Faith Isn't In Retreat

The historical development of science had many individuals working as clerics that made substantial contributions. In the age of feudalism the Church was a refuge for sundry intellectuals that were not aristocrats. Notably in England aristocrats made contributions to scientific advance.

Many people that had little choice besides religious structures were no longer compelled to enroll when secular opportunities developed after the reformation. That was the normal course of social progress. Progress does not always bring good order, decency, justice or right reason although the term progress generally is used to mean 'better' or 'advance'.

Marx had attended a religious seminary, and Stalin received Orthodox Church schooling, and those were two examples of a retreat from faith.

Trotsky's term as General of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War brought him to make many observations about military actions including his own aboard his train h.q. Isaac Deutcher wrote a good biography in three volumes. The godless atheists were an entirely secular flight from Orthodox religion closely associated with the ruling class hierarchy. The Tsar named the Metropolitan now and then.

There is a perennial effort to free Christian ecclesiastical structures from the worldly secular hierarchies that have too often dominated it. Some believe that a priesthood of believers is the right structure with an egalitarian liturgical form. The early friends church in America was something like that, where people met and talked in small groups.

The spiritual war between good and evil is a perennial phenomenon that will continue until the end of days. Christians and philosophically minded Christians have the opportunity to focus upon the Bible and study God's Universe cosmologically speaking without so much trouble from authorities and orthodox opinions on areas not covered in the Bible at all. Average people in the church like average people everywhere have a characteristic of wanting to have a concrete doctrine, method or structure; a religious approach to anything that they can simply repeat without thinking about anything philosophically. That dogmatic approach can perpetuate wrong ideas, yet the social war to liberate society from control by elites and class collectives is also a perennial effort.

There are numerous explanations available for about anything today-many of them wrong of course. The book above cited is a newer publication on computer-enhanced explanations in an age of explanations.

Christians and Jewish scholars of course may dive deeper into contemplation of the meanings and compositions of the Bible-and try to understand better its content meaning. Modern formal logical progress, analytic philosophy and archeological research as well as science generally have enabled a well of additional understanding of the Bible era for those actual interested in understanding.

Contemporary atheists have made an industry of attacking the Bible of course, as if disproving some straw man arguments or refuting the Bible might in some way provide a proof for atheism. It would do that no more than refuting the Ptolemaic System of Cosmology would provide evidence for Quantum Gravity cosmology.

Christians may leave their own concerns about doing the will of God, and having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through faith and the Holy Spirit's grace, to venture into explaining things for secular purposes as if they wanted to be educators in secular settings-however that was more for a time of the past-a distant past, whereas today they might simple provide a good moral environment for education absent of the raving depravity a little, if possible, that seems to be a goal of American leftists in order to reduce population or taxation.

Probably the better course is for inclusion of such philosophical inquiries into the Universe in a curriculum that isn't dogmatic in order to overturn some of the illogical grasps of atheism toward marginalization of faith and people of faith socially. Cosmology is a fascinating topic.

God probably had some practice or practical experience before issuing the process of the eventuation of this Universe. He may have created a trillion trillion to the infinite power of Universes already, and decided to leave this one the way it is for a while without too much direct interference. With practice one develops a calm about tempestuous Universe management I would guess.

Archeologists have discovered huts in Jordan circa 22,000 b.c. Human civilization seems to have arisen in the Middle East and it seems an appropriate place for Jesus to have appeared on Earth to set a new foundation for humanity to function in spiritually until the consumers and producers destroy the world or most of its population in a hundred years or two as some futurists regard as possible from global warming if nothing else.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform/dp/0670022756/ref=pd_rhf_ee_shvl3

Liberating Black Holes for Mass and Energy in the Future?

(unscientific speculation follows) In the Universe mass under the influence of gravity shrinks down to smaller and smaller structures such as neutron stars. In a black hole mass may shrink down even further to become quark holes, strings or membranes of one dimension. Yet if no one is presently certain of what gravity is besides the apparent effect of space curvature and time dilation of mass attracted to mass from the solid state level, it is not assurred that mass would not convert entirely into space-time curvature without leaving anything remaining as mass.

Space-time curvature may require a certain quantity of mass to occur. The energy converted to space-time curvature might be another equivalence of mass and energy times the speed of light. Flattened space-time energy may expand (dark energy) while gravitationally transformed space-time may contract. In the Universe there may be much space-time that is unbound from significant curvature and it could have a finite or infinite energy value.

Gravity may be an apparent effect of the entanglement of quantum particle probability waves that tend to interact. Proportionate increase of mass entanglement attracts mass toward mass. Mass sublimating into space-time curvature has the potential to become a black hole.

