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Theory-Affirming Evidence About the Universe
Bill Kendrick writes "Astronomers using a radio telescope at the South Pole have recorded a flicker of light from nearly 14 billion years ago that verifies most modern theory about the cosmos. Way back then, light and matter were only just beginning to separate from each other."
thats one of the many reasons i am an athiest.... sp
Everyone knows the Universe is only 4000 years old :)
Rich
You got the number wrong :)
"If a person read only the Bible, they would be one of the most ignorant on Earth as far as reality is concerned."
The Bible is about salvation. There is of course some history and science included but that is not the point. You liberals attack the Bible for your perceived historial and scientific faults as if it should be a divine source for both subjects. This idea of yours and your ilk is the real idiocy.
Christianity has changed right along with humanity since day 1, except it always wants to be 75 years behind.
Incorrect.
If you wanna be spiritual, that's cool, but don't expect to find any useful information in there.
The most important information ever known is in The Bible. It's all about salvation---something you fail to see.
PS Hey Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, et al: ---- -- ----! Stop ripping off the elderly with your gaudy, fake, materialistic --------!
What example are YOU providing to the world, then? Are you going without? I assume you used a computer to type your message. Maybe all the liberals should give up all their goods and clothe themselves in rags so they can claim they're better than others. They can live off of their intellect alone! Yeah! Why not try that? Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the liberals love material things---to the point of worshipping them.
When's the last time anyone saw Jesus wearing a Rolex?!
It probably wouldn't matter what they wore, you'd probably still find some reason to attack them for preaching.
Way back then, light and matter were only just beginning to separate from each other
14 billion years ago, matter and light were inseperable. They went everywhere together. Friends cheerfully complemented them on their strong attachment to each other, but whispered behind their backs about 'co-dependency'.
Then, something happened. No one apart from a few math-sodden physics profs are quite sure what is was. Some say matter was too indecisive, today forming simple hydrogen isotopes, tomorrow churning out all sorts of unstable heavy metals. Others blame light for being too inflexible, not wanting to 'move too fast'.
Whatever the cause was, matter and light decided to separate. Matter moved on, churning out everything from noble gases to metals that explode in water, satisfying every creative urge. Light, the brighter of the two, contented to be always aglow, yet unafraid to reveal shadows when the opportunity arose.
The tragic part of the tale involves the unfortunate castoff children of the great breakup, as divorces are never easy on offspring. Cosmic ray wreaks havoc anywhere and everywhere. Cynical X-Ray prefers to reveal everything hidden, as if compensating for repressed emotion. Young microwave is communicative, but very hot under the collar, and don't even ask about Gamma ray. Maybe someday the children of the great breakup will work out their issues.
i nid it mynelf
The Bible's purpose is oppression and control of the ignorant masses. Read your history. The Christian religion was invented by the Romans as a way to perpetuate their empire once political and military might were no longer sufficient to hold it together. That's why education of the masses is so important, so that they can learn the facts and choose what to believe for themselves. The Bible has had so much changed, removed, added and left out when its writers saw fit to further their own political agenda.
of quantum singularities and dilithium crystals emanating from nerft poft! i nid it mynelf
I always hear about "new telescopes which will be able to see back to the beginning of the universe". How can that possibly work? With the matter in the universe expanding slowly, (relative to the speed of light) the light from the big bang should be long past us by now -- streaking out into some void way beyond Earth... What did I miss when I wasn't paying attention in physics class?
yet another dumb old martian forgot to turn the light off before going on holidays!
irma trattino
eat.me at http://irmetta.free.fr
First off, firmament is a bullshit word. The hebrew is ra-key-ya(not sure I transliterated that right, no text in front of me) which is the word for bowl. Specifically a pounded out bowl, usually of a metal.
And the earth doesn't sit upon it in the story. The rakeya seperates the waters from above from the waters below. Remember the earth is flat, with four corners, and sitting upon 4 pillars. When people viewed the horizon of the seas, they thought it was the edge literally. The sun and moon are on tracks in the sky as well.
The world was preceived as being under a great dome. Kinda like the movie "The Truman Show". And the stars are pinholes in the rakeya. When it rains, it is because the windows in the rakeya are opened and the waters it was seperating fall down. BTW, this makes the idea of heaven being up, also possibly mean heaven is underwater. However, it is likely that early on (around 960BCE) they didn't have a real concept like heaven or hell. After all much of the Pentanuch are stories taken from the Canaanite Goddess(referred to in other religions as Isis, Ishtar, Anat) religion. The first five books repeatly deal with it.
Unless you count Sheol, which isn't hell but actually just like underworld of greek mythology. The idea of hell developes extremely late in the game.
All of this may seem incrediably silly in the space age, but think of the times. If you lived back then what would you think if you looked up into the night sky? What would you think if you stood North, East, South, and West, seeing nothing but edges meeting the sky? You think they knew anything about how we get rain? Heck if the earth is flat, and I have no reason to doubt it, why would I not think the sun and moon are on tracks?
Anyhow I agreed with most of post. Christianity changes and that isn't a bad thing. Religion has never been about logic or truth(truth is a plural anyhow). It has always been a practical tool for people. And when the tool no longer is found useful to people, they either change it or it quitely goes away. At one point many, many cultures believed in a great sky god who was associated with the wind -- where is he? He had influence on the creation of further gods, but slowly went away himself because he was too remote. Or so is the theory.
Anyhow, don't get too upset about religion, if only because life is too short. Also religion carries a lot of beauty to it in its culture and philosophy. The story telling is also second to none.
Jerry Farwell and Pat Robertson? I'm going to ignore that in general.
Shalom
A jet flies in front of thier telescope and now they know how old the universe is. I think scientists just make up this crap to keep thier jobs. I wish my job was like that, then i could say "yeah i saw a flicker of light on the way to work, which confirms my thoery that i get 10 weeks of paid vacation".
The Christian religion was invented by the Romans as a way to perpetuate their empire once political and military might were no longer sufficient to hold it together.
Ah, I see, and this is why Romans torturtured and killed every Christian they could find that wouldn't bow down and worship the emporer? This went on for MANY years until Constantine made it a legal religion.
Later on it was made into the _official_ religion, and when the non-christians joined the church because it was the "socially correct" thing to do, bringing many of their pagan beliefs into the church, thus polluting it and giving birth to the beast known as the Roman Catholic Church.
Your post is one of the most ignorant things i've ever written.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Your post is one of the most ignorant things i've ever written.
oops.
hehe
Your post is one of the most ignorant things i've ever seen.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
bringing many of their pagan beliefs into the church, thus polluting it and giving birth to the beast known as the Roman Catholic Church
A list of dates, people, and the pagan beliefs that were brought into the RCC please. If you're going to correct someone else's ignorant post, please be sure not to include ignorant claims yourself.
The RCC is not a beast.
The New Testament has a lot to do with salvation. The Hebrew Bible does not. The idea of salvation would have been wierd because they didn't have much of a concept of sin in the christain sense of the word. They had periods of being unclean, at which point they would have to become clean in order to re-enter the group. Jews didn't need to be saved because they were god's choosen people and you can't get much more saved than that.
Maybe you don't believe that because of your Christain translation. But there is plenty of evidence to prove my point. First being the things that are never mentioned in the story of Adam and Eve. Sin is simply never mentioned. Falling from grace is never mentioned. The word for spirit probably means wind at that point in history. They were not banished from the garden. They "went out" (in hebrew holek) from the garden. Banishment is an interruptive move. As are so many of the words in your english translation.
In short the stories take drastically different views in the original language. And if you study the actual history of what is going on around 960BCE between the early Jews and the Canaanites(which make up 95% of the population) then the questions of "Why a snake in a tree?", and "Why is Eve called the 'Mother of All Life' as they leave the garden?", etc. Become extremely clear. The story has nothing to do with original sin or man's falling, etc. It has everything to do with a story lifted out of history and put into a narritive.
how do they know, its not as if em radiation is time stamped, and im pretty sure our telescopes cant view objects from 14 billion light years away.
When astronomers look at really old objects and say "ah, these are 13 billion light years away, therefore we are looking 13 billion years into the past"... how does that work?
If the universe used to be really tiny and it's been expanding, is it expanding faster than the speed of light? Because if it isn't, why didn't that light from 13 billion years ago pass us a long time ago.
What am I missing here?
Here for example, NASA scientists say they discovered a galaxy that they think is 13 billion light years away.
If the universe is 14 billion years old, that would imply that it expanded faster than the speed of light in a very short time, leaving us 14 billion light years from these galaxies, so that the light would take 14 billion years to get to us. Maybe another possibility is that the rate or expansion is just under the speed of light, so that we (or our point in space) used to be fairly close to those galaxies, but the expansion was going on during the entire 14 billion years at such a high speed that the light from those galaxies is only now catching up to us.
On the other hand, if the speed of light always appears to be a constant, that last idea wouldn't work... or would it, since the entire universe would be expanding?
I never heard any of this discussed... what do the physicists say?
It started out Chaos (light and matter all jumbled together) but ended up as Order (light and matter divided just as the Bible litterally says it happened, with both entities taking on incomprehensible levels of order and complexity).
Without God, this outcome is fundamentally impossible according to the Entropy (the 2nd law of Thermodynamics).
You are telling me that Deut., Exodus, and Levit only contain 10 commandments? Try 316 when arbituarily counted by Rabbis. Where Christains get 10, I don't know. But they sure are selective.
"I don't know!!!" I love that phrase. It terrifies most people, and they try to avoid using it at all costs.
"Had the verification not been made, it would have tossed much current thinking into doubt, according to John Carlstrom of the University of Chicago.
Instead of stating that we think we really understand the origin and evolution of the universe with high confidence, we would be saying that we just don't know," absent the discovery, he said in an announcement from the university."
Let me paraphrase. Faced with a lack of evidence (the word that terrifies the hoi polloi) many scientists would have thrown away theories they were working with their whole professional careers, rather than cling to baseless nonsense because it was gratifying. Contrast that with your average person, who will believe whatever flips his ding ding no matter what the evidence or lack thereof, and once he forms an opinion (theory), he isn't going to change it and - GASP! - be wrong no matter how silly he looks. Clearly, "I don't know" can be the words of a wise man. Didn't Socrates say that?
"The Bible is about salvation."
And rules for buying and owning slaves. If the bible were true every banker would drop dead according to Ezekiel 18:13.
"There is of course some history and science included"
Which is wrong most of the time - which is why us "liberals" don't think the Bible is trustworthy.
"You liberals attack the Bible for your perceived historial and scientific faults as if it should be a divine source for both subjects."
No, but when it claims to foretell the future, it should be accurate. So when are the Jews going to get around to slaying the Assyrians? And where is the descendent of David who has been ruling Israel for these couple thousand years?
"This idea of yours and your ilk is the real idiocy."
Ok, pot. Me kettle.
"Incorrect."
Really? Name one way which Christianity has stayed the same.
"What example are YOU providing to the world, then?"
Think for yourself. Don't rip people off.
"Are you going without? I assume you used a computer to type your message. Maybe all the liberals should give up all their goods and clothe themselves in rags so they can claim they're better than others."
Nah, we just get what we need and try to avoid ripping people off for a living. I guess I'm a liberal!
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the liberals love material things---to the point of worshipping them."
Like little Gold statues, crosses, rosaries, icons, and sculpture, right? You're so good at stereotyping! Been taking lessons from YHVH or GW?
"It probably wouldn't matter what they wore, you'd probably still find some reason to attack them for preaching."
They're not preaching. They get on TV, say "Praise God! Send me $20!" and that's about it. If they acted anything like Jesus, I wouldn't have a problem with them. The real trouble with Christians is they're fanatical about being ignorant of the Bible.
-Dean
wot a load of old bollox!
(and that didn't take 20 seconds to type)
I wonder what kind of scientific knowledge Bible writers used. Were there Bibleisensteins among them?
err - Christians really only get 2. Really!
