Christian Democrats in the United States
Conceptual Issues - Science and ReligionEven if the daily mechanics of our clockwork reality exhibit regular behaviors that we call laws, for some reason it is not difficult for most people to imagine that the clockwork was set in motion, even if from outside time, by a creator that we do not claim to fathom, who may continue to exercise a mysterious and boundless will at times within that creation. As for the details, we don't think God or the devil is trying to trick us with dinosaur skeletons or carbon dating formulas. We choose not to debate the literality of the Bible or be drawn into false debates to "prove" the existence of God within limited conceptual systems. God laid forth a world before us, and though we should not allow ourselves to be mesmerized by it, we should learn to appreciate it at every level, but we must let love temper our curiosity.
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Thursday, March 4, 2010
1:08 PM
The primary reason why we do not need such a structure is that our solar system is full of raw materials already. Caves on the moon might even strike gold. The asteroid belt is already pulverized. Maybe dolphins can pilot the ship in the chaotic belt by giving them a representation of their echoes. If we use radar ships to resolve the weaving trajectories of the smaller asteroids, we can deduce which ones contain concentrations of different minerals by their relative motion to other asteroids and patterns of their spin. Then we go after the right ones and attach tugs to bring them in orbit around Mars over a period of a few years. Mars needs a proportionate moon to drive its internal dynamo if we are to give her an atmosphere.
With understanding, we can expand to space and live there more easily, spreading life and replenishing the Earth and the new earth on Mars. Why take much with us, when out there we will find everything we need?
no need for a space elevator
There is no need to build a space elevator from the equator into orbit. Whether balanced on each side or not, the rotation and orbits of the earth and moon around the sun are a dynamic system, and swinging pendulum whips around the axis with shifting loads on the elevator may have unexpected effects not accounted for by computer models because those models cannot account the large space of higher dimensional uncertainty that may play upon gravitational interactions. The Tower of Babel that splintered the empire's language when it fell may be metaphoric, but there is every reason take that metaphor seriously and apply it to a literal tower to heaven.The primary reason why we do not need such a structure is that our solar system is full of raw materials already. Caves on the moon might even strike gold. The asteroid belt is already pulverized. Maybe dolphins can pilot the ship in the chaotic belt by giving them a representation of their echoes. If we use radar ships to resolve the weaving trajectories of the smaller asteroids, we can deduce which ones contain concentrations of different minerals by their relative motion to other asteroids and patterns of their spin. Then we go after the right ones and attach tugs to bring them in orbit around Mars over a period of a few years. Mars needs a proportionate moon to drive its internal dynamo if we are to give her an atmosphere.
With understanding, we can expand to space and live there more easily, spreading life and replenishing the Earth and the new earth on Mars. Why take much with us, when out there we will find everything we need?
> detail, links and comments >>
Sunday, February 28, 2010
6:12 PM
Similarly, if some fisherman in Maine married a girl from Vermont or a girl from Rhode Island, my life might never coincide with relevant facts from theirs... so as far as I know, both are the case, or neither, since I haven't been fishing in Maine. So the fisherman's choice might exist in simultaneous states in the universe, and this would "map up" quantum uncertainty through transformation into 3-D macro dimensions. I could spend time researching random peoples' lives in Maine, and I might nail down concrete details, but the amount of detail over the expanse of the universe is infinite, and my time limited, so I could never coalesce the universe into one macro state.
If either of these levels of uncertainty are true, it may yet not lead the question of predestination either way. Certain general tendencies may be true, and similar patterns would likely evolve in any case in culture and biology based on the conditions in the environment, which have definite macroscopic causes at a much larger factor of time and space: the eon and the orbit. So the dinosaur age was a given, but other than a few bones and general deductions, we could never know for certain which individuals grazed where or whether they felt scared when they were dying out. Today, our increase of carbon in the atmosphere seems unavoidable, even though most of us don't want to melt down the poles and kill the penguins and polar bears, it looks as though it is going to happen, as it once did a long time ago after an increase of carbon. As for which of us are responsible for how much in some final divine accounting of how many molecules we each farted out of our lifestyles, we can't know exactly for certain, and this uncertainty may have metaphysical consequences. Perhaps in my view of the universe, person A is one of the fat executives in suits who belched out so much more than you or I, but in your view of the universe, person B sat in that chair. If you and I bump into each other on the street and pass on, how would we ever know the difference? When person C goes prosecuting polluters, it doesn't matter to the thought experiment: you see one headline and I see another, same difference: most polar bears drown and others adapt further south; most penguins starve but others adapt to new food and terrain. As for whether some species of penguin evolves a gold crest versus a red crest in your world or mine, it makes no difference.
This leads to deeper questions, such as, does the universe correct itself after the fact if our memories disagree about the color of the penguin's crest, as consciousness merges parts of the quantum multi-verse together as our personal communication and relationship changes? Haven't you ever remembered some minor detail like that one way, but then it is suddenly different and someone you know closely says it has always been that way? Most people simply adjust their brains to the new detail and move on, assuming it to be a quirk or minor error in their memory and if infrequent, nothing to worry about.
