A letter to Jerry Dale Ehrlich

This letter was written to my Uncle Jerry Dale Ehrlich who authored the book The Platonic Bible.

 

You can look up available copies on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Jerry%20Ehrlich&page=1

 

April 29th, 2008

 

I just finished your book last night.  I want to thank you for giving it to me...

 

About 9 years ago when I decided that the world was not flat, and that the stars were not painted each night by god's hand but a vast endless cosmos where anything is possible, my views changed forever.  No longer was I willing to accept on pure faith that the answer to all unknowns, or the dispute for known scientific facts was god.  I could not at that time believe in a god that would create so many different religions, religions that fought and killed over fundamental belief systems that had no proof or validity to them. 

 

It was then that I decided that there could be no god, the vastness of space itself answered the 'where we came from myth,' the unknowingness of infinity, the possibility that one planet in 10 to 100 could foster life.  We are here out of shear chance and chance governs our life, it governs our fortune, our health, and our very date of death.  Our only control is the very reaction to those circumstances, how one will excel at the knowledge of one's death and another will shrivel up and die.

 

Subconscious becomes our god, our opportunist, our governess.  Our willingness to believe that anything is possible and belief that we could succeed in that.  That belief comes not in some deity that has an unaltering plan for us but in ourselves to go beyond our limitations.  If I could believe in a god, plato's would make the most sense to me, but even in Plato's belief of god and the beginning of time he gave god the limitation of physical law.

 

I am going to start reading Charles Eucken's the Problem of Human Life (translated version) and was wondering if it made it into your collection of stored knowledge, if so I'd love to continue our discussion through that book.  I'll apologize in advance for the agonizingly slow pace of my reading.