That's a very Christian point of view. The "Christians" that the Romans tortured and killed were very different from "modern Christians". The Christianity of today is due to the influence of the Roman Empire, like it or not. They "embraced and extended it" if you will. Anyway, you're obviously a "believer" so what's the point in trying to be reasonable with you?
Please see reformation. Thank you, have a nice day.
of course its crap. he is one of those ashkenazi types, lives in north america (most israeli jews are secular) and he read that khazar hack of a religion's texts with great zeal. he owns a giant porno site, makes more money than god, preaches religion to his kids, probably doesnt use the phone on saturday for no fucking reason other than some guy in turkey in 800 AD made it the law you couldnt use a horse carriage, (what is shabbat on planets that have really, really long days? can you not use the telephone on mars for the mars day, or do you go by earth time?).
Oh, and while his kids are good enough for religious sanctity and purity, yours should download off his porn site. He has some phrase he found in the Talmud which makes it okay to sell porn to other non Jew kids, because he is chosen and we are all dirty people.
Eros. Please, you are such a jew zealot. take it from another jew, goto a buddhist temple or something and find your way outside of the rigid framework of crap western religion. and stop readding the kaballah.
I hereby prophetize that said Arab Prince will stick it up your ass till your eyes pop out.
You honsetly believe that post-Reformation Christianity is more like the pre-Catholic Christianity? Heck, half the stuff hadn't even been written then. Anyway, end of discussion.
"light and matter were"...
no
it was energy and matter. Light is always confused with energy.
A much more complete overview of the differences between Catholic theology and the Bible is available here. It uses as its source the 1994 Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church.
How ironic that a creationist would use a scientific principle to try and prove the existence of God. If you want to use the 2nd law of thermodynamics in an argument, then go and get a physics degree. In the mean time, check out this page and call me in the morning.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Now why is it that Hindu and Buddhism don't get the attention they need from western countries. These religions are far closer to ideal because they are not proscriptive, they do not cause war, the do not force people to act a certain way, etc
That's simple. They are feel good religions, much like if I were to build a religion around sniffing pretty flowers. Most if not all liberals see them as harmless because: Hinduism can embrace hedonism, likewise with Buddhism. Both can be seen as 'self worship' rather than Christianity or Judaism which seeks to deny self and give that self to the higher power = GOD.
The liberals don't want to humble themselves towards God, they want to be empowered/enlightened.
Of course, the question about why there is a universe at all has to be answered. But according to Bill Ockham's Remington, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. God + universe = two entities, universe = 1 entity, therefore, as Laplace put it, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
You poor misguided soul. "He's YOUR god. They're YOUR rules. YOU go to hell." He is my God. They are HIS rules. And if you don't get right with my God, You are going to hell. There is only one way to heaven and that is through Jesus Christ. Christianity is not a way of dealing with death. It is a promise. Why would you want to go one believing in a dead guy stuck in the ground? I prefer to serve a living God thank you very much. And on the money issue. Buddy, if you read the Bible you will quickly see that everytime God commands you give money, He always says you will get something in return. Everytime! And as for George Carlin, well he better get the Truth too.
-- Only a developer would see the 'Go to' part of "Go to Hell" as the problem.
Thanks for those links.
God + universe = two entities, universe = 1 entity
So you're saying the universe is God? As in, the universe itself makes all decisions about life, death, toast dropping butter side down or butter side up?
Apparently Occam never had a shot at 2 women. That may be unnecessary multiplication but there's still millions of guys who would go for it.
Occam's razer does not indicate which theory is correct. It only means that for 2 equally likely theories stick with the simpler one. The more complex one may be more correct but if you can't prove it then the fact that one theory is simpler is reason enough to stick with that idea for now.
Coding Blog
Oh boy, I detected a signal that i can make HUGE assumptions about.
Radio astronomy has it's uses and has made some major discoveries... but assuming signal strength of the source and distance as you CANNOT measure it with a radio telescope or even anoptical telescope... astronomical distances are a really rough guess at best.
Evidence? no way. and idea and something that has the possibility to be neat? yeah... but anyone screaming that this is evidence is a fool.
Not that I believe, but it's the only logical conclusion. :P), the desk, the windows.
For God to be omnipotent, he would have to be everything/everywhere.
The chair you're sitting on (God got a boner!
We all know the bible is the 'difinitive work' of god, written by humans.. (and the church isn't exactly full of 'Holy' men..) Who's to say god and 'Nature' are different beings, or even have a conciousness?
"god's will" is about equivalent to 'it just happens' or 'that's the way the world works'. There's only the assumption of a conciousness behind the outcome.
At least now you know that 1 'day' = 2 million 'years'. ;)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
.. is 42. But to understand that you'll have to project that flash of light to a surface, then you'll clearly see a fourty-two appearing.
[don't mod me if you haven't read the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy]...
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
If anyone actually read the real article they would be appaled at the sensationalism applied to this story by the slashdot editors and the submitting person. The ONLY thing it solidifies is the polarization aspects and NOTHING ELSE.
It is getting quite disgusting as how Slashdot's editors are allowing this site to become the new "weekly world news". what's next stories about a two headed alien worm baby and a phycic moose found in northern canada?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Since you've mentioned both intelligence and science-fiction wish-fulfillment...
I recently read a short story called Swarm, by Bruce Sterling. SPOILER FOLLOWS
The story is about contact between warring factions in our solar system and a hive entity called the Swarm. One of our factions is hoping to pick up advanced biological techniques from the apparently unintelligent Swarm to use in its war with the other faction. The other faction has already failed fatally in its similar efforts.
By the end of the story, the protagonists encounter a previously unknown type of larva being gestated by the Swarm. It is "Intelligence," and goes on to discuss the Swarm's position with the remaining protagonist.
It turns out that (drum roll, please) in the Swarm's long experience, intelligence is not a survival trait. Nearly all of the time, the Swarm is just plain better off without Intelligence, and has adapted to exist that way. Every now and then, such as the particular time the story occurs, the Swarm determines that it needs some Intelligence, and gestates an appropriate larva. The larva lives a few thousand years, long enough to handle the crisis, and then dies, leaving the Swarm to go its merry way.
Intelligence has proven a survival trait for the human species, at least for the past 30,000 years or so. But from Nature's perspective, that's only the short run.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I work at UChicago (Carlstrom, the professor here, is my advisor). For more information about CMB polarisation, I reccomend Wayne Hu's (a theorists) webpages at http://background.uchicago.edu.
He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated,
if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people
have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.
This really is an exciting timne in cosmology.
I still don't see what entropy has to what I'm saying. I know it exists. It doesn not however disprove God, which is proven by the level of living organisms that we see. A level involving a rediculous amount of law and order which flies in the face of the law of entropy.
This is what proves there is another variable unaccounted for. Nobody has been able to solve this problem... and the connundrum has made up the core of Stephen Hawkings work to come up with his "theory of everything" that is supposed to rectify the problem - which incidentally is severely found wanting. There are other thories like "string theory" but again, unprovable and no different than the theory that there is another power that must be considered (and no, that power isn't plasma because plasma is already considered as part of E=mc^2). I chose to call the power God, and nobody can prove it isn't by merely suggesting another imperfect theory.
Yes, I do say that, and that is because by Ocham's razor, it follows to be the most simple and thus most likely result.
There is a problem that I have raised: the impossibility of the findings in this article (everything came from a big boom) when entropy is considered. You have not yet addressed this problem, but rather attacked what I point out as the obvious resolution to the problem.
Incidentally, my theory can be proven - but only to yourself, and by different methods and a different kind of proof, "comparing spiritual with spiritual". See 1Corinthians 2:9-16 for more info.
String theory or "theory of everything" cannot be proven.
I'm amazed and how good this radio telescope must be to pick up waves from the visible light spectrum...
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Thanks for the best laugh I've had in days.
I wonder, if the universe was a loop and there was a such powerfull telescope able to take a "picture" of earth it self millions of years ago.. (of course that would only be possible if the loop had a lesser length in light years than Earth's lifetime.. )
... ;D
Just a strange thought i liked to share with you guys
__________
One day your head will be your box, your brain will be your client, and all energetic problems will be solved...
I have been to Kidderminster, and believe me, the Big Bang has never taken place there. Perhaps a very small bang on a Friday night, but that's it.
Nowhere in the Bible does it mention the Earth's age. Sure some Jews/Christians believe it was only 6000 years, but there are plenty of others (like myself) who believe in the Bible and still believe the earth is quite a bit older.
Anyway when I read this:
"when matter and light were only just beginning to separate from one another."
I thought of this:
Genesis 1:3 And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
I believe Genesis was inspired by God, but written though a person. I think the author of Genesis did a pretty good job trying to find words and descriptions for what they were shown.
Saved By Grace,
Brian Ellenberger
what the hell is up with your sig?
Liberty.
is we can spot a 14 billion year old flicker of light, but no one can prove definitively who killed John F. Kennedy in 1963 or who sent anthrax through the mail just last year.
Scientists: the only time they figure anything out is when it doesn't matter anymore.
Actually, if you read up on the creationist's theory (vs the evolutionary theory), as far as I am concerned, the creationist theory does hold some water (no pun intended).
Its sad to think that you base your opinion solely on those of your pastor (especially if he is like many other pastors in the fact that he is more pastor than scientist. Do you get your evolutionary theories from journalists?)
E
The rules that say "don't wear your cotton/wool blend shirt", "It's okay to enslave your neighbor", and "If your sister's husband dies, it's your duty to impregnate her"?
Remember, "Jesus" said that he wasn't changing the rules, just fulfilling them...so those old rules are still in effect.
Guess we're all condemmed.
OR, alternatively, consider this: God is ominipotent, right? So he can do whatever he wants, right? But you're saying the only way he has chosen to honor his creation is by this one thin path as represented in this book that they can't even agree on the contents of?
Or is it possible that an omnipotent God has the power to provide multiple roads to happiness, the heavily proscriptive "Thou must do this and not that" road for those too simpleminded to contemplate making their own decisions, and the "Do as thou will, so long as it hurt no others" for those who have the intelligence and ability to live their life their own way?
You have to admit it's possible, or else God isn't omnipotent. Pick one.
This seems too simple to have been missed, so my take is that it is ME that misunderstands. But here goes.
...making the diameter of the universe 28 billion light years.
The speed of light is constant
Light travels one light year per year
The universe is 14 billion years old
Therefore, nothing, including light, could have travelled farther than 14 billion light years.
Therefore the radius of the universe can be no more than 14 billion light years
So why do they say they don't know how big the universe is?
Obviously, I'm missing something here, but what?
Your assuming the Bang Bang took place at a single point. Look at some of the other posts. Basically we do not know how big the universe is, may even be infinite.
I think the "slow progression" theory of evolution has been replaced by a more "rapid spurts" idea of evolution.
And there are fossil records of our ancestors: homo erectus, homo habilis, australopithecus afaranus and so on.
Use some logic.
Something caused the universe to begin. Whatever that something is, He is God.
All religions except pagans believe in the same god, and the same angels. Pagans believe the angels are gods. Everybody BUT the Pagans only argue about what to call God, as far as the laws go, they're mostly the same (don't kill, don't steal, don't screw your neighbor's goat...)
Athiests believe that nothing created the universe, that it was some kind of accidental occurance, random chance. In which case, of course, nothing matters, nothing ever mattered, nothing ever will matter, and your entire existance is completely meaningless.
Gee, which religion has the most suffering?
This religion will surely bring the most rewards!
Anything else is just hippy-flower-sniffing!
Screw quality of life - it's quality of death that concerns us!
The Jews are telling me YOU're going to hell for worshipping false prophets. The Muslims tell me your religion ignores the 5 pillars which were handed down by God (They call him Allah -- potayto, potahto) so they pretty much think you're gonna burn too. The Mormons' say you're ignoring the 3rd Testament of Jesus which I'm sure is gonna at least get you a few million years in Purgatory.
