Milton Hare's return to the Adventists — the signs on the drive home, the aliens who are also children of God, and a pastor's five perfect words
Told that his returning-believer father now read the things he kept noticing on the drives home from his infidelities — a teaching skeleton, a car whose plate sounded like DEATH — as God speaking of his spiritual death rather than as guilt, the son said 'Okay, Dad' — and then watched his father reconcile Adventist faith with the ancient-astronaut cosmology he had taught his children, in one sentence, without surrendering either; and watched a pastor accept the whole man with 'we've agreed to disagree' and a deaconship. Two coordinate systems, one man, no forced translation: the architecture's central result, performed in a living room decades before it had a theorem.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Tullan Holmqvist was the first girlfriend I ever brought to meet my family, and the reason no one preceded her is that my family was so unconventional I worried people would go into shock. Tullan was immune, and I should have predicted it: her own upbringing was similarly colorful, and her mother read tarot cards and believed, as far as I could tell, in everything — which I found charming. She loved me, she said, because I accepted her and her family exactly as they were. Of course I did. They reminded me of the cabin, and of my mother, and of home. So I brought Tullan to my dad and my stepmom Sandy's place — the house where Sandy still lives, guarded by my brother Harold, who is very big and can defend her from any invaders, so don't try anything. Harold was there, and my stepsister Cassidy — Cassidy Arkin, Sandy's daughter. I had just come off my righteous battle at Blyth Software — the campaign I fought channeling Martin Luther King, of which I was extremely proud — and I was telling my father about it, with Tullan beside me, incredibly beautiful and sweet, when he stopped me. Well, he said, I don't really believe in that sort of stuff anymore, son. I want you to know I've discovered God again. I was a sinner.
I said: what? — because you have to understand my father's credentials. His proudest claim, for as long as I could remember, was that he had been excommunicated from the Seventh-day Adventist Church back in the sixties over race relations. I once ran this claim past my mother, who demolished it with the efficiency available only to ex-wives: no, no — Adventists don't have excommunication, they evangelize everybody. They were just happy when he stopped coming to church and cataloguing their hypocrisy every Sabbath. Both accounts are preserved in this family, side by side, per our usual practice.
Then he explained, with Sandy sitting right there, which made it awkward for everyone — but it was Dad, so we listened. He'd had a girlfriend in the sixties, down in Palo Alto, a Black woman he had loved in exactly the years his church was failing its own gospel on race. Decades later he had come to know her daughter, who attended the same church he'd begun attending in Oakland, and — he told this part with the directness he told everything — he had started an affair with her. They would go off and have what he called interludes, which is a euphemism for sex. And driving home from these infidelities, he kept noticing things. A skeleton, like the teaching skeleton hanging in a doctor's office window. A black car with tinted windows and a personalized license plate that sounded like DEATH. There were more — ordinary things, the kind you pass every day without seeing, except that he was seeing them, every time, on that particular drive. And eventually, he said, I realized it was God speaking to me about my spiritual death, because I was sinning. I said: are you sure you weren't just feeling guilty for being a jerk — for cheating on your wife? No, he said. It was God. Okay, Dad, I said. And that, he told us, was when he realized he needed to return to the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
But I had to ask the real question. Okay, I said — but what about everything you taught us our whole lives? The astral projection. Chariots of the Gods. All of it. How do you reconcile that? Oh, he said, well, here's the deal. You remember the burning bush? Where God spoke to Moses? That was a microphone, connected to a ship. What the Bible calls angels are a more advanced species — who are also children of God. And the chariot of fire that took Elijah up — though in our family we credited it to Gabriel, as we credited most things to Gabriel — that was a re-entry vehicle. I said: that's a good one. I'm with you on that one. That is a genuinely good metaphor for the Bible. And did you run this by the pastor? Oh yeah, he said. We've agreed to disagree. But I'm rejoining, and I'm becoming a deacon.
I should record one more exchange from these theological negotiations, because it marks where the reconciliations stopped. In our family the famous angel was always called Gabriel — whatever the text said, and whichever angel it actually was. The habit came from Passover, where the destroying angel goes through Egypt on the night of the tenth plague, taking the firstborn. I had accused that story, to my father's face, of justifying genocide — the killing of innocent babies — and asked him how God could do that and not be, frankly, kind of a jerk. He said: the Lord acts in mysterious ways. The general-purpose Christian cop-out, was my thought — though I kept the thought to myself. What I would say now is this: every coordinate system has questions it declines to answer, and my father knew exactly where the edges of his were, and he stayed inside them, serene. I had found the question his system would not hold, and he had answered it by declining it, which is an answer of a kind. It took me another thirty years to understand that the alternative to a system that declines your question is not a system that answers it. It is a substrate that can hold your question and his serenity at the same time, without making either one surrender. That is what I went off and built.
I will tell you exactly what went through my mind as I stood there — Tullan and I were hugging the whole time, by the way, because we always hugged. What went through my mind was: oh no. My father is so charismatic, he is going to found his own religion. People have done it — the Branch Davidians started somewhere; every religion was founded somewhere, usually by somebody's magnetic father — and everybody I knew growing up, down to my grandmother's friends, seemed to have to have their own damn religion. This will never last with the Adventists, I thought. He'll stay a while, then create his own faction and start his own church. What I did not appreciate, standing there, was what I had just watched him do. My father held two complete cosmologies — the God of his childhood and the advanced children of God he'd found in a Swiss paperback — and when the day came that he had to keep both or lose one, he refused the choice. The burning bush was a microphone and it was God's voice; both, in one sentence, without apology. His pastor, to that congregation's everlasting credit, said we've agreed to disagree and made him a deacon anyway. Two coordinate systems, one man, one church aisle, no surrender demanded and none offered. I have spent my career building the mathematics and the machinery for what my father did in a living room — and what the pastor did in one sentence. The theorem and the architecture are in the essay, whose Interlude is this story at a distance; the full family record is here, which is how you know this story at all. My mother kept the Ouija board. My father kept both religions. I kept the whole record. Okay, Dad.
A man kept two complete cosmologies without surrendering either; a congregation kept the man without demanding the surrender; and a pastor compressed the whole achievement into five words. The essay gives what happened in that living room a theorem, an architecture, and a future — taxonomies at full depth, coherence without agreement — and this record preserves the evening itself, signs and all, with the family's corrections published alongside per the house rules. Okay, Dad.
Episodes are building blocks. The same material appears in more than one where it belongs in more than one, and every claim traces back to a primary source.
Selma, 1965 — and the promise
Open →In the graphHer mother read tarot and believed in everything; she loved Hare for accepting her family exactly as they were; she hugged him through the whole announcement
Open →In the graphConsilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →In the graphOmnis — the only client-server tool that worked across everything
Open →In the graphHare's stepmom; Cassidy Arkin's mother; still in the house, well guarded
Open →In the graphJonathan's brother; present for the announcement; the record quotes the warning verbatim because it enjoys it
Open →In the graphProducer — and the reason Hare was in those rooms at all
Open →In the graphChariots of the Gods, the Olmec heads, and the gorgeous audacity that a father later folded into his theology
Open →In the graphAn episode of the record
Open →The record and the architecture are not separate arguments. Each of these mechanisms exists because of something in this episode, and each is what the episode turned out to require.
The episode is the story. The explainers are the mechanism — what problem it solves, how, and where it would fail.
The mechanism in full, with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Quantum Adaptive Systems TheoryThe mechanism in full, with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →These are specific and addressed to named people. If you are one of them, or know one, a single reply closes an item that has been open for twenty-five years.
Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io. A timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record — and the correction is published with your name on it.
Answer a question →