flickerbulb

This abstinence/anti-condom nonsense from the Catholic Church has got to stop. It doesn’t work. They are killing people with this message. And worse, Chimoio telling people that one of the truly effective methods of preventing infection is a cause of infection is one of the more despicable things I’ve ever heard. [From denialism blog : HIV/AIDS crankery from a Catholic Archbishop]

A meditating teenage boy in south-central Nepal is drawing the attention of scientists after attracting huge crowds in the past six months and earning himself the name Buddha-reincarnate.

They are mulling over how to examine him without disturbing his meditation.

Ram Bahadur Bamjan’s friends, relatives and managers say he has been meditating without drinking water for six months now and that he will carry on for another six years until he gains enlightenment.

Siddartha Gautama, who Buddhists believe later attained Nirvana, was born in 560 BC.

BBC story here

position: the whole bible is the “why” and genesis is a very short answer to man’s age-old question of “where did all of this come from?”

when god revealed the HOW (as he probably did to the first people, who took the story and ran with it, until moses got the “written” version), he did it in a way that could be understood by 8,000 or more worth of human beings — even ones who had not yet figured out how to make fire, or use a wheel.

and, yet, the account fits perfectly with the science:

check out this graphic showing the timeline of the universe, as the science currently says it happend, when compared to what genesis says, from the point of view on the ground, at earth.

amazing similarity, no?

i started to doubt that the earth was 6,000 when i first read stephen hawking’s “a brief history of time”. for those that are unfamiliar with it, it is a “primer” of sorts on current cosmological theory, with things such as gravity, how light works, and more explained in (more or less) everyday terms.

the book made sense, but i was angered that it went against what the bible clearly said.

so i went looking (this was before the internet was in every home!), and was shocked to discover that the bible did not require the “24 hour day” meaning of the word YOHM, as i spoke to in my last post.

armed with this, i went looking even deeper, and discovered that there were, in fact, many christians, some of them quite prominent, who were at least open, if not outright supportive of an “old earth”.

i still questioned, and felt guilty about questioning my faith, but kept looking into the science and the hebrew.

eventually, after a few years of this, i simply faced the facts, as i udnerstood them: the universe was old, and the bible had no problem with it.

once i accepted this, i was free in a way i couldn’t have imagined before.

this was in 1992 – 1994 or so. (ironically, i was in no way living my life in a way that pleased christ at that time, but was living quite selfishly for me.)

in any case, just recently the science has gotten even better: in early summer last year, new views of the universe has proven, beyond any doubt, that the univesrse is roughyly 156 billion lightyears across — which translates, with the inflationary model of expansion — to 13.7 billion years old. more info here

einstein’s theory predicited that the big bang had to have happened, and the bulk of the scientific community balked, because of the theological implications, but the science has proven too good to ignore, and it has become the accepted theory of how the universe was kicked off.

(the big bang requires a “starter” for it, where the “steady state” theory that had been popular until then did not)

there are many other signs just in our planet that require an old earth, as well:

- there’s WAY too much fossil fuel: we know where it comes from, and at any given time, there’s not nearly enough plants and animals on the earth to have made it all (even in some planet-covering flood)

- plate tectonics: we know how slowly the continents drift, and we know how far apart they are now, so we can deduce how much time they have needed to get where they are. (again, the flood doesn’t account for this, either: such a huge shift in only a month or so (thousands of miles!) would litterally rip the earth apart, and the surface would be uninhabitable for hundreds or thousands of years. think of the devastation that 1 earthquake that’s “only” a 9 on the richter scale has caused in asia this past couple weeks. and that is NOTHING compared to how much the earth would have shaken to move the contients as far as they have moved. (not to mention that the ark wouldn’t have survived the quaking)

- light appears old: the light that reaches us appears aged, in that it is scattered, and red-shifted in a way that it would not be if it had only been traveling 6,000 – 12,000 years.

some thoughts that i have, too, regarding the nature of god:

everything we encounter in this life, whether WE do it, or we SEE it done, happens through process.

our spiritual growth is a process. the way we are born is a process. the way we learn, the way we create, be it art, music, or writing, or math.

and we are created in god’s image.

i see much evidence in this creation that its creator LOVES process.

i see no evidence that god lies — and much that we see in our universe would be a lie if it is not old: fossils of tiny and large animals, the distance starlight has traveled before we can see it without eyeballs, the wear and tear on rocks that comes from erosion.

these things, and many others, point to this planet, this universe having been here a long time.

why would god fake that stuff?

bottom line is: i have decided he would not fake it. it appears to be old because it is old.

what’s more is: none of this takes away from god’s power, or detracts from the miracle of it all: this universe is a singularly unique place, and it was made that way, prepared specially for mankind, over the course of 13.7 billion years.

there are thousands of things that must be just as they are for us to even be discussing this, from the average distances between galaxies (this is a HUGE deal) to the distance form the earth to the sun (no error for margin here), to the mixture of gasses in our atmosphere.

it’s all simply a miraculous thing, and i love him for it.

i hope this helps.

as i said before: we have no need to be afraid of asking questions. our god is a god of truth! let us always seek it.

position: all dimensions, be they measurable, immeasurable or simply theoretical, are part of the created universe — and therefore necessarily dependent upon a creator.

this means god cannot dwell “in” them — as he dwelled before they existed.

even in dimensions that have no apparent meaning of “time”, there is still the fact that if a sentient being dwells in them, or inhabits them, then that being exists as it does.

and, we have text that speaks of god “regretting that he had mad mankind”.

now, i contend (and i cite feynman’s “the distinction of past and future“) that for god to experience anything resembling “regret” as we know it, he must have some concept of time as we know it.

regret as a notion implies that the past is distinguishable from the future — that things happen in 1 direction only, necessarily, even in dimensions where the concept of “time” is meaningless.

the only currently apparent processes that are immune to this are ones which are only acted upon by gravity[1].

and god, i submit, is not subject to the rules of gravity, themselves being dependent upon the the make up of this universe.

even if that were not so, merely the fact that the first four dimensions are as dependant upon the the last seven as the last seven are on the first four requires that god is able to exist outside of them, since we can prove to a certain amount of degree that the universe (all 11 dimensions) had a beginning, and we contend that god did not.

[1] planets traveling around the sun are identical in forward or reverse