To what degree can this lead to anthropic deductions about the future, to say that "the show must go on" in terms of catastrophic events, such as the possibility of nuclear war? It might be that many possible branches co-exist, but all the ones that end in nuclear war terminate: so because all of us are drawn together by the spirit, so to speak, the multi-verse as a whole goes on without that happening, and we are drawn along inevitably with the tide of history toward a better day when this is not a concern.
If any multiverse theory is true, merged or separate, to reconcile quantum uncertainty, then there may be a degree of control of personal consciousness as to which path of details the world takes: such as a man who was said to be able to pull the experience of thousands of people around him from a probability in which they had no food, directly into a probability in which those multitudes had plenty of fish and bread, as if, essentially, by magic.
Continental philosophy or postmodernism seeks to whisper in your ear at this point of intellectual freedom to say, God is dead, and if there is no certainty to reality, then those people out there in uncertain states must not be real people, and thus morality is a waste of time: this is false. The Devil tries to tell you that because you don't know for certain that you watched the same water fall, therefore the waterfall is not real. But the waterfall is just as real, even more real, and more beautiful, after you abandon your preconceptions and the assumed rules that your mind learns to apply to reality.
Morality is still necessary for humanity to figure out, even if the particular situations differ from life to life. We are still compelled by our nature to try to figure out morality outside of government and we must, and we must try to bring government in line with ideals, or we would still end up with concentration camps and gulags. God challenges you to see beyond what you can see, to understand beyond what you can hear. The people who are real are the people in your life. Principles are real when you apply them to the situations that present themselves to you, and you still can find truth where you seek it, whether those are causal events or deeper underlying principles. Specific facts still cohere as uncertainty settles for your point of view, and they have as much meaning as you choose to find in them. If life as a whole is uncertain, and what you do not know is uncertain, then the only certainty is the love of friends and what faith you have in God.
If one were to seek personal power by letting go of the certainty that we assume about the universe around us, the instinct to control would attempt to lock down common reality into one causal continuum or another to the extent we can perceive. Such choices would shift the multiverse of experience toward terminal endings, so they could never be sustained, and are not worth the effort. The man with the fish and bread also recommended that we abandon those instincts, that we put aside our viewpoint and allow the universe to be moved for us from within by a power beyond our understanding, because the benefit is more than we can imagine. Maybe he was onto something.
quantum uncertainty in macro dimensions
Maybe quantum parallels work out spatially distributed... if we look at a waterfall, the net result is some amount of water falls over in a given time, generally in the same places, but that's all each of us knows - you may have seen the water molecules fall a different way, but we would not know the difference. Even if we both recorded video and compared it, we could determine that both tapes were pictures of the same water to some degree of accuracy, but never with enough precision to know that the molecules were not re-arranged in different ways as they fell over the top. And while we were busy comparing tapes like crazy people, the rest of the universe proceeds without us.Similarly, if some fisherman in Maine married a girl from Vermont or a girl from Rhode Island, my life might never coincide with relevant facts from theirs... so as far as I know, both are the case, or neither, since I haven't been fishing in Maine. So the fisherman's choice might exist in simultaneous states in the universe, and this would "map up" quantum uncertainty through transformation into 3-D macro dimensions. I could spend time researching random peoples' lives in Maine, and I might nail down concrete details, but the amount of detail over the expanse of the universe is infinite, and my time limited, so I could never coalesce the universe into one macro state.
If either of these levels of uncertainty are true, it may yet not lead the question of predestination either way. Certain general tendencies may be true, and similar patterns would likely evolve in any case in culture and biology based on the conditions in the environment, which have definite macroscopic causes at a much larger factor of time and space: the eon and the orbit. So the dinosaur age was a given, but other than a few bones and general deductions, we could never know for certain which individuals grazed where or whether they felt scared when they were dying out. Today, our increase of carbon in the atmosphere seems unavoidable, even though most of us don't want to melt down the poles and kill the penguins and polar bears, it looks as though it is going to happen, as it once did a long time ago after an increase of carbon. As for which of us are responsible for how much in some final divine accounting of how many molecules we each farted out of our lifestyles, we can't know exactly for certain, and this uncertainty may have metaphysical consequences. Perhaps in my view of the universe, person A is one of the fat executives in suits who belched out so much more than you or I, but in your view of the universe, person B sat in that chair. If you and I bump into each other on the street and pass on, how would we ever know the difference? When person C goes prosecuting polluters, it doesn't matter to the thought experiment: you see one headline and I see another, same difference: most polar bears drown and others adapt further south; most penguins starve but others adapt to new food and terrain. As for whether some species of penguin evolves a gold crest versus a red crest in your world or mine, it makes no difference.
