About the End of History (Eschatology)

kairos eggus – (the time is at hand)

What if someone asked you to “write 60 pages explaining and defending your eschatological view. I thought about that, as might anyone before making a reply. I should say that I am not sure that I have an eschatological view. At least my eschatological view of what the end is does not necessarily coincide with a common definition of the end times of human life on or above (or below) Earth within a philosophical paradigm of naïve realism.

I actually tend to think that I will be out of here before the world comes to an end. The end times of the world thus would be for some other people-lucky ducks. My own end time probably will precede theirs and occur without the fanfare, prestige and pomp that would be common in a pre-mill tribulation paradigm with a glorious fearless leader who is an extraordinary anti-Christ incessantly being an obnoxious twit-for-others.

I believe the post-mill eschatology has about a 70% chance of being correct with pre-mill and amill rather splitting the 30% balance. One must rely to a certain extent upon one's own judgment in these matters of reading what data is available and so I stipulate a minuscule yet existing possibility of error myself...it is after all about faith and trust in Jesus.

Later I will write a little about why I think that the pre-mill paradigm is somewhat of a natural interpretation of the Revelation that is incorrect. While incorrect the pre-mill paradigm is paralleled in several other traditions from Buddhism and Taoism to Islam and Zoroastrianism. It seems as if many cultures have awaited for the return the god-king to overthrow a wicked ruling class and restabilize the chaos rollicking like a tsunami under heaven (and sometimes in heaven too).

The Acts 7:49

   49Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest?”

Is this metaphorical language or an analogy given so that people may have a notion of God’s power and dimensionality, that he is transcendent and visits the Universe as the absolute spirit that could visit a room or use the Universe as a king might use a chair, or as a throne if he especially regarded it as meaningful?

This passage gives the idea that God does rule the Universe or Cosmos, and that it his order that comprises the physical laws of the Universe perhaps. Kosmos in ancient Greek meant order, and it was given to mean the order of the stars in the night sky and of the Universe by a Greek philosopher. The physical laws of the Universe and all else are subject to the judgments and will of their ‘ruler’ and Creator. The Earth is God’s’ footstool’, or place that he rests his feet, perhaps not the center, most important and highest place of the Cosmos as some post-Copernicans have attempted too often to use as a straw man argument against creation by intelligent design. That is, Earth cannot be ‘nowhere’ as in some utopian and ethereal scheme of infinity in all directions, but must instead be at the center of what cannot have a center except in the context of being in a right relationship with the will of God.

This universe/throne may be one of many mansions that God has created. In the language of Arthur C. Clarke; God may have something very wonderful in mind for the future of the saved.

The Acts 7:50 “Hath not my hand made all things?”

John 3:5-6

“ 5Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

6That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

The creation is of matter, mass/energy and is a phenomenality arrayed in a marvelous time tensor of actualization through various phases. Yet it is a creation of God and might be considered to be the practico-inert to borrow a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre.

Humanity must overcome the self-concept of just being of mass-energy to realize the intangibles that are valuable to the Absolute Spirit that has created the material Universe and left it standing or existing in a configuration of a very subtle array of spin and string/waveform/particle appearances as the phenomenal Universe evident to human senses. Humanity has eyesight able to convert the light of photons at wavelengths of approximately half of one millionth of a millimeter (half a micron) into ‘visions’ that represent configurations of existential mass/energy. (ref.) page 110 ‘Five Ages of the Universe’ .

It is possible that an infinite spatial universe volume is something like a container in which the will of God may actualize appearances. It may have a consistent monistic appearance for one eon, and an infinite number of bubble universes in it the next.

It is not logically necessary that God be subject to the physical laws of the contingent created universes nor of a non-contingent field generating the content of universes. One may actually find a theological speculation I suppose about sentience, locality and the Universe that allows the creation of whatever it is that God wants to exist without use of implicit or evident finite spatio-temporal connectors to the Creator. The transfinite infinities of Cantor as examples can lead the way to infinities qualitatively transcended by other than spatio-temporal processes. If a new DVD is dropped in to the universe's infinity is that a bad thing?

Jesus Christ said that “the kingdom of God is within you”. God is eternal and the temporal is temporal hence one wonders in what sense 'the end' has meaning or meanings. Maybe a human characteristic is impatience. Assuredly the biological clock is ticking for human beings as mortality appears from the horizon as a grim reaper or high plains host of death with the shining scimitar of time.

To many the end of days for-themselves seems unfair when the opulent world continues as if the decay and death of the individual was nothing noteworthy-nothing more than a fall leaf drifting to Earth. The temporal world however is an event process with the end of anything inherent in the substance. Only spirit transcends the temporal structure. World lines of space-time evolving like a multi-dimensional spiral have an implicit end of energy shaping the destiny of the final form. At each moment spirit transcends space and time containing the Universe's quanta of energy as if it were a line segment created to run from point alpha to point omega. The Lord contains a Universe clump as if it was just a single atom. It is spirit that matters and transcends mass that is locked-in-form energy.

Though human life is temporal the spirit is eternal. God transcends the Universe and world that is contingent to his will. Even so the objective social experience of history does seem to have a pre-determined course to a certain extent. The saving grace of God brought the sacrifice of the Son to renormalize the lost to a right relationship with God. There does seem to be a course for humanity and human development that will eventuate in the majority of humanity being saved as Christians (ref. 'He Shall Have Dominion'). In short, when humanity has gone as far as it can without more direct help from God, the Lord will return to conclude human history in the temporal world and create a new heaven and Earth without the problems of space-time associated with phenomena of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics. Sin and death with Satan will be cast out and the elect will have new and improved bodies of an eternal form. That can only occur with the pure spirit of God in charge.

I tend to be a skeptic regarding micro-prophetic interpretations of the future course of history. Gentry described the Revelation in 'The Beast of the Revelation' as events that preponderantly occurred in the 6^th and 7^th decades A.D. I believe that is regarded as partial preterism. Chialistic interpetations of the Revelation that are pre-mill and even dispensational may entail a human wish to predict history as of they were the national weather service. The Magi of Cyrus were astrologers who also foretold events based upon the stars. Roman Emperors sacrificed animals on the plain of Mars before war. I believe that Octavian-Augustus sacrificed 80,000 animals if I remember reading Livy, Suetonius and Plutarch accurately. They would take out the entrails and examine them for signs and portents of the future. Individuals would question the Delphic oracle that would reply with somewhat enigmatic answers.

Today Americans seek to learn of their own future health through scientific D.N.A. analysis. At the other end of the spectrum there are those whom regard all things as uncertain because of quantum uncertainty developed theoretically by Werner Heisenberg. There may be an element of certainty and uncertainty if everything materially existing. Some physicists say that the entire physical cosmos could run in a reversed time direction theoretically; its just that the odds of the atomic quanta doing so are slim-it would require atomic behavior in concert, without a community organizer-to act against the 2^nd law of thermodynamics concurrently and in a measured, concise way that would make even the anthropic principle and fine structure constant appear comparatively like random flukes of chance.

A part of the human interest in end-times schedules is entirely rational. Originally perhaps it coincided with efforts to understand the physical world. Obviously though the human need to understand politics and the program of the tyrant ruling the nation involved specialized insider understanding and rumors too. Who could accurately have predicted the behavior of the Emperor Nero? I think the practice of inquiring into the end times of the world not only arises as a cause of an acute lack of accurate scientific data, it arises as well because of interest in the will of sentient beings or Being ruling the cosmos.

Jesus of course seemed to stress the kingdom of God is within you view of the world. Certainly for God the material world is a contingent creation quite secondary to His Spirit. Humanity sees through a glass darkly. At best political leaders are like Catherine the Great viewing a Potemkin village, yet if the got out of their insider alternative universe to take a look at what really is behind the facade they would find very little to know. Physics of the natural Universe regards a one-way mirror through which nothing of the other side can be known. Quanta, fields, packets of energy accompanied by a hypothetical appearance of virtual particles entangling to gather and coalesce into an entangled state of being that comprises mass for a Universe-a core of guts of a Universe that grows-like those guts the pagan Emperor Augustus examined on the plain of Mars with his expert priests giving analysis-are what science can provide as information to the politician. Spirit perceives it all and provides a little structural content to keep it reasonably remote from the dire possibilities humanity can create for-itself having learned from eating of the tree of knowledge.

So if the general ability to reduce human social existence to a deterministic course that may be read and understood by the cognoscenti at least is a classical human desire for some, it is not at all certain for me that the Lord wanted to stress such a way of looking at the world. Instead it seems as if getting people to live in as ethical and Christian way as possible was His purpose-and the salvation of the elect that would even comprise a majority some day is as reasonable of a means to that end as any of the better-case scenarios for helping humanity grow up.

With so much suffering in human history by so many billions of souls I would not willing tie any sort of social catastrophe to an official end-of-times schedule myself. God said that he would not again destroy about all of humanity again to Noah after-the-flood yet He didn't say that they couldn't go about accomplishing a verisimilitude of that action themselves. The plagues of the 13^th and 14^th centuries in Europe wiped out 2/3rds of the population. Wars killing tens of millions occurred in the 20^th century; there is a possibility that global warming will reduce Earth's population to just 200 million within 200 years (ref. James Lovelock's 'The Final Warning' and sea explorer Jacques Cousteau also thought that humanity had about 200 years-even so, if human population crashes down the road because of its own ineptitude at managing its affairs that doesn't necessarily mean the end-of-days is approaching. The population might recover quickly on or off-world and a new population could arise the majority of whom could be Christian. There is simply no certainty in correlating Biblical, eschatological events with worldly political and social formations so far as I know.

There is an event horizon ahead where artificial intelligence becomes smarter than human intelligence and it may be that at such a time if humanity becomes really obsolete and dehumanized beyond understanding that the Lord will reappear to bail us out.

Ladd says (quoted by Gentry in 'He Shall Have Dominion' page 52) ...

quote; "We must recognize frankly that in all the verses cited thus far it would seem that the eschatological Kingdom will be inaugurated by a single complex event, consisting of the Day of the Lord, the coming of the Son of Man, the resurrection of the dead, and the final judgment. However, in the one book which is entirely devoted to this subject, the Revelation of John, this time scheme is modified.... The theology that is built on this passage is millennialism or chiliasm.... This is the most natural interpretation of the [Rev. 20] passage, and it is the view of the present author. One thing must be granted: this is the only place in Scripture which teaches a thousand-year reign of Christ.”-end quote

When I was a little kid age 7 or so somehow a strange kid and I got into a fight at the end of a dock on a lake. Together we fell into the water and under the surface were still locked in combat. If his older brother hadn't pulled us out we would probably have drowned. The end times of the Bible may arise in such a circumstance where humanity has reached the end of its rope though the majority are Christian. The Lord used agricultural analogies quit a lot, perhaps when the harvest is optimally ripe then the 2^nd advent will commence.

The Cultural Mandate

The Cultural Mandate is an important concept in Gentry's post-millennialism. The cultural mandate is something like an equivalent weltanshauung to that of dispensationalism regarding how God interacts with people in history. And where Christian are now in history as far as what they ought to be doing and what they can expect in the future. It is a kind of applied teleology with its methods and purposes rather plain and drawn from Biblical exegesis.

I will quote Gentry on select exegetical elements of the Cultural Mandate expressed in the pre-Mosaic and early Mosaic years from pages 187-189...

quote;” The various features of the Noahic Covenant are found in Genesis 6: 17-22 and 8:20-9: 17. In this covenant, we have a clear reaffirmation of the Cultural Mandate, which is fundamental to the outworking of God's eschatological purpose

through man. l We also have a continuance of God's gracious

1. Cf. the references to the birds, cattle, etc. (Gen. 6:20; 8: 17 with Gen. 1:24, 25)

redemptive relation as the ongoing basis of the Cultural Mandate, which is likewise necessary to eschatology. This covenant is established with God's people: the family of Noah, who alone escaped the deluge by the grace of God.

Thus, this should not be deemed solely a common-grace covenant, for it was directly made with God's people (Noah's family), was established on the basis of grace and redemptive sacrifice (Gen. 6:8; 8:20-22), and is united with God's other redemptive covenants (cf. Hos. 2: 18 with Gen. 6:20; 8: 17; 9:9ff).

The Cultural Mandate, then, has an especial relevance to the function of God's people in the world: the Noahic reaffirmation of the Mandate is expressly made with God's people, the "you" of Genesis 9:1-12. On the basis of divine covenant, God's people are called to the forefront of cultural leadership, with the religious aspects of culture being primary.

In the Noahic covenantal episode, we also witness the objectivity of God's relationship with man: the world was judged in history for its sin. The rainbow, which signifies God's covenant mercy, is established with Noah and all that are with him, and their seed (Gen. 9:12).4 This indicates that the world will be protected from God's curse through the instrumentality of the Church (the people of God). This covenant is only made indirectly with unbelievers, who benefit from God's protection only as they are not opposed to God's people. Because of God's love for His people, He preserves the orderly universe (Gen. 8:20-22). His enemies serve His people: common grace (Gen. 9: lOb).

the command to "be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 9:1, 7 with Gen. 1:28), and the dominion concept (d. Gen. 9:2 with Gen. 1:28). 2. O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1980), p. 111. He refers to L. Dequeker, "Noah and Israel. The Everlasting Divine Covenant with Mankind," Questions disputees d'Ancien Testament, Metlwde et Theologie (Gembloux, 1974), p. 119. 3. James B. Jordan, "True Dominion," Biblical Horizons, Special Edition (Dec. 1990), p. 1. Cf. Robertson, Christ of the Covenants, p. 111. 4. It seems that the rainbow did not exist prior to this time. Apparently, the Flood was the first instance of rain (and the rainbow): Genesis 2:5-6.

Thus we see the objective corporate sanction of God against sin in the Flood, which also serves as a type of Final Judgment (2 Pet. 3:4-6). We also see God's judicial sanctions in history in His ordaining of capital punishment (Gen. 9:6). God's objective judgment therefore finds civil expression in the affairs of man.

