction. What I was seeing was the entire planet Earth literally rotating beneath my feet! The whole Earth mind you! The floor of the Planetarium was moving around the arc of the pendulum’s swing due to the Earth revolving on its axis. I could hardly believe it when I read the explanation. And had I stayed there all day, I could tell when the whole day had taken place because the floor of the Planetarium would have revolved back to the same place it was twenty-four hours earlier.

It was really neat that Leon and the other scientists figured out a way to show us things even though we couldn’t detect them normally with our five senses. We had to use our brains too. I sort of had a newfound respect for my brain after that. What this helped me understand at such a young age was that everything was not as it appeared to be. Scientists discovered that our universe wasn’t a static entity but it was growing. It was actually expanding and at the speed of light no less. But what was it expanding into? Little by little we’ve discovered a universe that was a lot different than what we thought it was just by looking.

We’ve discovered as human beings that our four dimensional, carbon based physical existence is woven into the fabric of the universe the same as galaxies, distant pulsars and black holes. This is also referred to as the space-time continuum. We have three dimensions of space … length, width and height. And we have one dimension of time. We are keenly aware of our 3-D spatial surroundings on the Newtonian level and how we interact with them in our normal everyday lives. Possibly, never before in the history of mankind have we been so acutely aware of time. Most folk’s lives are governed around time. We wake up at this time. We eat breakfast and get the kids to school by that time. Arrive at the office by such and such time. We eat lunch at this time. And if we google the subject “time,” it tells us it took their computers only 0.12 seconds to return just under 2.5 billion results. On and on it goes, day after day, 24/7.

Time means different things to different people in different circumstances. Time is money for business. In sports, an announcer tells us the losing team doesn’t have time on its side. If we’re retired, we may have time on our hands. When up against deadlines, time flies. On a long flight when we’re anxious to get to where it is we’re going, time may drag on, but it certainly doesn’t fly.

In our modern day, we have time most of us didn’t even know existed. By now, just about everyone familiar with computers knows about nanoseconds, those bunyanesque one-billionths of a second compared to picoseconds, femtoseconds as well as attoseconds, one-quintillionth of a second or 10-18 second? But even these are huge amounts of time compared to Planck Time, which is considered the smallest amount of time possible at 10-43 or 10-44 second. This is the time it would take a photon traveling at the speed of light to zap across a Planck Length, which is very, very, very small indeed.

While these amounts of time and space may appear insignificant to us at the Newtonian scale in which we live our normal daily lives, they are critically important as they are an integral part of the quantum fabric of the Creator’s universe in which we live. In fact, it is this seeming contradiction of scale between the microscopic universe and the macroscopic universe that physicists are wrestling with in their quest for a grand unified theory that accounts for the apparently weird differences between the two, perhaps best popularized by Nobel Prize winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger's Cat thought-experiment.

Thankfully, most of us don’t have to deal with units of time smaller than minutes in our daily lives unless you happen to live in New York City where minutes are said to move much faster. As we’re all scurrying around on the surface of planet Earth, an hour for us is the same as an hour for everyone else. This is the classical reference of time used in Newtonian physics. Alas, it is not so simple.

Until 1905, no one realized this except an office clerk who had flunked his entrance exams in physics to the local polytechnic. Let’s see. What was that 26-year-old kid’s name again? Oh, yeah. Einstein. Anyway, this Einstein kid managed to get his paper on special relativity published [On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies] that sort of pushed Sir Isaac Newton’s concept of absolute time off the edge of the expanding universe. Even then only a few people knew time was relative and not absolute. Fewer really understood it. Gradually, the rest of us heard about time’s relativity, but most probably still don’t understand it much less see any significance for us in our daily lives. While we may not be aware of the significance of various aspects of time, it is important for us to understand the basic concepts of the nature of time. The nature of time is a part of creation as much as we are.

** *** **

The concept of time being a singularity is a relatively new scientific discovery of an aspect of the universe as created by God and written down in the Biblical record three millennia ago. It may be a bit difficult to understand how the fundamental nature of time is that the past, present and future all exist at once on the quantum level, but this is the basic fabric construction of our universe. Space and time are interwoven. At the beginning of universe, at the last instant just preceding the Big Bang, time was a singularity.

Think of a balloon that isn’t inflated. You take a felt tip marking pen and put a dot on it. The dot represents time as a singularity. Now stretch the balloon out to one side. What happens to the dot? It stretches to become a line. Time as we experience it at the macroscopic level in our universe is like that dot stretched on the balloon. Time is linear. It goes in one direction for us. In our case, time moves in the direction of the expansion of the universe just like the dot moves to become a line in the direction of the stretching balloon. We aren’t told why it’s this way; just that this is the way it was created. It has created a reality unique to our experience of physical life in the universe.

If time, the past, the present and the future are a singularity, why is it we can only remember the past and not the future? Again, how can it be like that? That’s the way our universe was created. Or as we read in Ecclesiastes, “God requires that which is past.” The Hebrew word requires here is baqash [baw-kash'] a primitive root meaning to search out but can also be translated as requires. The Hebrew word past is radaph [raw-daf'] a primitive root meaning to run after, figuratively, of time gone by. So the Creator, by implication, “requires” us to run after and search out the past, but we aren’t allowed to do the same with the future even though, according to the laws of quantum physics, time is equally accessible in both directions. Maybe it’s another way to tell us we should learn from the past.

