Introduction

    Life is a mystery. How to live it well may be a even greater mystery. Over the centuries many have tried to understand life and its origins, but more importantly how life came to be and for what purpose? These questions have sparked a quest that has been pursued by consecutive generations, each with their own wise people, spiritual leaders and philosophers devoted to providing solutions. Mainly through observation, these people developed ideas about possible answers that they would in turn shared with others. The ideas were first shared through the spoken word and oral history then through the written word. Stories that proposed answers to satisfy their curiosity.

    A story seems to be the perfect mechanism. Stories provide a way to share information so that it is easily remembered, which is important to how we learn. “People learn by making sense of the environment and of stimuli around them," (Hammond, et al. (2006). How People Learn : Introduction to Learning Theories, Stanford University School of Education p. 11 https://web.stanford.edu/class/ed269/hplintrochapter.pdf.) In a story you can take complex concepts and convert them into an understandable format. The brain does this through association. It connects the outside stimuli with concepts and ideas with which the mind is familiar. The metaphors like “God is love” and similes like “he is like a tree planted by the rivers of water” help people to connect the new material with items that they already understand. A well-told story can simplify complex ideas and package them in a way that embeds information, in many cases information that is important for survival.

    So myths and legends, fairy tales and fables pass down through the generations information that is important for living. Lessons about survival and the proper interaction in community taught in order to keep society intact. Some of the most powerful, influential of these stories found in religion. These not only share important information about survival they also provided explanations to large nagging questions like how the world came to be and how it functions. Mysteries that if remained unanswered threaten to psychologically cripple whole societies.

    The stories of religion answered the big questions and allowed people to go on living without angst. They provided a foundation for laws and rules that governed communities. they satisfied curiosity. A satisfaction that is sometimes short lived as new questions arise that demand new answers and a new story that at times would contradict the old.

    In our time a new story about the beginnings of life is told by scientists from various disciplines — biologists, cosmologist, and physicists, to name a few. They have observed the universe and how it functions and have, through a process developed through reasoning, introduced a very different story. This new story about how life came to be and evolved differs greatly from the old story told by religion. It is a story supported by evidence and deducted by reproducible experimentation. These stories threaten to relegate the deeply held, centuries old understanding of the universe to myth, the grave yard of all prior stories about the origins of life. An unsettling proposition for those faithful to the old stories.

    The unease with the new story that science tells is not mere ignorance or lack of intelligence. The old stories about the origin of life are centuries old and tightly woven with other stories that describe how the universe works and the mystery of why things happen to us. The stories are tied into an individual’s mental health as their explanation are used to combat the many stresses associated with living. The removal of these stories is therefore like pulling a loose piece of yarn from a quilt. It is likely to not only unravel the associated religions, but the individuals whose lives are deeply influenced by them.

    Some proponents of science take a very callous view at the prospect of such an unraveling. They view it as a positive event for humanity because they attribute many social ills to individuals carrying out fundamental dogmas of religion. They fail to recognize the meaningful role religion plays in the lives of so many. How it is a mechanism for unifying people under a common cause. Unfortunately, that cause can be both good and bad and easily exploited.

    There is another story being developed by neuroscience and psychology about what it means to be human. About the operation of the human mind and the mystery of consciousness. A mystery that some have dubbed the hard problem.These scientific methods also involve seeking evidence through observation and experimentation. Their results, particularly in psychology which is less concerned with the physical things as it is with ideas does not result in a discount of the importance of religion, rather finds that the methods developed in religious traditions have great value for human well being. Psychology, the science that studies the mind, suggest that religion may aid people’s mental health by providing ways for the mind to cope with some of the unpleasant aspects of living. Religion in this sense provides the unconscious mind with a defense against troubling thoughts and ideas. The stories about protection and provision, certainty in a world of uncertainty. The ability to relinquish worry to a higher power so that your mind can focus on living.

    Religious ideas therefore continue to have a helpful and meaningful role for many even as some would argue that these ideas in fact hold their adherents hostage. Ideas are a particular kind of information that some like Biologist Richard Dawkins argue can take on a kind of life of their own, compelling their host human to aid in their reproduction. He calls them memes, an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture and like genes are intent on survival. (Dawkins, R. (2016). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). Similar to genes memes reproduce.

    There are many people now creating new and meaningful stories about the secular practice of mindfulness and spirituality. They do so by divorcing the practices of eastern religious traditions from their associated religious stories. Religious practices like yoga and meditation have been successfully converted into meaningful secular practices because practitioners, through reason and evidence based research, have found a way to validate them as useful and at the same time demonstrate that a religious context is unnecessary to continue to receive such benefit. The successful transformation is rooted in the work of neuroscience and psychology providing a rational basis for the continued use of these practices by showing scientific proof of their effectiveness. This book follows the same approach arguing that the practical application of Christian moral teachings can have lasting benefits to individuals, a fact already proven by reason and evidence based research — research that just hasn’t been connected to Christianity in a way that is easily digested by the general public.

    This book tells a new and meaningful story about how an individual can grow into the best person they can be through the adoption of Christian principles. The book suggest what principles to adopt, how to successfully adopt them and the types of outcomes that should be expected when these principles are adopted. Following the tradition of those who come before, it is told through a story borrowed from one of the world’s most revered text — the Bible. It is the story of a tree.