Decisions, decisions. Maybe Shinto; that sounds nice.
m00.
That was just the signal light of the Vogon destruction fleet getting ready to demolish the earth to make way for a hyper-space on-ramp.
Don't panic...
Jesterr
Say you've got two points, 2ly apart. Also say that the universe is expanding at pretty close to the speed of light, but still less than light speed. Call it 99% of c.
.99*c, it takes light something like 102 years to make it to point B, at which time point A is 102 light years away from point B. When the light started it was only 2 ly away, but it got slowed down in it's journey because of the expansion of the universe, and yet it was travelling at c the whole time.
Okay, now a beam of light travelling from point A to point B takes 1 year to travel 1 ly. But in that same amount of time, the universe has expanded 99% of 1 ly and stretched our two points apart by that much (the universe being our two points here). So the total distance from A to B is now just under 3 ly, and our light has only gone 1. It didn't really cover a lot of ground, did it?
Work the rest out yourself. If the universe is expanding at
And this scales up or down in terms of time. Whether I used years or seconds or milliseconds makes no difference, the expansion of the universe means that things move apart at some speed, thus increasing the travel time of light without slowing it down.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
My bad, in that example it takes light something like 200 years to traverse the distance, not 102. Sorry.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Ok Big Bang....
Everbit of matter in one ball...
It explodes...
All mattr is spread out through the galaxy
Billions years later, we are born.
We decide that if we just look at Light that is old enough then we can see the big bang!
Wouldn't the light from the big bang be about 14billions year PAST us?
That or the earth was traveling faster then the speed of light for a few billion years, and just now slowing down enough for the light from the big bang catching up with us.
Does any of this make sense?
NO! Read the Bible, ALL OF IT!
If you still don't beleave, then quote this:
"And God created matter, and he said BANG and ther was a BIG BANG)
You cannot use logic or science when discussing religeon.
Religeon says BELIEVE, don't doubt, don't apply logic or reasoning. Stay dumb and send me the money.
Science says DOUBT, because doubt brings questioning, reason, logic, and finally the answer.
Despite your line breaks
You are no e. e. cummings.
And it's "you're", not "your".
m00.
I'm no physicist by any means, but I'm having problems accepting this.
1) If they've found light from 14 billion years ago from the supposed SOURCE of the universe (or general direction of), how is it just now getting to us?
That would suggest that the universe is expanding at a variable rate, because: a) It would suggest that the universe has expanded faster than the speed of light in the past, and b) the universe has stopped expanding fast enough for the original light to catch up. Sorry, I dont buy it.
2) How are they verifying the source of this light? It seems to me that if the universal expansion theory were true, then the direction of the originating explosion would be dark.
Sorry, just my thoughts. I'm probably going to get rocked by some Physics major here, but I just don't buy alot of the current -theories- (thats all they are!) in acceptance by the scientific community.
Cheers!
Dave
How did they record a flicker of LIGHT with a RADIO telescope?
This is really off-topic, but...
Yes, you're correct about Piltdown Man; he was a fraud perpetrated by a rather small group of British researchers (including, of all people, Arthur Conan Doyle.) He is mentioned in many scientific and literary works of the early 20th Century, including the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It was a wildly successful piece of scientific trickery and deceit, perhaps the most successful hoax in history.
But here's the thing: it wasn't anti-evolution activists or Baptist ministers who exposed Piltdown as the fraud it was. The truth came out of a process that started at an international congress of paleontologists in 1953. That's right; the same scientific establishment that you are accusing of widespread fraud and corruption is responsible for learning the truth about Piltdown Man. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find a biology textbook written any time after 1958 that mentions Piltdown Man in any context other than that he was a fraud. Find me a modern biology textbook that references Piltdown Man as evidence for evolutionary common descent.
Good luck.
Compare and contrast this with the creation science community. Many (but not all) of these folks consistently refer to theories and pieces of physical evidence that have long been debunked or shown to be fraudulent. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is references to the Paluxy River tracks, which some claim show human tracks next to dinosaur tracks, suggesting that man and dinos were contemporaries. This "evidence" was debunked a long time ago, and even the Institute for Creation Research, an organization not known for its strong committment to the scientific method, has suggested that "honest creation scientists" not use the Paluxy River tracks as evidence for a young Earth.
That's just one example of creationists providing false and/or debunked evidence for their particular brand of creationism. The list goes on and on; we've got ridiculous claims that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we've got the false stories about moon dust and about how NASA was afraid that Apollo 11 would get mired in it, we've got the urban legend about NASA computers "finding" the missing day from Joshua's siege on Jericho, etc. etc.
The point is this: Before you accuse scientists en masse of widespread fraud, lies, and deception, you might want to consider getting your own house in order first. The Piltdown Man debacle demonstrates that scientists are ever skeptical and are willing to admit when they are wrong and have been misled. Are you and yours capable of the same honesty?
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Don't bother trying to explain the theory of evolution to bible lovers. No matter how much proof there is, they will always stick to the bible.
I'm a very religious person, believe in God, and enjoy reading the Bible. So I take offense at this kind of attitude because it seems so unchristian to me. You talk about Jesus, but at the same time are being judgemental, and are being publicly "noisy" about how righteous you are, and so much more favored than the rest of us. I believe that the salvation Jesus Christ gives us isn't about the afterlife, but about here and now, obeying his teachings, following his example.
I wanted to post this because I didn't want others to think that rigid indoctrination is what religion is about. I don't believe the universe is only a few thousand years old, or that there needs to be any conflict between religion and science. I consider myself to be Christian mostly because I see great value in the Bible and Jesus' teachings. I think, for example, Matthew 5-7 encapsulates all of what Christianity is about. This is a fantastic moral discourse, and would bring world peace and prosperity if obeyed. But it's difficult and uncommon advice -- shockingly different from "worldly" (popular) philosophy.
Finally, I don't think it's a conflict to believe the Bible and also the Big Bang theory. I think the accounts of creation in the Bible are technically just ancient Hebrew folklore, but they belong in the Bible because they contain rich moral lessons, and describe the true nature God and the Universe. The Bible isn't a history book. It's not written that way. It's a religious work, and should be treated as such.
Sorry to rant. I'm done now.
Nope, not 316. 613.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
but i don't see how a flicker of light can hope to confirm such a theory... it seems like poor science...
how can you make the claim that a flicker of light from a particular region of deep space
='s
light from an occurance of matter and light breaking up from early time...
???
everybody's favorite man in a gorilla suit,
m.
http://www.pataphysics-lab.com
So they see a flicker of light. How do they know that this flicker is the "beginning" flicker of light and matter separation. For all we know it could be a few extraterrestrial teenaliens flickering their headlights at us...
Hey Xorg, bet this will really confuse people 10 billion years from now - phorm
If you assume that a "day" really means "day" in the Bible for the first 7 days (and why wouldn't you?) and then add up all the ages of the people listed from generation to generation, you get a fairly conclusive age for the universe according to the Bible. (I don't know if off the top of my head, but I know it's there) Now, you could argue that a the first 7 days in the Bible are actually billions of years long. But then if you start saying that words in the Bible mean different things than what we normally attribute words for, then you're allowing yourself to make up whatever you want to believe in and interpret the Bible however you want.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Speaking of misguided, it's not terribly wise to open a message describing your beliefs with an insult if you expect anything good to come out of it. I agree with everything you said, (except maybe the "something in return" part.. that's deceiving because the "something" may not show up in this world but rather the one to come) but I don't agree with your tone.
Ben
"If curiosity's a sin then ask yourself,
Is it better to serve in Heaven or to reign in Hell?
If my soul's gonna burn then let it burn like the sun."
You're 'explaining' one mystery (creation of the universe) with another (God). You are doing this on no evidence that I can see.
If God created the universe, what created God? And what created the creator of God? If God wasn't created, you're admitting some things don't need creation, and either sprang into being by themselves, or always were. In which case you are making it too complex... the simpler explaination is that the universe sprang into being by itself, or always was.
As for your interpretation of meaning of life for athiests, it is quite wrong for most athiests. Athiests give themselves meaning, not needing to be handed meaning from some imaginary being. Athiests are, in general, pretty happy and well.
I agree with you. You are not alone.
"The Truth is out there! And boy will you all be surprised when you find it out!"
Nobody is "hiding behind science". Science cannot PROVE anything. But it's still by far the best method we have for describing the natural world around us.
The conservatives don't want to allow liberals to have their own beliefs, they want to save everyone/convert them to their own ideals in the name of slvation.
Get a clue friend. Regardless of the reality of the universe, it sure isn't encompased in strict "conservative" bash people's belief for being a heathen or liberal's let's all just get along, and don't stick your religion in my face.
If god exists, he gave everyone a choice that conservatives seem to want to take away. If he doesn't, ueber liberals are disrespecting conservative's choice to believe in what they want.
Both groups are ignorant, foaming from the mouth fools, both are going to be wrong about some things, and both are attacking the other side in an eternal struggle that will never be won.
So stop with this conservative vs. liberals bullshit. You can't save yourself, and that's a fact of your religion because you believe only Jesus can do that, so you can't save anyone else. It isn't up to you.
...who is Grace?
I just want to mention the not all Christians are against evolution. I am an Orthodox Christian, and I believe in the possibility that physicaly humans might have evolved from apes, if that is what the evidence shows. I see science and religion as complimentary to each other, one dealing with the physical universe, the other with the spiritual dimension.
Any theories on what existed 14 Billion Years and one day ago? -Just curious
I don't believe in sigs.
(* Were they on the rubber sheet when it blew up or just in the room? *)
The "Rubber Room" analogy seems to answer more questions than the "Rubber Sheet" analogy. Who ever said a diety had to be sane?
For example, why would a "stable" diety need to hear hymns about him/her/it-self over and over again? To me, that would suggest an ego problem.
Table-ized A.I.
One of the differences between science and religion is that science is typically open to accepting that it is wrong and modifies accordingly. Religion, on the other hand, has to be conked over the head a few times, and even then it lags behind science in accepting certain things, sometimes by centuries.
The point you seem to be missing is that Science is a process and Creationism is a part of a faith.
Science at one time did believe the world was flat. Science questioned itself and eventually rejected an absurd notion. Faith doesn't do this.
It doesn't matter to reality one whit what people believe. The world was always round, regardless of our perception of it. All science is, is humankind's effort to gain a more correct perception. And it's an ongoing effort, which is why things like cosmology matter.
Science isn't a myth, it's a process. A process that produces results, by the way. So, the next time you turn on a light or flush a toilet, thank a scientist.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
(* Apparently Occam never had a shot at 2 women. *)
Lately it seems to be coming to light that most great thinking comes from pondering dating issues.
Table-ized A.I.
Or maybe it is just God's plan for you to annoy the fuck out of independent thinking folk.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Finally, a religous person who is still open minded. Thank you very much for posting.
I wish Aesops Fables had as big a following as the Bible, their teachings are just as good and more relevant to daily life.
An unlawful system uses the same amount of energy as a lawful system. A Lemur's biochemistry is just as complex as a chimps. A thousand "a"s use just as much energy to transmit as a thousand letters of "Brief History of Time" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/strange/html/bigb ang.html)
The limit Entropy puts on Life doesn't limit the _intelligence_ of the system, just the total amount of energy available to do work. The work can be intelligent or stupid, Entropy doesn't care.
where does any religion say that?
and who are you to say that I cannot use logic or science when discussing religion?
last time I checked, I had a free will to doubt (or to believe) if a god exists or not, to logically weigh whether various issues are right, or even to reason.
Really? Than the origin of the Universe?
I'd also point out that _Scientists_ aren't in charge of figuring out who did those things, LE is (or has been). An entirely different group you should be mocking for their failures.
Meanwhile, scientists have figured out a few things long before they "mattered" (such as how to build a transistor).
In fact, seems to me that many real problems happen because folks refuse to listen to scientists until too late, (such as the folks warning the Govt. for years that the US mail was in danger of being used in a biochemical attack).
