Our Mysterious Lives

I was a Science and Mathematics teacher for a combined 20 years before retiring from a small school in South Georgia (USA) around the year 2014 at the age of 62. For a period of 20 years between the teaching years, the author worked in industry where unbelievably, used Mathematics and Science while doing the job. For the last eight years of retirement, I read and studied science, math, history, and religion at home, at libraries, and on the internet. Of course, there are many books, audiobooks, and internet videos related to the topics discussed in this text. My goal for this book is to acquaint the reader with a few topics with which he/she may not be familiar, and to submit a few of my views regarding religion. My religious views originate from several sources, including my own brain. As I will discuss later in this book, I do not think we can choose to believe. Our brain does that for us, and then lets our minds know the result. Contrary to the way many of us feel, we have only a limited amount of control over our brain, and most of our brain is dedicated to managing our hundreds of bodily functions and systems. Sometimes, while driving an automobile and something gets in our way, the foot will hit the brake before we are aware of it. In fact, we can drive without even thinking about what we are doing. Occasionally, some operator will make a poor decision and an accident will occur. Occasionally, someone will compare our brain with a modern computer. The modern computer can perform a billion operations in one second. Our brain is much slower than that. We perform operations at the rate of around 20,000 operations per second. However, our brain has abilities that are better in some ways. For instance, we can recognize faces and place items in categories much quicker. Modern computers make fewer mistakes, but humans can recognize mistakes and keep trying to find the correct answer. Computers can learn, but they cannot sit around a table and discuss better ways of accomplishing things, at least not yet. I grew up in a small town located in South Georgia and can remember attending weekly as a child and then as a teenager to a Christian church. I believed in Christianity. However, after being baptized at the age of 12, I did not really feel much different. This was interesting. I was encouraged to become baptized by my early youth football coach, so I did. I never saw the point.