In the Beginning...

 

I was raised United Methodist and joyfully attended Church and (more often) Sunday School for much of my childhood. In addition to this, I spent six summers at a Catholic Camp in southern Illinois. The idea of God has always been in something I have considered, for as long as I remember. Whenever I was in junior high, I discovered science and during the same year (7th grade) attended my first "Lock-in" with some of my highly religious friends. I was "saved" that night. It was really at this point that I started developing my own opinions on God, separate from the opinions given to me by the Church. During this time as my interest in science boomed, I began to debate whether or not there was even a God at all.

By the time I reached high school, I essentially considered myself an atheist and had an inseparable love for the sciences. My family moved three hours north in Indiana after my freshman year and I was forced to make new friends and get used to a new place. I loved the property they bought and would spend many hours walking the creek and contemplating life, time, god, and the universe. I developed a list of theories (which can be seen HERE), many of which involve time. This list was developed in the autumn of 1999, shortly after moving. In this same time period I wrote in a notebook a quasi-poem about time. This is the first-ever record of IGITY-related thoughts that I have (written when I was 15), and can be viewed HERE.

    Throughout high school, I felt that science could explain just about everything that religion calls to a God for, and so there really was no need to believe in God. My atheistic beliefs continued as I went to college and took an Astronomy class. The class was called "The Birth and Death of the Universe". Halfway listening to the lectures, I allowed my mind to wander and wonder. I thought of how science could explain everything that happened after the moment of the initial "Big Bang", but nothing could probe what caused it. My views changed to slightly agnostic, believing that a God or something could have created the initial conditions of the universe, but physics and evolution can explain everything since.

        In the years since that course, I have continued to contemplate God and the universe. I have read several books on theoretical physics and string theory. The works of Einstein, Hawking, Hofstadter, and Greene among others have strongly influenced my ways of thinking. At last, in 2006 all of my thoughts came together into a single theory; one that I have subconsciously been developing for years. It came together during a brainstorming session just after midnight on 10-17-06. I was alone and thought-meditating in a gazebo which I had decorated to produce the most relaxing environment possible. I knew there were some big thoughts that needed to get out and I created the perfect conditions to extract them. Thus, "God is Time" was born. I will eventually post the original writings which IGITY is based off of.

In the autumn of 2006, I first discussed this theory with a close friend. I was shy with the theory in the beginning, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that it made sense.  

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