This leads to deeper questions, such as, does the universe correct itself after the fact if our memories disagree about the color of the penguin's crest, as consciousness merges parts of the quantum multi-verse together as our personal communication and relationship changes? Haven't you ever remembered some minor detail like that one way, but then it is suddenly different and someone you know closely says it has always been that way? Most people simply adjust their brains to the new detail and move on, assuming it to be a quirk or minor error in their memory and if infrequent, nothing to worry about.
To what degree can this lead to anthropic deductions about the future, to say that "the show must go on" in terms of catastrophic events, such as the possibility of nuclear war? It might be that many possible branches co-exist, but all the ones that end in nuclear war terminate: so because all of us are drawn together by the spirit, so to speak, the multi-verse as a whole goes on without that happening, and we are drawn along inevitably with the tide of history toward a better day when this is not a concern.
If any multiverse theory is true, merged or separate, to reconcile quantum uncertainty, then there may be a degree of control of personal consciousness as to which path of details the world takes: such as a man who was said to be able to pull the experience of thousands of people around him from a probability in which they had no food, directly into a probability in which those multitudes had plenty of fish and bread, as if, essentially, by magic.
Continental philosophy or postmodernism seeks to whisper in your ear at this point of intellectual freedom to say, God is dead, and if there is no certainty to reality, then those people out there in uncertain states must not be real people, and thus morality is a waste of time: this is false. The Devil tries to tell you that because you don't know for certain that you watched the same water fall, therefore the waterfall is not real. But the waterfall is just as real, even more real, and more beautiful, after you abandon your preconceptions and the assumed rules that your mind learns to apply to reality.
Morality is still necessary for humanity to figure out, even if the particular situations differ from life to life. We are still compelled by our nature to try to figure out morality outside of government and we must, and we must try to bring government in line with ideals, or we would still end up with concentration camps and gulags. God challenges you to see beyond what you can see, to understand beyond what you can hear. The people who are real are the people in your life. Principles are real when you apply them to the situations that present themselves to you, and you still can find truth where you seek it, whether those are causal events or deeper underlying principles. Specific facts still cohere as uncertainty settles for your point of view, and they have as much meaning as you choose to find in them. If life as a whole is uncertain, and what you do not know is uncertain, then the only certainty is the love of friends and what faith you have in God.
If one were to seek personal power by letting go of the certainty that we assume about the universe around us, the instinct to control would attempt to lock down common reality into one causal continuum or another to the extent we can perceive. Such choices would shift the multiverse of experience toward terminal endings, so they could never be sustained, and are not worth the effort. The man with the fish and bread also recommended that we abandon those instincts, that we put aside our viewpoint and allow the universe to be moved for us from within by a power beyond our understanding, because the benefit is more than we can imagine. Maybe he was onto something.
> detail, links and comments >>
Thursday, April 2, 2009
2:53 PM
It makes sense, since sin is what tries to hide the light, the light of more than the sun, but a hidden light inside all of everything that we catch glimpses of if we seek it with open eyes. Perhaps that's why we use our modern word "sin."
In any case, these topics are interesting and should be freely pursued by the interested. Shouting at children that they have to believe in a certain set of mythic or allegorical symbolic references really only makes them memorize the words, since they don't have (we don't teach them) the vast body of non-Biblical ancient literature, which provides good context for understanding the emergence of new metaphysical understanding from Christ.
I suppose people don't teach children to seek additional context for interpreting the word of God because then adults feel threatened that they do not themselves know everything, but they fear losing control of children. Since they do not know why it is right, they have to shout at kids. Only it seems like people like to shout at kids, using them as pawns to feel personally empowered, which is sick. Or maybe they just get off on the adrenaline. I've felt the same thing from the other side, but not until college, which would have turned me off from learning various theories on evolution, archaeology, religion and thought, if I were not made in a curious image with the courage to question their self-proclaimed certainty.
After learning that the experience of thought and action is basically inexplicable, I learned that law can only seem to be justified when based on respect for this miraculous and apparently infinite defiance of the logic that thought itself gives us, creating a logical criteria for common and equal respect of human beings.
I came to the conclusion, for example, that abortion cannot be rationalized because there is no logical criteria that separates a person from a potential person, and there is no criteria to determine the existence of a potential except conception; but neither can I rationalize the fascism needed for bureaucratic enforcement of that moral truth. Anyone against abortion should adopt or participate in, advocate for or donate to social welfare for orphans. If you all do this without threats of violence to mothers from abuse, retribution or jail, abortion would become socially unacceptable.
I didn't seek understanding because people shouted at me, I did it in spite of them, and that's too bad. Via the freedom of my mind, I've sought the best path for me that leads to greater understanding of God and my own life.