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, said in regards to only knowing the past while attempting to understand time as a singularity, “It may prove useful in physics to consider events in all of time at once, and to imagine that we at each instant are only aware of those that lie behind us.” This is not unlike watching a movie for the first time. While the entire movie is a singularity, that is, it’s on a single disk, our dot, yet at each instant of the movie we are only aware of the events in the movie that we have already seen or that lie behind us. The movie, by comparison as it exists on the disk, is in its microscopic state. We can move from any point on the disk into the movie’s future or into the movie’s past with equal ease using our remote control. When we watch it on a screen, it expands into its macroscopic state. In both cases it is bound by the speed of light. The entire movie may be burned onto the single disk within seconds, yet it may take us two hours to watch it relative to our “normal” frame of time. So how long is the movie, two hours or just a few seconds? It depends on the observer. If we could watch the movie there in the disk in its microscopic state, then we’d have to answer in seconds not hours. In our normal experience here with time, we’d have to answer two hours.

When we look at time’s relativity and it being a singularity, Einstein, Feynman, Hawking and our Biblical non-physicist 3000 years ago have reached the same conclusion about the construction of our universe, but from two different, though, complementary routes.

Now what gets a bit more interesting is the Hebrew word used for the “past is the present,” “the future is the past” is kbar [keb-awr'] and can be defined as an extent of time. It is derived from the primitive root Hebrew word, as found in easily accessible Hebrew lexicons, kabar [kaw-bar’]. Kabar means to bind together; or to be great, to be long and continual or length of space, continuance of time. Hmmm, does this sound anything like our English phrase space-time continuum? Bind together an extent of time. Bind it with what? Time and space are bound together!? How can it be that in the pages of the Biblical record we find the concept of the space-time continuum and that time is a singularity written thousands of Earth years ago when physicists have only recently discovered these same principles? Hmmm, just maybe, God did create the universe. But just maybe it wasn’t created the way we thought it was. He created the Earth. It just isn’t flat. God created time. It just isn’t absolute.

We can explore the universe through the eyes of orbital telescopes or through experimentation, but physical beings have a boundary that we can’t get past. That boundary is the speed of light. The speed of light, and apparently the speed of gravity, is 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum [in a laboratory or in space] as measured on Earth. Space and time contract as they get closer to this speed. To attain the speed of light, mass increases in such a way that it would require an infinite amount of energy. It just won’t happen. The speed of light is an absolute, even though physicists are searching for possible exceptions. While the speed of light is a boundary for our physical universe, it has no hold over the non-physical or matters of the spirit. The potential for a full understanding of life, therefore, comes not from the flesh in our four dimensional universe, but rather from mankind’s fifth dimension, the spirit. Until we focus on the spiritual, our understanding of life remains incomplete.

Let’s read two rather interesting quotes. “In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.”

And secondly, “He has made everything beautiful in his time: also he has set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end.”

The two quotes make the same point. The second quote is from the Biblical record in the Book of Ecclesiastes. The first quote is from Albert Einstein. In other words, man will never be able to discover through observation, or the scientific method, the ultimate mystery of our universe and our life in it. We have to be told. And the Biblical record contains one of the keys to understanding. By using our brains and combining the knowledge we can glean from scientific observation coupled with an understanding of the non-physical or spiritual, we have the opportunity to have a fuller and more complete understanding of the world around us.

What makes the points in the above quotes all the more fascinating is the meaning of the Hebrew word translated into English as world in the Ecclesiastes verse. The word in Hebrew is ‘owlam. It means concealed, i.e., the vanishing point, generally time out of mind, past or future.

The world is a vanishing point of time, both past and future. That vanishing point is our boundary of our expanding physical universe, the speed of light. We can’t open Einstein’s watch nor can we peek past the vanishing point of time in the universe. Knowledge of what’s on the “other side” of our expanding universe, or what was on the other side prior to its inception, is concealed from mankind at least by direct physical observation. Scientists will never be able to “stare God in the face” as it were. They can, however, certainly know his work.

God has set the vanishing point of time [singularity] in man’s heart [feelings, will, intellect] so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end. Physicists have shown that we can’t know what takes place on the other side of time’s vanishing point prior to the Big Bang or into our future. The universe, the space-time continuum had a beginning and will have an end according to the author of Ecclesiastes. Thus, neither space nor time is absolute, but it’s relative to the observer and his or her motion through the fabric of our four-dimensional space-time continuum that is our God created universe.
You might ask, “Okay, time is relative, yada, yada, yada, but the Biblical record in Genesis one states that creation took place over six days. Verse five states very plainly, ‘And the evening and morning were the first day.’" There are six of these virtually identical phrases in Genesis describing creation. We don’t need to know about the ends of space and time, just a twenty-four hour period, an evening and a morning. And you are absolutely correct. But the big picture helps us to properly understand the details. The details in this case are that there is an evening and there is a morning, then Genesis says it was the first day. Did creation take place in six days or not? According to one popular evangelical organization, Answers In Genesis, it “stands firmly on the authority of Scripture, which entails that Creation occurred in six normal-length days about 6000 years ago.” But is this what the Biblical record in Genesis is literally saying? Well, let’s examine it because like the example of the Foucault pendulum, we need to use our brains because we can’t always see everything with just our eyes.
 
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