My Collected Thoughts to the Chabad.org Article, “Why Don't You Spell Out G-d's Name?” By Aron Moss

Dramatic Pause, Then Thought, and Least of All Execution

If I ever wrote about Gd when I didn't know Him; that is when I used God. However, because of that I have this wonderful neural pathway where first I think of The Blessed Be He, as God, but then I pause to think about how I will communicate my idea about G_d to an audience. That pause is crucial to paying respect to G:d, such that I give Him His due respect. The actual way G-d appears in my writing has very little to do with the personal respect I attribute to Him, but rather through permutations of God, anticipating them, and trying for slight randomness before writing Gd with variability gives my brain the kick it needs to continue treating God with the utmost respect. Thus, the written form is not as important as the thought behind it. However, for someone reading this the cryptic nature of my post may cause additional thoughts for the reader that are also beneficial, as it should be clear far beyond a reasonable doubt that I'm trying to show the utmost respect.

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich, MA

I have a second opinion about vowels. I believe Hebrew was originally spoken without vowels and thus none are written. There is ample evidence to show that the hominid ancestors of humans could speak on only using consonants. If you need a reference that confirms that hominids at one time could speak only with consonants, then I suggest the book, “The Ancestor’s Tale” by Richard Dawkins.

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich, MA

Goad

I no longer use God or G-d, but Goad. Goad is much more descriptive than G-d. Everyone that conceives of G-d has his or her own idea of what G-d is, and they not only vary from religion to religion, but even among followers of particular religions. Let's be frank. Goad is an Almighty and Universal motivator. Goad motivated the universe into being. Goad motivates us to be ethical and Goad rewards us and punishes us according to the Goading we receive from Goad. We could even consider ourselves to be imitating Goad if we do some of the motivating ourselves.

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich

Note 10/25/2013:  Obviously I no longer do this.  Additionally, two spelling changes where corrected.

- Google says -

~search results~
660,000,000 for God
127,000,000 for Craig
92,100,000 for G-d
2,580,000 for chabad

By those rules, I would say, "Even if I post my name, God, and or G-d it ends up in the same place." nych nych nych nych

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich, MA

Note 10/25/2013:  These search results seem to change daily.

Judgement

That the author attempted to show respect shows good intent. He has greater righteousness than that person that paid attention to spell check. It is likely that any attempt to show respect to the divine Name that gains popularity is likely to receive recognition by a computer program. However, I would say that since we now know that G-d is in some spell checkers, I would say, “Spell check should be ignored when considering respect to the Name.” Upon analysis of writing, we will simply know the meanings of various forms of respect.

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich, MA

I think you misunderstood. I do not understand how what you write beyond your third sentence refutes me. 
My suggestion is that people worshiped Odin after his death when polytheistic mythologies were generated in Norway. In fact, several people in my line had the same deification lie generated, such as Beowulf, Thor, and Zeus. Likewise, I want no generation of a lie that I am a deity either, as it is possible people are already calling me "Lord Chaos" in internet mythologies, as "chaos Craig" was my nickname years ago (Internet Book of Shadows).

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich, MA

Note 10/25/2013:  Never mind this post.  It is crud.  See craig-ancestry.blogspot.com for more.

I count Odin and Thor in my direct paternal ancestry and I suggest posthumous deification occurred. Does Paul Bunyan ring a bell? King Wittekind son of Odin, another of my paternal ancestors was a Norse Pagan and forced into Christian conversion after Charlemagne executed possibly 4,000 of his men at Verdun. Anyone who has studied mythologies of other cultures understands that most "gods," were actual people, having an actual day of birth and a day of death. King worship is common to Jewish history as well. It may be an area of confusion in popular thought. Check out the book Antiquities of the Jews (Flavius Josephus) for examples of king worship of David son of Boaz.

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich, MA

Note 10/25/2013:  Never mind this post.  It is mostly crud.  See craig-ancestry.blogspot.com for more.

Faith is Logical!

Driving Force = Matter / Decay

If God is "Driving Force," then Driving Force is one, while matter and decay describes the cycle of reality.
If a human is "Driving Force," then decay is variable, while matter is the flesh. The driving force of a human is the soul. The goal is for humane Driving Force, such that freewill connects us in harmony; otherwise stated for a human to be of God. Reworded, the goal of freewill is to find the meaning of God, and not only know this meaning, but to act in accordance to the will of God. Thus, decay of human flesh always perverts the meaning of God, the Collective Singular that we live in. To disbelieve in God is to deny Torah, or literally to believe that there is no consequence for action.