I can't think when other people are shouting at me. It's really annoying - there's too much work to do and too many good discoveries waiting to go on shouting at each other and at little kids. God provides many paths away from evil to be walked freely. It's not so scary that one has to accuse little children of sin and damnation for being born with the free minds that God gives us.
shamesh, ishtar and sin
What does it mean to say that sin is responsible for our sins? We're free to seek new and old ways to interpret this, the Bible and other sources of ancient wisdom, though certainly not all of those ways will seek God. It may mean, that Christ bought our (eventual or chosen?) freedom from sin with his blood, and we are forgiven for our entrapment. There are other ways of looking at the thought from other historical perspectives. For instance, if akkadian/sumerian Shamash (shemesh/shams) is a way of seeing God, and Ishtar the sex-war idol is "MYSTERY" who distracts us from God, Sin (Nannar-Sin) is a name of the void of night (the moon) in which all existence came to be when willed by the creator. In opposition to MYSTERY, the name given to Babylon, the City, an exultation of humanity over God, Sin the void of night is the false prophet, preaching nullity, nothingness, annihilation of all being.It makes sense, since sin is what tries to hide the light, the light of more than the sun, but a hidden light inside all of everything that we catch glimpses of if we seek it with open eyes. Perhaps that's why we use our modern word "sin."
In any case, these topics are interesting and should be freely pursued by the interested. Shouting at children that they have to believe in a certain set of mythic or allegorical symbolic references really only makes them memorize the words, since they don't have (we don't teach them) the vast body of non-Biblical ancient literature, which provides good context for understanding the emergence of new metaphysical understanding from Christ.
I suppose people don't teach children to seek additional context for interpreting the word of God because then adults feel threatened that they do not themselves know everything, but they fear losing control of children. Since they do not know why it is right, they have to shout at kids. Only it seems like people like to shout at kids, using them as pawns to feel personally empowered, which is sick. Or maybe they just get off on the adrenaline. I've felt the same thing from the other side, but not until college, which would have turned me off from learning various theories on evolution, archaeology, religion and thought, if I were not made in a curious image with the courage to question their self-proclaimed certainty.
After learning that the experience of thought and action is basically inexplicable, I learned that law can only seem to be justified when based on respect for this miraculous and apparently infinite defiance of the logic that thought itself gives us, creating a logical criteria for common and equal respect of human beings.
I came to the conclusion, for example, that abortion cannot be rationalized because there is no logical criteria that separates a person from a potential person, and there is no criteria to determine the existence of a potential except conception; but neither can I rationalize the fascism needed for bureaucratic enforcement of that moral truth. Anyone against abortion should adopt or participate in, advocate for or donate to social welfare for orphans. If you all do this without threats of violence to mothers from abuse, retribution or jail, abortion would become socially unacceptable.
I didn't seek understanding because people shouted at me, I did it in spite of them, and that's too bad. Via the freedom of my mind, I've sought the best path for me that leads to greater understanding of God and my own life.
I can't think when other people are shouting at me. It's really annoying - there's too much work to do and too many good discoveries waiting to go on shouting at each other and at little kids. God provides many paths away from evil to be walked freely. It's not so scary that one has to accuse little children of sin and damnation for being born with the free minds that God gives us.
> detail, links and comments >>
Thursday, December 25, 2008
4:10 PM
Christmas in winter is a wonderful time to celebrate, because the birth of Jesus gives us hope that evil and death, cold and darkness will not triumph over our souls.
But if rigorous scientific inquiry suggests that the appearance of the star and Lord's birth occurred in the summer time, then why are we as common Christians not entitled to know the same wisdom as the three magi from the east?
"I will pray to the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, that he may be with you forever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world can't receive; for it doesn't see him, neither knows him. You know him, for he lives with you, and will be in you." -John 14:16-17
How do we know truth? Is it only what we say to ourselves over and over, or read over and over, even in the Bible? No:
"In praying, don't use vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their much speaking." -Matthew 6:7
In the sense of philosophical or logical symbol truth, we can only reduce "truth" to circular statements of identity, which refer to the statement where you started, or with references to other symbols, which mean something other than where you started. In that sense we can only judge "truth" by whether a statement agrees with or contradicts a set of assumptions.
Postmodernist thought argues that because of our human inability to verbalize or conceptualize it with a limited set of symbols, therefore there is no universal truth. But that assertion is limited by the set of symbols, so it cannot be true.
So what is truth?
Truth is a spirit, a living force that we allow to thrive in our minds. Are you capable of inviting the Spirit of Truth to live in you, and to allow it to challenge the things that you think and hear and say?
"However when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak from himself; but whatever he hears, he will speak. He will declare to you things that are coming." -John 16:13
Keep in mind that even our monthly calendar is only an invention of the Roman state, which was forced upon the world well after Christ's first mission. There is nothing inherent in the world which dictates the numbers of days and names of months. These are abstractions which prove useful but which exist only in our minds.
How many things do you depend on that are only ideas, but do not have any existence in reality other than what we make of them?
Have you challenged yourself to allow the spirit of truth to question all of your beliefs, to see which ones are left?