I'd say that if "scientists" were a team in the ball game of figuring out stuff that matters, they'd be pretty much taking the pennant every year...
Ah yes, that is it. Thanks.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Actually both, the Torah (Bible), and the theory of evolution are both true.
According to the Kabbalah and the teachings of Chassidut
the theory of Evolution (Earth's age is Billions of years)
and
Bible / World was created 6000 years ago
are true.
G-d created the world 6000 years ago (actually 5,753 years to be exact, see a Hebrew Calendar) and made it appear as if it existed 16+billion years ago.
Simple explanation: Creation is such a supernatural phenomenon, to create something from nothing (as opposed to humans who can only create something from something, like create a table from wood, a fire from existing brimstone, a computer from existing metal and silicon parts, etc)- it is not beyond the creator to create something with a past, to create the world 5,753 years ago and make it appear to (or really) have existed 16+billion years ago. So when G-d created the world 5,753 years ago, G-d created the world, and science, to (appear to have) existed billions of years ago.
Further explanation: Lets suppose today is the first week of creation. You are Adam, the first man, and you look around at the beautiful world. You walk to a nearby field and pick up a rock, and examine it.
You ask yourself "Has this rock existed for only 6 days?"
According to the Bible, the world was created only 6 days ago, so yes, it only existed for 6 days.
But then ask the rock, how long have you existed?
And the rock would conteplate for a moment, and then say "well, i've been here today, i've been here yesterday, and the day before, and the week before, and last year" ad infinitum.
And the truth is, the rock is right, as well as Adam is right.
According to Adam (and the Torah [= bible]), the world was created 6 days before.
According to the rock's best knowledge, he was always here, at least thats what the rock feels.
Because there is no _Scientific_ reason why the rock would not have existed billions of years before.
That is because G-d, with creation, created everything including the laws of science, and according to science, there is no reason why that rock would not have existed the day before, and the day before that too ad infinitum.
However, one must always realize and remember that science is also a creation from G-d, and when the Torah states (and is often repeated in Kabballah:) "God looked in the Torah and created the World, one must remember that Torah is the reality, and science is only as real as the Torah has set forth for it.
You can and should rightfully believe that the world existed 16+billion years ago, because in a way it is true, G-d made it so that one would draw a scientific conclusion that the world existed 16+billion years ago.
But when speaking of such a wonderous thing such as creation, the act of creating something from nothing, one cannot suppose that with our limited intelligence we can grasp the concept of creation from nothing and decide that it must have been 16+billion years ago in order to appear to actually have been created billions of years ago.
According to Judaism, Torah dictates reality.
But the Torah states that according to non-jews, science dictates their reality, therefore it is not wrong for non-jews to believe that the world began to exist 16+billion years.
-Ari Feinstein
I always think people get a bit self centered when they talk about the translated version of Genesis in the Bible. Both the Hebrew of the original version and the Arabic of the Quran have the six "days" but you will find that the Quran also explicitly states in two places that you can't translate the times between our existence and God's existence. It gives a time translation like the joke above. I think as time passes and we get more accustomed with time not being "rigid" like the time contraction of the GPS satellites (yes they go fast enough that the atomic clocks have to be adjusted constantly) there be fewer and fewer "fundamentalists" that so horribly underestimate the supreme complexity God created in this reality as a pointer to God's power. After all the Catholic Church didn't admit that Galileo was correct about the earth being round and orbiting the sun like the rest of the planets until the 1970's. I only hope future generations will accept Galileo's assertion that "reality" is God's first revelation and all the rest of the revelations are essentially commentary to get people back on track when they start accepting their own screwed up ideas over God's.
Light is simply the vibration of super strings. So why can't these folks say that in their theories? Polarization of light? You mean a polarized vibration of strings in the 4th dimension? So what if they find "Light from 14 billion years ago". These so-called "News Stories" are only perpetuating an Einstien mindset of light being "Particles" or "Waves" where in fact the only 'particles' are the certain vibrations of super strings in different dimensions. Give us all a break and help us understand the universe as it is understood today, rather than that of theories 50 years ago.
Namaste
and don't forget about the Government grants of 'money'
But see your argument relies on an assumption that everything is within time. The only way for us to measure change is via a ruler called time. "The universe was created" (a spot in time where on one side there was nothing (or something else), and on the other side the universe existed. So if we can assume that everything exists inside of time, then the "logical" or "scientific" way to go about this is to "doubt" that assumption. Now of course we can't (yet) prove their is a state where time doesn't exist, or maybe outside of time, but if we try to get into a state of mind where time wouldn't exist, then there would be no need for a creator of god. nor for a lineage of gods. Of course this would mean that god isn't a finite entity. Maybe god, or whatever, is matter. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Maybe it's just not explainable. But, what ever the case, I don't think the rules that man has set up to try and bind us into doing "good", would be the little petty things that God would be trying to enforce. What would a god care if I made it to a certain building on time, one day a week?
Please reply to this... I would love to hear the rebuttal.
Thanks
This is the "watchmaker" argument, made about 200 years ago (replace "car" with "watch"), one version of the "argument from design." Fairly persuasive in its day, because people didn't know (before Darwin) how it was possible for complexity to arise out of simplicity.
Read The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins. He eloquently answers the argument from design. It is, IMO, one of the best books on evolution (since Darwin). Also has lots of neat computer analogies, and some simulation software.
I say that you are not allowed to use logic and science when discussing our religion...
-God / -Voice in your head
I couldn't agree more - MOD PARENT UP! All these presumptions and incessant bickering are fucking ridiculous!
Let science find God if he exists, don't make atheism Yet Another Religion(tm)!
If you assume that a "day" really means "day" in the Bible for the first 7 days (and why wouldn't you?) and then add up all the ages of the people listed from generation to generation, you get a fairly conclusive age for the universe according to the Bible.
That is your interpretation that the Bible's creation story represents the creation of the Universe.
"In the beginning" it starts. But the beginning of what? To say it is the universe is probably not accurate, considering the scripture that points to events "before the beginning".
"...God created the heaven and earth"
Heaven is somewhat ambigous also, and probably better translated as "firmament" which is closer to sky or atmosphere then universe in my book. But it can be used to mean everything in the universe that isn't matter. But later when it discusses seperating the waters from the waters suggests "atmosphere" to me more then "universe".
Verse 14 sheds an interesting cast on this debate also...
"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years"
However, the direct context of day is established earlier when the seperating of light and dark made for the "morning and the evening of the first day." So we see clearly that the 24 hour day as we know it from the periodic solar occulting of the earth wasn't established until the fourth day. And for the next few days, you I see nothing to give the impression that God adapted the earth's time table as he mentions creating seasons and generations of animals.
But then if you start saying that words in the Bible mean different things than what we normally attribute words for, then you're allowing yourself to make up whatever you want to believe in and interpret the Bible however you want.
I remember Larry Wall's assertion to an atheist on Slashdot recently where he mentioned that the atheist was "actively disbelieving" where Larry was "actively believing" in a God.
To illustrate how this happens, lets take your quote which describes someone who is actively believing in God, and see how it works the other way also.
"But then if you start saying that words in the Bible mean different things than what we normally attribute words for in their context, then you're allowing yourself to make up whatever you want to disbelieve in and interpret the Bible however you want."
I'll add in the name of "Science" warning that to impose your every-day definitions of terms created in the context of your own situation on words used in a situation completely different, is a bad practice.
Not quite. What you are asking for is negative proof. Instead what you should ask is, 'do we observe anything that isn't bound by time or anything which has behavior that can't be explained if it did exist within time?'. So long as that answer is no, we don't have to look into it. It's the same thing as 'do we observe invisible intangable fairies going around and putting small knots in hair'. We don't observe that... we have no evidence of it. These 'elf knots' can get into hair in rather mundane ways.
We can invent any number of fanciful scenarios, none of which can really be disproven. This lack of disproof doesn't make them true, or even worth looking into. We need positive evidence.
An extraordinary claim, such as something existing outside of time, requires extraordinary proof.
How low was the initial entropy? In The Emperor's New Mind , Roger Penrose makes a back of the envelope calculation, and comes up with 1/2^10^80. Now one explanation of where this highly selected early universe came from is that "it just happened". Another explanation is that "God did it". Both views have about equal explanatory power from a scientific viewpoint. Roger Penrose's comment was, "Even God couldn't be that precise!"
Religeon says BELIEVE, don't doubt, don't apply logic or reasoning. Stay dumb and send me the money.
Science says DOUBT, because doubt brings questioning, reason, logic, and finally the answer.
This is a massive oversimplification. My experience with religion has been that it says "Exercise faith in things which are true which are beyond pre-verification (or verification at all under certain epistemologies)." This is not all that different from certain observations about axiomatic systems made by Kurt Godel.
Not only that, but it's actually very easy to see religion as a personal spiritual experiment. If a religion teaches you a principle, and you apply it, you've had a chance to perform an experiment and see if you gain the same results. It will never be clinical double-blind, but that's not what matters. What matters is whether or not there's fruit in your life. (And remember, clinical double-blind studies have their weakenesses. Phen-phen was supposedly tested in this way. Too bad a friend of mine destroyed her heart with it).
Most people in a religious community don't talk about it so much, but doubt serves a role. I sometimes see it as a bit like gravity in the flight process: you don't want it to be the ruling force, but its presence makes conventional air travel possible by providing an anchor for the fluid that airfoils use to provide lift. Doubt provides tension that pulls you toward confronting a question and answering it with a decision.
Of course, that only works if your religion is about real human and divine transformation. Doesn't work in a "hold a dogma/cosmology at all costs" kind of religion, which you may be assuming all religions are. Common mistake, by both "believers" on "non-believers".
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Something caused the universe to begin. Whatever that something is, He is God.
:)
....and there is a problem with this worldview? I know is doesn't give the religous a nice warm, cuddly feeling to think that humanity is not the sole reason why the cosmos exists, but even the most megalomaniacal among us would have to admit that the universe as a whole would no more mourn or indeed even NOTICE our extinction than you would notice a sand flea dying in the Sahara.
Use some logic.
Something caused God to begin. Whatever that something is...... uh, oh..... damn causality loops!
Nothing matters, nothing ever mattered, nothing ever will matter, and your entire existance is completely meaningless.
Hinduism can embrace hedonism, likewise with Buddhism. Both can be seen as 'self worship' rather than Christianity or Judaism which seeks to deny self and give that self to the higher power = GOD.
You don't know much about Hinduism, do you? The goal of the Hindu is to become one with Brahman (the Ultimate Reality / God) and escape the cycle of rebirth. This is done by (surprise) denying the self, forsaking materialism, practicing dharma (righteousness).
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Ya know, I sure as hell hope God isn't the chair I'm sitting on. If it is, I'm going to hell for sure, since I had beans for lunch...
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
I mean, did they C14 date it :) ??
Speculation is the mother of all science (except math)
The Raven
The Raven
Those LE people in charge of figuring out criminal things are forensic *scientists*. So it's okay to mock them. I checked.
ROTFLMAO!!! It always amazes me to hear BigBangers reason this way. Just ask a physicist the analogous question: "If the big bang created the universe, what what created the big bang?" It's amusing to hear the varied replies (which invariably sound just like the religionist's answers) usually along the lines of "That's unknowable/undefined because time didn't exist, blah, blah blah...".
In my experience, the Big Bang theory is a religon of it's own, with all that comes with religons in general... zealots, those who will defend their 'beliefs' in the face of a mountain of conflicting evidence, and entirely ignore anything that doesn't fit into their narrow paradigm (ie. the verified quantization of red-shift, extra-galactic superscale structures, etc, etc, etc...), but then they come up with just as fanciful and unprovable inventions to try to reconcile their beloved BB Theory with the ever increasing mountain of conflicting observation (ie. Cosmic strings, numerous unobserved/unobservable theoretical particles, dk matter, etc, etc, etc...)