Craig Hamilton
Sandwich, MA, 

Trust, the Lord and the Problem of Pain

Trust, the Lord and the Problem of Pain

I believe in G-d. To clarify, I believe in a Cosmic Organizer outside of creation. I do not believe in creation. I do not believe in any part of creation, or that any part of creation ever was G-d. To believe in creation is to be an atheist. To believe a part of creation is G-d in either the past or the present is idolatry. To believe in the Force behind creation is to believe in G-d. However, I am without trust in G-d. This is mostly due to my own personal health problems, especially when I was in college. I did fairly well in high school, but slowly over the four years of high school and my first three years of college, my health declined. Yet, this isn’t just about me. The centerpiece of this essay is an analysis of the problem of pain. Pain is such I consider that humanity aught not trust in G-d.

Though I exhibited many overt actions that indicated that G-d was at the very center of my being during the years of my decline, the truth was that my heart did not seek G-d. I believed in G-d, but I was very much lukewarm in my faith. Certainly, I was very involved in my local community, and even in international outreach projects, but my heart wasn’t where G-d was. I did these things because I thought it would be a good idea to do them, yet I had an evil sense of self which did not allow me to delight in the service G-d as I did them. This is especially interesting to me because my health did not begin to recover until I reached out to G-d.

It was not until I committed my heart to G-d that things started looking up for me. Before I committed my heart to G-d, I was a junior at Rutgers and very unhealthy. The worse I felt, the more I would blame it on G-d. I had lost my faith, and G-d was but a symbol of the things that plagued me. Yet, despite all this, I am reluctant to attribute my recovery to G-d. In the dark days, it was as if an evil spirit of the Lord had come upon me.

I understand that G-d may work in mysterious ways. Really, it was a matter of getting the right tests, the right doctors, and the right medications that improved my health, but that is not to say that G-d did not have a provisional hand in it. In fact, one could go so far as to say I prayed about it and my greatest problems vanished, neglecting to show the operation of the Lord as a Motivator of the Cosmos. In fact, one of my counselors, whom was a faith based counselor, declared, “You are a Job,” where Job is a biblical character whom overtly acts good, but blasphemes G-d internally. In the story, G-d entrusts Job to Satan, Satan causes much suffering to Job, but eventually Job proves himself innocent, such that what is taken from him is restored. This does sound very similar to the story of my life so far. The only thing that needs to happen to complete the story is that I have to live to be over 100yrs old, as Job reportedly did. In fact, it was during my worst times before I had known any real recovery that I spoke with this counselor, and it came only as a surprise to me that my life years after he said that has become filled with abundance. When the counselor told me this, mentally I shrugged it off thinking I would only suffer more and die, never having hope of a cure.

It occurs to me that actually what I have is a great fear of the Lord, gained through my own personal knowledge of the gravity of which humanity is capable of suffering. I do all in my power, most of the time, to observe the upright teachings of the Lord, yet even though he has given me the desires of my heart, a wife and a son, I still to not really trust the Lord. I still remember those days of suffering when it seemed that things could not get any worse. I question, how could a loving G-d allow that to happen? I question how can a loving G-d afflict children? I question, how can a loving G-d permit something such as the Holocaust to occur? These things wear on me, and when I think of them, I am bitter toward the Lord. I question, was it by chance that my health improved, such that I consider that it was not my wholehearted obedience to the Lord that brought me salvation from suffering, but that this happened only by chance? And yet, I am wholehearted in my obedience.

I do not believe that there are good answers for such things. The Bible says that God can be both good and evil, and if God can be both of these things, why should I believe in G-d at all, except for out of fear? This is such that my eagerness to obey the Lord wholeheartedly is philosophically weak. By the scientific method, I would need to repeat this experiment for the rest of my life before being able to show any significance. However, I have resolved that for me there is no other way but to trust in the Lord. It worked once, and that is enough to last me for a lifetime of wholehearted obedience. If the Lord forsakes me, then I believe it is best to question: Why? However, even if the Lord forsakes me, possibly again, as I believe that there is nothing I could have done to merit the amount of suffering I experienced; my idea of the Lord will remain unchanged. The Lord is sovereign.

God Is What You Conceive God to Be

God Is What You Conceive God to Be

by Craig Hamilton on Tuesday, December 28, 2010 at 4:39pm

God Is What You Conceive God to Be

A wise Jew once said to me something like, “God is what you conceive God to be.” To be certain, I don’t see how we can get beyond this definition. Ultimately, our view of God is limited the power of our own mind’s ability to conceive of God.