Or are you scared that when you do so, that you will no longer believe in God and Christ? If you are scared of this, then I challenge you, that you never really believed it was true in the first place.
Perhaps your idea of God is in fact only a construction, an assumption to make the world more intelligible and less scary. However, even if that is true, about ideas of God being invented, false or wrong, it does not mean that God does not exist in an objective sense.
The spirit of truth has kindly destroyed all of my old selves, occasionally left me struggling to believe even in my own existence, but in the end has by its own presence, a "difficult ally," convinced me that God is not just an idea, not just an abstraction that we lay upon the world in order to make it understandable. The spirit of truth leaves me with the belief that in fact God is real, a personified presence within his own creation, a watcher for the most part though occasionally a mover, and that he gave us his son, whose life we took but could not take, to save us from extinction and damnation.
The spirit of truth leaves me solid in that belief - whether Jesus was born in the summertime or the winter makes no difference.
Unfortunately I am not one of the blessed who can believe without seeing and understand without hearing; the good Lord had to whack me on the head with signs that I cannot explain any other way - and I still refused to accept the reality for many years, because it was too far out of reach of my puny brain. By accepting the spirit of truth, I came to realize the importance of what I saw, clouds in the shape of the Son, singing, in an ornate tunic, perfect and still like a sculpture, and inexplicable.
Merry Christmas. Keep the faith.
Christmas in July?
If Christ really was born in the harvest season, then shouldn't we acknowledge that when celebrating Christmas?Christmas in winter is a wonderful time to celebrate, because the birth of Jesus gives us hope that evil and death, cold and darkness will not triumph over our souls.
But if rigorous scientific inquiry suggests that the appearance of the star and Lord's birth occurred in the summer time, then why are we as common Christians not entitled to know the same wisdom as the three magi from the east?
"I will pray to the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, that he may be with you forever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world can't receive; for it doesn't see him, neither knows him. You know him, for he lives with you, and will be in you." -John 14:16-17
How do we know truth? Is it only what we say to ourselves over and over, or read over and over, even in the Bible? No:
"In praying, don't use vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their much speaking." -Matthew 6:7
In the sense of philosophical or logical symbol truth, we can only reduce "truth" to circular statements of identity, which refer to the statement where you started, or with references to other symbols, which mean something other than where you started. In that sense we can only judge "truth" by whether a statement agrees with or contradicts a set of assumptions.
Postmodernist thought argues that because of our human inability to verbalize or conceptualize it with a limited set of symbols, therefore there is no universal truth. But that assertion is limited by the set of symbols, so it cannot be true.
So what is truth?
Truth is a spirit, a living force that we allow to thrive in our minds. Are you capable of inviting the Spirit of Truth to live in you, and to allow it to challenge the things that you think and hear and say?
"However when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak from himself; but whatever he hears, he will speak. He will declare to you things that are coming." -John 16:13
Keep in mind that even our monthly calendar is only an invention of the Roman state, which was forced upon the world well after Christ's first mission. There is nothing inherent in the world which dictates the numbers of days and names of months. These are abstractions which prove useful but which exist only in our minds.
How many things do you depend on that are only ideas, but do not have any existence in reality other than what we make of them?
Have you challenged yourself to allow the spirit of truth to question all of your beliefs, to see which ones are left?
Or are you scared that when you do so, that you will no longer believe in God and Christ? If you are scared of this, then I challenge you, that you never really believed it was true in the first place.
Perhaps your idea of God is in fact only a construction, an assumption to make the world more intelligible and less scary. However, even if that is true, about ideas of God being invented, false or wrong, it does not mean that God does not exist in an objective sense.
The spirit of truth has kindly destroyed all of my old selves, occasionally left me struggling to believe even in my own existence, but in the end has by its own presence, a "difficult ally," convinced me that God is not just an idea, not just an abstraction that we lay upon the world in order to make it understandable. The spirit of truth leaves me with the belief that in fact God is real, a personified presence within his own creation, a watcher for the most part though occasionally a mover, and that he gave us his son, whose life we took but could not take, to save us from extinction and damnation.
The spirit of truth leaves me solid in that belief - whether Jesus was born in the summertime or the winter makes no difference.
Unfortunately I am not one of the blessed who can believe without seeing and understand without hearing; the good Lord had to whack me on the head with signs that I cannot explain any other way - and I still refused to accept the reality for many years, because it was too far out of reach of my puny brain. By accepting the spirit of truth, I came to realize the importance of what I saw, clouds in the shape of the Son, singing, in an ornate tunic, perfect and still like a sculpture, and inexplicable.
Merry Christmas. Keep the faith.
> detail, links and comments >>
Thursday, September 11, 2008
3:24 AM
The people attempting to trace lineages through Abraham and Noah back to Adam and Eve to "prove" that the world was created some 10,000 years ago ignore this sound advice.
All evidence and observations of the world outside our doorsteps seem to indicate that there was a massive ice age that ended sometime around 10,000 to 14,000 years before Jesus.