Please note that I'm not advocating religon over science or science over religon, but just pointing out that the similarities between religons and certain dogmatic 'scientific' theories are compellingly similar.
If the Universe is an ever expanding "sphere", then what is making it infinite? A sphere has an outer surface and so would the Universe in such case. If this is so, then what astronomical / mathematical / theological phenomenon is preventing matter or energy from passing through that border?
IIRC there are observations or theories that the universe is slowing it's expansion due to the fact that matter attracts matter. If the mass in the universe is enough to sufficiently slow down the expansion, stop it or even reverse it, light would in such case be able to travel faster than the universe is expanding. This would seemingly lead to light actually being able to at least reach the outer surface of the theoretical sphere of the universe and possibly pass it unless God or some other phenomenon stops it.
Anyway, the above could be hogwash, or it might not. If anyone has a simple layman explanation (read not more complex than absolutely needed) to why the universe wouldn't have an outer surface I'd be interested to know of it.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Forensic scientists can only work with the evidence they have & the evidence is generally gathered by non-scientists (to put it mildly).
IOW, we'd be alot further from discovering the origins of the universe if we had to rely on the Detective Fubars (Furhman) of the world to gather the evidence.
Then of course the _findings_ of the FS's are not always made enterely public in cases with political ramifications...
Please, no need to reply...
This post isn't intended to be offensive, but given the thread that has developed about Biblical creation stories, it seemed somewhat appropriate, if also a bit offtopic. Let's go!
If you're going to make such strong claims please at least back them up [...]I'm curious how one would come to the conclusion that the creation story of the Old Testament was inspired by the Judeo-Christian God. I am interested in having these strong claims backed up, if possible. The writer of the first post in this thread remarks that:
I believe Genesis was inspired by God, but written though a person.However, I am not aware of any reason for holding such a belief vs. not holding such a belief. Perhaps there are two options, let's call them (A) and (B).
First, (A) someone might come up with a rational proof for the existance of the Judeo Christian God and the fact that He influenced the text of the Bible. Unfortunately, no such proof has ever been successful. The "Proof By Design", "Ontological Argument", "Cosmological Argument" and such have all been shown to be flawed. (For example, there seems to be an exhaustive list available. I know the source may be seen as biased, but the same information can be gleamed from any decent introductory book on this history of philosophy.)
The real problem behind the problem is the nature of God Himself. If you make the conception of God specific and complex, for example by claiming that He is benevolent or tripartite, rational undisputable proof becomes extremely difficult (impossible?). I'd wager that to justify the idea of a complex God, one would have to use (B) the justification by faith. None of the traditional proofs of God, such as those outlined by Aquinas get us closer to specific attributes; they only argue for raw existance. This other extreme, the claim that God is simple, takes such forms as: God is everything, God is love, etc. This won't do either, because then God just becomes synomonous with "Universe" (in the first case) and won't be able to be used to defend any particular creation story or moral teaching, at least as far as I am aware of.
Second, (B) someone might hold that God wrote the Bible on the basis of a justification by faith. The idea behind the justification by faith seems to be that somehow this knowledge is 'extra-rational', so one just has to have faith in the fact that it is true. If justification by faith is itself justified, what should we have faith in? There are three possible answers.
Take it as an assumption that justification by faith is correct.
1) Have faith in everything. This will lead us to have faith in the Christian conception of God, the Judaic conception of God, the Islamic conception of God and Greek Pantheon, etc. We will have to believe that the Quran is absolutely true, the Bible absolutely true, and Greek mythology is absolutely true. I don't think many people will want this. In the ethical sphere of religious teachings, it would necessarily lead to complete ethical relativism: i.e. anything anyone justified by faith would be justified (human sacrifice, murder, etc.). Furthermore-- and more importantly-- since we are admitting the general correctness of the justification by faith methodology, we will be unable to criticize others as having incorrect morality. For example if a murderer has faith that murder is what God wants, we are forced to accept his justification by faith (just as our own must be accepted) and cannot say that the murder is then wrong.
2) Have faith in nothing. This would lead to extreme skepticism, so we don't have to deal with it.
3) Have faith in some things but not others. This looks like it would have to be the method if we want to support belief in God without leading to complete ethical subjectivism like (1) did. Unfortunately, (3) is not a solution to the problem at all. If we are to have faith in some things and not others, what critera should we use to decide what to have faith in? If the answer is reason, then we have to deal with (A) again-- trying to determine rational proofs for the existance of the Judeo-Christian God and of His having influenced the writing of the Bible. But there are no good rational proofs. If the answer is faith itself, then we must go back to (B) and start over, which is clearly nonsensical.
Therefore, as (2) and (3) will not allow us to coherently achieve a justification by faith, (1) is the only option left. So when we start out assuming that a justification by faith is valid, we find that it necessarily requires us to be complete moral subjectivists. Since that kind of subjectivism undermines the project of the ethical teachings of the major monotheistic world religions (including Christianity), the justification by faith cannot be used to justifiy Christianity.
Imagine a person who'd been raised without the idea of religion at all, who has been presented with all the world's religions (past and present) and asked to choose. What choice should he make? Let's assume that all of them claim to be the true religion, and that we cannot hold all of them because many of them have conflicting teachings. Justification by faith appears inable to provide a method for correct choice in this situation. Unfortunately, reason seems also unable to help us without a valid argument.
-- "--," ?
Dude I pissed myself reading this, its so fucking funny. BWAHAHAHHAHA. I love you man.
I'm not sure if this is the right explaination but you can imagine the surface of the sphere as an universe. This universe would have no border if you move ALONG the surface (move within universe). Our universe is probably a 3-Dimensional equivalent of this imaginary 2-Dimensional universe.
Hmm, your explanation of "beginning" seems self-contradictory since events before "time" can't happen if time a requisite parameter of an event. It may be true in a "God can do anything" kind of way, but even then it doesn't make sense scripturaly. I think it means something much more plain and simple, and people are just getting way to "cosmic" about it.
I read a site once "How to talk creation to a Jehovah's Witness" that was pointed to from the AiG people. They brought up a good point, that if the day was 1000 years then why did God create plants and then wait a thousand years before creating the insects to polinate them?
But that doesn't matter much to me since I personally think that the 1000 years time thing sufferes from the same problem as the 24hour thing (i.e. the sun hadn't been made yet). So I never subscribed to that view anyway.
I just take the Bible for face value.
I don't think plants being around on the third day discredits it either, since light existed on the first day, before the sun came around. And since light was present from the first day, there is no reason that you can't have plants.
People just think its the sun, becuase it is such a common light to us here on earth, but not becuase they read Genisis very well. Don't worry, not until a few years ago did I realize the "light" in the first verse wasn't the sun either. The sun is just way to prevelant in our lives for us not to think it is.
But I motice that God points out clearly in those verses that his first light and day was something different then what we are used to.
Here's the verses again...
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
It seems pretty clear to me that the "sun" is the greatest light during the day and he made it the fourth day. He also says that "days" didn't happen in some sence or other until the fourth day, along with seasons and years. Its all just straight forward and plain to me.
If AiG realized that, I think they'd realize it corresponds with AiG's other positions a lot better also, like starting with a small select group of "types" of animals becoming the many species we have seen since the Fall rather then populating the earth him/herself. God did things in stages, you need water, light and earth before vegetation and begetation before animals...etc. I think it started out small in the garden and things were told to "multiply and replenish the earth."
Actually I digress. I actually came to a simular conclusion as them on many respects independantly before I read them, which is why I liked their site so much. And when they tied it all together with the Fall it made a lot of sense with what I already believed.
If i instead read several verses that say the same thing, then I can be sure of it. This is where JW's and Mormons etc. have their problems.
Actually, the JW's and Mormons would probably argue that you are only taking verses that sound the same, and ignoring the ones that may not point where you want it to.
One of them being God's reproval of Job where he says...
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
Honestly, I think Job was an anti-deluvian work. probably the only one book except the Book of Enoch that survived the flood. But that is just my theory. Either way, I think that laying the foundation of the earth was either before the "beginning" or during the first two days, yet we already have "all the sons of God" or all the players to go on to the stage. To me "Beginning" or "The beginning" means the start of some particular stage in God's plan, specifically relating to us. It could be the start of the whole universe or "time" but I don't find anything beyond it being the start of a stage in God's plan.
Also, since the "days" weren't created until the fourth day (in God's time) that makes the "Ancient of Days" Adam rather then God (which makes sence since God's throne doesn't have wheels which show God giving power to move). I don't agree with the JW's or anyone else who thinks Adam was a bad guy, since Christ is called the "second Adam" and "last Adam" at different times. Christ wouldn't be considered an "adam" if "Adam" wasn't a good guy.
Speaking of crazy beliefs, I've been perplexed how Christians say "you can't be saved by your works" and then tell people "you will be saved if you do this..." which is usually a very specific and prescribed "work" they have to do (like praying, acknowledging, etc...) That sure sounds an awful lot like they are being saved because of something they are doing.
If the human experience for so many requires that the universe must have a creator, so be it.
But, then, if all must be "created", who created "God"?
Good point. I know Dante also referred to a spherical earth in the Divine Comedy.
I believe the common man may have believed that the earth was flat well into the middle ages. Maps from that time seem to indicate a belief in the edge of the earth. "Beyond Here There Be Dragons" and all that.
But for what it's worth, you've changed my mind on the flat earth perspective. I've examined something I believed, and after reviewing evidence changed my mind. That's how Science works. Isn't it wonderful? =)
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
he said "in a higher dimension" or somesuch -- as in, fifth dimension that you can't directly observe. think about the fact that standing on the surface of the earth, you'd have trouble telling, just from that, that it's not flat ... so on the scale of the universe, the next dimension may not be apparent, etc. (no, it's not a bullet-proof analogy.)
> The Bible is about salvation. There is of course
> some history and science included but that is not
> the point. You liberals attack the Bible for your
> perceived historial and scientific faults as if
> it should be a divine source for both subjects.
The Bible isn't about salvation; the Bible is a collection of documents claiming to be 1) an accurate historical record; 2) an allegorical instruction on the preferred way to live our lives; 3) prophecy which is, by the way; 4) either directly or indirectly created by the hand of an omnipotent, omniscient being.
It fails to fulfill #1, sometimes quite spectacularly; especially as it sometimes contradicts itself, not to mention the fact there's exceedingly little reliable corroboration of most of its content.
Secondly and dealing with issue #2, most atheists recognise that humanist morals tend to be ethically superior to Christian commandments.
Issue #3 is pretty unacceptable given the failure of the first two points and -
Issue #4 is pretty well blown out of the water by the embarrassingly poor performance of the first three points.
> The most important information ever known is in
> The Bible. It's all about salvation---something
> you fail to see.
As addressed above, that's not so. Furthermore, it's a GOOD thing that it's false, bearing in mind the despicable events and modes of prescribed behaviour. Perhaps the atheists are not the only people who might be recommended to check their own perceptions.
> What example are YOU providing to the world,
> then? Are you going without? I assume you used
> a computer to type your message. Maybe all the
> liberals should give up all their goods and
> clothe themselves in rags so they can claim
> they're better than others.
Uh huh. After you.
. . . Bronze Age minds. The only true surprise is how many are still around, not just Creationists , but flat earthers, Marxists, Democrats, Republicans, . . .
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
i read you web page, you make me sick you fucking towel. and i have a mac here, they suck. your stupid inferior arab peanut brain likes simple interfaces. suck my dick, towlel reag fucking towel head. you fucking pull start hucka lucky. if i ever met you i would be polite, try to be your friend, muse on how islam is interesting to me. and i would follow you home and stab you with a knife in the skull. i want to stick a knife in your skull and whatch your dying body convulse . i want to feed your corpse to pigs so that they shit you out. death is for you DEATH. i hate you fucker fucker fucker. die pig swine. fuck you towel you wet rag scum i piss on you death.
the Bourgeoisophobes
Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel.
by David Brooks
04/15/2002, Volume 007, Issue 30
AROUND 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world. Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts. They had none of the high style of the aristocracy, or even the earthy integrity of the peasants. Instead, they were gross. They were vulgar materialists, shallow conformists, and self-absorbed philistines, who half the time failed even to acknowledge their moral and spiritual inferiority to the artists and intellectuals. What's more, it was their very mediocrity that accounted for their success. Through some screw-up in the great scheme of the universe, their narrow-minded greed had brought them vast wealth, unstoppable power, and growing social prestige.