His grant of legitimate authority to the civil government to enforce capital punishment is based on a religious principle, namely, the image of God in man (Gen. 9:6), and is given to the world through the Church (ire., Noah's family).5 God ordains civil sanctions as a means for preserving the human race for His redemptive purposes (cf. Rom. 13:1-4; 1 Pet. 2:13-14).”-end quote

I wanted to note that 'the first instance of rain' mentioned above by Gentry could have been an anomaly in a parched desert region. I spent some time in Albuquerque when there hadn't been measurable rainfall in a few years...who can say. I have written elsewhere of difficulties associated with interpreting the book of Genesis.

Eschatology and Evolution

Eschatology to many means a prophetic vision of the end times of either the world or its people. Alternatively it may refer to the end of a civilization or even the Universe. Traditionally eschatology has been regarded as something more of a religious field -although in the early times of mankind before vast right-wing polysyllabic words arose that could describe with a sociological objectivity human areas of belief such as might be regarded as religious end times eschatology could also be said to have included a unified field of primitive religio-philosophic-physical speculations about the nature of the experienced world-environment. Thus Ragnarök and Brahma along with the plain of Tilmun were out there with Janus the Door goddess and the vast turtle of labor carrying the world upon its back. At least like Aristarchus the idea of a rotation of the Earth or land was a primary element of the explanation.

Humanity never developed a comprehensive explanation for the reason that the Universe exists in natural philosophy nor did it find an exhaustive, unimpeachable description of the physical boundaries. Instead it learned that time is an implicit characteristic of matter that is itself convertible to energy explaining rather nicely I suppose that energy can present a time aspect when it becomes matter and loses it inversely as it converts to energy. Cosmologists can speculate perhaps if time was included in finite quantity at an initial singularity with alpha and omega being equal or if energy existed at singularity or mass and if it was a finite quantity and is so, why? Why did an initial packet of energy or mass filling the singularity cut off at a particular spot without having exhausted an initial supply? Why didn't all of the possible virtual particles that might exist find there way to the first singularity?

Christian eschatology has three fundamental fields on the reformed side of things. One is a premillennialist belief that John's Book of Revelation described future events that mostly haven't yet happened. That viewpoint has some logical difficulties. One is that for the saved Jesus lives in a real sense in their spirit in some mysterious way. That indwelling spirit is the being born again belief and is the first resurrection post-mills believe. Logically it might be absent from the pre-millennialist paradigm wherein Jesus won't appear until the end time. There is something of a different criteria for the kingdom of God existing in part right now on Earth too.

Post-millennialists believe along the lines wherein Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is within you, that the kingdom of God is drawing in new believers and that the world will gradually increase the number of Christians until the real end times that could be soon or way down the road even unto the distant future (when the time of the gentiles is fulfilled). Christians in the post-mill scenario are a dampening of the doom that results from a pagan or atheistic world that is always seeking to increase its power. Christians should eventually become a majoritarian polity though evil still does exist in-the-world.

One might regard the fact that it requires just a small minority of Bolsheviks or terrorists to throw a wrench into social stability or establishment even when the establishment is a corrupt or oppressive minority itself; evil minorities are historically not uncommon ruling political powers seeking to expropriate the private property and economic independence empirically in order to establish networking collectives dominated by oligarchy, plutonomy, aristocracy or dictatorship. Annihilating marriage designed to protect the poor and middle-class interests in order to theoretically reconfigure society to a spineless white meat boneless product increasing profits for the rich is a usual method for turning the clock back to the year zero socially speaking so that the timer may begin all over again to the drummer bought and paid for by the sponsors. When these sorts of things happen believers may look for one coming in the clouds to change the changlings back to a less politically antipathetic form.

End times paradigms exist thus in many contexts. Some require active human participation, others have a deterministic fatalism such that it is all pre-determined clockwork ticking along like a wave of bombs biding there time until explosion. Some are of a Universal and physical kind-a third kind one might say, without a plain end-somewhat silly for an end-times theory I will note.

Cosmologists with humble and uncertain origins of the singularity that started the big band or inflaton or collision of symbolic membranes such as occurs in the 1812 Overture may consider the end of the Universe as a very distant future event that would be the conclusion of the highly organized energy at the start of the Universe that expanded losing its organizational coherence in the time-process and ran down to a cold and low energy state with matter perhaps as energy dispersed in powerless isolation as basic elements. Whatever it is that make up quarks-perhaps one-dimension brains-would be equally spaced away from each other perhaps a few trillion miles and that could be said to be an uncertain yet probable end time.

Except that evolution as a process of degradation of organization materially speaking could evolve not more complex forms on the way to the cold dead end, it could evolve non-existence at any time too. There is no guarantee that evolution could not move molecules or quarks to some mysterious presently yet pre-determined configuration that poofs mass and energy into coherence again with a return to the One singularity. Coherence is sort of an odd word as physicists use it for cosmology and quantum affairs. They regard mass as a kind of entanglement of energy quanta in a field that decohered from the field to take the form of mass (matter) as if it were a sacrificial lamb found by Abraham in a bush to take the place of a son for a sacrifice, or better-a cosmology theory to sacrifice.

I am not very comfortable with the idea of energy quanta existing decohered from a meta-Higgs field yet still going through the hoops of a singularity and expansion as degrading organization with some life formation from complex, expensive molecule on the way-it seems a little like having two different theories in one that makes one or the other so contingent that it is hard to be fashionably cool. If one knows that a particular cosmology theory is something of a joke-or at least a little Buddhist illusion resembling yet still real, it is challenging to take it as seriously as if it were a ninja turtle carrying the world on its back.

Energetic particles of quanta have existing forces such as the strong force that keeps quarks together. It is hard to imagine how they would break down. In a Higgs and meta-Higgs field however all things are possible for the imagination at least.

In the end of the universe isolated quanta would still exist in a meta-field and might be regarded as the final phase of decoherence before returning unto the one true field of fields. Maybe only only in complete end times isolation could an energetic quanta be so relativistically dissociated from other particles that it could be considered to be matter-as-energy for-itself. Energy however seems like an event instead of a thing. Energy must be some sort of intrusion through micro-entanglement into the space of nothingness that humans regard as the Universe. So when it is really run down that field fluctuation return generally produces nothing for observers entangled in the field to observe nor any observers either. It makes philosophical writers wonder what is happening on the other side of the field that yielded the entangled state of energy that seems to be the matter of this Universe,-or perhaps, what is happening all the time 'up there' in the heaven beyond the quanta entangled in a steady state form that seems to be this Universe?

The answer to what a sponsoring field is like isn't that of a myriad Universes. A myriad Universes could be produced simultaneously or in an order and progressive profusion however that would be beside the point in question such that one wonders if the field progenitor of Universes with an abundance of energy sufficient to light up a infinite number of Universe into being has much of a concern about how much time it takes (just kidding)

There are some controversies about all of the various forms and potentials for end times scenarios synthetic and given by Revelation. There are those who trust a particular theory and desire the extinction of any sort of rival theory of course however with the all things must pass thought in mind the astute interpreter of end times theories may find that though some seem to have more merit than others none are entirely comprehensive nor even necessarily mutually exclusive and exhaustive as the very interpretive terms and literal values of rival theories may be in error or inaccurately understood. That amazes one considering how God could keep track of all of the various theories of end-times for-Himself.

Jesus Christ as the way to renormalize the spirit unto a form acceptable with God transcends the time whorls and relativistic networks of space-time and potential space-time that are circumstantial formations of the physical cosmos. Reason overcomes evolution in a sense always transcending and surpassing its deterministic parameters in some senses yet remains within it as a product or quality of the field-entanglement itself. Quantum uncertainty within the field and within the mind of an individual may be enabling conditions that let the soul or living identity of an individual in-the-field become within the transcending kingdom-of-God even while remaining within the steady state decoherence of the Universe-field quanta. When the worldly existence of an individual or of the species will end is difficult to know exactly yet be assured that there are a number of elements working to bring that situation to exist if unintentionally through economically fueled mass extinctions and global warming gas emissions.

End Times Elements

In the beginning of Genesis some points especially interesting to me are the time literal problem of Genesis and the famous six days of creation issues. It seems that days to God were perhaps just a way of differentiating important events of creation. I suppose one could take the six days of creation as a minimalist outline. Certainly one might not take it as six present Earth days.

For example; God creates matter. Then God divides matter into various configurations, then God creates living things such as plants, air and sea life, perhaps mammals and mankind last. These are events such as science might recognize. The six events are like movements in a symphony God made. It seems a reasonable way to classify things given from an omniscient source to mankind circa 2000 B.C.

One notes that Hindu religion has a day and night for Brahma of between 4 and 8 billion years approximately. The prophet Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch recorded God as saying that everyone knows Him-they just forget who he is. That would be an example of what Sartre called 'false consciousness'.

There are many ways to interpret the book of Genesis’ creation values and I will consider a few keeping in mind that worshiping God with salvation unto eternal life through the Son Jesus Christ is the primary concern for Christians. For decades if not centuries there have been those that have tried to oppose existence itself through scientific study to the credibility of Christian values. The spiritual is not the material and material researches could never disprove the spiritual. The real world and Universe is not in opposition to the spiritual, instead it is one realm where the spiritual can occur through human experience.

The Swiss theologian Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics, according to Geoffrey Bromley’s survey of the work (An Intro to the Theology of Karl Barth), wrote that scripture hasn’t a cosmology. Scripture is about God’s relation to man in the cosmos. Further, scripture refers to several cosmologies but is loyal to none. There is a creation account of course yet the purpose is to describe God’s relation to mankind, how that relation has historically developed (beginning ex-temporally I might add) and the covenant relationships.

Evidently Barth seems to have thought that to become loyal to a particular cosmology is to risk defection from faith. The reason for that is I suppose that the physical cosmos is from a Christian perspective contingent being rather than primary or ultimate. True though that is, it isn’t necessary to ignore the mechanics of the contingent cosmos so long as one realizes that the ultimate though untraceable source is God. One can meet many scientific points satisfactorily regarding creation without building one’s own creation theory from scripture keeping in mind that God’s acts or interactions involving mankind phenomenally are what are brought to light in scripture instead of a physical cosmology of the Universe.

John and the Revelation

It is amazing to consider that so many have misinterpreted the book of Revelation (of John the Disciple of Christ). Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach, Muhammad of Mecca and innumerable lunatics tattooed with the mark of the Beast (666) as well as innumerable congregations full of saved evangelicals evidently got it wrong. The analysis and interpretation of literature-historical; prophetic literature, was probably not their strong suit. The first resurrection was that of being spiritually born again in the faith; most of the prophecies in the Revelation were fulfilled during the violent, troubling times experienced by first century Christians going through tribulation and persecution of the Roman Emperor Nero.

The Bible is a beautiful book in the sense of a beautiful mathematics or physics theory that has a wonderful structure. With the Revelation of John correctly interpreted the New Testament gospel of the Lord becomes more beautiful to in its marvelous fulfillment of prophecy and reshaping foundation for the course of mankind. With the spirit of the Acts of the Apostles John's Revelation provides and overview and binding foundation for understanding the continuing work of the Lord and Holy Spirit in human history beyond the sufferings, persecutions, tribulation and destruction of the temple in the first century. An age of the gentiles that would be fulfilled with the evangelization of the peoples of the world. The good news of the Lord could be carried to the people of the future-even unto the farthest reaches of humanity down the road and even into space I would think. Humanity and Christians in particular are not to cower under toadstools waiting for the sky to fall and rapture to remove them from impending Armageddon and the draconian power of the beast (that in a sense inevitably coheres residually within any human collective or government I suppose original sin being what it is).

Life in the temporal realm isn't eternal. There are fundamentally three ways of interpreting the Disciple John's book of the Revelation regarding when the Lord Jesus Christ will return to conclude human affairs and to judge the living quick and the dead that are popular today. This field of Christian theology is incidentally named eschatology.

Pre-mill,post-mill or amill; regardless of your stand I believe a Christian is saved if the Lord is their personal Savior. One should always be ready for the return of the Lord in the Second Coming.

Catholics are I believe generally amillenialists. They regard people that die as going to heaven directly (or hell or purgatory perhaps). Not being Roman Catholic I stipulate that I am not very well informed on the issue. Evangelicals Protestants tend to be premillennialists believing that the Revelation is a prophecy of events to come preponderantly. Post-millennialism is another point of view with the view that the Revelation largely described near term events that occurred in the first century A.D.

It does seem reasonable that John foresaw the future of the Jewish and Roman world and how it would effect Christians within the decade he was living in rather than just events about 2000 years distant. Nero began his persecutions of Christians in 64 a.d. and Christians (saints) went through a tribulation. Gentry goes over the evidence for a first century interpretative paradigm for the Revelation in detail.

If post-millennialism is correct it doesn't mean Christianity is obsolete-instead it confirms it's truth and prophetic accuracy. We are living in the age of the Gentiles. Instead of expect a sudden anti-Christ and Armageddon Christianity should grow and increase human peace, prosperity and knowledge of the Lord (perhaps with a priesthood of believers replacing the hierarchical priesthood). The second coming and final judgment could take an indefinite time even occurring after human settlement of Mars and distant galaxies, its hard to say for sure.

Kenneth Gentry's book 'The Beast of Revelation' identifies the Roman Emperor Nero as the particular beast referred to in John's book of the Revelation. Besides Nero as the particular person of the beast the Roman Empire is said to be the general actualization of the beast. I think that Gentry's analysis is quite convincing.

I'll try to adumbrate points of view that are relevant to the issue of Biblical eschatology and end times inspired by Gentry's analysis of the Revelation.

The Revelation may be viewed as a history book as well as a book of prophecy. That fact has implications for how one interprets its content. History books generally are written after the fact while prophecies are written before. If one is a secularist it might be a priori challenging to accept a date for the composition of the revelation before the events described within it as prophecy. Instead of an early date at or before the first year of Nero's reign e.g. 63 a.d. the option of accepting the credibility of the later date of 95 a.d. might be preferred with a certain neo-realistic bias.

