Sodom, Gomorrah and the rain of fire

Archeologists think they may have discovered the sites of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. They found two towns very close together that were destroyed by fire, ash, and stones from the sky. They had different names, but other details are consistent with the story in Genesis. We can recall that Lot and his family lived in one of the towns and that God told Lot that he was the only just man in either town. Lot should take his family and flee because God was so enraged at the towns he was going to destroy them with fire from the sky. Lot argues that he can find, finally, just five just men in the towns, and God tells Lot that if he can find five just men, He will spare the towns. Lot cannot find even five just men.
Meanwhile, a stranger passes through the town, and in accord with Jewish law, Lot invites him to stay in his home. The stranger should be treated better than one's own family, so lot is required to treat this stranger with extreme courtesy. The men of the towns find out that Lot is harboring a stranger in his home and come to Lot's door demanding that Lot send out the visitor so that the villagers may "know" him. Lot stands in the doorway of his house and refuses the village men entrance. The men are very threatening, but Lot has a duty to God to protect the visitor. As a just man, he cannot release his guest to this crowd, so he offers his virgin daughters instead. The crowd refuses and continues to insist that Lot send out his guest. God tells Lot to take his family and flee. He is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot gathers his family and flees the town just as fire and stones begin to fall from the sky. The two towns are obliterated.
I may have some of the details of the story wrong, and I have left out the warning not to look back. Lot's wife does look back and is turned into a pillar of salt with interesting consequences which I will not discuss here. My apologies for errors in details. However, I would like to say something about what has always seemed to me to be a very strange story. Why would the men of the towns be so obsessesd with "knowing" a stranger under any circumstances? The towns were probably trading towns, and under any circumstances, settling and maintaining a town requires a certain practicality and stability in the inhabitants. It seems to me that towns where the men were obsessesed with raping strangers would hardly stand long. One rarely hears of homosexual gang rape because someone is passing through and for no other reason. As I say this story seems very strange. I think I may have an explanation.
Ancient Jewish people seem to have considered that all events were the direct result of God's pleasure or anger. People want reasons for things that happen. This is the root of science. We do not simply understand that things happen. They are the result of something. Everything has a cause. The early Hebrews had exactly the same brains we have today but a lot less information. They looked for causes for things they did not understand, and like most cultures, they attributed what they did not understand to God. If the Jews pleased God, things went well. If they displeased him, he punished with drought, fire, and flood. Reading Robert Alter's literary translations, I get the impression that Jews often assumed they had pleased or displeased God when things went well or badly. Two towns wiped off the face of the earth by fire, ash, and stones falling from the sky definitely suggested that God was not pleased.
Like all cultures, the Jews told stories which were passed orally for hundreds of generations before they were put together in the Five Books of Moses. The towns that have been discovered were destroyed by volcanic eruption. People at that time usually did not travel far from home, and the people of the area may have known nothing whatever about volcanoes. These towns have been obliterated in horror from the sky. God was clearly displeased. What could the residents of the town have done to cause such devastation from the Almighty?
As I said, coutesy to the stranger was an important law for the ancient Jews. Defiling a stranger is about as bad as one could get. Two whole towns full of men who wanted to "know" a guest in a man's home would definitely make God very angry. Maybe the storyteller could think of nothing more terrible that the people of a town could do. They had to have sinned grievously to have earned such a terrible fate. The entire populations of both towns would have had to violate the commandments very grievouly. There was one just man in those two towns, and he was spared with his children.
I think this story is an ancient attempt to understand what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah rather than literal truth.

pansies

lettuce shoots seed stalks
garden spring winter plants die back
earth awaits color

athens

Acropolis stones
lie on silent earth, sun beats
ancient secrets blow

Suddenly in March

I brush plum petals
from my windshield in the morning
the kids take to playing
Iraq War in the gorge behind the park
robins consider nesting
in the eave of the porch
framed conveniently by the open door
hummingbirds shoot across the yard
roost in the scrub trees
downtown glitters against the sky
and the market is full of tulips
every year I wake to this feast
and know
that before I can fall in love
morning glory will be strangling the myrtle
the canyon walls will be gold
in the evening
the hawk will circle and circle

Mathew 22

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt alove the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great acommandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

The following essay is fairly difficult, but I have been thinking about these things lately and decided to post my ideas. I hope I don't drive people away.

