D. Michael Bruce

Before the Beginning, there was only The Void; All was Dark, All was Cold. 

 

It liked it that way.

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Then at the Dawn of Time it happened, The Light sparked into existence, or at least that's how it seemed to The Void.

 

The Void Hated The Light, for The Light was The Word and The Word was God. 

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The Warmth of The Light burned through The Darkness and The Void howled in its Fury; its voice echoing in the Emptiness. The Void tried to destroy The Light, but all it could do was embrace it, for The Void was powerless against The Light. 

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So The Void came up with a plan; what it could not crush outright, it would instead tear apart. It would take Time; more time perhaps than Eternity had to spare, but in the end, The Light would fail and The Void alone would remain; content once more. 

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It missed The Dark, it missed The Cold and The Light brought with it too many Moving, Scurrying, Needful Things. It would be good to be rid of them all. 

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But how could this be done? How could The Void tear apart a thing as powerful as The Light; a thing as powerful as itself; a thing it could only just embrace?

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Human Science had found the Essence of The Void without understanding what it was that it had discovered. We call it Dark Matter, we call it Dark Energy; these are the Body and Breath of The Void. 

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In the moments after Time's Dawning, The Void used its body to try and crush The Light and when that failed, it exhaled, using its breath to try to tear The Light apart. 

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It is still trying and will continue to do so until the Setting of Time....

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.......

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What I've detailed above is an excerpt from a book I'm writing called "Final Judgement," part of which includes some of my own personal Belief System. 

 

I was born into a Christian household, Southern Baptist to be precise, but was raised in a non-denominational Church. 

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As such, my Theological Belief System is based in Christian Teachings, but once I reached my teen years, I began asking questions to which I could not get satisfying answers. Mostly though, I was simply told not to question God's Word. 

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I fault no one for this. After all, you cannot provide answers you do not have. 

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My question was of course always the same; Why?

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So I started looking at other sources for the answers to my question. I looked at other Faiths, I looked to philosophy and I looked beyond. 

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Eventually, I came across an all but extinct religion called Zoroastrianism, which is cited as a precursor to many Western Faiths and was nearly wiped out by the early Catholic Church as Heretics. 

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The Zoroastrianist belief system was a bit paradoxical in that it was Monotheistic on the one hand and Dualistic on the other. The part that spoke to me was the Dualistic side of it, which is used to explain The Problem of Evil in the World. 

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What I took from it was the idea that God, who is All-Powerful, doesn't get rid of Evil in the World because he is, for lack of a better way to put it, stuck in a stalemate with an equally All-Powerful Anti-God. 

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This idea spoke to me because of its similarity to the Taikyoku, or Yin/Yang Symbol of East-Asian fame, which, as a long time Martial Artist, was already part of my philosophical makeup. 

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The idea of a Dark Anti-God also seemed to answer some of the questions I had regarding information that The Bible seems to leave out; things that are hinted at but never actually touched on. 

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To be clear though, I don't see this Dark Entity as a God or even an Anti-God, as such, but rather as something else entirely different. This Entity does have a name however and just as The Light and The Word are synonyms for God, so too is The Darkness and The Void a synonym for The Abyss. 

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Don't get me wrong though, as I also still believe in everything that The Bible teaches and I hold that nothing in my extended beliefs run contrary to it. It would take a great deal more space than I wish to take up here to fully explain that in detail though. 

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Ironically, I also believe that the only reason our Universe works the way it does is because of the way in which God and The Abyss interact in their Eternal Struggle for Dominance. In philosophy, we have the dualistic idea of Order and Chaos, which comes close to what I believe, though not quite there. 

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Setting the concept of Good and Evil aside, I believe that God and The Abyss are not so different from one another on a fundamental level; more like mirror images of one another than True Opposites. In my estimation, they both want the same thing; Order. It's just that they have diametrically opposed definitions of what Order is. 

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To illustrate, imagine two glasses of chocolate milk. One is divided into two layers; one of chocolate and one of milk and the other is mixed to homogeneity.  Depending on how you define it, either one could represent Order. The problem though is that the two types of Order are diametric opposites; if you have one, then by definition, you cannot have the other. 

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And so it is with God and The Abyss. On the one hand, you have God who wants to turn all of the mater in the Universe into stars and planets and people, and on the other hand, you have The Abyss which wants to tear it all back to its component particles and disperse them evenly throughout Creation.

 

So it is that we see the problem between them, and thus the divergent tactics of God and The Abyss as the dueling forces of Order and Chaos, or Good and Evil if you will.  

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But of course, it is not possible to fully discuss such ideas, or their implications, in so short a text, but eventually, I do intend to write about it in more detail in the future.