It is difficult to say what reason John could have had for composing the events of the book of Revelation after the events described within it, although one might offer the point of view such as pre-millenialists have that the events described do not pertain to the first century events at all, or perhaps have a dual-purpose meaning of events then and in the future.

Some have pointed out that the churches and Christians of the time might have found John's prophecy somewhat superfluous if they did not relate to the pressing issues of the time such as the Neronic persecutions and martyrdoms of Christians by Nero or immanent dangers to Jerusalem by the Roman Army. John might have found events of the first century a kind of coincidental template for describing future events-yet if so he would have needed to view the near-term events prophetically as well as the distant future events in order to note their similarities and congruence of format. Yet it might have been the angels that provided the right coincidental data in order to make John's Revelation insights of prophecy useful to Christians then and now. Historians with an entirely secular viewpoint would dismiss that possibility as irrelevant. I would imagine that it is easier for Christian theologians to accept a Revelation prophetic paradigm that was immediately relevant to first century Christians rather than a later date that requires a more convoluted explanation. If John's Revelation was written before the events that were rather near-term with such accuracy it would be difficult not to accept the fact that it was genuine prophecy rather than coincidence or dead-reckoning political analysis of the highest quality and accuracy.

Political predictions of future events of from one to 17 years distant generally involving the highest levels of an imperial government and the existence of the Jewish nation were just not easy in the first century. Few think tanks had such access to the highest levels of the Roman Government, or would have if such had existed. There were additional accurate predictions regarding the success and growth rate of the Christian faith would have been unlikely in the first century. The Delphic Oracle did not provide such accuracy.

I have enjoyed looking in to numerous points of cosmology and only lately found Barth’s paradigm. Barth was an excellent theologian and worthy successor to Calvin in topics such as predestination where Barth point out that the Lord is pre-determined and human beings only vicariously the elect through Jesus Christ. That is a sweet kind of retro-causality worthy of John Wheeler’s retro-causality theory of cosmology. Of course the Lord’s election by God (only God can recognize God in-the-creation) hasn’t a physical causality that is explicable by science. That is an acceptable example of the problem of looking for physical cosmology in scripture-it isn’t about physical cosmology.

Physical cosmologists of academia seem to run comparable risk to in accepting or rejecting string theory variations such as M and Emperor Theories regarding tenure.

Barth interprets Genesis stipulating that is has supernatural revelation though human agents (prophets) instead of with just natural philosophy as Newton or Einstein’s mechanics lead to, yet Barth’s method is beyond the scope of this work. I share the belief that scripture presents divine revelation and appreciate Barth’s theological work much.

People have over history developed numerous approaches toward proving or disproving the existence of God in what came to be known as the physical world-Universe. Barth probably would discount such efforts as events occurring in the natural world-Universe whereas the sole way of learning about God is through revelation from God as in scripture. Arguments from design would seem to be founded in the natural world. Perhaps the ontological argument has merit also as a good-enough in the course of human intellectual history. Human intellectual history wasn’t always where it is today; the fundamental parameters of understanding existence differed more than scientifically.

End Times Implications

If the end times are in a sense the beginning of the natural world's transition for the then living to a new and better, more spiritual way of being, the increase of ethics and faith to comprise a majority of humanity requires something of a change toward an optimal use of human, material, intellectual and spiritual resources indefinitely. One might wonder how that can be accomplished in a world with tight and sometimes repressive social hierarchies, organizational brainwashing of the masses and occasional efforts by elites to reduce humanity to a worm-like condition of just-existing.

Probably innumerable ways of improving social existence can be found an applied within and without social orders with a majority of Christians to improve human prospects in the long endurance event life as penultimate existence. There is no necessary abnegation of social responsibility for the state of the world because of anticipation of immanent apocalypse. In a real sense for political leaders at least the apocalypse is within them rather than the kingdom of God and intellectual comprehension of how to invent maximum social liberty and ecospheric health.

‘Abraham-The First Historical Biography’ by David Rosenberg

Christians today are the heirs of Abraham, yet so were the children of ancient Israel. The end of days arrived for ancient national Israel in 70 A.D. yet they were taken captive before and had experienced diaspora. The world continued on. It was the spiritual presence of God that increased

Reading this fine book published in 2006 is a kind of journey through mind and of space and time as Rod Serling might have said. One returns to a kind of aboriginal dreamtime of the foundation of civilization catching glimpses of the people of Ur in the year 3300 B.C.E., then learns more about the life and history of that civilization and its people unto the time of Abraham in 1800 B.C. A crucible driving Abraham to a break with his cultural past bringing him to make that momentous journey out of Sumer to the land of Canaan is brought to life with Rosenberg’s word portraits of the Patriarch’s world.

The author points out that after leaving Ur, Abraham was ‘houseless until his death’; not such bad company for today’s homeless to be in. The meek it is said, shall inherit the Earth.

God is a creative being, one who makes things exist. Sin on the contrary is nihilistic activity, making things not exist and abnegating individual integrity for-self and for-others. Sin is destruction of creation-the production of broken forms.

A logic of sustaining beings and allowing things to exist in this universe or in any possible form of universe, rather than to not exist, is plain enough and good. The meek are more compatible with creative eternal life than are those reinforcing continua of nihilism and eternal death.

Abraham we learn was obedient to God. Abraham’s conformal behavior was compatible to the principle of life and existence over death and non-being. The founding patriarch of three faiths was simultaneously bold yet meek. Abraham was of course faithful to The One (who is three).

There are not too many biographically descriptive references to Abraham in the Bible that one might easily get much data describing the life at Ur of the founder of what today is thought of as the Jewish religion. Rosenberg-who provides his own translations from Hebrew carefully considers Biblical material and tries to create a reconstruction of the culture and time of Sumer and the home town of Abraham-the city of Ur, drawing upon ancient material and sources such as large numbers of cuneiform clay tablets of the Sumerian civilization that were excavated in the 20th century and now.

Rosenberg mentions a Sumerian epic story-history called ‘The World Order’ that probably was known a thousand years later at the late 11th century B.C.E. court of King Solomon. It is apropos that President G.H.W. Bush’s term ‘The New World Order’ was coined in the era of the first U.S. war with Iraq. Not so much changes after 5000 years in politics-at least where fossil fuels are concerned.

Scholarly translations and compilations of that ancient data from Sumerian libraries and elsewhere have increasingly shed light on the culture of ancient Sumer unto Abraham’s day.

David Rosenberg is a poet and biblical scholar. He is also a co-author of ‘The J Book’. That interesting work is an exposition of the J (Jehovah?) writer of the earliest parts of the book of Genesis. Scriptural criticism supposes that there were four primary scribes, writers and or redactors of the first five books of the Bible that have reached us today beginning with the J writer most likely of Solomon’s court; and surprising to some, possibly a female writer. The treatment of Sarah’s response to news of her planned pregnancy (planned by God) seems to have a more feminine touch than a male writer of the time might have had-yet if it was originally a scribbled note by Abraham himself-who can say? His relationship with Sarah and other highlights of the journey could have been saved as an outline-diary of meaningful events. Such jottings of one of the best writers of Sumer making his own exodus out of decay may have made it down through history and much retelling to J at King Solomon’s court.

-note;Abraham is said to have wandered with his father Terah toward the City of Haran up the rivers toward Damascus or Megiddo on his way to Shalem (Jerusalem) where lived King Melchisedek and his Jebusites. It makes more sense that an ancient traveler would follow along the water-way for drinking refreshment than that he would have turned southwest toward the Arabian deserts. I have elsewhere in this article mentioned Abraham as wandering around the Arabian Peninsula that after reading Rosenberg's book I would tend to agree that it would be an improbable route of travel.

Shimon Gibson in writing about his excavation of the cave of John the Baptist a couple of miles from his home town also made the point that early Christians were much less sexist than later ecclesiastical structures and traditions that developed in reflecting perhaps the pervasively male hierarchical social establishment of the era. The early Christian ideas of social priorities have themselves been eclipsed a little by the secular social hegemony over Christian organizations.

Abraham may have trained his own scribe to keep the cuneiform writing alive on his journey out of Ur. John Smith brought his own scribe to write down his actions exploring Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps the ‘disciple Jesus loved’ was a reference by one of John’s school of writers at Ephesus to their founder. Some of the more important writers of history had others complete their works under supervision-Julius Caesar for instance in his history of ‘The Civil War’ and wars in Libya and Alexandria.

The additional possibility exists that Sarah too learned to write cuneiform, and became one of the world’s first secretaries, added personal points of view to her husband’s recollections.

The topic of Abraham writing cuneiform leads me to wonder if a synthesis of cuneiform and hieroglyphic literacy traditions by Moses upon leaving Egypt led him to create an alphabet to write down Jewish speech about 1500 B.C.E. during the Exodus. I believe the Hebrew symbol yod is from the cuneiform numbering system. It would be interesting to have a map of archaeological locations of cuneiform writing outside of Mesopotamia. An alphabet representing sounds may have been simpler for Moses to construct than a synthesis of two less phonetically based writing systems. Were the Ten Commandments the first alphabetically based legal code?

osenberg builds with scholarly learning, poetic inference and creative insight an exegesis of J’s construction of Genesis from earlier sources including a hypothetical X writer in King Melchizedek court. We discover that Abraham was likely to have been a Sumerian writer himself who left Sumer at a time when the New Babylonian rulers were repressing the religious and culture creative license of Sumer that had already existed more than a thousand years. Abraham was called to venture away and found a new religious civilization or culture, and his heir would be named Israel.

Rosenberg’s book on Abraham is fine reading. One learns philosophically new ideas-perhaps worth being called a religious ontology, that might be quite different from the usual assumptions about the religious culture of ancient Ur. For some, the idea of treating Abraham as a real man albeit in a reconstructed and good spirited, best effort historical scenario could be a little bit faith-shaking initially. How could Abraham emerge from an evolving cultural religious paradigm and quite reasonably have a personal God flowing rather naturally from the culture and history of the time? Shouldn’t Abraham have simply been thwacked on the head by a finger of God and provided with divine insights while he was just minding his own business even though secularists already would be developing hagiographical details about the saintly, deserving soul?

Philosophically speaking, the development of a history outline of the religious culture of Sumer is brilliantly informative. There are other approaches to interpreting ancient civilizations and the foundations of some religious practices obviously, and some things are left out perhaps from this books such as one might expect existed in ancient culture such as human sacrifice, yet the book accomplishes rather convincingly presenting the picture of Abraham & ancient Sumeria while explaining mankind's theoretical and practical relationship to the divine and unknown in the ancient context. One knows that much is left out and much is poetically liberated from nothingness with creative speculation, yet that is the brilliance of the work in finding so much in the scant and occluded historical record.

Religious ontologies may exist simultaneously with mundane, familiar weltanschauung, Sartre’s existential personal world experience coheres within the phenomenality of social dialectical reason and the cultural environment. Mankind and his civilizations exist within an apparent universe emerged or selected from all-possible-universes put up in some way fine tuned to support life.

From an unknowable perturbative vacuum with quantum uncertainty perhaps a void and space-time plus energy emerge. No one knows if a quantum uncertainty field before all universes really exists or why even one virtual particular particle would ever become a temporarily real thing or where it could appear or why, before anything materially was. One would think that all things existing become the past, presenting a form of paradox for-itself even if one regards a temporal linear series of events mechanically and as self-explanatory.

The Sumerians had their own way of examining the juxtaposition of the supernatural and unknown with the natural and known-the Babylonians repressed that artistic and intellectual liberty with the dogmatism of the cult of Marduk and Abraham with his sculptor father Terah set out over the Arabian Peninsula to change the future history of mankind.

Sodom and Gomorrah were said to be located near the confluence of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Perhaps the mud brick towns were new and located on opposite bank of the Jordan. Over historical time it might have occurred to someone to dam the Jordan and one such dam broke sending a raging wave to sweep the perverse townsmen and their bricks before a river wave down to return to the elements in the Dead Sea.

Looking back into ancient history is a good thing for scholars. Culturally though societies may stagnate in the past or forget its lessons dooming themselves to repeat its errors. When Abraham’s nephew Lot was ordered to flee the city of Sodom before its destruction he and his family were told not to look back.

Leaving a corrupt civilization is what Abraham did when departing Ur that had fallen into economic and spiritual stagnation. Lot’s wife had to stop and look back across salt collection and drying ponds outside Sodom and was perhaps splashed and covered over with quick drying salt-slurry when some kind of collection retaining wall collapsed or a splattering thing struck down the city.

There are several messages in the story-a true story that one may take concerning the need for social and cultural reformation, the need to not have contempt for God and/or about the phenomenality of existence in a phenomenal Universe.

Perhaps we should not have smug politicians ignoring global heating, ecospheric depletion and economic corruption because they own stock in Exxon-Mobil or have investments in China. When capitalism is corrupted such that it puts a price on people and what they are worth to delete the economic methods assaults democracy and becomes a tool of financial democide. Corrupt political parties ping-ponging an economic ball with hypocritical moral paddles over an oily atmospheric and biospheric decay have too much of the Sodomites about them to be reformers and escape the enveloping return unto inanimate being without free will in-itself.

I recommend reading Rosenberg’s book ‘Abraham’. It is a serious effort to reconstruct more about ancient writers and what they thought of life. Some people believed that God could have evolved the world if he choose, yet philosophically it’s easy to understand that God also would have complete foreknowledge of all quantum variables at any level so far as he like. People have free will yet God’s will entirely determines how things are-even quantum mechanics has similar paradoxes on the nature of matter and of getting information about it.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is also a kind of quantum displacement principle as all things determined are yet grounded in the infinite and unfounded expect for the phenomenal-perhaps inclusive of the human mind and of human experience. Abraham might have emerged from a culture supporting the religious concepts that emerged and in part formed elements of the religious paradigm of Judaism, Islam and Christianity-yet so what, would God not human beings to develop a religious or spiritual capability bringing them to recognize His true self the Universe phenomenalized?

