Sympathy for the Angel

Chapter Thirteen: The Parallel

There are numerous things God has done which I disagree with, all of which could be justifiably insane by someone with the best interests of humanity in mind. However, God being God, He actually did something genius which I think was brilliant: He ran a parallel — The Parallel.

This differs from what God and I disagreed over — the one thing which led to my expulsion from Heaven — but when he commenced The Parallel, I (and nearly all of us) thought it was a genius idea.

Here's how it went: God had several ideas on how he wanted the "grand scheme" of humanity to run and what he wanted to happen within the history of mankind. So rather than simply creating mankind and watching it roll out, he made two simultaneous versions of his creation. People nowadays might refer to it as "alternate dimensions," but we simply call it "The Parallel."

Simply put, The Parallel was the existence of two parallel "realities" occurring simultaneously, nearly identical.

[NOTE: The first divergence of God's "realities" came with the split of Isaac and Ishmael, but He quickly remedied this, seeing where it would have led — not necessarily a negative outcome, but also not the outcome God had in mind. In my opinion, the split of Isaac and Ishmael was God's way of "testing the waters" for what The Crossover would eventually become.]

The Parallel began the exact same way and remained completely parallel and identical for centuries. Throughout the expanse of "Biblical" history, God kept everything uniform because He knew the accounting of His history would be questioned, examined, and picked apart (not unlike Lee Strobel) so, up through the last bit of punctuation John wrote at the end of his writings in Revelation, God kept each Parallel completely identical.

However, after that, he began experimenting. He began changing small, minor, and seemingly insignificant things to see how (or if) the two parallels would diverge. But here's the thing: they didn't. That whole concept of "The Butterfly Effect" is crap. Small things do not lead to medium things which lead to large things, etc. That's all just science fiction. People think the idea started with something called the "chaos theory" of reality. But listen: "chaos theory" isn't because of any small or insignificant event which leads to some large earth-changing cataclysmic event. But I'll explain the true "chaos theory" later.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah. So "The Butterfly Effect" is not just some bizarre second-rate Ashton Kutcher movie. The term itself stems from the theory that The concept is much older than that. Many "educated" people (or people considered well-read) would tell you "The Butterfly Effect" stems from a short story by Ray Bradbury (the guy who wrote Fahrenheit 451) called "A Sound of Thunder" about a guy who time-travels to the past, steps on a butterfly, and changes the course of human history. Some people believe the term comes from the work of a 20th-century meteorologist named Edward Lorenz; he devised the widely-known concept that the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the planet could cause a typhoon on the other side of the planet — or, something like that.

However, they would all be wrong. The true origin of this concept goes all the way back to the 1800s when a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote, "you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby . . . changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole." So the term for this phenomenon — "The Butterfly Effect" — may or may not stem from the Bradbury story or Lorenz's work (I'll have to ask Kryst about that), but the concept has been around for a very long time.

I just love useless trivia. Too bad I can't go on Jeopardy! or something.

I think I'm rambling.

So, back to the concept of The Parallel. God forged two identical versions of His creation, and when he made small changes, he noticed one major thing which defies the "theories" of mankind: Nothing happened!

So He started changing big things.

So this was when things got interesting.

When God started changing things in one of his Parallel creations and not the other, eventually one creation became The Experiment and one became The Constant. These were the titles given to the two elements of The Parallel.

Do you follow? The Experiment was the one He made changes with; The Constant is the one He did not change. It's like in scientific it psychological research. The Constant was the "control group" and The Experiment was the "variable group).

This is something you will not read in The Holy Bible. Okay, that's not entirely true either, but I'll get to that.