Naturally, the artists and intellectuals were outraged. Hatred of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion of the French intelligentsia. Stendhal said traders and merchants made him want to "weep and vomit at the same time." Flaubert thought they were "plodding and avaricious." Hatred of the bourgeoisie, he wrote, "is the beginning of all virtue." He signed his letters "Bourgeoisophobus" to show how much he despised "stupid grocers and their ilk."
Of all the great creeds of the 19th century, pretty much the only one still thriving is this one, bourgeoisophobia. Marxism is dead. Freudianism is dead. Social Darwinism is dead, along with all those theories about racial purity that grew up around it. But the emotions and reactions that Flaubert, Stendhal, and all the others articulated in the 1830s are still with us, bigger than ever. In fact, bourgeoisophobia, which has flowered variously and spread to places as diverse as Baghdad, Ramallah, and Beijing, is the major reactionary creed of our age.
This is because today, in much of the world's eyes, two peoples--the Americans and the Jews--have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success. Americans and Israelis, in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth, the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of idolatrous values. These two nations, it is said, practice conquest capitalism, overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbors in their endless desire for more and more. These two peoples, the Americans and the Jews, in the view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually stunted. It is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow them to build fortunes, construct weapons, and play the role of hyperpower.
And so just as the French intellectuals of the 1830s rose up to despise the traders and bankers, certain people today rise up to shock, humiliate, and dream of destroying America and Israel. Today's bourgeoisophobes burn with the same sense of unjust inferiority. They experience the same humiliation because there is nothing they can do to thwart the growing might of their enemies. They rage and rage. Only today's bourgeoisophobes are not just artists and intellectuals. They are as likely to be terrorists and suicide bombers. They teach in madrassas, where they are careful not to instruct their students in the sort of practical knowledge that dominates bourgeois schools. They are Muslim clerics who incite hatred and violence. They are erudite Europeans who burn with humiliation because they know, deep down, that both America and Israel possess a vitality and heroism that their nations once had but no longer do.
Today the battle lines are forming. The dispute over Palestine, which was once a local conflict about land, has been transformed into a great cultural showdown. The vast array of bourgeoisophobes--Yasser Arafat's guerrilla socialists, Hamas's Islamic fundamentalists, Jose Bove's anti-globalist leftists, America's anti-colonial multiculturalists, and the BBC's Oxbridge mediacrats--focus their diverse rages and resentments on this one conflict.
The bourgeoisophobes have no politburo. There is no bourgeoisophobe central command. They have no plausible strategy for victory. They have only their nihilistic rage, their envy mixed with snobbery, their snide remarks, their newspaper distortions, their conspiracy theories, their suicide bombs and terror attacks--and above all, a burning sense that the rising, vibrant, and powerful peoples of America and Israel must be humiliated and brought low.
BOURGEOISOPHOBIA is really a hatred of success. It is a hatred held by people who feel they are spiritually superior but who find themselves economically, politically, and socially outranked. They conclude that the world is diseased, that it rewards the wrong values, the wrong people, and the wrong abilities. They become cynical if they are soft inside, violent if they are hard. In the bourgeoisophobe's mind, the people and nations that do succeed are not just slightly vulgar, not just over-compensated, not just undeservedly lucky. They are monsters, non-human beasts who, in extreme cases, can be blamelessly killed. This Manichaean divide between the successful, who are hideous, and the bourgeoisophobes, who are spiritually pristine, was established early in the emergence of the creed. The early 19th-century German poet Holderlin couldn't just ignore the merchant bourgeoisie; he had to declare the middle classes "deeply incapable of every divine emotion." In other words, scarcely human.
Holderlin's countryman Werner Sombart later wrote a quintessential bourgeoisophobe text called "Traders and Heroes," in which he argued that there are two basic human types: "The trader approaches life with the question, what can you give me? . . . The hero approaches life with the question what can I give you?" The trader, then, is the selfish capitalist who lives a meager, artificial life amidst "pocket-watches, newspapers, umbrellas, books, sewage disposal, politics." The hero is the total man, who is selfless, vital, spiritual, and free. An honest person might ascribe another's success to a superior work ethic, self-discipline, or luck--just being in the right place at the right time and possessing the right skills. A normal person might look at a rich and powerful country and try to locate the source of its vitality, to measure its human and natural resources, its freedom, its institutions and social norms. But for the bourgeoisophobe, other people's success is never legitimate or deserved. To him, success comes to those who worship the golden calf, the idol, the Satanic corrupter, gold.
When bourgeoisophobes describe their enemies, they almost always portray them as money-mad, as crazed commercialists. And this vulgar materialism, in their view, has not only corrupted the soul of the bourgeoisie, but through them threatens to debase civilization itself and the whole world. It threatens, in the words of the supreme bourgeoisophobe, Karl Marx, to take all that is holy and make it profane.
Some of the more pessimistic bourgeoisophobes come to believe that the worst is already at hand. "Our poor country lies in Roman decadence," the French conservative poet Arthur de Gobineau lamented in 1840. "We are without fiber or moral energy. I no longer believe in anything. . . . MONEY HAS KILLED EVERYTHING." (A great place to read bourgeoisophobe writing is Arthur Herman's "The Idea of Decline in Western History." Bourgeoisophobia is not Herman's theme, but his book does such a magnificent job of surveying two centuries of pessimistic thought that most of the key bourgeoisophobes are quoted.)
And once the bourgeoisophobes had experienced the basic spasm of reaction, they soon settled on the Americans and Jews as two of the chief objects of their ire. Because, as Henry Steele Commager once noted, no country in the world ever succeeded like America, and everybody knew it. And no people in the European experience ever achieved such sustained success as the Jews.
So the Jews were quickly established in the bourgeoisophobe imagination as the ultimate commercial people. They were the bankers, the traders, the soulless and sharp dealmakers who crawled through the cellars of honest and noble cultures and infected them with their habits and practices. The 19th-century Teutonic philosopher Houston Chamberlain said of the Jews that "their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life." The Jewish religion, he said, is "rigid," "scanty," and "sterile."
The American bourgeoisophobe family, the Adamses, contained more than its share of anti-Semites. Brooks Adams lamented that "England is as much governed by the Jews of Berlin, Paris and New York as the native growth." Adams compared the Jews to a vast syndicate and declared simply, "They control the world." Henry Adams protested against the interlocked power of "Wall Street, State Street and Jerusalem." Later, the English historian Arnold Toynbee argued that the Jews, with their "consummate virtuosity in commerce and finance," had infected Western civilization with a crass materialism. Through their arrogance and viciousness, they were responsible for capitalism, godless communism, and the Holocaust, and so had contributed to Europe's decline.
It's actually amazing how early America, too, was stereotyped as a money-grubbing commercial land and Americans a money-grubbing people. Francois La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who traveled in the United States in the 1790s, declared, "The desire for riches is their ruling passion." In 1805, a British visitor observed, "All men there make [money] their pursuit." "Gain! Gain! Gain! Gain! Gain!" is how the English philosopher Morris Birbeck summarized the American spirit a few years later. In 1823 William Faux wrote that "two selfish gods, pleasure and gain, enslave the Americans." Fourteen years after that, the disillusioned Russian writer Mikhail Pogodin lamented, "America, on which our contemporaries have pinned their hopes for a time, has meanwhile clearly revealed the vices of her illegitimate birth. She is not a state, but rather a trading company."
Each wave of foreign observers reinforced the prejudice. Charles Dickens described a country of uncouth vulgarians frantically chasing, as he first put it, "the almighty dollar." Oswald Spengler worried that Germany would devolve into "soulless America," with its worship of "technical skill, money and an eye for facts." Matthew Arnold worried that global forces would Americanize England. "They will rule [Britain] by their energy but they will deteriorate it by their low ideas and want of culture." By 1904, people around the world were worrying about American cultural hegemony. In that year the German writer Paul Dehns wrote an influential essay called "The Americanization of the World." "What is Americanization?" Dehns asked. "Americanization in its widest sense, including the societal and political, means the uninterrupted, exclusive, and relentless striving after gain, riches and influence."
In the 20th century the Americans' aggressive commercialism was symbolized by the unstoppable spread of jeans, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Disney, and Microsoft. America, in the bourgeoisophobes' eyes, is the land of Bart Simpson, boy bands, boob jobs, and "Baywatch." The land of money and guns. Of insincere smiles and love handles. So by the time Osama bin Laden came along, hatred of America was well rehearsed, a finished product just waiting for him to pick it up. In 1998 bin Laden declared war on "the crusader-Jewish alliance, led by the United States and Israel." He added, "Since I was a boy I have been at war with and harboring hatred towards the Americans." He was only echoing Toynbee, who 30 years earlier said, "The United States and Israel must be today the two most dangerous of the 125 sovereign states among which the land surface of this planet is at present partitioned."
FOR THE bourgeoisophobe, then, the question becomes, how does one confront this menace? And on this, the bourgeoisophobes split into two schools. One, which might be called the brutalist school, seeks to reclaim the raw, masculine vitality that still lies buried at the virile heart of human nature. The other, which might be called the ethereal school, holds that a creative minority can rise above prosaic bourgeois life into a realm of contemplation, feeling, art, sensibility, and spiritual grace.
The brutalist school started in Germany, more or less with Nietzsche. In "Thus Spake Zarathustra," Nietzsche has a character declare that he is turning his back on the whole world of degenerate "flea-beetles," the ones who spend their lives "higgling and haggling for power with the rabble." Salvation instead is found in the will to power. The Ubermensch possesses force of will. He can thus be "a mighty . . . hammer" who will smash, "break and remove degenerate and decaying races to make way for a new order of life."
The brutalists urged sons--"the explosive ones"--to revolt against their fathers. They romanticized insanity as a rebellion against convention. They looked back nostalgically to the crude, savage, and proud men of Homeric legend, Germanic history, and Norse myth. They looked for another such hero to emerge today, a virile warrior who would demolish the stale encrustations of an overcivilized world and revive the raw energy of the species. "We do not need ideologues anymore," Oswald Spengler argued, "we need hardness, we need fearless skepticism, we need a class of socialist master men." This, of course, was the path that led to Mussolini, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden.
Meanwhile, the ethereal bourgeoisophobes were emerging in Paris and later London and the United States. They argued that people in decaying cultures should not try to reclaim their former economic and military power. It was wiser to accept the decline of their worldly power and embrace the contemplative virtues. Toynbee acknowledged that Europe's virile, self-assertive days were over. Europeans would have to choose between spending their money on comfortable welfare states and spending it on militaristic "war-making states." They could not afford both. He predicted (in 1926) that they would choose welfare states--and be forced to accept being "dwarfed by the overseas world which [Europe] herself had called into existence."
The Europeans should therefore turn inward. As Arthur Herman notes, the human ideal Toynbee described looks a lot like Toynbee himself: "diffident, sensitive, religious in a contemplative and otherworldly sense, a man who shuns the world of violence and barbarism to pursue the 'etherealization' of himself and society." Toynbee denounced patriotism, commercial striving, and the martial spirit. Artists and intellectuals, the "creative minority," should lead until "the majority is drilled into following the minority's lead mechanically."
Though Toynbee despised the United States, his books sold well here. His lecture tours were lucrative, and his picture was on the cover of Time magazine. When Hitler came along, Toynbee was an enthusiastic appeaser. He met Hitler in 1936 and came away deeply impressed (the two men hated some of the same things). He told his countrymen that Hitler sincerely desired peace. For, just as the brutalist school of bourgeoisophobia led to Hitler and Saddam, the ethereal school led to Neville Chamberlain and some of the European reaction to George Bush's Axis of Evil.