There are still Sumerian ethnic peoples-Amorites living in Iraq. Those we might regard today as Jews were just another Semitic people many of whom had moved to Sumer though some lived in Canaan. The ideas of Sumer continue with us including some of the religious paradigms in some regards. Abraham in leaving Sumer became the first Jew, it is said; a religious way of relating to the transcendent.

It is good for Christian faith that the principals in our own first century a.d. drama of reality were all real people, Jesus Christ was a real man too, for whom the witnessed experiences of the Apostles, disciples and countless others of the miracles of Jesus were given, transcending the foundations of experience and history to become a reliable ontology for-itself…the best a human being may have.

Dual Booting a Natural Universe

God created creatures called humans. In this paradigm the creatures learn through divine revelation that God is real and concerned about them. That is humanity has received sufficient communication to assemble in the Bible. What about God’s point of view of things? We don’t often consider that (as if we could) yet we might act a little as if we did in order to understand our own situation as human beings a little better.

God is. God is the great I am. God is God. God is being. Creating creatures or anything sentient with its own Universe is like dual booting an operating system that isn’t aware that it exists within a larger OS. God can set aside a partitioned area of the omnipotent hard drive and create a Universe or Multi-verse within it containing people, animals, matter and energy with its own protocols of order. It has death in it-nothingness delimiting the temporal boundaries of the creatures. Like an operating system that won’t be maintained forever-like Windows XP unfortunately-humanity in the partitioned Universe just won’t be maintained in their contingent being beyond a certain, finite date.

Within the partitioned area of the hard drive the existence of the partition cannot be known. Only revelation arriving from God transcending the partition can inform the creatures of the true nature of their existence. Though mankind as fallen, temporal being subject to evolutionary thermodynamic entropy has implicit facts, obedience to the revealed will of God frees humanity from that bondage to sin. Sin is fundamental disobedience to the will of God.

Sin is itself an aspect of nothingness. Being and nothingness is the veritable dichotomy of good and evil. Evil and sin is the brinksmanship in disobedience unto nothingess.

Philosophically speaking God is the unmoved mover Being all things. He is Lord of everything. Nothing is a mysterious element that permits free will to make errors; errors, falsehoods and intentions leading to nothingess. Containing disobedient free will within the temporal Universe is a brilliant way of adapting the altered spiritual condition of the beta version humans Adam and Eve to a Universal environment commensurate with their change. It has strife and challenge. Yet God still cares about His creatures and the Son appeared as man himself in order to give humanity a way to return to a normative, obedient relation with God. Jesus Christ is God as is the Holy Spirit. The trinity cohere within one another for-us.

The Universal operating system has physical cosmology of great interest with the pursuit of knowledge of that system developed in natural philosophy. God is however, live, eternal and creations and everything else are contingent aspects of His own Being. God is all Being yet not all sentient beings are God. In a comparable way-all of the data and programs in an operating system of a contingent operating system were created by the meta-operating system programmer and are in a sense ‘his’ too, however not all of the individual lines of code in the contingent Universe OS are the operating system. Anyone who has looked at the files on Windows knows that not al files including program files can be said to be the Windows operating system.

Perhaps I didn’t make that last point very clear. Here is another point of difference yet, Windows isn’t the hardware comprising the computer whereas the operating system for the contingent Universe in it’s partitioned area comprises that Universe’s hardware.

The steady state Universe of entangled quantum mass and energy is regarded by some as information or bits of data with locations running in accord with thermodynamic physical laws of causality. The OS is the hardware flowing from an original boundary condition at the point of origin-Big Bang, Inflaton, Membrane or Dimension collisions whatever. That Universe exists as a partitioned area-one cannot locate evidence of the metaphysics of the realm beyond the partition because God exists beyond, spiritually. Only through the word of God and in particular the Lord Jesus Christ can one return to freedom with obedience to the will of God. God forgives the sin of the fallen creatures of the temporal partition if they accept the Son as their Lord.

Jesus Christ made the atoning sacrifice on the cross. He showed that God recognizes the fallen human condition and condemns it even in His Son yet because Jesus Christ was resurrected God showed that there is a way through and away from that temporal human condition leading to death and unto the right eternal relationship with the Creator transcending the temporal Universe and sin. God does not condemn God. In other words God didn’t condemn Jesus Christ-only the temporal physical form of mankind existing in the partitioned Universe OS. People have the ability to overcome their programmed D.N.A. and have faith in the Lord and His sacrifice providing a way unto the right relationship with God and eternal life in heaven (the operating system beyond the partition where God is the evident administrator).

For most of my life I learned science and religion concurrently. While a youth I learned of Watson and Crick's research, The Silent World of Jacques Cousteau, the Gemini program and all the scientific discoveries news could report via television, the Encyclopedia Britannica and other sources, yet I attended Sunday school and learned of God.

Albert Einstein passed away the year of my birth, and his Theory of Relativity was a live social topic even in science fiction films in the early 1960s. Over the decades I was able to read the Bible and develop a better faith in and understanding of Jesus Christ.

The philosophy of logic and even existential philosophy used as a device to regard human thought as phenomenal-though the temporality of life was noted even by King Solomon- reinforces for me skepticism in the value of any judgments of mankind except for those that express faith in God. Life is temporal and phenomenal on a stage itself of uncertain meaning. The recently confirmed Higgs boson supports the concept of a field with phenomenal appearance of particles in it. The true nature and deeper explanation for the source of any field or field of fields seems to be without a satisfactory explanation other than that God wills to be.

I believe that most of humanity are generally going in the same direction and have the same goals. They live within a space-time stream of experience and jostle one another politically and socially in order to obtain what they want-even if it is the power of clumping several thousand or millions of people together with them in their journey downstream for whatever reason. The logic of the flow-to maximize the general environment and to accomplish the best individual maximization of potential with the least amount of friction and chaos may seem a reasonable way for the individuals moving through to proceed yet seldom is that the prevailing political philosophy in theory or application.

The tangled bank of confusion that was Darwin's idea about evolution becomes a political modus vivendi for political governance of the global banking system while so many have trouble understanding that God does not share the limit of knowledge that humanity has at any given moment in history. This book of essays comparing and contrasting interdisciplinary vectors to cosmology is a non-specialized expression of my interests in history, Christianity and scientific cosmological theory.

'Church' phonetically arose from the old and Middle English word 'cirice or circe' that meant (the) Lord's, and that is from the word meaning 'Lords' in Greek- κυριακον.

Ref. http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Church_-_Etymology/id/1287683http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Church_-_Etymology/id/1287683

It is written that the word 'church' in many or most translations into English from the Bible refer to the word in the Bible 'ecclesia' (in Greek -κκλησία').

The concept of a church or the church of Jesus Christ means simply that the believers have a true relationship to the absolute Truth in-itself, for-himself Jesus Christ. The faithful are the Lord's having been saved from the temporal conditions of original and subsequent sin.

Jesus Christ as Truth of an absolute sort is also being referred to with the word 'Truth' meaning an abbreviation of sorts, such that it simplifies saying that Jesus Christ is also God and Author of Everything including the Universe and so forth. If one does believe that then the relationship to Truth is far more important than the relationship to others who are not of faith and who are not saved. It is something comparable to it being more valuable to be on a lifeboat on a sinking ship than in the gambling lounge of the doomed vessel playing cards for penny points yet the stakes are ultimate. The church in the world is still basically a dysfunctional Temple Priesthood in little fiefdoms such as crucified our Lord. People cannot let go of the worldly power and security, and even want political power still.

Reading 'New Theories of Everything' I encountered some ideas about the Weak Anthropic Principal, which seem to be a nearly necessary element of contemporary cosmology theories if they are to have accuracy.

Life in a given Universe such as supports our carbon based being could not exist without a certain amount of time to exist outside of lethal radiation, and with enough time for generations of stars to have cycled through to produce such elements that later go in to building living things. Space needs to expand far enough, at least ten billion light years across for these conditions to exist, and the stars do burn out in 100 billion years. That time interval may seem like a lot, yet it really isn't in the infinite possibilities of things.

In archeology I prefer rather disciplined material of a non-polemical nature. I believe that God designed the Universe and that Jesus is God. That is consistent with a Plotinian cosmology generally, and the New Testament in particular, depending upon the values one gives to some of the time and space literals of Genesis.

I think it is difficult to date certain archaeological pieces and confirm their credibility outside of an original excavation site or in a carefully preserved 'chain of evidence'. Then one has the difficult matter of interpreting any written material on it. Faith in substantially supported and verified Biblical data is worthwhile. An interesting point about the gospel is that it has anticipated some of the scientific method criteria of providing two or three or more independent points of view of the same phenomena-in this case the life of Jesus Christ as the Son of God provided by the author of the Q source and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Universe is rather complex, and physical reductionism is a definite desire of many physicists who wish to explain the order and form of the observable Universe upon the basis of extrapolating what the 'smallest' parts of the Universe do, where they came from and so on. The assumption of such theories combining math and observation is that the laws of the universe, if laws can be said to exist, can be known, are a production of the smallest particles themselves (that is the smallest parts of atoms, quarks, strings, membranes and so forth bring their own legal codes with them) and can be traced back to an initial origin because the laws haven't changed regarding the behavior of the smallest particles and hence the past of the particles or loops can be calculated with a sufficiently capable computer. Christians generally just have faith in God's creation of the Universe because of the Word of God expressed through the Bible.

The information that can be put into any given volume of space is thought to be limited to the surface area of the volume. This evidently is because concentrating information in some mass area, as information at the most dense levels would produce so much gravity eventually that a black hole would form and no information would escape its 'event horizon' or surface volume. That concept is predicated upon the principal that any given area of space-time invariably must have a gravitational field, and perhaps that space-time itself has a gravitational field even though it may or may not be of zero-mass itself.

In a given volume of space-time without a gravitational field barring other repulsive forces such as might create a hyper-inflating field for itself at super-luminal speeds an infinite amount of information may be stored, perhaps. An infinite amount of information in an infinitely small space does seem imponderable yet that's the way the cookie crumbles.

The space-time of the Universe may allow space-time to slip into the scuppers of extra-dimensions deleting certain amount of time from the universe, perhaps that's a cause for the accelerating speed of expansion of the space-time of the Universe today. It is possible that gravity may exist in more than the four dimensions of space-time, and it may have an alternate dimensional time-field associated with alternate dimensional gravitational fields in the space of other dimensions than those of the standard known Universe. The relationship of space-time in Universe1 to sub prime Universe1 values without apparent possibility of interaction as a traversable field lends a time 'mortgage' to extra-dimensional borrowers (dimensions) that may or may not return in space-time at 'book-marked' locations in the Universe in what would inevitably be 'the past'.

The Uncertainty principle acting upon space-time in extra dimensions would want an information 'data bank' of information of an infinite and predetermined rate of all possible yet selected values such that the right of return of elements of space-time would not conflict with existing standard dimensional manifestations of space-time. Information in dimensional constructs should be traversable faster than light by information unrestricted by gravitational field values.

Reason is a cognitive elaboration of inward dialog evolved from existential processing of sense data in motion and temperature. Form and substance are interpreted by the mind and it is with the development of an artist's perspective that the mind expands its awareness of external yet implicit relations in nature some of which become modeled by mathematical ideas such as non-Euclidean Riemannian geometry. Reason and logic are synonymous and were formally developed by Aristotle and Frege amongst others.

Symbolic logic and set theory reinforced philosophical notions about theory of knowledge and its relationship to reality. Though reality is perceived in cosmology through a fuzzy frosted glass of incompleteness phenomenally, reasoning people still try to get their feet on the bottom of the ocean of eternity that encompasses the Universe. If cosmology theory has 'solid ground' to stand on the faithless feel better while those of faith have a relativity faith based on God as Jesus Christ that neutralizes the need for a material framework for the Universe besides God. That relativity theory about cosmology for Christians serves well in tolerance today for the ambiguous plethora of cosmology theories available today; Christians may find one theory interesting for the time being yet not 'sign off on it' and thus be ready to adjust to the next set of cosmological physics theories issued in the following week.

Faith is essential about belief that the Universe has an Author named God. Reason supports faith in adducing proofs of the miraculous nature of the Universe, of which so little can be known with certainty beyond those articles of faith provided by God through the Bible.

The Universe is believed to have been 'spoken' into existence from nothing by God/Jesus Christ. Quantum cosmology entails the possibility that quantum tunneling let the Universe appear instantly from nothing, literally. Contemporary cosmology offers dozens of supervening possibilities regarding the creation of the Universe even beyond Big Bang Theory.

The Protoevangelium-first occurrence of the idea of redemption from the fall is said to occur in the garden itself with the mention of the bruising of the head of the serpent. The good news and covenant relationships grow simultaneous with the experience of mankind.

Faith in God for Christians and the correlation of references in scripture to the creation of the Universe with ongoing cosmological investigations by scientists allows simple classifications of parallel, complementary and/or independent isn't simply a matter of overcoming Wittgenstein's linguistic paradoxes in the indeterminacy of translation created by historically separate semantics, it is a matter of comprehending that God hasn't defined His works entirely within ontological terminology of created, contingent Universe concepts that science has understood in part; instead nominal yet important historical descriptions in as transcendent language as possible for humans according to His purposes set analogies of creation out in the book of Genesis. The amazing thing is that they aren't inconsistent with probable courses of cosmological etiologies understood today as simultaneous possibilities amidst possibilities. Humanity sees through a glass darkly and faith is required of the rest.

The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus developed Plato's ideas about philosophical realism to an extant that understanding of what lies beyond the material and evident Universe could be understood. Physicists researching quantum cosmology pursue the same goals in understanding what can create the Universe from nothing, if time exists apart from space dimensions and predates the creation of the Universe or if space-time was created together from nothing without any sort of surrounding time.

