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Vatican Debates Possibility of Alien Life
Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference on alien life, the discovery of which would have profound implications for the Catholic Church. For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church. Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God 'made man in his own image' and Jesus Christ's role as savior would be confused; would other worlds have their own Christ-figures, or would Earth's Christ be universal? Just as the Church eventually made accommodations after Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and when it belatedly accepted the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution, Catholic leaders say that alien life can be aligned with the Bible's teachings. 'Just as a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God,' says Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organizers of the conference. Others do not agree. 'If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations,' says Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist. 'The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism.'"
The hypothesis that no deity of any kind exists solves the problem in an unbeatably elegant fashion.
We need money to build an interstellar cruiser. Now, this space ship will be able to travel through a wormhole and deliver the message and guh-glory of Jesus Christ to those godless aliens.
S-send your money now. Amen.
or is this just a "cover our own backs" maneuver to avoid what happened with Galileo, Copernicus and others? Those cases weren't exactly the best publicity they've had.
This is blinging
Normal folks think of aliens as being extraterrestrial. In this case, it's probably a study of non-Catholics.
So the bullshitters have changed their story after it's shown to be implausible. It's not like they had much choice. People are leaving that organization in droves.
God is an alien - no doubt - cause no human has laid eyes upon him. That should stop the debate.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
It is likely that there are aliens. There are so many infinite universes and planets and solar systems that there must be other intelligent life. We don't know for sure if they exist, and vice versa. My thoughts are that they are likely superior to us. If they have UFOs and can travel millions of light years to find us, they probably have superior technology. But, being ignorant, conceited homo sapiens, most of us would think of them as inferior beings (think Linux gurus like Eric S. Raymond). We probably shouldn't refer to them as aliens - they would probably consider us aliens. Some of us would be smart enough to recognize them as normal, thinking, homosexual, living beings. Who knows? They may look just like us. They may fuck like us. Or they may be like the green aliens many of us draw and masturbate about with tentacle hentai. No one knows the facts, but there is at least a strong chance that other lifeforms exist out there. The usual argument for the non-existence of alien life is that none have openly contacted us here on Earth.
Advanced civilizations might have good reasons for not doing so, or, as could happen with us, they may have reached a point where they gave up on space exploration. If so, they would have ceased to exist once their parent star evolved and died. UFO's and eyewitness testimony notwithstanding, there is no positive evidence that the Earth is being visited, or has been visited, by intelligent extra-terrestrial aliens. Rob Malda is an alien, so the point is moot. Now, granted, he's a cocksucker alien nullo who takes it in the arse every chance he gets, but the point stands.
This is a commonly used theme for science fiction because life elsewhere in the universe is strongly probable. Yes there are. There's like 300 million galaxies out there. We are not alone. One important thing to consider is the vast distances between the stars. Even if there were an intelligent technical culture of organisms in our own Milky Way galaxy, it would take them many years traveling at the speed of light to get to us. By the time they arrived here their own home planet would have aged so much that they would not have any relatives they could remember when they returned.
About the only way we could be visited by extra-terrestrial beings is if they had the ability to manipulate both time and space. And the way to do that is with quantum physics. Then, maybe, our three dimensional world could be found among the million and traversed by going through the other dimensions. The current Superstring Theory suggests that there needs to be 10 dimensions plus time - the eleventh dimension.
Going to get modded down for this, but if you believe anything the Vatican/Bible says your fucking stupid. Lets listen to the religion who has killed millions of innocent people just because they want to think differently; the same people who have detested the thought of non-human life for centuries.
George Carlin puts this best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o
The pope needs to get kicked in the balls, hard. There is no man floating up in a cloud somewhere...and even if there was, he's a bloody moron. Leave this stuff for the pros, and go back to your worldwide business.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Yep, here you go, breaking news if you didn't watch CNN last night. Instead of reading the article, you can watch the youtube video for this story here. Or you can read iReport and get the story here.
Either way, remember, slashdot is where you'll get yesterday's tabloid news today.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Vatican, the UN and the USAF already has been in contact with the aliens; this conference is just to prep the world for the breaking news.
If you don't believe me, check out V on ABC (in the USA)
ET phone Rome.
The catholic church could deal with the multiple species thing where other species look different, from other planets, by simple acknowledge that God has many forms and can take the form of many different species which represents different aspects and characteristics of god. God can be seen as life itself , the consciouisness and soul in all living things, the world arises from this infinite consciousness from its infinite potential to create reality. So in a sense we are living in our own collective dream. The world as such reflects our own attitudes, since we are god, however we have forgotten much of who we are as god, the world as well does not display the true nature of god, which is infinite love, kindness and compassion and which desires to see no being suffer.
Current Catholic theology is the result of about 1500 years where some of the most powerful minds of occident contributed to build a quite solid intellectual building. It might be based on nonsenses but still it's internal coherence and its resistance to foreign attacks is quite good.
"extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God 'made man in his own image'"
Surely it would be a problem for those too literalist (the ones that really believe the universe was built in six days, Noah's ark, Metusellah living 600 years, etc.) but for Catholics, God's image has nothing to be with having two arms or five and two heads or breathing liquid methane; it's about self identity and the thought of our own transcendence so probably any intelligent alien (non self-concious non-intelligent alien life pose no problem) would still fit the definition.
