God As Lord Of Life And Joy

| briansabey

Genesis 1:1-2 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

I am no Hebraist, but I have learned a little about the Hebrew in these first two verses. The word for “God” throughout Genesis 1 is “Elohim,” a plural noun more accurately rendered as “Gods.” The Hebrew word rendered as “Spirit” means, at one and the same time, spirit, wind, and breath. More mysterious is the word rendered as “moved” in the KJV. (“The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

That word is “Merakhefet” – the root verb “RHF” is a feminine, present tense participle. In English, our verbs don’t have gender, but a present tense participle is a verb that ends with “ing.” Scholars have only a vague idea of what “merakhefet” means. It appears only two other times in any ancient Hebrew writing, both in the Old Testament. One has to do with the trembling or shaking of Jeremiah’s bones in response to the Word of Jehovah.

More helpful for understanding Genesis 1:2 is the only other passage of ancient Hebrew to use the verb, in Deuteronomy 32:10-11.

He found [Israel] in a desert land,

    in an empty, howling wasteland.

He surrounded them and watched over them; 

guarded them as the apple of his eye.

As an eagle stirs up its nest,

    hovering over its young . . . . 

So the imagery here is of a mother eagle. As she is to her nest and her eaglets, so is God to Israel. The word rendered as “hovering” is merakhefet.

So turning back to Genesis 1:2, an alternate translation would be that the Gods’ breath-spirit was hovering, nesting, brooding, or fluttering over the deep. Continue reading →

Skywoman Falling: A Supplement To The Fine-Tuning Argument For Intelligent Design

| briansabey
https://peopleofthelonghouse.tumblr.com/post/111803813873/dwebongwe-heres-a-painting-by-my-dad-bruce-king

In my last post, I argued that the evidence of science profoundly supports intelligent design. The following is offered not as an additional argument or an evidentiary supplement but as a methodological supplement or perhaps even a corrective. There are, as Robin Wall Kimmerer argues, other ways of knowing than the scientific. The sheer wonder, grace, and givenness of creation, and our proper relationship to it, are perhaps captured better–and certainly more concisely–in creation myths than they are in scientific writing. Plus, I thought it was beautiful and wanted to share it. Consider this a step in my own “dance” of thanksgiving for the earth.

Thanks and credit to https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2018/12/20/skywoman-falling-reprint-from-braiding-sweetgrass-by-robin-wall-kimmerer/ and Robin Wall Kimmerer, who opens her lovely book Braiding Sweetgrass with this myth. The rest of this post is a direct quote from that book:

In the beginning there was the Skyworld.

She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze.* A column of light streamed from a hole in the Skyworld, marking her path where only darkness had been before. It took her a long time to fall. In fear, or maybe hope, she clutched a bundle tightly in her hand.

* Adapted from oral tradition and Shenandoah and George, 1988.

Hurtling downward, she saw only dark water below. But in that emptiness there were many eyes gazing up at the sudden shaft of light. They saw there a small object, a mere dust mote in the beam. As it grew closer, they could see that it was a woman, arms outstretched, long black hair billowing behind as she spiraled toward them.

The geese nodded at one another and rose together from the water in a wave of goose music. She felt the beat of their wings as they flew beneath to break her fall. Far from the only home she’d ever known, she caught her breath at the warm embrace of soft feathers as they gently carried her downward. And so it began. Continue reading →

The Fine-Tuning Argument For Intelligent Design

| briansabey

This essay does not pretend to break new scientific ground. Rather, it aims to condense and render generally accessible a powerful, science-based argument in favor of an intelligent designer of the universe and of the earth so as to support intelligent life. This essay will proceed in four steps: (1) summarizing (with Claude’s help) the ways in which the universe in general and the laws of physics are “fine-tuned” for intelligent life; (2) summarizing (with Claude’s help) the ways in which the Earth is fine-tuned for life; (3) quoting some Actual Scientists who do not accept the argument for intelligent design, but whose statements in a podcast discussing the fine-tuning problem, to my mind, strongly support it; and (4) my ultimate evaluation of the evidence, arguments, and remaining questions. Continue reading →

Holy Week and the Hope of Universal Reconciliation

| briansabey

I want to put a plug in for us to celebrate Spirit World Saturday as part of the Holy Week observances of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The belief that between his death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, Jesus visited the world of the dead is not unique to our church. The harrowing of hell is a venerable Catholic tradition that is also found in various other Christian traditions, all of which draw scriptural support from 1 Peter 3, which says that Christ was “put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit; by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.” Continue reading →

Dear Republican Congresspersons: Might Does Not Make Right In Greenland Or Anywhere

| briansabey

Dear Republican Congresspersons,

I have always considered myself a Republican, because the issues I care the most about are the “moral” issues of social conservatism—family values, keeping a child-centric society, preserving moral boundaries in matters of so-called self-expression, preserving the various means by which our society tells its best and truest story about itself to the next generation, fidelity to the Constitution, which I believe was divinely inspired in a significant degree, preserving those aspects of traditional morality that I believe to be right, conserving and developing a wholesome sense of American identity, conserving belonging and community in our neighborhoods, religious freedom, etc. I acknowledge many of the values underlying these issues are not unique to conservatives. But the Republican Party—the party of Abraham Lincoln—has always seemed to me the better servant of these values. Like many others of my ilk, I have never liked President Trump. 

I have, to a certain extent, rejoiced in my society’s recent cultural rebuke to what the Free Press is calling the “illiberal Left” (cancel culture, the Left’s identity politics, the casual use of terms like “bigot” when opinions about the Left’s pet moral issues diverge from a moral orthodoxy that cannot seem to stay put for a single year, much less a single decade, etc.). But Trump’s strong-arm way of going about his part in that rebuke has always seemed wrong-minded and polarizing to me. Continue reading →

The Government Should Stop Criminalizing Honest Parenting Mistakes

| briansabey

On May 27, 2025, Judge Vance dismissed criminal charges against me and closed the case on my criminal negligence child abuse prosecution. My crime? Failing to notice that my toddler, Miriam, had snuck away from the van while I was buckling in the crying baby, inadvertently leaving the toddler at the park, and driving home (at which point I noticed she was not present). She was absent from me for roughly 20 minutes before I had rushed back to the scene. By then, two well-meaning women had found her crying at the roadside and called 911. 

Continue reading →