In the future scientist might be able to transform and release the space-time structure of a black hole converting it back into energy and mass. As the Universe draws down over trillions of years towards heat death it might be a natural resource used to recharge creative stellar synthetic fields locally.

Since the Orwellian introduction of Hate Crimes legislation to attack the gross physical assaults that threaten the privileged class as well as the unemployed and working class one wonders if some sort of Financial Hate Crimes laws that would chastise white collar workers victimizing investors or victimizing internet posters that express political opinions that are not those of various political entities will be added to give Supreme Court Justices something more to chew over?

If homosexuals hate people that are opposed to a queer culture hegemony and would confiscate earnings at corporate sites simply for the expression of disagreeable political opinions why shouldn't they be charged with hate crimes too?

One wonders how all that hate can be rooted out of America, and in what way strong individual boundaries against the violation of personal space boundaries can be enforced inclusive of job security and the right to exist in economic health at a natural level free of hateful financial oppression?

One might also wonder about NPR and other broadcast media? Do they truly have the spirit of love in their hearts or do they have an inward, Leninist hate for people right of center or across from Wal-Mart down the street?

Does anyone really know if the U.S. and Europe love Syria and its President or are they harboring sinister ulterior motives for fanning up the conflict in order to get a regime change in that country? Is it ethical to sacrifice ten or twenty thousand Sunni Syrians in order to get a regime change if they would not have gone about that action without western media support? Is that all 'tough love' or is it impossible to report peace and Utopian lifestyles if they were to exist in Nebraska or elsewhere?

Were there Arab media demands for regime change in Syria before the Brits and Obama and the U.N. decided to support the mowing of the regime of grass? Even if the Syrian Government periodically uses violence to repress its masses, is it necessary for the U.S. Government to become a supporter of blood in the streets their with disingenuous proclamations for non-violence while they intended to encourage the process of regime change?

How can a free society work if the corporate world will not allow free speech on Internet sites when it isn't something they support? The financial harm that corporate collectivism can apply to an individual assuredly may seem hateful to the victim, as might Goldman-Sachs gutting of fish(muppets) investors on Wall Street, if they actually have contempt for investors and consider their money as a kind of caviar to extract?

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/economy/2012/03/14/5092/story-day-goldman-sachs-hates-its-clients-call-the/

While the American society continues to exist and before the final ecological break with viability, one wonders if the expansion of the legal concept of Hate Crimes will reach upward to beset the prosperous and rich too, or if such laws will only be developed to hog tie the under-educated from having being a concern to the silk shirt class of 5th Avenue?

Electro-magnetic Mass Catcher for Mars Landings?

In reading a book on VSL recently the author mentioned that someone skydiving without a parachute is stopped by the electron force of the molecules of the ground rather than the ground itself (not much consolation to the unfortunate skydiver though). It was gravity that brought the mass from the sky to meet the other electrons and particles that were clumped below (the Earth).

Shouldn't it be possible to shape an electro-magnetic field on Mars or the Moon that would gradually slow (safely) chunks of ice from space, space ,modules or even an astronaut? If so it could expedite landfall and reduce the fuel need for retro burns of de-acceleration of planet bound mass.

It might even be a fun way to safely skydive on the Earth.

I believe one would need to wrap the objects sent down to the planet's surface in a magnetically charged cover. The electro-magnetic field would be like a large intake funnel that would be oppositely charged and powered up accurately to slow down incoming mass.

Replies to Ideas that Atheism Is Supported By Scientific Evidence

I wrote the following in reply to comments on my video 'The Ignorance of Atheism' elsewhere. It works toward a logical consideration of the unscientific concept.... Human knowledge has accumulated through conscious effort. Human beings seem to exists in a large space (universe). It seems to be a functioning event process. Uncertainty arises before its origin and follows it entropic demise or phase transition ahead. What human experience actually is in't certain.. it may be described just in the circumstance of social and existential relativity.

Metaphysically remember Bishop Berkeley as well as Emperor Theory.

Plotinus described some of the One, Christians know The Son.Logically the atheist/atheist position for itself are two sides of a coin with agnosticism on the edge.

If one regards atheism as a faith or belief rather than a positivist assertion made without evidence, it then would be entitled to be regarded as an example of the Argument From Ignorance that Bertrand Russell invented. I am not sure of what 'other perspectives' might exist on belief in God, belief that god does not exist and the point of uncertainty.

Those three opinions seem to encompass what one might have about it. It is rather like the binary states of computers today in the on or off setting. Eventually with quantum computers it may be possible to have more states than that though one cannot know for sure right now.