Philosophers and Christian theologians have researched the subjects of cosmological interests for millenia while physicists and mathematicians were simultaneously measuring and calculating apparent dimensions of the cosmos. New forms of math developed by scientists or mathematicians provided the idea that space-time is warped and of a non-smooth topology without certain boundaries while time is warped. From that point of view God's creation of the Universe in six days or six time periods seems practical.

The age of the beginning of life on Earth made by multiplying the life span's of the antediluvians with the value of one day to God equals a thousand years to man approximates the age of the actual biological evolution of multi-cellular life on Earth. If one thing about the physics of the Universe can be certain it is that uncertainty is an intrinsic aspect of it.

While God is absolute and unbound by definitions from a secular perspective no more than quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle of mechanics is, with super-positioning of knowledge and super-string information being equally possible for God and the universal unified field entailing the energy-mass of the Universe and space-time human reasoning upon the basis of faith about the nature of the Universe can provide interesting insights in the 'what it is' of the Universe such as it has done for individuals such as Augustine and Newton in prior generations.

Augustine wrote, "Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time." The unification conceptually of space-time by Einstein is a sort of proof of that principal perhaps. Christians can always reason about the nature of the Universe, and all the works of God referred to in the Bible and look for contemporary correlations of interpreted points of epistemology and metaphysics.

The Universe grew from the smallest seed to provide shelter for all manner of living things, yet ossification of Christian worship forms and church structure set in as soon as the Apostles were gone. Martin Luther wrote, “All Christians are priests, and all priests are Christians. Worthy of anathema is any assertion that a priest is anything else than a Christian." After the crucifixion of Jesus by the Temple priesthood and the destruction of the Temple later another human cultural tradition of hierarchical priesthoods grew to resume the authority structure of a few upper class leaders instead of the egalitarian priesthood of believers as Jesus seemed to want to move to in reformation of the way people relate to God. Will Christians ever generally develop the faith even for that simple step?

The Church today could use a priesthood of believers organizational and design leader. Martin Luther believed that all Christians were to be priests in distinction to hierarchical priesthoods that continue an exclusive elitist politick.

A priesthood of believers would be something like groups of twelve with peer status sharing their weekly Sunday meeting roles in majority speaker, minority speaker, weekly reports and song leader. With this sort of fundamental organization with perhaps three ranks of novice, regular and elder status the Church would have just one high priest (Jesus Christ) and a priesthood of believers sharing in evangelical and missions work and so forth.

Many church needs should be supported by these dedicated groups, and perhaps Churches would be full with 144 members. I prefer they meet in monolithic domes sitting about round tables.

With such a squad structure churches should hopefully be able to be more supportive of medical and other group needs with contracts to Christian services to provide things the group cannot. The composition of each group should be as balanced as possible occupationally speaking.

This is a radical change to the way things are now done-Protestant Churches are set up like little franchise Catholic Churches supporting a hierarchical priesthood. Jesus ended the hierarchical temple priesthood form with his death and resurrection.

A 2nd reformation would be useful.

A priesthood of believers could be evolved from existing church structures to make a more egalitarian and Biblically correct for of Christian organization better able to evangelize and express the will of God so far as I understand the New Testament.

The old testament has a temple worship form something similar to other priestly hierarchies of other faiths...paradoxically Muslims have an imam that isn't actually a priest but is instead just a group leader of merit.

A priesthood of believers is described somewhat in the book of Hebrews by the apostle Paul, and of course Jesus said that Christians would be as servants rather than as those placing themselves first.

Of course regular Christian priesthoods have served to bring the message of the gospel over the millenia, however in this populist era all should be more equal and serve equal roles as servants able to serve other Christians first and then others as is useful or consistent with Biblical doctrine.

Here is a brief organizational structure example...

Christians in a church would be organized in groups of 12. Maybe a useful Church would have 12 groups of 12. Each worship day one elder would have a 15 minute time to talk or sermonize, a few hymns could be sung, and everyone else in the group could have five minutes to talk or not. Alternate weeks would have a new elder selected to sermonize.

Perhaps it would be better to have half of the 11 non-sermonizers talk for 10 minutes each instead of for 5 minutes. Each would be expected to share some learning from the Bible and perhaps to discuss individual work assignments.

Tithing could continue yet no one would be paid. The money would be invested in insurance for group associates and physical maint. Each member would have their own outside job, yet each group would so far as possible provide fairly free services to other members when and how useful.

In the priesthood of believers all would be trained to be front-line working Christians trained to speak in small groups, evangelize outside when possible, and be a Christian educator. The only position women would not take, in order to be consistent with the Bible, would be that of the 15-minute sermon leader, who would also lead the responsive group reading. Since he doesn't get paid, and the position changes no one should care, and the members should have plenty of other meaningful work to do.

New Christians could be brought into a new member group, or shifted into groups without twelve people and so forth. This is just an idea that I believe would help to establish more Christians in presently non-Christian areas that would bring more Christians out of backseat roles and into the forefront of actual Biblically directed Christian living and so forth.

1. Light of the World

John 9: 4-5

⁴ I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. ⁵ As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

The Anthropic Principle and Reversals of Anthropomorphism

There may be a tendency for some humans in the modern era to attribute to humanity characteristics of God in a way that is hubris and unrealistic regarding stature of attainment and achievement. Such an effort may account for the theory that Universes might be artificially created by super-beings in parent Universes with very high technology instead of by God. One hopes that human science might be able to create universes for-themselves some day, yet the universe is temporal and God is eternal. Salvation through Jesus Christ-the light of the world, is what we aim for.

Theoretical human production of universes is variant recursion of the first cause principle. Some adherents of the theory of tech procreation of Universes stipulate the likelihood that God may have created the very first Universe. The parameters of creation still fall within the simultaneity and absolute non-temporal time values of the Creator/God it should be noted. All points in time are equidistant from the eternity of a non-temporal deity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnthropicPrinciple

This universe/throne may be one of many mansions that God has created. In the language of Arthur C. Clarke; God may have something very wonderful in mind for the future of the saved.

Resurrection Points

The neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus wrote about how The One might have emanated the Universe. Actually the creation of the Universe is a great mystery for finite minds. Cosmological physicists think about the topic all the time and sometimes irreverently regarding the order of Genesis from the Bible. We trust in God though for creating Universes more than ourselves. Scientists regard its origin sometimes as a substance that just naturally arose from nothing and/or without cause in some cases finding mathematical logic to support a recycling perpetual recurrent universe.

I too wonder how the One might have created a Universe that arrives as a great tree of life. The idea of the unmoved mover seems best; the Creator of the Universe Himself has no cause as He always existed. Without the mathematics that provides so many excellent sets, infinite series, differential and integral fields to structure models of Universe from, I am left to poetics and prose.

Jesus mentioned in John 11 some interesting points when he set about resurrecting his dead friend Lazarus. Let me point out what Jesus said about the light not being in man.

The friend of Jesus had died, and Jesus talked of the light not being in man hence he stumbles in the dark. Jesus was addressing four or five points simultaneously it appears. He was talking about the problem of sin in mankind (people had sought to stone him) and referring to those people as being in spiritual darkness who did not see the light of the world (God) Jesus Christ, and he was also referring to his dead friend Lazarus who had not life in himself any more (a lack of quarks or strings configured to produce life), furthermore, being dead, Lazarus could not negotiate in the world beyond without resurrection. That was a hint of the spiritual world to come in which actual spiritual resurrection occurs better than physical resurrection such as would be done for Lazarus soon.

Apologetics for Eschatology

With several eschatological systems in the world derived from various weltanshauung such as Science-atheist, Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and so forth it is worth including brief commentary upon elements of those systems. It is difficult to wriote today advocating for a articular point of view such as Christian eschatology of a post-millennial kind without an awareness that the general reader is assaulted by innumerable contra-indicative messages that 'frame up' the gospel in order to create a certain bias against it. With that in mind it is something of a pleasure to make a try at sufficient erudition in interdiciplinary fields and comparative religion to attempt to respond to some of the issues raised a priori.

It might be adequate for a Christian to be somewhat indolent about replying to cultured despisers of Christianity or to offer a recognition to people of other faiths that one has considered elements of there beliefs as well in order to point out how or why they may have come to differ, and even try to provide a way to return to the Lord for them so far as possible. Yet Christian activism arises from the spirit of the Lord I would think with the enthusiasm for the gospel that brings. Within a multi-cultural world Christian writers ought to try to bring a multi-cultural approach to their works so far as possible, though keeping in mind that there isn't anything wrong implicitly in people being who they are.

Hindus believe that Brahmin lives 311 trillion year, 30 billion years. The material content of the Universe every 4 to 8 billion years is recycled. Each of those ages or Kalpas is quartered into periods called yugas. The present yuga is ruled over by the demon Kali (instead of the goddess Kali) and is characterised by wickedness and a decline in morality.

Thus the Hindu religion shares a kind of eschatological pessimism with the pre-millenialists. Since this yuga is the last of the cycle in the Kalpa and ruled over by a demon it is not the tribulation period and that of the anti-Christ.

Those these Hindu had initially little in common with the Jewiish tradition-plainly the Aryans may have had contact with Abraham at some point, or at least religious influence when Abraham migrated north to the future Israel.

The Hindu religions originated with those of the Aryas from Iran-Afghanistan maybe 1500 B.C.

In 100 B.C.E. a Hindu sage wrote; “Social status depends not upon your accomplishments, but in the ownership of property; wealth is now the source of virtue; passion and luxury are the sole bonds between spouses; falsity and lying are the conditions of success in life; sexuality is the sole source of human enjoyment; religion, a superficial and empty ritual, is confused with spirituality”—Vishnu Purana (source wikipedia article on Hindu eschatology)

Plainly one may read that and consider Thorsten Verblen's 'Theory of the Leisure Class' or consider the 1% concentration of wealth and regard similarities in human nature except that addiction to power and the material security are equally important values.

It is possible that Zoroaster was also influenced by the same religious inspiration source-element as the Aryas and perhaps Abraham. Evidently some Zoroastrians anticipate that one Saoshyant will appear some day in a verisimilitude of a pre-mill idea of the second coming of Christ. (source wikipedia). Buddhists have a concept of a second Buddha that will end death and create bliss and etc. according to one Buddhist eschatology article. From what I know about the original Buddha that is a far cry from the ideal of nothingness as nirvana that be taught. The 'second Buddha' is named; 'Maitreya'. Germans had an entirely secular return of Barbarossa-yet I suppose that every people has some ideal figure in cultural history whom could restore a golden age. Scientist might view a clone of the late Carl Sagan as a kind of atheist demi-urge that could bring an era of scientific atheist behaviorism to human culture before populist doom from resource consumption ends the good times for us all.

The Lord however appeared unto Abraham and developed the Jews as the people amidst whom the Lord would be born. The end of peoples and the end of civilizations does not mean the end of spiritual increase. It is notable that though Zoroastrianism in Iran was largely annihilated by the arrival and purges of Islam, none of the civilizations that developed spiritually in the same era circa 1500-1000 B.C.E. have ceased to exist. Individual human life discontinues while the kingdom of God grows. In some senses the most practical end time is that which occurs when one physical dies and transitions to the spiritual realm of God.

Li Hong was a Taoist mystic and messianic figure that Taoist thought would arrive to reconcile heaven and Earth aright. A wikipedia article on Taoist eschatology reports that the legends concerning Li Hong started in the Han dynasty and continued until the 5^th century A.D. with several Taoist rebellions occurring periodically until then under people named 'Li'. That of course hasn't anything to do with Robert E. Lee the confederate general. Rebel leaders can have the same morpheme surname and be unrelated.

It is plain that some political and religious leaders sought to unify and consolidate their powers t include rolling back the tides on order like King Canute to just over heave and Earth like the self-declaring gods known as Roman Emperors. Jesus notably and exceptionally said to Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world.

Even so it is interesting to consider the scientific viewpoint about the Universe and how it changes (runs down in organization through entropy). While scientists might consider a singularity of all of the mass of the Universe as the most organized state of existence-when it is smaller than the head of a pin they fail to consider that the sublime spirit creating all need less size or dimension at all in order to exist for-Himself.

Select Scientific End Paradigmata

(Consider that the end might be like a 'z' point on a line segment that appears to reverse direction, polarity or become the point of a new rhythmic beat of a new song.)

Stephen Hawking postulated concepts to explain mechanics of black holes. Recently a Dr. Mathur has postulated super-string-concepts in a black hole mechanics paradigm. Being inexpert on the subject my contemplation of the issues raised points that probably would be insubstantial to the knowledgeable.

Super-string theory and essentially M-Theory postulates ten dimensions. How can gravity 'wrap up' the other non-standard four dimensions beyond the event horizon into a black hole? Black holes were theorized with just the standard four dimensions weren't they, at least initially?

It does not seem reasonable that gravity, one of the standard forces, should have an ability to attract other, micro dimensions. The mechanics of inter-dimensional interactions might more rightly account for the allocation of micro-dimensions.

How would one biggest string account for all of the future deployments of micro-dimensions and string/contents without a primary pre-determinism? In reading of the works of Augustine, the pseudo-Dionysus and certain other early philosopher-theologians in a history by S.J. Coppleston I found many speculations about the early conditions of the Universe seemed to have similarities with logical points about the Universe.

Human knowledge of time, matter and motion is imperfect and changing...it does not apprehend the way of God "interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecto possessio".

In the second century ad Christian theologians believed that the Universe was created along with space-time from nothing. That is they believed that the physical Universe was created by God where no Universe had been before. Cosmologists since the big bang theory originated have tended to have the same opinion, although pre-bang explanations were left for scientists within a mist until recently.

In recent years physicists have evolved new cosmological theories that have attempted to unify Einstein’s relativistic Universe with quantum mechanical explanations of matter. A standard model of cosmology was developed that placed a big bang from a singularity some 13.3 billion years before present. The math and physics to explain the expansion of space-time to its vast size of 13.3 billion light years was incomplete and left gaps in the theories.

The four primary physical forces of the Universe and their origin from a unified field at the singularity with one force were incomplete as well. Brilliant physicists such as Stephen Hawking and others examined and conjectured about theoretical and indirectly observable astronomical objects such as black holes in order to fill in the gaps of understanding.