When the weather changed and all that ice melted, there would have been a lot of flooding. So it's plausible to think that Noah was a real person, and built an boat to protect a number of wild creatures, who perhaps would have known the mega-storms were coming and were led, instinctually or by the mind of God, to his Ark. As for the specific and contradictory details of the story, which were by some accounts stitched together from separate texts around 4,000 years before Jesus, are they really that important? It's a miracle that humanity survived the Ice Age. Isn't that enough?
As for the lineage from Adam and Eve to Noah, just think about how bad our government is at keeping records. Imagine how hard it would have been to do so for a scattered handful of illiterate nomadic tribes who faced constant threats for survival! Maybe 10,000 or maybe 100,000 years passed between the dawn of humanity and Noah's divinely inspired prudence. Who cares? If you take a step back from the biblical details and view the stories as more recent recordings of millenia of oral history, the light of what we have discovered about our world in the modern age only magnifies the miraculous nature of our survival and proliferation against all odds.
Both our survival of the Ice Age, and our modern science now, are testament to how incredible was the difference that separated Adam and Eve from the animals. I contend with the scientists, there is no physical natural selection process like bird beaks or flippers that can explain the appearance of such highly developed upper cortex in the primate brain, which enables us with sophisticated language, iterative and lateral critical thought, and unquantifiable abilities to communicate with the Spirit.
If you don't want to be considered an ape, stop acting like one, read books, reflect and learn to seek knowledge on an ever higher plane.
"But don’t forget this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." II Peter 3:8
"For a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night." Psalms 90:4
Arguments that say the world was created at some specific point 6000 years ago are arguments from the perspective of human time, and are wrong, divisive and anti-biblical.
Open your eyes to the reality of creation and all of its mysterious evidence. Take it with an open mind and an open heart. Stop dividing people with ignorance. That's not what we're supposed to do.
time, "literal" bible interpretations and history
In 1st Timothy 1:4 Paul exhorts Timothy to charge certain men not to give heed to myths and endless genealogies, which cause disputes, rather than God's stewardship, which is faith.The people attempting to trace lineages through Abraham and Noah back to Adam and Eve to "prove" that the world was created some 10,000 years ago ignore this sound advice.
All evidence and observations of the world outside our doorsteps seem to indicate that there was a massive ice age that ended sometime around 10,000 to 14,000 years before Jesus.
When the weather changed and all that ice melted, there would have been a lot of flooding. So it's plausible to think that Noah was a real person, and built an boat to protect a number of wild creatures, who perhaps would have known the mega-storms were coming and were led, instinctually or by the mind of God, to his Ark. As for the specific and contradictory details of the story, which were by some accounts stitched together from separate texts around 4,000 years before Jesus, are they really that important? It's a miracle that humanity survived the Ice Age. Isn't that enough?
As for the lineage from Adam and Eve to Noah, just think about how bad our government is at keeping records. Imagine how hard it would have been to do so for a scattered handful of illiterate nomadic tribes who faced constant threats for survival! Maybe 10,000 or maybe 100,000 years passed between the dawn of humanity and Noah's divinely inspired prudence. Who cares? If you take a step back from the biblical details and view the stories as more recent recordings of millenia of oral history, the light of what we have discovered about our world in the modern age only magnifies the miraculous nature of our survival and proliferation against all odds.
Both our survival of the Ice Age, and our modern science now, are testament to how incredible was the difference that separated Adam and Eve from the animals. I contend with the scientists, there is no physical natural selection process like bird beaks or flippers that can explain the appearance of such highly developed upper cortex in the primate brain, which enables us with sophisticated language, iterative and lateral critical thought, and unquantifiable abilities to communicate with the Spirit.
If you don't want to be considered an ape, stop acting like one, read books, reflect and learn to seek knowledge on an ever higher plane.
"But don’t forget this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." II Peter 3:8
"For a thousand years in your sight are just like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night." Psalms 90:4
Arguments that say the world was created at some specific point 6000 years ago are arguments from the perspective of human time, and are wrong, divisive and anti-biblical.
Open your eyes to the reality of creation and all of its mysterious evidence. Take it with an open mind and an open heart. Stop dividing people with ignorance. That's not what we're supposed to do.
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Wednesday, September 3, 2008
12:51 AM
Fundamentally I think the problem with the Large Hadron Collider is that we ought to be spending these resources to feed the poor. I hope that doesn't make me like Judas Iscariot when he whined about the opulent oil used to anoint Jesus and how it could be sold to feed the poor. Maybe with it, physicists will find some new technology that will create free energy and travel the stars. It is easy to jump to conclusions. But sometimes the conclusions jumped to can be interesting and often scary. They should be considered, at least, though considered rationally.
