Hello everyone. I am Jeremiah, posting here as @we6jbo. I am from San Diego. I joined because I am interested in academic discussions where religion, science, identity, and human meaning meet.
My background is in information technology and cybersecurity, including graduate study in cybersecurity at National University. I also work on cybersecurity, programming, and local AI tools. A lot of my practical experience comes from supporting technology in an educational environment. I wrote about my education path in Sufficiently Educated, which I think of as a learning disability memoir. My technology interests go back to running Quendor BBS in the San Diego area around 1998-2000.
One reason I am here is connected to family history and a childhood baptism certificate from Holy Cross Lutheran Church. I am thinking carefully about what that kind of record means over a lifetime. I would currently describe myself as atheist but interested in religion, so I am not trying to pretend that my present view is ordinary Lutheran doctrine. My core argument is that my 1983 baptism certificate says, “God has made you a member of the holy Christian church.” From that text, I interpret my position as: “Jeremiah O’Neal will always, now and forever, have one foot in the God mentioned in the certificate’s church, and that foot would remain there forever.”
I am not trying to prove Lutheran doctrine with archaeology. I am researching how the certificate’s God-language fits into the longer human evolution of belief, ritual, symbolic meaning, the Lion Man, and evidence of sacred imagination before Christianity. I am interested in how religion may have evolved from early Homo sapiens and earlier human relatives, including the long human path after Homo erectus, through symbolic culture, ritual, burial, art, mythology, and later Eastern religions.
I am also a family-tree researcher. I started around 2008, and I am constantly researching. My late family lines include people such as John McCabe (1896), Alice Elliott (1906), Archie Smith (1894), Polly Bowman (1887), Burke Maynard (1904), Amelia Hedtke (1904), Percy Shapley (1901), and Minnie Schlorff (1905). I did family-tree research over the spring, and I learned about Lutherans in my family tree from the book Ancestors and Descendants of the Indiana Pioneer George Bowman: A History of the Bowmans From 1738.
I hope to learn more from people here about religion, belief, history, symbolism, and how human beings create meaning across time.
My background is in information technology and cybersecurity, including graduate study in cybersecurity at National University. I also work on cybersecurity, programming, and local AI tools. A lot of my practical experience comes from supporting technology in an educational environment. I wrote about my education path in Sufficiently Educated, which I think of as a learning disability memoir. My technology interests go back to running Quendor BBS in the San Diego area around 1998-2000.
One reason I am here is connected to family history and a childhood baptism certificate from Holy Cross Lutheran Church. I am thinking carefully about what that kind of record means over a lifetime. I would currently describe myself as atheist but interested in religion, so I am not trying to pretend that my present view is ordinary Lutheran doctrine. My core argument is that my 1983 baptism certificate says, “God has made you a member of the holy Christian church.” From that text, I interpret my position as: “Jeremiah O’Neal will always, now and forever, have one foot in the God mentioned in the certificate’s church, and that foot would remain there forever.”
I am not trying to prove Lutheran doctrine with archaeology. I am researching how the certificate’s God-language fits into the longer human evolution of belief, ritual, symbolic meaning, the Lion Man, and evidence of sacred imagination before Christianity. I am interested in how religion may have evolved from early Homo sapiens and earlier human relatives, including the long human path after Homo erectus, through symbolic culture, ritual, burial, art, mythology, and later Eastern religions.
I am also a family-tree researcher. I started around 2008, and I am constantly researching. My late family lines include people such as John McCabe (1896), Alice Elliott (1906), Archie Smith (1894), Polly Bowman (1887), Burke Maynard (1904), Amelia Hedtke (1904), Percy Shapley (1901), and Minnie Schlorff (1905). I did family-tree research over the spring, and I learned about Lutherans in my family tree from the book Ancestors and Descendants of the Indiana Pioneer George Bowman: A History of the Bowmans From 1738.
I hope to learn more from people here about religion, belief, history, symbolism, and how human beings create meaning across time.