A ten-dimensional super-string or M Theory was created to explain many of the inexplicable appearances of matter in the Universe and its origin. The four observable dimensions of space-time in Einstein’s paradigm and the convertible mass-energy it was comprised of were postulated to be the surface elements of six micro-dimensions of sub-Planck length extent filled not with particles but instead with vibrating ‘strings’ that extruded into the four standard dimensions seemingly as solid objects.

Some physicists have described the behavior of quantum mechanical particles as wavelets instead of as particles or waves. Strings that vibrate at various harmonic frequencies that seem in the standard four dimensions to be quarks and other sub-atomic particles naturally also give rise to the question ‘what are strings made of’. For that I have no answer. Perhaps the philosopher and co-inventor of the Calculus; Leibniz had an answer with his theoretical monads that were perhaps like bubble thoughts in the mind of God. I haven’t a better explanation.

Recently, interesting developments have occurred in the field of physics and cosmology. A Bose-Einstein condensate was formed in a solid for the first time. Subjected to a pressure of 900 G (I believe it was) very near the temperature of absolute zero, the atoms in the solid seemed to blend into one single wave. Another development was a paper by a Dr. Mathur in Nuclear Physics B. I read of the report in another periodical.

Dr. Mathur has suggested modifications to and developments beyond Stephen Hawking’s theoretical work about how Black Holes emit radiate energy through virtual particles. Dr. Hawking's paradigm does not explain how information going into a black hole might not result in the loss of information, known, I believe as Shannon entropy.

Here I’ll sketch my notions about Dr. Mathur’s paradigm about the structure of black holes that he has made based upon super-string theory. Gravity increasing as mass increases falling into the event horizon of a black hole was though to break apart atoms and particles with the information of their structure being thus lost violating a principle of physics about its conservation.

If a super-string model of matter is used the base state of the particles might instead simply be strings that compile or are deposited analogous to the way geological materials are deposited over time, in an order that would preserve the information content or structure of the particles that had been crunched or downsized.

Virtual particles at the edge of the event horizon might still be outsourced allowing matter to escape to the non-black hole space, though I could not guess if that would be in some order regarding the strings inside the hole. If so in theory one might be able to learn something from the virtual particles outsourced about their origin. Inside the black hole super-strings would form as a giant ball of string. Yet under such intense pressure, what would become of the super-string mass itself and its extra dimensions? Would they, like the Bose-Einstein condensate in the solid recently produced in a laboratory, transform themselves into one transverse wave of unknown dimensions? What would delimit the space-time of the one super-string wave within a black hole?

Dr. Mathur’s theory about super-string behavior inside black holes obviously has generated consideration about what an initial singularity that might have given rise to a big bang and thence inflated the Universe in rapid expansion increasing in space-time and believed now to be accelerating at an increasing rate of speed would be like if instead of having a mysterious enigma called a singularity it was instead an extremely tightly bound ball of super-strings that when expanded produced an orderly universe at the greatest observable scale.

If the ball of super-string is used neither black holes or the initial cosmic singularity would need to have had a singularity at their core where all matter and time is condensed beyond physical theoretical modeling structures. The one wave at the core of a cosmic singularity in which all potential structures would be produced and upon which all life would surf in time is a novel concept for cosmologists and others to consider.

Other theories of a pre-big bang have been created that place other macro dimensions turning corners or moving down funnels into channels that emerge through a singularity. Yet other theories have posited a recursive universe in which it inflates, then contracts to re-expand something like a yo-yo Universe. The new theories in cosmology present a cornucopia of ideas and tools for Christians to consider when correlating and comparing the Biblical book of Genesis and its remarks about creation with what is known and theorized about the natural Universe.

Several of the theories of recent cosmology seem to be constructed upon premises that may never be directly concluded or verified because of time and dimensionality conditions.

Christians too have a wealth of experience and revelation upon which to construct or believe premises that will not be conclusively answered at least for some, until after their lives depart from the natural Universe. The premises require faith that the conclusion in heaven will be true. Scientific cosmologists base premises generally upon structures that will produce testable conclusions in the natural Universe, give or take a few dimensions.

Micro-dimensional ‘Scuppers’ and the Bottomless Pit

Not being a physicist, my wording of these questions will have parameter inconsistencies with standard physics contexts I should think-yet I will write these several ideas anyway. Essentially I had an interest in why it is that particles become increasingly heavy as they approach the speed of light, and infinitely heavy at light speed thus barring more acceleration. What is it that would be added to, for instance, a hydrogen atom that was subject to an accelerating force?

Then of course considering string and M-Theory artifacts that have filtered down to the general public, I wondered if the criterion that could provide answers to my question might not be a dimension protocol that affected particles and waves.

Salvador Dali painted an interesting conceptual picture named ‘The Persistence of memory’ that had a scuppers as one might have found in a British lifeboat at the bottom of a landscape over which was draped upon a branch a melting down clock; memory perhaps would drain off in time into the scuppers.

Are the micro sub-Planck length theoretical dimensions posited in M-Theory just artificial ‘scuppers’ that contain particles too small to be measured in the standard four dimensions? Are the smaller dimensions simply artificial concepts developed to explain a difficult concept such as Einstein used to explain how gravity worked upon all objects or particles (except anti-gravity) within a gravitational field equally when he compared the effects to ‘curved’ space-time?

Of course there is ‘real’ substance to the smaller dimensions in that larger particles or possibly waves too cannot enter into them. That is large particles and waves are not small particles and waves and cannot ‘run’ with them anymore than a giant basketball player could fit through the wing window of a Porsche. Very small sub-plank length strings have a realm of ‘behavior’ so small that only they can exist in that context.

Yet why is it that particles accelerated to the speed of light become infinitely heavy? Could it be compared to that Porsche that if traveling a low speed or no speed parked in a lot won’t get traffic tickets, but if it goes faster and faster it will be given tons of traffic tickets becoming heavier? Is it that as a four-dimensional realm particle travels at faster toward the speed of light it’s string base traveling the in the micro extra dimensions is collecting more baggage or tickets at an accelerating pace that become infinite toward the speed of light?

Or is it that as it passes through more of the super-string ‘scuppers’/dimensions at a faster pace it’s grounding or base becomes associated nearly simultaneously with more of the micro dimensions and it becomes mass of ‘infinite weight’ comparable perhaps to a magnetized object that increases it’s realm of contact to an infinite field?

Could the fact of mass be a phenomenal association of existent four-dimensional waveforms with aspects of the micro-dimensions that are ‘stickier’ than those of energy? Is energy and are photons traveling at light speed and that have nearly no mass as waveforms or string vibrations transparent to the micro-dimensional fields of super-string theory because of phenomenal characteristics of waveforms or particles accelerated into acting as waves in space-time?

I will leave off these questions here, with the comment that in part I wondered about the infinite weight characteristic and interesting points in common between black hole singularities with infinite weight and mass and those of very small particles that acquire infinite mass accelerated to the speed of light. Also, the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit that is mentioned in the Biblical book of the Revelation is referred to somewhere perhaps in chapter 18 as that which was, and is not, yet is. That ‘bottomless pit’ could perhaps be a reference to the infinite curvature of space time at a black hole, and it’s possibilities of time travel with the paradoxes generated thereof. Black hole connections/wormholes to birth or intersect other universes have been theorized.

Could gravity intruding into the standard four dimensions yet mostly iceberging below the surface as a characteristic of the micro-dimensions then be a quality or aspect of the micro-dimensions or particles themselves that seem to warp or fold space time most directly?

The way that quantum super-positioning acts to have particle/waves at all probable worldlines or places in the Universe that are selected to collapse when measured in the Heisenberg uncertainty context seems another interesting aspect or phenomenality of the relationship of space-time, gravity and waveforms to their configuration in the very small realm of super-string waveforms and branes posited by super-string and m-theory.

The cumulative effects or phenomenal appearances of particle waves, mass and probabilistic existence as well as travel of photons perhaps as continuously sampled massless or nearly massless probability phenomena arising in relation to sub-micro dimensional protocol provides much food for thought-and of course the interesting notion of the beast that could lurk one day in an infinite quantum gravity pit or wormhole to another universes or time.

Micro Black Holes, Particle Accelerators & EMG Mass Drivers

II Timothy 4 "3For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear."

Since the fiscal fiasco attempting to build a super-conducting super-collider in Texas, physics gurus have had more time to develop additional theories about quantum mechanics. A recent idea is the possibility of creating short-lived micro-sized black holes with existing particle accelerators in order to observe the effects they have on other particles as they deteriorate.

It is an interesting notion of course. Black holes are supposed to be the longest lasting large-scale and presently recognizable features of the Universe in some distant future of 1000 times a trillion trillion trillion years or so, until they have leaked out all of their mass through radiation in the Hawking process.

Page 114 of 'The Five Ages of the Universe' mentioned the point that there are three basic sorts of black holes; there are the ones of modest size resulting from collapsed stars, there are the ones at the center of galaxies that grow very large even to the size of 4 AU (astronomical units), and there are very small ones of fewer than a hundredth of a millimeter in size left that were theoretically created along with much else in the earliest micro-seconds of the Creation. It is that sort of Black Hole that some physicists hope to create on Earth. Will they inadvertently preempt the apocalypse in doing so?

Of course scientists have assured that creating micro-black holes will be entirely safe. It does seem that some factors that weren't understood properly in quantum and string or M-Theory might give the pit bulls of the quantum world an opportunity to bite and devour the comparatively trivial mass of the Earth in a heartbeat as they revert to form consistent with their character.

Some of this exciting physical research might be better put off for a few years until a more advanced manned space program permits the construction of 'safe' research facilities. For the black hole production and research facility I'd suggest the Martian moon Phobos as a place to locate a super-conducting super-collider 20 years from the present.

Why Phobos? Because it's fairly small and if consumed loss of mass would not immediately destroy the Earth nor perhaps Mars. Additionally Phobos has very, very low gravity (one can easily hop around it in miles long bounds) and is very cold. The low temperature of Phobos would make the installation of low-temperature super-conducting lines cheap. Phobos also has enough size to support a good-sized accelerator with a modified configuration.

The federal government really does need to invest in the development of an Earth to high orbit mass driver in order to expedite space access quantitatively. Electro-magnetic accelerators have been advocated for decades, perhaps even a hundred years by forward thinking philosophers of space travel.

Robert Goddard, experimenting with rockets in Roswell New Mexico in the 1930's, had long before proposed federal funding for an electro-magnetic subway from New York to Boston--I'm sure he had ulterior motives of space-travel.

The lunar landing and evacuation module was able to lift off from the moon with such a small rocket propellant supply because lunar gravity is just a sixth of the Earth's. The moon is a good location for assembling future manned space missions with easy return to the Earth. The primary obstruction and cost difficulty is the lack of a high-quantity mass driver to boost modules from Earth to high orbit. The federal government has built SDI 'rail guns' that proved the feasibility; a mass driver need be larger and accelerate more slowly over several miles. Overcoming the few seconds of atmospheric friction can also be overcome-perhaps by a leading dummy module taking the brunt of the heat.

One should work for the future with faith.

These very small black holes that might in principle be artificially created have another theoretical use that is quite remarkable. ‘The Five Ages of the Universe’ (page 180) mentioned the possibility of using black holes as ‘sinkholes’ that erupt right out of out Universe’s space-time continuum altogether and become another universe in it’s initial phase that increases.

It would perhaps be possible for physicists or clever computers to design an ephemeral black hole packed with a design that would shape the nature and the future of the new Universe that ultimately would be ‘disconnected’ from our own. It is interesting that physics professionals may imagine in theory Universes that could be the product of intelligent design, yet so far as public discussions go, they seem to be unable to grasp the idea that the present Universe already is the product of intelligent design.

Many of the cosmological operations theories seem to have parallels in the Bible. Certainly theologians have been discussing ideas about infinity and the characteristics of God, or the nature of God, for millennia. The idea of infinity and eternity emerge in the history of modern thought as theological subjects contemporarily with philosophical researches. Even Democratis had the atomist idea more than two millennia before scientists of the 19^th century did.

The tremendous space-time alteration to mass-energy and space-time are anticipated by some Biblical paradigms. A Red dwarf star approaching the solar system one day to bring on some of the events of the tribulation would be easy to associate with Bible prophecy.

Why Religion?

One might ask what the etymology of religion is. The word religionem was a Latin word meant to repeat or bind fast, perhaps to venerate. Yet the word allegiance also is similar. A liege or liege lord had feudal origins of France and England...again possibly through the Latin and more ancient indo-European languages.

Why would people have one religion? Well the answer would implicitly be in the word. It would be to have one repeating resort to a particular belief instead of to several.

Have people always had religion, or perhaps been monotheistic instead of being polytheistic? The answer is no. Paganism and idol worship was rampant, pervasive and customary in times past. In parts of the world people still believe in many deities.

Obviously a certain amount of social inertia exists in worldly organizations that draw people into participation through reasons beside self-determination. Personal belief made from one's own experience and thought, or call by the Spirit would perhaps be more meaningful to citizens of democratic states than coerced religions or theocratic directives.

In ancient times, and in modern times in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime, people were required, even unwillingly to adore the main deity of a state religion as the government described it. The Aztecs required human sacrifice in a pervasive pagan religion maintained by the state, yet the paganism of that culture permitted many pagan deities drawn in from other peoples to coexist with their own pantheon of idols and demiurges in the pagan worldview.

The Roman Empire before Constantine's conversion also had a state religion at times that permitted the induction of appropriate pagan statues/representations of pagan scientific paradigms into their particular cult of veneration. An excellent lightening god, or ocean god, sunset god or doorway god might become popular and elevated to a high place.

I was reading an historical fiction book of the Aztecs that noted that the planet the planet Venus was known to the Aztecs Quetzalcoatl. It is interesting if true.