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, there has been a great deal of analysis of the roots of Muslim rage. But to anybody familiar with the history of bourgeoisophobia, it is striking how comfortably Muslim rage meshes with traditional rage against meritocratic capitalism. The Islamist fanatic and the bourgeoisophobe hate the same things. They use the same words, they utter the same protests. In an essay in the New York Review of Books called "Occidentalism," Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma listed the traits that enrage al Qaeda and other Third World anti-Americans and anti-Westerners. First, they hate the city. Cities stand for commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, and sexual license. Second, they hate the mass media: advertising, television, pop music, and videos. Third, they hate science and technology--the progress of technical reason, mechanical efficiency, and material know-how. Fourth, they hate prudence, the desire to live safely rather than court death and heroically flirt with violence. Fifth, they hate liberty, the freedom extended even to mediocre people. Sixth, they despise the emancipation of women. As Margalit and Buruma note, "Female emancipation leads to bourgeois decadence." Women are supposed to stay home and breed heroic men. When women go out into the world, they deprive men of their manhood and weaken their virility.
If you put these six traits together, you have pretty much the pillars of meritocratic capitalist society, practiced most assertively in countries like America and Israel. Contemporary Muslim rage is further inflamed by two additional passions. One is a sense of sexual shame. A rite of passage for any bourgeoisophobe of this type is the youthful trip to America or to the West, where the writer is nearly seduced by the vulgar hedonism of capitalist life, but heroically spurns it. Sayyid Qutb, who is one of the intellectual heroes of the Islamic extremists, toured America between 1948 and 1950. He found a world of jazz, football, movies, cars, and people obsessed with lawn maintenance. It was a land, he wrote, "hollow and full of contradictions, defects and evils." At one point Qutb found himself at a church social. The disc jockey put on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." As Qutb wrote, "The dancing intensified. . . . The hall swarmed with legs. . . . Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love." This was at a church social. You can imagine how the September 11 al Qaeda hijackers must have felt during the visit they made to a Florida strip club shortly before going off to their purifying martyrdom.
The second inflaming passion is humiliation--humiliation caused by the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s, many Arab and Muslim nations tried to join this bourgeois world. They tried to modernize, and they failed. Some Arab countries continue to pursue the low and dirty modernizing path, continue to ape the sordid commercialists and even to accept the presence of American troops on Arabian soil. And this drives the hard-core Islamic bourgeoisophobes to even higher states of rage. As bin Laden himself notably put it, protesting the presence of American troops on Saudi land: "By God, Muslim women refuse to be defended by these American and Jewish prostitutes." The Islamist response to humiliation has been worship of the Muslim man of force. Islamist extremists romanticize the brutal warrior, just as the German bourgeoisophobes did, only the Islamists wear robes and clutch Korans. Like European and Japanese brutalists before them, the Islamists celebrate violence and build a cult of suicide and death. "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," declared al Qaeda's Mualana Inyadullah after September11. Jews "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die," declared Hamas official Ismail Haniya on March 28 amidst a rash of suicide bombings.
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, there has been a great deal of analysis of the roots of Muslim rage. But to anybody familiar with the history of bourgeoisophobia, it is striking how comfortably Muslim rage meshes with traditional rage against meritocratic capitalism. The Islamist fanatic and the bourgeoisophobe hate the same things. They use the same words, they utter the same protests. In an essay in the New York Review of Books called "Occidentalism," Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma listed the traits that enrage al Qaeda and other Third World anti-Americans and anti-Westerners. First, they hate the city. Cities stand for commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, and sexual license. Second, they hate the mass media: advertising, television, pop music, and videos. Third, they hate science and technology--the progress of technical reason, mechanical efficiency, and material know-how. Fourth, they hate prudence, the desire to live safely rather than court death and heroically flirt with violence. Fifth, they hate liberty, the freedom extended even to mediocre people. Sixth, they despise the emancipation of women. As Margalit and Buruma note, "Female emancipation leads to bourgeois decadence." Women are supposed to stay home and breed heroic men. When women go out into the world, they deprive men of their manhood and weaken their virility.
If you put these six traits together, you have pretty much the pillars of meritocratic capitalist society, practiced most assertively in countries like America and Israel. Contemporary Muslim rage is further inflamed by two additional passions. One is a sense of sexual shame. A rite of passage for any bourgeoisophobe of this type is the youthful trip to America or to the West, where the writer is nearly seduced by the vulgar hedonism of capitalist life, but heroically spurns it. Sayyid Qutb, who is one of the intellectual heroes of the Islamic extremists, toured America between 1948 and 1950. He found a world of jazz, football, movies, cars, and people obsessed with lawn maintenance. It was a land, he wrote, "hollow and full of contradictions, defects and evils." At one point Qutb found himself at a church social. The disc jockey put on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." As Qutb wrote, "The dancing intensified. . . . The hall swarmed with legs. . . . Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love." This was at a church social. You can imagine how the September 11 al Qaeda hijackers must have felt during the visit they made to a Florida strip club shortly before going off to their purifying martyrdom.
The second inflaming passion is humiliation--humiliation caused by the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s, many Arab and Muslim nations tried to join this bourgeois world. They tried to modernize, and they failed. Some Arab countries continue to pursue the low and dirty modernizing path, continue to ape the sordid commercialists and even to accept the presence of American troops on Arabian soil. And this drives the hard-core Islamic bourgeoisophobes to even higher states of rage. As bin Laden himself notably put it, protesting the presence of American troops on Saudi land: "By God, Muslim women refuse to be defended by these American and Jewish prostitutes." The Islamist response to humiliation has been worship of the Muslim man of force. Islamist extremists romanticize the brutal warrior, just as the German bourgeoisophobes did, only the Islamists wear robes and clutch Korans. Like European and Japanese brutalists before them, the Islamists celebrate violence and build a cult of suicide and death. "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," declared al Qaeda's Mualana Inyadullah after September11. Jews "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die," declared Hamas official Ismail Haniya on March 28 amidst a rash of suicide bombings.
THE BRUTALIST bourgeoisophobia of the Islamic extremists is pretty straightforward. The attitudes of European etherealists are quite a bit more complicated. Europeans, of course, are bourgeois themselves, even more so in some ways than Americans and Israelis. What they distrust about America and Israel is that these countries represent a particularly aggressive and, to them, unbalanced strain of bourgeois ambition. No European would ever acknowledge the category, but America and Israel are heroic bourgeois nations. The Israelis are driven by passionate Zionism to build their homeland and make it rich and powerful. Americans are driven by our Puritan sense of calling, the deeply held belief that we Americans have a special mission to spread our way of life around the globe. It is precisely this heroic element of ordinary life that Europeans lack and distrust.
So the Europeans are all ambivalence. The British historian J.H. Plumb once declared that he loved America (and he was indeed a great defender of the United States), but even his admiration for the country "was entangled with anger, anxiety and at times flashes of hate." In his infuriatingly condescending and ultimately appreciative portrait "America," the French modernist Jean Baudrillard wrote, "America is powerful and original; America is violent and abominable. We should not seek to deny either of these aspects, nor reconcile them."
But Europeans do seek to deny them--because they simply can't remember what it's like to be imperially confident, to feel the forces of history blowing at one's back, to have heroic and even eschatological aspirations. Their passions have been quieted. Their intellectual guides have taught them that business is ignoble and striving is vulgar. Their history has caused them to renounce military valor (good thing, too) and to regard their own relative decline as a sign of greater maturity and wisdom. The European Union has a larger population than the United States, and a larger GDP--and its political class has tried to construct an institutional architecture that will enable it to rival America. But the imperial confidence is gone, along with the youthful sense of limitless possibility and the unselfconscious embrace of ordinary striving.
So their internal engine is calibrated differently. They look with disdain upon our work ethic (the average American works 350 hours a year--nearly nine weeks--longer than the average European). They look with disdain upon what they see as our lack of social services, our relatively small welfare state, which rewards mobility and effort but less gracefully cushions misfortune. They look with distaste upon our commercial culture, which favors the consumer but does not ease the rigors of competition for producers. And they look with fear upon our popular culture, which like some relentless machine seems designed to crush the local cultures that stand in its way.
To European bourgeoisophobes, America is the radioactive core of what Ignacio Ramonet, editor and publisher of Le Monde Diplomatique, recently called "The Other Axis of Evil" in a front-page essay. It controls the IMF and the World Bank, the institutions that reward the rich and punish the poor, Ramonet claimed. American institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute promulgate the ideology that justifies exploitation, he continued. The American military provides the muscle to force-feed economic liberalism to the world.
They look at us uncomprehendingly when our leaders declare a global assault on terror and evil. They see us as a mindless Rambo, a Mike Tyson with rippling muscles and no brain. Where the Islamists see us as a decadent slut, the European etherealists see us as a gun-slinging cowboy. The Islamists think we are too spoiled and comfortable, the Europeans think we are too violent and impulsive. Each side's view of us is a mix of Hollywood images (Marilyn Monroe for the Islamists, John Wayne for the Europeans), mass-media distortions, envy-driven stereotypes, and self-justifying delusions. But each side's vision springs from a deeper bourgeoisophobia--the prejudice that people who succeed in worldly affairs must be morally and intellectually backward. This article of faith governs the way even many sophisticated Europeans and Muslims react to us.
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, there was a widespread fear in Europe and in certain American circles that the United States would lash out violently and pointlessly. In fact, the United States has never behaved this way. It was slow to respond to Pearl Harbor; it was too timid in its responses to the USS Cole and other attacks. But to many Europeans, who must believe in our mindless immaturity in order to look themselves in the mirror each morning, it was obvious that the United States would shoot first and think afterwards.
These Europeans have assigned themselves the self-flattering role of being Athens to our Rome. That's what all the talk about coalition-building is about; the mindless American car dealer with the big guns should allow himself to be guided by the thoughtful European statesman, who is better able to think through the unintended consequences of any action, and to understand the darker complexities. Much European commentary about America since September 11 has had a zoological tone. The American beast did not know that he was vulnerable to attack (we Europeans have long understood this). The American was traumatized by this discovery. The American was overcompensating with an arms build-up that was pointless since, with his gigantisme militaire, he already had more weapons than he could ever need.
Furthermore, the American doesn't see the deeper causes of terrorism, the poverty, the hopelessness. America should really be spending more money on foreign aid (it's interesting that Europeans, who are supposed to be less materialistic than we are, inevitably think more money can solve the world's problems, while Americans tend to point to religion or ideas).
"What America never takes a moment to consider is that, despite its mightiness, it is a young country with much to learn. It had no real direct experience of the First and Second World Wars," declared a writer in the New Statesman, echoing a sentiment that one heard across the Continent as well. America, many Europeans feel, has no experience with the Red Brigades, the IRA, the Basque terrorists. Americans have no experience with Afghanistan. The dim boobies have no idea what sort of instability they are about to cause. They will go marching off as they always do, naively confident of themselves, yet inevitably unaware of the harm they shall do. Much of the reaction, in short, has been straight out of Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American." The hero of that book, Alden Pyle, is a well-intentioned, naive, earnest manchild who dreams of spreading democracy but only stirs up chaos. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," one of the characters says about him. Much of the European intellectual response to the American war has less to do with actual evidence than with figures from literature and the mass media. Sometimes you get the impression that the only people who took the images of Rambo, the Lone Ranger, and Superman seriously were the European bourgeoisophobes who needed cliches to hate.