God and Time

Time moves, and infinity does not. Time begins, ends, and changes. Infinity is static because movement implies time. The cosmos is thought to be finite. We have not reached the end of what exists in time, but there is, in theory, an end. Planets, stars, constellations, and dark matter exist in time and are therefore, finite. Time is countable. The cosmos began at some moment, and at some moment will cease to be. In theory, we could find the end of what we know to exist. The question that rises is, "What is outside time. When the cosmos ends, what is there?" The question is a strange one. In one's mind, one comes to the farthest part of the universe, and we find what? Whatever is out there beyond time and what we know to exist is infinite. Physicists have wondered and suggested maybe outside time there is nothing at all. Not an absence, like a vacuum, but infinite nothing. Time arises out of infinity and will go back to infinity. Infinity is unchangeable, the everlasting now. Change implies time and finitude. Infinity does not change. It cannot because change implies the end of something and the beginning of something else, movement. Beginning and ending happen in time, and time is finite. Life as we know it is finite. It begins at a point in time, and ends at another point.
There are two possibilities regarding the infinite. Something is there or nothing. If nothing is outside time, then in theory, we could come to the end of the cosmos and stop. There is nothing else. The cosmos will end, but outside the cosmos there is nothing at all, and nothing is infinite. It neither begins nor ends. The other possibility is that there is an infinite something outside time.
Consciouness exists in time. There are days, months, years, and eons, but they are countable, and they begin at some point and end at some other. Consciousness moves and is aware of itself. Human consciousness begins at some point in development and ends at another. The subconscious knows nothing of time. It has only the never ending now. It does not count and does not move and does not know that it can end. If something exists outside of time, we can calll it God and posit that God is subconscious. God is infinite, eternal, and exists in the never ending now. I have spent years of my life uninterested in the existence of God. I can neither prove that It exists or does not exist. I can find no terms on which I can determine one or the other. However, if the infinity outside the cosmos is not nothing, we can call the infinite subconscious outside of time "God" and then think about what qualities such a being might have.
Time and finitude rise out of eternity and will sink back into it. If the eternity outside the cosmos is defined as God, then we can maybe say some things about It. It is not conscious, but subconscious, but the conscious mind rises out of the unconscious which rises out of the subconscious. Animals exist whose minds are probably no more than subconscious. They are entirely instinctive and decide nothing. Alligators come to mind. One can move and alligator from one swamp to another, and if its needs are met, it is fine. No alligator needs time adjust to change as far as I know. Many animals probably have nearly no conscious minds, but functioning unconscious minds, for instance cats. They don't think, but they do learn. They are very instinctive animals with some ability to synthesize and act according to new information. However, they do not communicate much in any sort of conscious sense. A cat does know when it's time to eat. They exist in time, but are nearly without consciousness. Conscious animals manipulate the environment. Whales are social.They have communication systems about which we know almost nothing. They could be very complex. And they do manipulate the environment. Whales have been trained to play ball and perfom for rewards. If consciousness rises out of the unconscious which is in time, and the unconscious rises out of the subconscious which exists outside of time, then reasonably an infinite existence outside of time would be subconscious. The infinite subconscious could occasionally exist in time and give rise to unconscious and conscious life in time and therefore begin at a given point and sink back into infinity at another point. A subconscious God could in fact give rise to a mortal Son in time who gives his life in empathy for the agony of mortal beings. One of the most ancient and important questions in human life is the problem of evil. If God is infinite, merciful, and just, how can he account for concentration camps, starvation and the other horrors of human life?
An infinite being that can rise to consciousness could have given rise for His own reasons to both time and mortality. Such a being would decide nothing about temporal affairs. He would set them in motion and they would progress according to laws of nature. Humans decide for themselves who they are and how we behave.
Sartrean existentialism states that man defines all of nature including himself. We observe whales to figure out what they are, and we can observe human behavior to understand human nature. In other words, an eternal, non conscious God exists and can rise into time to do things. It will, however, sink back into unchangeable eternity. Humans exist in time and love, suffer, give succor, or abuse each other. God simply permits us to exist. However, God can rise into consciousness and offer empathy for the sufferings of man. We can, if we choose, believe that nothing exists outside the cosmos or that an eternal infinite Being exists outside of time. We have, as far as I know, no information either way other than an apparent human need to believe. Faith is a decision, at least until we reach the end of the cosmos and find out what if anything is out there