While I was alone in my bed room at college, and I am not drug user, I heard a voice coming from the walls of my apartment. It was a male voice that said, “I am God and I am punishing you.” I was an atheist turned believer, convinced that the voice was legitimate, so, I shouted back, “Why are you punishing me?” I was so miserable at the time that I conceived that if there was a God, then it could only be that God was punishing me. That is, within a matter of a few seconds I felt like I had realized the Source of my misery, and that it was a result of punishment. I conceived of the idea that I had done something wrong, such that I had done something to deserve of punishment. This was a vastly different idea from the idea of God people had told me about, the God that only goes about doing good things, while everything wrong in the world is blamed on Satan. Instinctively, I knew that story – the goody goody two shoes god and the big bad devil - to be a crock, but I believed in the God that spoke from me through the wall. And, it wasn’t that I believed in the wall either, I thought of it as if creation spoke to me, as G-d spoke to Moses through the burning bush.

Not knowing much of anything about religion, and never having even bothered to read the Bible, Christian or Jewish, hearing this voice caused me to believe in God. I transferred to a Christian college because I wanted to find out more about God. The God I heard about there, Jesus, was incompatible with my own inner feeling as to what God was, and Jesus is still incompatible with my belief. Rather, I found the God I had met, and that likely my own mind had conceived of was the God of the Old Testament. Eventually, I even ripped the New Testament out of my Bible.

I have come to believe that it was not God that I spoke to on that night, as the next day I was hospitalized for being psychotic. Then, I took medication and the hallucinations went away, but twice I went off medication and the hallucinations came back, so I ended up concluding that God was ultimately what my mind had conceived of through hallucination. However, the words of the wise Jew echo true to me, “God is what you conceive God to be.” Though some people might believe that God is a rock or a statue or even a person, the God I believe in is the Jewish God, outside of creation.

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• Craig Hamilton
  

  Pete, what is yours is yours. However, it should be that we study an older covenant before we study a new one. Why? Chronologically, the "new covenant" should be understood from the light of the old, as historically the people were presented with the new covenant after they were presented with the older covenants. To evaluate the new covenant we must see it through the eyes of the people that were presented with it. That is from the historical point of view, we best understand things in the light of what came in the past first, or else we are without empathy for those whom are in the stories of the "Gospels."

  
  

  December 29, 2010 at 12:23pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton What is more interesting is that those whom knew of the older covenants reject the new one, with a few exceptions. These exceptions would be those whom we say the mourners caddish for, as they are dead men walking in the same way that the Torah calls Terah, a wicked patriarch, dead while he was still alive.
  

  December 29, 2010 at 12:30pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton Others that accepted it - the early followers of Jesus - were generally lay people, illiterate etc., such that they probably did not understand the "old covenant" in the first place. The Hebrew word for such a person is a, "Peti," and the word is defined as a fool whom has not learned enough.
  

  December 29, 2010 at 12:36pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton One translation for the second level of the soul in Cabbala is that of empathy. Cabbala is a spiritual commentary on the Torah. It is such that, according to the Bible, before we reach a level of being able to empathize, we are merely fumbling about through the world, the first level.
  

  December 29, 2010 at 12:41pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton In conclusion, the proper place to start is at the beginning, with what came first, not a covenant. That is where I started with Alex, study of things such as day, night, evening, insects, rest, fish and birds. For example, Alex knows that the cow says, "Moo."
  

  December 29, 2010 at 12:47pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton
  

  The entire creation week is to be taught to a newborn his/her first week of life. This is why circumcision is to take place on the 8th day. The 8th day is a mystical day indeed. Alex was circumcised on the third day. Imagine my dilemma...See More

  
  

  December 29, 2010 at 1:55pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton
  

  Lol.. The Jews beat Paul for his sins and Paul gave up on them thinking himself the victor. I know of no intelligent Jews that record Paul's supposed genius. The only evidence of Paul's genius is Paul's own self proclamations. Paul did ...See More

  
  

  December 29, 2010 at 8:06pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton I should add that Maimonades book did not include Chinese traditional medicine, which actually seems very promising. Western medicine has really been unaware of Chinese traditional medicine up until the last ten years, and vast amounts of research need to be done on it before its employment at Western doctors' offices. Maimonides book was primarily a summary of Greek medicine.
  

  December 30, 2010 at 12:11pm via Facebook Mobile ·
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  Craig Hamilton Well Pete thanks for what you do. I figure that if Alex is to be any good at life he will have to be able to sort things out on his own. Bringing him to a Christian church gives him the opportunity to do that, in the same manner that bringing him to hear a priest of Zeus would 2,000 years ago. As I say, "Crawl time is for babies." So Pete, your role is important.
  

  December 30, 2010 at 12:21pm via Facebook Mobile ·