Religions are not simply interchangeable products and services such as Americans and modern consumers might be familiar with in store shelves. It isn't simply a matter of selecting the best product, or assembly of products. The etymology, or origin of religions, historically has real contexts that determine the nature of each.

Sure it is implicit upon an individual to determine for himself what he beliefs and regards as true. At least in a western civilization context that was the point at least before broadcasters took up lying as a natural right to increase political influence. Some would like to decide for the public all the time what to believe.

Citizens may have a re allegiance, or re liege ance to many forms of social conduct from watching a favorite morning news show or following commercial football to adoration of the Dow Jones Industrial reports several times a day.

Many Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the way unto eternal life with God, exclusively.

Even so some would evaluate religion as if they were comparing products from which they need only select the best value, if they think it has value at all in the modern mass-marketed, mass-communicated world order.

About Truth Theory and Elements Regarding the Phenomenality of Life

I am a believer that Jesus Christ is God and is the sole way to receive meaningful eternal life. The world is a temporal place and the Spirit must draw one into a right relationship while the day exists and before eternal darkness falls. The question is momentous for one's eternal destiny. One may err, form one's own definite ideas yet get that undesirable verdict at the Day of Judgment.

There are many philosophers that have written about life. One may spend one's days in numerous ways that will lead nowhere. Some philosophy purposefully supports an examination of what is yet does not seek to provide eternal answers, nor metaphysical answers. One may become somewhat adrift within worldviews or Weltanschauungs that are literary, interesting and ultimately on the wrong road.

There are many ways to form true opinions. One may choose what course of learning one decides as opportunities support. Of course some knowledge may be pre-destined or not. Some answers may be learned and other perhaps given by grace.

It is possible to accept the authority, expertise or experience of someone else whom has investigated all of the religious and philosophical subjects so far as possible within one lifetime, trust their determination and be content with that or not for oneself. Alternately one investigates all the aforementioned for oneself, and perhaps reaches a different or the same conclusion. There are many criteria for making decisions. Regardless of what I write I should reasonably suppose a reader might not believe or act as I have suggested with equal possibility as belief or agreement.

Paul (the Apostle) was sent to Rome and executed after a few years in captivity. He had written letters to Churches while in captivity and before. Much of the New Testament is made up of Paul's letters. In one letter he relates that Luke is with him. He asks a church to send Mark along with some parchments and books. I believe Paul was asking for writings about Jesus Christ and his life...the Old Testament should have been available from any synagogue in Rome.

Mark and Luke were two of the writers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ books. Since they were all together that is perhaps where they correlated their data and got the idea for writing their own accounts of the "Gospel of Jesus Christ according to". Paul was probably executed ten or twenty years after Jesus was crucified. The Churches including those in Rome kept Paul’s writing.

Perhaps the last living Apostle and writer of the Revelation was John. John's Gospel book has a somewhat different style and theological technique. A somewhat older individual wrote it. Since none of the books of the New Testament mention the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70 it is reasonable to suppose they were completed before that time. Jesus made the only mention of the destruction in ad 32 or 33 perhaps when he predicted the event.

Peter's books seem very much like what Peter would have written before he too was crucified as the cornerstone of the Church. James the Brother of Jesus wrote an interesting book. Because these people were 'famous' or well-known Christians the expanding early church kept their works and supported their authoring I should guess.

Because John was imprisoned on the prison isle of Patmos by the Romans perhaps for being a Christian evangelist upsetting local establishment synagogues or pagans, he would have escaped the destruction of Jerusalem (500,000 people were killed approximately) and had the opportunity to write the last book included in the standard bible canon.

The New Testament is the four gospel books, Paul's letters, The Acts of the Apostles, Peter, James and John's letters, a theological work name 'Hebrews' written by probably by Paul, and the Revelation. Everything likely was written before Christians were driven underground by the Persecutions of Nero and other Roman Emperors, followed by the destruction of the Jewish Temple and Jerusalem.

The New Testament occurs in a continuum of Jewish history...read the genealogy of Jesus.

Muhammedism is a syncretism. Buddhism is a philosophy something like stoicism developed in India by Sakyamuni. Taoism is a nice naturalist philosophy of a pre-scientific/scientific nature...etc. There is one God, yet the Mohammedans have erred in believing they can get to eternal life without Jesus Christ's atoning substitution.

Though they worship God they have the belief that they are fit to precede directly, without remission of their sins, into his presence. Jesus/God alone can enable mankind to escape the eternal penalty for original and subsequent sin.

What if political authorities erased the word referring to 'the end' or of eschatology? Would end times still exist?

There are theories of truth, such as disquotation theory, correspondence and coherence theory, yet I prefer the idea that the Creator of the Universe; God/Jesus Christ, is Truth.

I should mention here, incidentally, that science has come up with a quantum cosmology term named ‘decoherence’ that is used to denote a concept regarding a quantum change from a perfect and unaffected waveform environment to one that is collapsed and ‘decohered’. It hasn’t the same sort of meaning as that of coherence theory in a teleology context, unless one were to say that moral relativism occurs in a social process of decoherence from the absolute laws of God as expressed in the Holy Bible-in which case each use has a structural yet not content similarity.

Truth is the notion that something actually matches up with what it is posited to be...words and objects correspond accurately.

The Creator of the Universe can be the only ultimate Truth as the source of what is.

Sartre wrote about 'use-truth', or organizational definitions of what is true that serve their own purposes/needs/values. The Soviet Union for example, or Nazi Germany, would make lies into the truth because it served their interests best. Dictatorships often utilize.

'True lies'.

Human beings with phenomena of mind do exist and interpret what they experience. Self-awareness is why people aren't thoughtless inanimate objects...or it’s at least the prime difference. Self-awareness is the simultaneous sensing of the world/sight/feelings etc. and thought processing of it, such as depth perception, motion etc. It is a live phenomenon of a soul in existence within the Universe and physical forces (designed by God I believe).

One might say that existence is truth, and call mind self-awareness as truth perhaps. Truth however is not all that is, unless one associates it with God and the Universe singularly.

Truth is subjective and conditional in regard to its purpose. Human beings and thought may also have false ideas and opinions about the world or perceptions they have...it is the nature of the phenomenon of mind-processing that it does err and have inaccuracies in interpreting sense data in order to determine what does exist and how it works.

Acts 2: 32 “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we are all witnesses.” Luke wrote this of Jesus after resurrection about the apostles and their experiences of Him.

Misc. Eschatology Considerations

As one of the reasons given in support of a first century context for interpreting the Revelation Gentry gives the information that the futurist, dispensationalist way of interpreting the Revelation creates a persistent Christian despair about the present accompanied by a rationalization that this world is doomed and given over to the deus a machina of wickedness under the dark powers of Evil and that Christians can look forward to the rapture taking them out of the society of despond.. Of course one does not require a Christian eschatology that interprets the Revelation within a dispensationalist, futurist paradigm in order to have a pessimistic outlook on world events and life in general. In fact atheists continuously cite the evil and wickedness in the world as reasons against the existence of God. For many atheists any possible Universe created by God must be as Sugar Mountain with barkers and colored balloons but no sort of accidens (not to misuse that Aristotelian term but the error works rather well in this context).

R.A. Torrey was a dispensationalist and well-meaning Christian writer. Gentry is another and thus it seems evident that it is possible to have different ideas about what the book of Revelation means and when it was written. I believe that the fact that there are consequences to taking one of the two positions mentioned here are significant though.

Gentry thinks that Christians with a gloomy dispensationalist viewpoint awaiting a skyhook from Jesus to extract them out of the turmoils and persecutions of the world become socially indolent or disengaged from social constructive actions to a certain extent. That is they fail to live up to their potential and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy making improvements to the world. One wonders what the position of the Puritans was on dispensationalism and futurism versus convenantalism and preterism?

Apparently the realistic immanentalism of John's prophecies written to the churches of the day (the seven churches and other Christians in the Revelation was lost to those living past the time of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and slaughter by a Roman legion of as many as half a million Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem circa 70 a.d.. That is by the second century the real context for interpretation of the Revelation was lost preponderantly. Maybe Martin Luther's observation that the Revelation 'had a lot of straw' (as in too much for making good bricks) was a sort of accurate insight in regard to making the Revelation a futurist book out of a prophecy largely intended, or immediately purposed to warn and correct, exhort, comfort and explain to very challenging Christians soon to undergo extreme persecutions what their status was and what the outcome would be. Even so the Revelation does not implicitly exclude within Gentry's paradigm a dual-purpose futurist paradigm of inaugurated eschatology. There is difficulty in making certain uncertain terms with uncertain contexts of initial use.

Mohammedan eschatology seems founded in a futurist sort of misunderstanding of the Revelation. Mohammad's father had been keeper of the Spirit House-Kaaba-at Mecca with its vast assembly representing pagan religions. When he was made an orphan and cast out of the good graces of the pagan shrine in time he developed a revolutionary syncretistic monotheism to take back his heritage and of course make the Kaaba a shrine for one God with Mohammad as his exclusive prophet. Mohammad must have surveyed the available religious material as best as he could from Jewish and Christian sources and with the help of his older wife hashed out a revolutionary personal monotheism different enough that it could not be construed as representing the oppressive Byzantine Orthodox variety of Christianity that had dominated much of the ancient world in the day as a theocratic device. For Mohammad the Revelation was futurist and the Jews were Christ killers as they were to many of those of the dark and middle ages in Europe. Thus in Mohammedan eschatology Jesus will return to wreak vengeance upon the Jews and Muslims will help in a Holy Jihad against Jews comprising Armageddon. It is interesting how wrong interpretation of literature can have lasting consequences.

Jesus didn't hold a grudge against the Jews not only because he was himself Jewish-although Bobby Fischer seemed to hate the Jews though his mother was evidently a full bloodied tribal Jew. Jesus advocated forgiveness-even seven times seventy times forgiveness and is an improbable choice to portray as returning to wreak vengeance on the Jews. At the last judgment in fact all that one needs to do to be saved is to have had faith in Jesus as Lord and to accept his grace and atonement for one's sin. Then a kind of default choice lets a de facto self-judgment by the lost correct the lost with eternal punishment. Since Jesus is the only way-the soul bridge to God and eternal life with the Lord, any other course leaves one in the wilderness of perdition and doom in any possible Universe-a tough choice to make.

Gentry's book seems to focus very much on the identity of the beast and providing support for a first century interpretation of the Revelation. That's fine yet it is a little limiting on vision for what the Revelation is an means to post-temple era Christians.

Some Christians have a natural antipathy toward a partial preterist interpretation of the Revelation inasmuch as accepting its veracity would tend to indicate that even though the prophecy was 100% accurate more or less, its fulfillment means that a greater error occurred in Christian teleology/prophecy such that though everything else happened Jesus Christ didn't return and thus the prophecy of the Lord were falsified. Such a logically unnecessary proposition depends on interpreting John's writing in such a way that the meaning of the return and 'coming in the clouds' have particular meaning-values too. On the latter point Gentry provides evidence for supporting a meaning of 'coming in the clouds' within a Biblical context as meaning a time of social uncertainty when God intervenes to change things. I think it likely that the use of modern definitions for ancient ideas have sometimes made inaccuracy in understanding by Biblical interpreters occur. Gentry points out there are five meanings of the Greek word he or 'ge' used in the Revelation 80 times and two used prevalently means 'land' interchangeably with 'Earth'. That has implications for the interpretation of certain cosmological inferences and construction of interpretive paradigms for cosmology by modern expositors.

Even so it is incumbent upon interpreters of the Revelation to sort through and determine what elements of the book might have futurist relevance post-Temple destruction and to the present and/or future.

Seemingly the seven hills of Rome representing the generic rather than particularization of the beast could represent worldly government in general in a sort of City of God versus City of Man context. Humanity seems to pursue a developed social abstraction of a generalized human being as a kind of social goal. In the U.S.A. under the corrupting sway of an anti-democracy elitist broadcast media owned by a corporate plutocratic invisible empire the pragmatic ideal of a brainwashed mass-man without anti-corporatist or individual private interests seems to be the actualization in reduced form of the political goal of Thomas Hobbes philosophical treatise on the ideal (British) government of the absolute dictator personifying the will of the people. I suppose the idea of Nero and Rome as the beast of Revelation might be the first formal expression of that ideal evil empire in writing, although some might regard Plato's Republic and its triumvirate of philosopher-kings as a fascist precursor of the Great Satan mirroring the condition of the abstract will of the people that the people are in return conditioned to be (at the will of the dictator. The late dictator Saddam Hussein was a more recent example of the form as are/is the string of post-second world war North Korean Communist dictators).

Karl Barth in his 'History of Christian Thought' noted what the philosopher Ortega y Gasset later described as 'the revolt of the masses' against elite rule in Europe. Barth was applying the concept to an earlier period of transition leading to the French Revolution wherein the ordinary became rulers inverting the concept of elite rule. Karl Marx of course envisioned the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact in modern America within the paradigm of atheist led scientism with anti-Christian values and even creeping purges of Christianity from the U.S.A. along with national economic sovereignty the modern media is a mooning colony conditioner of mass social identity toward the revolutionary transition of Hobbes' all in one absolute dictator to one Satanic presence in all subjects rather than citizens). It is believed I would think that off-market economic interests have antipathetic potential toward the collective financial networks of globalism in which all must play or be marginalized. The house always wins in Las Vegas and the same situation prevails with preferred networks of concentrated wealth and power.

If John's Revelation was fulfilled entirely in it's day of the first century with the Neronic persecutions and the following destruction of the Temple it is important not to dismiss the book capriciously from future meaning or lasting examples of human conduct and ways of being that can be learned and avoided or corrected.

Just as one ought to learn the ethics of the Lord it is worth drawing additional inferences from the life and times of the Lord and Apostles about things not to do such as stoning adulterers or crucifying persons critical of government incompetence and the corruption of politicians and other officials of interest.