The proponents of the Large Hadron Collider who claim that collisions of these energies have been occurring through history due to cosmic rays hitting the moon and so on are ignoring a key point of quantum physics. Settling of simultaneous superpositional states depends on someone looking, what they are looking for and how. No one has a massive detector and data processing system monitoring cosmic ray collisions on the moon. They built it here. Creating those energies in the LHC may, in fact, have odds worse than winning the lottery that we will create stable black holes or matter-consuming strangelet particles or a chain reaction of subatomic disruption, which could produce enough energy to crack the crust of the earth. But watching quantum events has an effect on what happens! That is the nature of quantum physics, the world as it was created, which we do not yet fully understand. And if you could afford to play the lottery a trillion times in quick succession, you might win. They are still thinking of these problems in human, 4-dimensional terms. But God and the universe do not think of themselves in human terms.
Furthermore, even creating a quantum possibility may create the actual event in some descriptive plane that is connected to reality. While normal particles may behave as we might expect in these situations, creating the possibility of strangelet particles and other unknown combinations of strings may not behave in the probabilistic way that we use to describe the manifestation of everyday particles. We cannot afford to take that kind of risk on experimentation if we do not fully understand the math.
We do not know much about emerging theories of the universe, but we are beginning to see doorways to energies that we did not know were there. These dimensions are like seals upon the face of reality that we perceive, gateways into the hidden domains within and stretched around us. Before we open the next seals, we ought to think for generations to understand what we are about to do.
I do not believe that groupthink and politics, "things as they are," etc. are inevitable. We can do whatever we put our minds to because God gave us free will. However, people's mass disbelief in their free will, and the momentum of the project being what it is, and the political unlikelihood of bombing Switzerland, make me think that perhaps the fulfillment of Revelation is inevitable, that the anti-christ is already at work jealously attempting to cancel the profound destiny of humanity, that the "Abomination that causes Devastation" will stand where it should not, and woe to pregnant women and nursing mothers and all that. Such a gravitational distortion would set the earth's and moon's rotation out of balance, it would cause earthquakes and volcanoes as the tectonic plates readjust, and the safest place at least in the short term might be on the deep sea. These things are written. Perhaps John dreamed them through a vision caused by tachyon pulses going back in time from our immediate future. We cannot say that these things are not possible for those "who have the ears to hear and the eyes to see."
I really can't say either way, and I cannot in good faith make any claim that this is the end of the world, though it does appear to me to be the end of an age.
But this concerns me that we are about to embark on this journey of quantum physics blind without any idea where we're going. But if these things come to pass in some form or another, then I suppose I can take heart, that these days will be cut short, that if a mass-increasing strangelet is created, here, that it would be a threat to the rest of the galaxy or the universe. And the galaxy being as old as it is, the likelihood that other life exists, even ancient mechanical life, and has connected with God and discovered us is actually very high. And the universe appears to be capable of self-corrective action, or maybe it would have been destroyed aeons ago.
So if it happens, take heart that a 350-mile cube with 2 golden doors on each side will come down, zap the strangelet away, and then settle on Mars, the "new Earth," where we will go to visit it, enter inside this New Jerusalem, become perfected in the light of ancient knowledge, and enter through the wormhole gateways inside to the greater civilization of light throughout the universe.
It's in the book. Try reading it! "Fear not, for I [the angels] bring Good News."
Or if it doesn't happen, great, maybe we will discover how to make a warp field and bend space so we can travel to other stars. That would be awesome!
Maybe I am a luddite about the Large Hadron Collider. But I don't fear technological change in service of life. It's just that diving into this high-energy experiment without sure knowledge ahead of time of what is going to be created doesn't seem like a wise plan. It's not like the Manhattan project when everyone knew what they were trying to create. It's not clear that people know what particles they're trying to create.
No one really knows. Maybe the LHC is the profound destiny of humanity. It's tough to say. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But no one knows of that day and hour, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only." So I might be one of the raving mob after all.
I have faith that even if something really really bad does happen, that "those days will be cut short" and God will bail us out. Again. Because if the universe didn't have magnificent and weird means of correcting the extremes of possibility that are necessary for anything to exist, then we all probably wouldn't be here.
the Abomination that causes Devastation
Or, Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.Fundamentally I think the problem with the Large Hadron Collider is that we ought to be spending these resources to feed the poor. I hope that doesn't make me like Judas Iscariot when he whined about the opulent oil used to anoint Jesus and how it could be sold to feed the poor. Maybe with it, physicists will find some new technology that will create free energy and travel the stars. It is easy to jump to conclusions. But sometimes the conclusions jumped to can be interesting and often scary. They should be considered, at least, though considered rationally.