When the etherealized bourgeoisophobe goes to practice politics, he instinctively dons the pinstripes of the diplomat. Diplomacy fits his temperament. It demands subtlety instead of clarity, self-control instead of power, patience instead of energy, nuance instead of restlessness. Diplomacy is highly formal, highly elitist, highly civilized. Most of all, it is complex. Complexity is catnip to the etherealized bourgeoisophobe. It paralyzes brute action, and justifies subtle and basically immobile gestures, calibrations, and modalities. Bourgeoisophobes have a simple-minded faith that whatever the problem is, the solution requires complexity. Any decisive effort to change the status quo--to topple Saddam, to give up on Arafat, to foment democracy in the Arab world--will only make things worse.
We Americans have our own bourgeoisophobes, of course. If I pulled from my shelves all the books about the moral backwardness of the enterprising middle classes, I could stack them to the ceiling. I could start with the works of the Transcendentalists, then move through Dreiser, Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis. Then we could skim swiftly through all the books that bemoan the moral, cultural, and intellectual vapidity of suburbanites, students, middle managers, and middle Americans: "Babbitt," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," "The Souls of Black Folk," "The Lonely Crowd," "The Organization Man," "The Catcher in the Rye," "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," "The Affluent Society," "Death of a Salesman," "Soul on Ice," "The Culture of Narcissism," "Habits of the Heart," "The Closing of the American Mind," "Earth in the Balance," "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," "Jihad vs. McWorld," just about every word ever written by Kevin Phillips and Michael Moore, and just about every novel of the last quarter century, from "Rabbit is Rich" through "The Corrections." It's a Mississippi flood of pessimism. As Catherine Jurca recently wrote in "White
Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel," "As a body of work, the suburban novel asserts that one unhappy family is a lot like the next, and there is no such thing as a happy family."
The pessimism falls into several categories. There is straightforward, left-wing bourgeoisophobia from writers who think commercial culture has ravaged our souls. Then there is the right-wing variant that says it has made us spiritually flat, and so turned us into comfort-loving Last Men. Then there is the conservative pessimism that purports to be a defense of the heroic bourgeois culture America embodies while actually showing little faith in it. Writers of this school argue that the solid capitalist values America once possessed have been corrupted by intellectual currents coming out of the universities--as if the meritocratic capitalist virtues were such delicate flowers that they could be dissolved by the acid influence of Paul de Man.
It all adds up to a lot of dark foreboding, and after September 11, it doesn't look that impressive. The events of the past several months have cast doubt on a century of mostly bourgeoisophobe cultural pessimism. Somehow the firemen in New York and the passengers on Flight 93 behaved like heroes even though they no doubt lived in bourgeois homes, liked Oprah, shopped at Wal-Mart, watched MTV, enjoyed their Barcaloungers, and occasionally glanced through Playboy. Even more than that, it has become abundantly clear since September 11 that America has ascended to unprecedented economic and military heights, and it really is not easy to explain how a country so corrupt to the core can remain for so long so apparently successful on the surface. If we're so rotten, how can we be so great?
It could be, as the bourgeoisophobes say, that America thrives because it is spiritually stunted. It's hard to know, since most of us lack the soul-o-meter by which the cultural pessimists apparently measure the depth of other people's souls. But we do know that despite the alleged savagery, decadence, and materialism of American life, Americans still continue to react to events in ways that suggest there is more to this country than "Survivor," Self magazine, and T.G.I. Friday's.
Confronted with the events of September 11, Americans have not sought to retreat as soon as possible to the easy comfort of their great-rooms (on the contrary, it's been others around the world who have sought to close the parenthesis on these events). President Bush, a man derided as a typical philistine cowboy, has framed the challenge in the most ambitious possible terms: as a moral confrontation with an Axis of Evil. He has chosen the most arduous course. And the American people have supported him, embraced his vision every step of the way--even the people who fiercely opposed his election.
This is not the predictable reaction of a decadent, commercial people. This is not the reaction you would have predicted if you had based your knowledge of America on the extensive literature of cultural decline. Nor would you have been able to predict the American reaction to recent events in the Middle East, which also differs markedly from the European one. Just as the French anti-globalist activist Jose Bove, heretofore most famous for smashing up a McDonald's, senses that he has something in common with Yasser Arafat (whom he visited in Ramallah on March 31), most Americans sense that they have something in common with Israel in this fight. Most Americans can see the difference between nihilistic terrorism and a democracy trying fitfully to defend itself. And most Americans seem willing to defend the principles that are at stake here, even in the face of global criticism and obloquy. In this, as in so much else, George Bush reflects the meritocratic capitalist culture of which he is a product. While the rest of the world was lost in a moral fog, going on about the "cycle of violence" as if bombs set themselves off and the language of human agency and moral judgment didn't apply, the Bush administration, by and large, has been clear.
IN THIS and many other aspects of the war on terrorism, the American leaders and the American people have been stubborn and steadfast. Just as the American people patiently persevered through a century of fighting fascism and communism, there is every sign they will patiently persevere in the conflict against terrorism, which is really a struggle against people who despise our way of life.
Maybe the bourgeoisophobes were wrong from the first. Maybe they were wrong to think that 90 percent of humanity is mad to seek money. Maybe they were wrong to think that wealth inevitably corrupts. Maybe they were wrong to regard themselves as the spiritual superiors of middle-class bankers, lawyers, and traders. Maybe they were wrong to think that America is predominantly about gain and the bitch-goddess success. Maybe they were wrong to think that power and wealth are a sign of spiritual stuntedness. Maybe they were wrong to treasure the ecstatic gestures of rebellion, martyrdom, and liberation over the deeper satisfactions of ordinary life.
And if they weren't wrong, how does one explain the fact that almost all their predictions turned out to be false? For two centuries America has been on the verge of exhaustion or collapse, but it never has been exhausted or collapsed. For two centuries capitalism has been in crisis, but it never has succumbed. For two centuries the youth/the artists/the workers/the oppressed minorities were going to overthrow the staid conformism of the suburbs, but in the end they never did. Instead they moved to the suburbs and found happiness there.
For two centuries there has been this relentless pattern. Some new bourgeoisophobe movement or figure emerges--Lenin, Hitler, Sartre, Che Guevara, Woodstock, the Sandinistas, Arafat. The new movement is embraced. It is romanticized. It is heralded as the wave of the future. But then it collapses, and the never-finally-disillusioned bourgeoisophobes go off in search of the next anti-bourgeois movement that will inspire the next chapter in their ever-disappointed Perils of Pauline journey.
Perhaps, on the other hand, September 11 will cause more Americans to come to the stunning and revolutionary conclusion that we are right to live the way we do, to be the way we are. Maybe it is now time to put intellectual meat on the bones of our instinctive pride, to acknowledge that the American way of life is not only successful, but also character-building. It inculcates virtues that account for American
success: a certain ability to see problems clearly, to react to setbacks energetically, to accomplish the essential tasks, to use force without succumbing to savagery. Perhaps ordinary American life mobilizes individual initiative, and the highest, not just the crassest aspirations. Maybe Baudrillard, that infuriatingly appreciative Frenchman, had it right when he wrote about America, "We [Europeans] philosophize about a whole host of things, but it is here that they take shape. . . . It is the American mode of life, that we judge naive or devoid of culture, that gives us the completed picture of the object of our values."
Because the striking thing is that, for all their contempt, the bourgeoisophobes cannot ignore us. They can't just dismiss us with a wave and get on with their lives. The entire Arab world, and much of the rest of the world, is obsessed with Israel. Many people in many lands define themselves in opposition to the United States. This is because deep down they know that we possess a vitality that is impressive. The Europeans regard us as simplistic cowboys, and in a backhanded way they are acknowledging the pioneering spirit that motivates America--the heroic spirit that they, in the comfort of their welfare states, lack. The Islamic extremists regard us as lascivious hedonists, and in a backhanded way they are acknowledging both our freedom and our happiness.
Maybe in their hatred we can better discern our strengths. Because if the tide of conflict is rising, then we had better be able to articulate, not least to ourselves, who we are, why we arouse such passions, and why we are absolutely right to defend ourselves.
hi clitoris chopper. you fucking animal. i hate you you pull start camel jockey.Towel heads! Camel Jockeys! Sand niggaz! Ackmids,
Abeebs, Carpet Flyers, Dune coons, Rag Heads,
Sand scratchers, Habeebs, Abba-Dabbas, Camel-Humpers, Demi-niggaz,
Fig-Gobblers, Hucka-luckas (hucka hlacka ghalcka ghugh), Lefties (If you steal, you lose the right hand so...)
Ocnods, Pull-Start-ables (imagine pull starting Ossama's dirty rag like a Briggs and Stratton),
Roach-Ranchers (habibs cant kill roaches by a tenant of Is-slum),
Sand Moolies............
Take home a bucket from KFC. Kabul fried chumps.
Abra ca dabra! Shazam!
Yeah, it's also good to pay attention to spelling. That last word is spelled `g-r-a-m-m-a-r'.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I'll try to explain.
If the Universe is an ever expanding "sphere", then what is making it infinite?
Nothing. It's not infinite, it's finite.
You are correct that the universe has an outer sphere, however, this is not a physical boundary, it's determined by the speed of light and the age of the universe. According to Einstein nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So, if the universe is 16 billion years old, then the universe has a radius of 16 billion light years. So, nothing can pass through the border, since the border is defined by the fastest traveling thing (i.e. light).
IIRC there are observations or theories that the universe is slowing it's expansion due to the fact that matter attracts matter.
Actually, the lastest observations indicate that the expansion is speeding up rather than slowing down.
Besides that, it is clear that the matter in the universe is not expanding at the speed of light (gravity slows it down, and matter can't travel at light speed in the first place), so photons have overtaken the farthest matter already anyway.
Again, the border of the universe is not determined by matter, but by photons.
Hope that didn't confuse matters too much...
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
as Laplace put it, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese
For the non-french speaking, I believe this translates to:
"Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis"
This was in reply to Napoleons rebuttal of his theory on Celestial Mechanics for failing to mention God in his calculations.
However, I strongly suspect Monseur Laplace wishes to retract that statement now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Thanks, I liked that explanation. :)
/. describing that information has been moved faster than light (think it was something about fiddeling with photons or some thingy about matter), ie. instantaneous data transfer. What is probably keeping the result of that discovery from creating a loop-hole in the logic that light is the absolute maximum speed at which matter can never exceed, is the fact that matter of light were components in this data transfer. Thus this finding would not allow anything to travel past the border of the universe.
For now, perhaps I should add, as new discoveries might bring forth new theories
Anyway, your description of the width- and consequently the border of the universe being the distance light has traveled since the big blast, is something I find as a simple end elegant explanation to this problem, which can easily be conveyed to others.
Not too long ago (IIRC) there was a story on
For the sake of modern science I hope "Star-Trek Warp" stuff thingies won't be realizable as that would make rather a few assumpions of the universe go straight out the window.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Actually, if you read up on the creationist's theory (vs the evolutionary theory), as far as I am concerned, the creationist theory does hold some water
The creationists don't *have* a theory. A theory has to have evidence, and it has to be refutable. Saying "God did it!" fails on both counts.
especially about the origin of the universe or about evolution, do throngs of religious nuts come out of the woodwork to give their crackpot, factless reasons why it can't be so?
Are religious people so insecure in their beliefs that they must attack every scientific fact that in any way refutes what they believe and call it B.S.? I suppose they feel compelled to do this to keep the delusion going.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
What a freak you are. Posting anonymously at that. I cant believe you are telling me that Jesus is gay. Hope you like enternity in hell.
And Im sure the people that live at the addresses that you posted above appreciate all the phone calls and letters, because I have moved since then. Sorry. BTW, what college did I attend?
-- Only a developer would see the 'Go to' part of "Go to Hell" as the problem.
Hi, I used to read about Astronomy and Physics some 5 years ago.. but becuase of some unavoidable circumstances i had to shift my field to Software... but now i want to again go back to my origins... so reqd desperate help... can anyone guide about the latest theory about Origin of Universe... I have already gone through some articles and books but all those were some 3-4 years old or more... and i want some latest stuff.. can you help by sending some links or otherwise... here or my mail deepak_ahu@yahoo.com Thanks ad Regards, Deepak