^{Eschatology is a term referring to the study of end times-that is the end of the world and Universe. Many cultures have end times prophecies as a kind of counterpoint to creation stories. Science of course views everything through a jaundiced eye of causality reasoning from within the field of being. With logical investigations and mathematical calculations one may infer the cosmological history of the Universe and project the future of the Universe and even its end. Of course science does not inevitable have all the facts hence it may miss out on significant elements for calculating. In 1999 it was discovered that the expansion of the Universe is increasing and has done so for about 7 billion years instead of slowing down under the influence of gravity. One might wonder how renewed, accelerated spatial expansion occurs in-itself and how that effects the parameters of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.}

^{I believe that historians of eschatology paradigms of diverse cultures have classified the form of thee end times. Science has had a big rip-in which the Universe’s space-time is torn apart by too rapid of expansion. Science has also had a big crunch wherein the gravity of the Universe slows the expansion and draws it toward contraction and an end times singularity. There are also cyclical theories of science wherein space-time field membranes periodically collide, bounce and end and start a new cycle of expansion and evolution until it wears down its energy in thermodynamic exhaustion. That would be something like a ball thrown into the air that goes higher and higher until its energy is spent whereat it falls to Earth, hits a trampoline with energy in the skin of the trampoline that adds energy to the returning ball for a bounce of equal height again.}

^{Hindu eschatology has time periods called kalpas. After the equivalent of (x) billion years have passed Brahma wraps up the Universe and recycles it. Brahma is the Christian equivalent of God.}

^{Ragnarok and other Nordic myths are included in the field of eschatology. Yet as Christians we are concerned with the eschatology paradigm of the Bible. Scholars of Bible studies necessarily make a kind of limited systematic theology by deciding what valid eschatology references in the Bible are and how they should be correlated with references in other books of the Bible. There are several ways of interpreting the collected eschatology materials producing different ideas about when or how the end times scenarios eventuate.}

^{In end-times paradigms the world may end in flames, or flood, disaster of various kinds with signs and portents, predicted circumstances and indications that the end times are on the way.}

^{Jesus Christ of course said,}

^{Matthew 24-4 “And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.}

^{5 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.}

^{6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.}

^{7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.}

^{8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.}

^{9 Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.}

^{10 And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.”}

^{The temporal exstasis, the rate and nature of the passage of time, in eschatological scenarios tends to be linear with the arrow of time moving forward irreversibly along one dimension or direction. Some theorists believe that if space-time can be regarded as a composite of dimension entailing membrances that moving along or through each other producing the phenomena of time for observers. They may also postulate that the complexity of matter interactions make reversibility of time theoretically possible yet practically not so. It goes witout saying that the entire space-time field would need to reverse rather than just a portion of it, and that seems unlikely, not that one would ever notice if it did.}

^{At any rate, I mentioned the foregoing as a lead-in to pointing out that Jesus Christ seems to bring a different paradigm to space-time eschatology without necessarily advancing neither a cyclical nor a linear time paradigm for end times. Even though the New Testament does provide something of more usual end-times information, it also has a different temporal axis, one based in the  of  that is for-itself outside of space-time existing as a transcending fact beyond the linear order of causality.}

^{Yet of the causal order the Lord was not short of knowledge. He mentioned at one time to his contemporaries prophecies concerning himself and , yet they failed to understand then. The destruction of Jerusalem would be an apocalyptic event, yet not that of the entire world, unless of course one interpreted the resurrection of the Lord as the most important eschatological event-the end of temporal history as the main place of meaning-with the new emphasis shifting to the church and the kingdom of God-though the temporal line runs on for a time or time and a half, a kalpa or a trillion years…like something of a cul de sac.}

^{Jesus said;}

^{Matthew 16-1 “The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven.}

^{2 He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red.}

^{3 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?}

^{4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.”}

^{One then considers that Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D.}

^{Heaven may have a different physics, a different field, or even a spiritual foundation with fundamentally new structure of existence. From what Jesus said here about marriage, it seems that temporal thermodynamics might be absent from heaven.}

^{Matthew-29 “Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.}

^{30 For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.}

^{31 But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying,}

^{32 I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”}

^{Eschatology has many Judeao-Christian and even Muslims interpretations. I will briefly consider a few more..}

^{Christian eschatology is a large field concerned with learning when the second coming of Christ and end of the present temporal world order will occur.  Some of the basic fields for interpreting the Revelation and apocalyptic references comprising eschatological material are Praeterism, Idealism, Historicism and Futurism. There also are fields of study about a millennium of rule by the Lord on Earth. One finds a comparable paradigm in the Muslim period ruled by Isa. The field opinions about a millennium of rule by God/Jesus or Isa his rep are called premillennialism, post-millennialism and amillennialism. Islam doesn't seem to be post-mill at all.}

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_eschatology#Amillennialism}

^{There is yet another context-ism about these time periods. Dispensationalism has the idea that there are various ages or epochs whereby God relates to humanity providing a different emphasis. This age of the Gentiles might be regarded as one such era. I think this idea is one paradigm abstract with some true elements. Yet one can have a few true fence post located at right places and still make a fence with the wrong shape. That is there might be more going on than a simple dispensation paradigm might take notice of.}

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realized_eschatology}

^{This point of view is described by the wikipedia article as being mostly an historical viewpoint. It seems something like Bultman might have liked. It is the ministry and legacy of Jesus that was the eschatological event and the corresponding worldly events have already happened. It differs from futurism and futurist dispensationalism with those ideas anticipating a coming anti-Christ, Armageddon, rapture and so forth. Even so it is not so simple. What Jesus said and his ministry wasn’t entirely or even primarily worldly or grounded in space-time rather than the  of . Time is non-linear for the Lord.}

^{Inaugurated Eschatology was popularized by George Eldon Ladd-a prolific Christian theologian. He has several books available on-line. It has some elements of futurism while also has elements that were fulfilled already with the appearance of the Lord. It seems a reasonable approach.}

^{http://www.amazon.com/Presence-Future-Eschatology-Biblical-Realism/dp/0802815316/ref=la_B001KITWUA_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410646377&sr=1-3}

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inaugurated_eschatology}

^{http://eschatologytoday.blogspot.com/}

^{This web site has interesting real-time political concepts about end times fragments in the .  offered some Sinai land to the Palestinian authority in the context of making a final settlement with  and that was rejected. Wars and rumors of wars include , the Caliphate and the prospects for partitioning  to give the Sunni of Syria half of that nation so they can extricate themselves from the civil war that evidently cannot end without further.}

^{Muslims have an eschatological tradition somewhat similar to Jewish and Christian though with less accurate content. The Bible was written by many authors under the direction of God while the Quran was written, it is said, by one man. Hence there isn’t as much detail or subtle weaving of nuance and scripttural references and allusions developing over more than a thousand years in the Quran. Even so the end times are called Qiyamah. That is the Resurrection or the Final Day. Muslims have a battle of Armageddon too. The point of view of those events differs from Christian and Jewish paradigms.}

^{Muslims have some paradigms of apocalypse similar to those of John the author of the Revelation. An anti-Allah appears named Masih ad-Dajjal and the bad folks follow he who claims to be god though he has just one eye while the good are led by the returning Mahdi (Jews expect a mahdi to appear to establish the kingdom). The Mahdi and Isa will beat down Masih ad-Dajjal and establish peace on Earth.}

^{After Isa’s period of ruling the faithful placidly ends two evil tribes descended from evil beings will start a battle to wipe out the believers. The Ya'jooj and Ma'jooj tribes start a general decline of morals. I believe these tribes are also known as Gog and Magog. Instead of a rapture, a pleasant southern breeze arrives to remove the faithful from the world, and all hell breaks loose.}

^{An evil beast will come out of the ground (something like the beast in the pit) and vanquish the faithful and the Quran will be forgotten. People will fornicate in the street like donkeys before a black smoke covers the world. The sun rises in the west and a trumpet sounds and everything is wrapped up. The only things living are what Allah wills to remain. Another trumpet sounds and everything is hunkie dorrie-everyone is resurrected and a journey starts. The good go to Janna and the faithless go to Jannanam (heaven and hell I suppose).}

^{The paradigm seems to reflect Jewish-Christian-pagan syncretism changing the orientation to reflect Muhammad’s point of view. Muhammad’s father was the keeper of the Kabba at Mecca before he was orphaned. He probably had both testaments of the Bible. By the 7th century the New Testament had been translated into Gothic for Germans. It was moving about the old world with priests liberally. With the fall of Jerusalem and the Roman Empire the attack upon the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople was getting started. Mohammad's warrior religion was the unifying power for conquest of North Africa, much of Asia and Europe. With the retreat of the Byzantine Empire and start of the dark ages in Europe the game was on. Before the invention of the Internet or even the telegraph literacy was usual controlled by political powers rather tightly especially regarding publishing prerogatives. Expressing end times theories might have been difficult. Forecasting end times might have antagonized those in power. The Lord is more understanding.}

^{Jesus Christ on eschatology.}

^{From the book of Matthew Chapter 24 (K.J.V.)}

“1 And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple.

2 And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

3 ¶ And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

4 And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.

5 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

9 Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.

10 And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.

11 And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.

12 And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

13 But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

14 And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

15 When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:)

16 Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains:

17 Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house:

18 Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

19 And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!

20 But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day:

21 For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.

22 And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

23 Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.

24 For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

25 Behold, I have told you before.

26 Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not.

27 For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

28 For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.

29 ¶ Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:

30 And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

31 And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh:

33 So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.

34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.

35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

36 ¶ But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark,

39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

40 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

41 Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

42 ¶ Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.

43 But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.

44 Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.

45 Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season?

46 Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing.

47 Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods.

48 But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming;

49 And shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken;

50 The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of,

51 And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

CHAPTER 25

1 Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.

2 And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

3 They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:

4 But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

5 While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.

6 And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.

7 Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.

8 And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.

9 But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.

10 And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.

11 Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.

12 But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.

13 Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.

14 ¶ For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.

15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.

16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents.

17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.

18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money.

19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them.

20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.

21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them.

23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:

25 And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.

26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed:

27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.

28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents.

29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

31 ¶ When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”

Some of the above references seemed applied within that generation and other sayings are applicable in all human times.

China to Announce 2015 List of Legal Places to Worship

China will announce the 2015 list of legal places to worship. But do they know the difference between post-mill, pre-mill and amill? Evidently they also banned crosses in churches in order to punish Catholics. Kenneth Gentry's excellent book 'He Shall Have Dominion' is a fine theological primer on the truth (so like Pilate they might ask-'What is truth?'

http://www.ibtimes.com/china-will-publish-list-legal-places-worship-effort-root-out-illegal-cults-1767976

If the Chinese authorities make the serious error of failing to choose to support post-millenial eschatology they will automatically default toward tribulationist ahead points of view I suppose like that of Mohammad, Hong Xe Quan and a few pre-tribs. One would think that even the Chinese Communists would want to be on the right side of the post-mill/pre-mill/amill controversy and be more in harmony with the teleological evolution of the will of God for humanity-though they may not believe in philosophical and theological ways of thinking at all and instead prefer material reductionism rather exclusively as a world-view.

Isaac Newton was of course a profound believer in the Lord and made productive insights in fundamental scientific theory. I think that the ability to have faith in a metaphysical spirit allows greater latitude in considering steady state mass and energy phenomenally.

Russia Anticipates Slump-Will that Stimulate Investment?

Russia forecasts a solid economic slump in 2015 because I would think, of U.S. led sanctions and the sharp downturn in oil prices. The Russian recession may stimulate direct foreign investment and trade as the ruble crashes in value. It may also lead Russia and perhaps the U.S.A. to seek membership in the oil cartel. A future U.S. President may look into forming a rival oil cartel with Russia and the U.S.A. as members as well as Iran and Iraq, yet who can say?

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/26/uk-russia-crisis-market-rouble-idUKKBN0K40H420141226

https://news.vice.com/article/ukraine-and-pro-russia-rebels-complete-major-prisoner-swap-in-donetsk

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/25/us-ukraine-crisis-parliament-idUSKBN0K30JT20141225

President Obama's foreign policy in retrospect seems to have been to stimulate conflict and expand the Dar al Harb to benefit Sunni fundamentalists in the long run. Creating civil war in Ukraine and Syria does tend to attack non-Sunni peoples. I hope the next U.S. President pursues a different policy. The United States could benefit from a prosperous Russia rather than one where the poor experience protracted unemployment, underemployment and destitution in a very cold climate. One recalls Solszhenitsyn's descriptions of the cold weather at the Kolyma transit camp in the Gulag Archipelago II and how the frozen corpses were stacked outside the hut like cord-wood. The Hawaii-Harvard-high thermostat set probably don't get it. Taking all of the Ukraine for the west from Russia was not a good long-term policy.

The Obama administration seemed teed off at Putin and probably expects Russia to become a queer marriage friendly, dope growing and toking nation if it wants the sanctions dropped.

Analysts believe that the sanctions may deter foreign investment in Russia and even create capital flight out of the country yet obviously the opportunities for those not honoring the sanctions to invest in Russia will be of interest. Devaluation of currency and inflation can bring a new economic investment fundamentalism in Russia perhaps better than at any time since the 1990s.

One would think that President Putin will be seeking a varriety of Asian trade and investment opportunities ahead. Russia though has a history of self-reliance. With its population crash and solid resource assets it is likely to weather the economic storm ahead and plant for long-range growth more reasonably than the Washington Redskins and Denver Broncos-teams that each needed a premier ground game to go with their star quarterback.

Russia has updated its defense policy and plans to upgrade its nuclear ballistic missile force intended to defrappe aggression and attacks on Russia. One must wonder though how effective a traditional ballistic missile force will be when the U.S. is developing a space-hyper-plane drone to serve as nuclear weapons packages within 3-5 years? Those maneuverable drone warhead delivery systems can make adaptive flight course changes unlike ballistic missiles that are comparatively  easier to knock down? Another avoidable  new nuclear arms technology race seems to be in the cards. They are expensive, dangerous and not worth much to the poor-especially when one's political leaders don't really give a whit about finding better alternative policy directions.

http://rt.com/news/217823-putin-russian-military-doctrine/