God is not regarded as a creature incidentally. If one might say anything about Him analogously it might be more like a Unified Field containing and setting an infinite number of potential forms to be or become deterministicaly. Human forms and referent Universes are phenomenal denotations within His experience. He has promulgated nature in accord with His will.

One should be aware that the political and sociological criteria of dissent from faith is not the same question as an objective investigation of nature on in search of evidence for or against the existence of God. There are valid historical circumstances where political reform in liberation from oppression by state religions were valid, and of course the opposite situation where religious minorities or even minorities were persecuted, exiled or slaughtered by governing power.

That atheists tend to rely too much upon the work of refuting ancient doctrines is one of the salients points I made in the video essay. That is an historical approach to finding objective cosmological evidence-certainly a less than scientific approach.

Perhaps Jews invented History writing. The Greeks had Homer but Thucydides was tardy comparatively. This isn't, with respect, a history 101 class.

The point about divine inspiration is a good one-intriguing especially for the New Testament....

One might disprove the Ptolemaic cosmology and discount the possibility that any unified field theory could exist I suppose, and have a paradigm something like the reasoning of atheists that are theoretical physicists today when they extract an argument for atheism based on criticism of Zoroastrainism, the Bible or whatever.

The Bible is not historical fiction. It is not Don Quixote.or The Tales of Genji. Neither was it Sophocles or Euripidean in style. Kings, Chronicles and so forth are some of the best history of the era existing. I did point out in the video however that atheists rely on badly formed criticisms of the Bible to infer atheism.

Ockham's razor would suggest that one be agnostic on the topic taking Wittgenstein's 'Whereof I cannot speak thereof I must be silent'.

Atheist opinion may be developed by ignoring scientific method. It may also be developed by ignoring Biblical facts and levering a false alternative with a straw man.

Good opinions are well informed; atheist opinion is not.

One is aware of the argument of William James about the consequences of placing a wrong bet on faith and salvation, yet that aside, the absence of conclusive proof as in any scientific endeavor ought to leave one agnostic. Mixing up scientific method with philosophy and. theology, Biblical history and so forth isn't a good way to find purely scientific proofs.

A logical fallacy. I can't recall the name of it, although I could search for that. Philosophers of logic worked on that kind of issue in the 50's and 60's or even earlier. I can't duplicate that work here to help explain it. Kripke's 'Naming and Necessity' and Russell's description of names provide insight into why not all verbal constructions have referent objects. That isn't the issue with God though.

Deductive and informal fallacies are common. The Argument From Ignorance asserts the existence of anything that cannot be disproved. That works in the opposite direction as well for asserting the state of non-existence for anything for which there is no evidence.

One can use dead reckoning judgments to generalize odds for referents without support of objective evidence; contingent probability perhaps.

The fallacy of composition also may afflict cosmology, politics and defense.

Consider the mythic history of Pegasus. People disbelieve that, however what Europeans disbelieve is probably different from the original legend arising in Greece.

If the white horse with wings is a northern European idea transformation of the Greek legend of a horse so fast that it could be said to fly, it is possible that there was an Arabian stallion that was brought by ship to Greece long ago, perhaps even over as far as Troy able to outrun the slower European horses and becoming legend.

Deductive and informal fallacies are common enough. Russell's Argument From Ignorance asserts the existence of anything that cannot be disproved. That works in the opposite direction as well for asserting the non-existence for anything for which there is no evidence.

There is simply no known evidence in support of atheism that would meet even minimal scientific criteria.

The acceptance of any sort of universal proposition describing the non-existence of a non-contingent Supreme Being is implicitly incomprehensive. It is something like using a set of even numbers to prove that no odd numbers exist (if one had not yet discovered them).

Theories of knowledge or epistemology moved into formal logical paradigms can be in an ontology of meanings regarded as verified or not. There is a verificationist theory of truth incidentally.

Determining the truth values of language constructions is a philosophical practice, as it is for anyone.

It isn't a simple topic. Noam Chomsky provided an example of a sentence that is meaningless yet semantically correct...

at wikipedia...Colorless_green_id­eas_sleep_furiously

There are several methods of describing sentences or propositions that have no object of reference. A theory of names (Kripke and Russell) can be realist or nominalist, Yet Quine also developed a language term structure called an ontology. Propositions and names may have a descriptionist form. Krike at least expressed the form 'x such that Fx' in Naming and Necessity. He said that the form is be used for names as well as descriptions.

X can be any thing that exists. One may use existential quantification and say that there is at least one X in the Universe such that Fx. F might be any sort of adjective, verb, phrase etc that describes the referent X. Lexicons are lists of meaningful content of a language.