The proponents of the Large Hadron Collider who claim that collisions of these energies have been occurring through history due to cosmic rays hitting the moon and so on are ignoring a key point of quantum physics. Settling of simultaneous superpositional states depends on someone looking, what they are looking for and how. No one has a massive detector and data processing system monitoring cosmic ray collisions on the moon. They built it here. Creating those energies in the LHC may, in fact, have odds worse than winning the lottery that we will create stable black holes or matter-consuming strangelet particles or a chain reaction of subatomic disruption, which could produce enough energy to crack the crust of the earth. But watching quantum events has an effect on what happens! That is the nature of quantum physics, the world as it was created, which we do not yet fully understand. And if you could afford to play the lottery a trillion times in quick succession, you might win. They are still thinking of these problems in human, 4-dimensional terms. But God and the universe do not think of themselves in human terms.
Furthermore, even creating a quantum possibility may create the actual event in some descriptive plane that is connected to reality. While normal particles may behave as we might expect in these situations, creating the possibility of strangelet particles and other unknown combinations of strings may not behave in the probabilistic way that we use to describe the manifestation of everyday particles. We cannot afford to take that kind of risk on experimentation if we do not fully understand the math.
We do not know much about emerging theories of the universe, but we are beginning to see doorways to energies that we did not know were there. These dimensions are like seals upon the face of reality that we perceive, gateways into the hidden domains within and stretched around us. Before we open the next seals, we ought to think for generations to understand what we are about to do.
I do not believe that groupthink and politics, "things as they are," etc. are inevitable. We can do whatever we put our minds to because God gave us free will. However, people's mass disbelief in their free will, and the momentum of the project being what it is, and the political unlikelihood of bombing Switzerland, make me think that perhaps the fulfillment of Revelation is inevitable, that the anti-christ is already at work jealously attempting to cancel the profound destiny of humanity, that the "Abomination that causes Devastation" will stand where it should not, and woe to pregnant women and nursing mothers and all that. Such a gravitational distortion would set the earth's and moon's rotation out of balance, it would cause earthquakes and volcanoes as the tectonic plates readjust, and the safest place at least in the short term might be on the deep sea. These things are written. Perhaps John dreamed them through a vision caused by tachyon pulses going back in time from our immediate future. We cannot say that these things are not possible for those "who have the ears to hear and the eyes to see."
I really can't say either way, and I cannot in good faith make any claim that this is the end of the world, though it does appear to me to be the end of an age.
But this concerns me that we are about to embark on this journey of quantum physics blind without any idea where we're going. But if these things come to pass in some form or another, then I suppose I can take heart, that these days will be cut short, that if a mass-increasing strangelet is created, here, that it would be a threat to the rest of the galaxy or the universe. And the galaxy being as old as it is, the likelihood that other life exists, even ancient mechanical life, and has connected with God and discovered us is actually very high. And the universe appears to be capable of self-corrective action, or maybe it would have been destroyed aeons ago.
So if it happens, take heart that a 350-mile cube with 2 golden doors on each side will come down, zap the strangelet away, and then settle on Mars, the "new Earth," where we will go to visit it, enter inside this New Jerusalem, become perfected in the light of ancient knowledge, and enter through the wormhole gateways inside to the greater civilization of light throughout the universe.
It's in the book. Try reading it! "Fear not, for I [the angels] bring Good News."
Or if it doesn't happen, great, maybe we will discover how to make a warp field and bend space so we can travel to other stars. That would be awesome!
Maybe I am a luddite about the Large Hadron Collider. But I don't fear technological change in service of life. It's just that diving into this high-energy experiment without sure knowledge ahead of time of what is going to be created doesn't seem like a wise plan. It's not like the Manhattan project when everyone knew what they were trying to create. It's not clear that people know what particles they're trying to create.
No one really knows. Maybe the LHC is the profound destiny of humanity. It's tough to say. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But no one knows of that day and hour, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only." So I might be one of the raving mob after all.
I have faith that even if something really really bad does happen, that "those days will be cut short" and God will bail us out. Again. Because if the universe didn't have magnificent and weird means of correcting the extremes of possibility that are necessary for anything to exist, then we all probably wouldn't be here.
> detail, links and comments >>
Saturday, July 12, 2008
1:13 PM
Any parent who reviews the behavior of primates like Rhesus Macaques or played with them knows they behave like children, and while growing up, human children engage in behaviors like them, which is why we teach our children to stand up straight, read and sail, and respect each other civilly, even if they disagree.
Any person with respect for life and the spirit of children would not plug human children into machines and euthanize them when they are done performing experiments.
If we behave like brutish animals, with no respect for other products of creation, then we are only that, regardless of the false trappings of our scientific jibber-jabber.
P.S. eat organic.
stop primate experiments
If we are not apes, why do we act like them?Any parent who reviews the behavior of primates like Rhesus Macaques or played with them knows they behave like children, and while growing up, human children engage in behaviors like them, which is why we teach our children to stand up straight, read and sail, and respect each other civilly, even if they disagree.
Any person with respect for life and the spirit of children would not plug human children into machines and euthanize them when they are done performing experiments.
If we behave like brutish animals, with no respect for other products of creation, then we are only that, regardless of the false trappings of our scientific jibber-jabber.
P.S. eat organic.
> detail, links and comments >>
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