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Daniel of Doulogos Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
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The Buzz


Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich

His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole

[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train

This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos

Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead

There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
 
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Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Wednesday Night Christian Fiction...
He had been born to a middle class family in Tennessee early one September morning in 1971. He had heard the gospel twenty times growing up, but mostly it was the "say this prayer and you will be saved" sort of tract gospel - the kind where repentance is just a word, and you do what you have to do in order to secure heaven for yourself. He had said the prayer many times, but even he knew that didn't make him a Christian.

At 30 he heard the gospel for the first time with his heart engaged, and suddenly sin was real, and hell was real, and Christ was real, and he knew deep down inside that he loved his sin, and that was why he hated Christ so. He knew in his head that it was madness and death to deny Christ's rule in his life, and yet that knowledge wasn't enough to pry the love of sin out of his heart, and in a despairing moment he knew that sin owned him, and yet in the bleakness of that crushing certainty, in the utterness of his certain damnation - in the very moment that he was certain that he was lost - suddenly the message of Christ was more than a message, it was life itself. What only moments ago was unthinkable - an act of surrender so alien to all he had ever been suddenly poured itself out from the deadness of his heart - life where once there was death, beauty replacing ashes, and belief, hope, and joy gushed into his being as he surrendered the entirety of his life to Christ.

That was in 2001.

For the next eleven years he labored tirelessly in faith. His walk was steady, methodical, paced out by the silent rhythm that rises from that tension between what we know we should be in our faith, and what our faith allows. Slowly the house was being cleaned, and with the cleaning, new light, freedom, and grace. Whether the path lead through the valley of the shadow of death, through wilderness, or rich fruitful and easy fields - the pace was steady, and every step worked with each previous step to bring him to wherever he happened to be.

He had studied as an architect, but particle physics was his real joy. Though only an online layman, his interests and his untutored brilliance began to cause seasoned trend setters in the trade to take notice. Some of his ideas - rough and even outrageous - they were nevertheless, plausible, and even solid. His faith was not something that got in the way of these things - it was all part of his personality. He wasn't one of those "quack" Christians who harmlessly invites you to dinner then suddenly snaps and tells that you vote wrong, and that you're going to hell, and that its the devil who makes you smoke. Naw, he was just a very serious thinker, and though it seems impossible an unlikely combination, he a wit that was at once warm and caustic - which while being magnificently hilarious, never made anyone feel bad.

So it was interesting when he began to study time. Now, in reality, the past and the future do not exist, all that exists is the present. The past is something we remember in the present, and the future is something we anticipate in the present, but what is gone by cannot be touched, nor what is to come. We see evidence that things have happened before this moment, our own memories testify to this - and our experience in the present, tells us that a future is immanent; but we only have the present.

Time travel, or so the theory went, was really a matter of relative space/time. In order to move through space, we must move through time, but because time and space are relative to where you are, you can only really measure it according to one observer's observation of another - and either time is going to seem faster or slower but never backwards. Which is why when he began to speak of the possibility of sending information backwards in time it would have been laughable, had any one else mentioned it.

He had this idea, a theory really, about "inverted space" I never really understood it, and it sounded bizarre. His premise was that sub atomic particles were not fully "tuned" to this reality, having only one or more "phases" that passed through this reality to give them the semblance of presence in this reality. But he theorized that these phases were part of a hyper dimensional state that could only be fully understood if one graphed the whole object across both space, and "inverted space".

I didn't see the point, and he took a lot of flack in the community - that would have all started, I suppose, round the winter of 2011. There were a couple of guys who stuck with him, but he started to withdraw a bit and in a few years, most of the regulars had moved on, and I seldom hung in those circles, having finished my PhD, not in physics but in Maths.

But in the spring of 2015, I came across an article on trans-phased string theory that had all the marks of you-know-who, and it was sheer brilliance. He had gone to the woodshed and worked on his chops for a few years it seemed, because this article was both crazy and stunning. By tangling a phased string, he theorized, one could "twist" information round into "trans-phased" space - quarks and whatnot, he described as trans-phased spiral vectors that twisted in and out of phase in our time/space so that if one tangled a twist, one could pass information through the phase and it would appear again "simultaneously" when the twist again re-entered this side of the time-space continuum - tangle-twisting up the chain was impossible for some reason that though he explained well enough, I really couldn't understand, but one could twist the tangle downward - and that would drive the information encoded in the tangle, theoretically at least - backward in time.

On August 14th, 2019, in his own basement, he built a very rudimentary communication system, and as he was about to try it, a message from his future came to him telling him of their success. He then sent the message. He then received three more messages, one from the 15th one from the 17th, and one from the 23rd of August. The one from the seventeenth included lottery numbers for the 16th.

The numbers won, but he didn't play - he was, as you recall, still a very committed Christian, and the idea of depending upon his invention to supply his needs rather than God was a temptation he was unwilling to surrender too. But a thought came to him after that - why not send back hard earned Christian lessons - wouldn't it be better to learn up front what took years to know? He determined to do just that.

By 2030, he had streamlined his invention, and no longer needed a special "receiver" to receive messages, he could use the twist-tangled string to influence radio frequencies - and thereby, use wifi connections in the past to transmit data packets to their long ago networks. In fact, he could even send emails to people, and naturally he chose himself as the test subject.

His first email he sent to himself was received before he even came up with the idea of twist-tangling strings. He sent it to the time just after he was saved, and knowing all the struggles he was about to go through - he carefully and thoughtfully explained all that thirty or so years of Christian growth had taught him. It was perhaps, a doctrinal masterpiece that only he could truly understand, for he knew what questions and doubts had plagued him, and what struggles he had passed through to arrive at an illumined answer - and he documented it all and sent it back to himself.

What a profound gift (or so he reasoned) he was giving himself. All that struggle and hardship could be avoided, and who knew the heights his faith could reach if only he hadn't spent so long toiling in this mire then the next. Here was a road map through all the struggle, and sent to himself at the time he most would need it. When he finally sent it however, his heart went cold as a stone in his chest.

Time manipulation is funny like that. Because he suddenly remembered that he had received that same email so long ago, and how he relished it, and for a season had seemed to grow spiritually in leaps and bounds, only now he remembered that it was only a short while after that, that some small struggle had overcome his "faith" - and he had given up on Christianity. In fact, for the past twenty five years, he had been a great hater of the faith, a bitter atheist who only had contempt for Christ, and here he was, not happily married and content, but suffering burnout from two divorces, having three children, one who died of a drug overdose - and about as far from happy as you can be. In fact, if it weren't for the booze, he wouldn't have strength to face another day.

It was a strange thing to do, but hating Christ so much, he determined to send one more email - to warn himself of the ridiculous faith he was about to embark upon - and he poured all the venom pent up in his soul into that email - and when he had slandered Christ with a cold and satisfying wit, certain that this would save him the folly of a few years wasted in Christianity, he hit send.

Yet suddenly he remembered that too - he remembered getting that vitriolic email, and he remembered deleting it with disgust, and deleting the next days email from the same address. He remembered his struggle in the faith, and his perseverance, and suddenly understood that there was a point to his struggles, a point to his failures, a point to all his walk - that maturity and perseverance are not hindered by struggle, they are produced by it - and without struggle, without chastisement, if you will, one is not a legitimate child. It was then that he put away his invention, erased his notes, and prayed himself, with much thanksgiving, to sleep.

The end.

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posted by Daniel @ 9:13 PM  
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