The 20th century philosopher Carnap provided the grammatically correct yet meaningless nonsense phrase "This stone is thinking about Vienna". Perhaps it could be said to have a value as an abstract fiction enabling thought about the inability of stones to think at all.

Existential quantification as a construction with words from a lexicon refer to known referents or speculative referents, yet cannot meaningful refer to unknown referents... such as... ∃ (is a Universe without a Creator)

Gödel's incompleteness theorems of natural numbers demonstrated the inability of axioms to provide necessary proofs of consistency of themselves. I believe a correlative example is that there cannot be a set of all sets containing itself. Cantor's trans-finite number series cannot get around that.

One is left with an infinite number of possible cosmological theories for which the infinite number of possible Universes is just one trans-finite set. It is not possible to place a finite cap on any given Universe that would provide information of the unknown state of non-existence of a Creator for any given Universe that exists. It is perhaps not even possible to apply the concept of a non-Created Universe to all possible Universes rather than just a or one Existentially quantified, and of course begging the point of completeness of proof.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoedelsIncompletenessTheorem.html

The Goal of a Shield from Relativistic Effects Near Light Speed?

Photons and other particle-waves traveling at light speed are very small. Things that travel at the speed of light are all very small. Larger clumps of things such as atoms don’t go real fast in a generally straight line. The speed of light could exist because there are a limited number of kinds of things in the Universe that are small enough to have that apparently standard unit speed. Neutrinos, cosmic rays, gravity-these things happen at the speed of light.

It would be a good thing if one could wrap some large object like a human being in a Bose-Einstein condensate of the neutron kind made at absolute zero-evidently they behave like one single particle. If that single apparent particle could be accelerated at the speed of light yet not pick up the extra weight that mass does as it accelerate-perhaps tricking whatever usually acts upon mass to make it become infinitely heavy as it approaches the speed of light then one might be able to send Bose-Einstein shielded astronauts to nearby star systems in a few years.

Of course that’s just wishful thinking, for whatever it is about space-time that screens out everything except for very small, fast particle-waves from traveling at light speed must act upon net mass and size rather than topological features of a unit in space-time.

It could be that space-time has extra small dimensions that light can pass through or around while larger objects can’t and push up a resisting bow wave of space-time. One might like to think that space-time has some of the characteristics of gravity or of a gravitational field for-itself that acts upon accelerated mass to slow and weigh it down. Instead of gravitons mass is deflected along a stretched matrix of space-time. Quantum mechanical networks of wave probabilities might comprise the entire phenomena fundamentally, to a limited extent.

It is interesting t consider that a photon is a fundamental massless or nearly massless particle wave. Light speed could be a fundamental speed for all fundamental particles or even strings except as they are bound up in larger structures of apparent aggregates of mass such as neutrons, protons If quarks are made of strings, perhaps the strings travel at light speed as parts of the quark while the quark appears stable. The quantum levels of particle waves may consist with speed of light characterizes consistent with special relativity. Just a thought.

U.S. Senators of Western States in the Era of Slump

I wonder if the quality of the U.S. Senators from the western states has significantly declined the past couple of decades. Perhaps it is just viewing the Scoop Jackson, Warren G. Magnuson, Mark Hatfield, Bob Packwood a socially flawed individual) era with nostalgia; the U.S.A. had perennially balanced budgets then and the difference between rich and poor wasn't stark.

Scoop Jackson got that nickname by delivering newspapers on a route in his youth rather than experimenting with cocaine as did the President. One cannot blame the change on blacks rising with affirmative action either since there are no black members of the Senate from the Western States.

Well, the Tea Party at least hopes to get rid of that holdout from the Reagan era Orin hatch of Utah. I don't think that would help much to change the tendency toward perennial unrealpolitk that took over after the end of the cold war.

Rather than guns and butter, people want illegal aliens for cheap labor for the middle class, all the dirty industrial work outsourced to compliant communist ruled workers under authoritarian supervision and a snarky broadcast media slaughtering political self-determination by trampling over everyone's grapes of wrath before they can be bottled and sold to consumer-reformers with an American bias toward egalitarianism and personal liberty, a good robust wild ecosystem and a new generation of practical low-cost concrete dome homes.

It is for Americans to build an irrational number style bureaucratic economic principle with an infinite number of persons slicing the pie of corporate and government distribution of shares returning profits from investments abroad. A next generation of better politicians should have economic and environmental literacy with the goal of approaching a minimal entropy, full employment national production infrastructure that manufactures goods rather than paper profits from financial and trading transactions.