"Jesus Christ's role as savior would be confused"
Minor problem: Rome would say that each intelligent species would take its own path towards or against salvation and that's all. Regarding the heaven chores (angels and all that stuff) they are both real things and methapores of the relationship with divinity and you are done.
"would other worlds have their own Christ-figures, or would Earth's Christ be universal?"
Both stanzas are true at the same time. Literally that would be no problem for Catholic church, after all its God is one and three at the same time; logically it's still not a big problem: the path to redemption (or the lack of) would be tied to the local History of those aliens; they either don't need redeption (rationally that could be the case, of course I don't think Rome would accept that; they would be out of job), or they found their own path or they came to know about us so they can learn about Christ and share our own redemption (they know *now* that Christ did die for them to so their souls can be saved etc.).
"says Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer "
Of course, it had to be a Jesuit. Quite clever folks, those Jesuits.
"The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism"
Yes. But since God is uber-everything (almighty, omniscient...) it's easy to acomodate the idea that there are a lot of different ways for a mere mortal to be made in God's image (and even real reincarnations might be accepted by Catholics if aliens are involved; they'd just say that it's no "real" incarnation but kind of larval state: just as a worm and a butterfly seem very different but they still are the same individual you might incarnate on an alien or the other way around and still being accepted as being the same individual -that wouldn't be too hard a problem for Catholics: Christ showed us there was live beyond human death, etc.).
They're going to bring the roof down on their own heads with that completely unnecessary debate. They could easily say "there is no intelligent alien life" and keep their privileges, possibly forever. Alien life is as elusive as the christian god. What do they do instead? They point out inconsistencies in their own story. Idiots.
His noodley appendages touch ALL planets
Why are they wasting time with this, do they know something the general pubic hasn't been told yet?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've encountered people who think that the discovery of intelligent alien life would completely upset the apple cart of Christianity, "proving" that it was all a bunch of hogwash. But it wouldn't. There's nothing anywhere in Genesis that says that there are no other "people", and it's not as if this would be the first time that a New World was discovered. To be sure, there'd be some challenging theological questions to wrestle with, such as whether the Original Sin of Eve tainted their world, or some ancestor of theirs did it for them, but most adherents don't really care about that stuff: they just believe.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"Just as a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God."
I am agnostic, and I have no problem with this line of reasoning. The presence of aliens neither proves nor disproves the existence of God, from a philosophical point of view. The 'smart' religion is the adaptable one. If you want to keep your followers and expand your base, you need to keep your belief systems up-to-date. This is a very smart thing for the Catholic church to do. Now if they could just get over their hatred of homosexuals...
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
The Catholics should start with dolphins, who are arguably as intelligent as humans, but not tool users, and alien in their thought processes and communications mode. Frankly chimps are close enough to at least spark a debate.
And what of lawyers and politicians? Do they *have* souls? Is it possible?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Purge the xenos, for the glory of the Emperor!
If you look back at the history of Christian debate on this, it divides into two camps. There are those that believe that it is human destiny to bring salvation to the aliens, and those who believe in multiple incarnations
What about the possibility that alien species have not Fallen or suffered from Original Sin?
It's been 425 years since Bruno argued in De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi (Italian; use Google translate) that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable stars, with countless planets around them, some containing life.
He was pretty far ahead of his time... far enough ahead that in 1600 the Church had him burned at the stake. Good to see they're getting round to considering his ideas, albeit a little bit belatedly.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
If they tought that God were almighty and everywhere, they could still think that, just put up several orders of magnitude how much powerful must be. And, of course, stop thinking on it as an human form.
Or go to Clarke's law for religion, any sufficiently powerful entity is indistinguishable from God and redefine that we had just one, not "the" god in universal scale.
Or just think.
Religion is a good tool, but dont have to be the truth.
For your sensitivity to my religion. Please know how much your respect is appreciated.
'Cause that would seem to be an important preliminary to your definition of science?
The problem: existence is the thing that *everything that *exists has in common, and scientific articulation of its meaning would require a comparison between the things that do and don't exist. Which comparison it cannot make, because as you rightly point out scientific inquiry cannot be made into non-existent things.
btw the 'which' in "things which don't exist" is a funny word misusage in this context -- do you see why?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
This is one of the fundamental problems with modern religions.
When religion and scientific evidence are in direct conflict with each other, enlightened people accept the scientific evidence. Enlightened religious people accept the scientific evidence and try to find ways to resolve it so that their religion remains logically consistent. (Yes, sometimes jumping through hoops to do so, but at least they don't look at scientists as some kind of evil tricksters or conspirators.)
The dumb ones, though, continue to argue against the scientific evidence not because of any particular keen insight, but because of what they think they know about an invisible guy who reigns supreme and, for the most part, what a two-thousand-year-old book that was written in an ancient language by ancient people and interpreted through various political and theological lenses says.
And, of course, most modern religions (and in particular, most modern people pushing it) are out there trying to convince people that if you question their interpretation of the "facts," that you'll burn in hell for eternity.
The church shouldn't even be having this argument. Science points towards an almost certainty of intelligent alien life out there, even if we never meet it face-to-face. They need to resign themselves to the fact that it exists, and adjust their thought accordingly. A biblical reference to the "four corners of the earth" doesn't mean that the earth literally has four corners (i.e. it's flat). A biblical reference to God making man in his own image doesn't mean that the god they worship literally looks like we do.
Duh.
As for the whole Christ thing, well, I'm guessing that alien cultures probably have their own religions, and some of them are probably even more interesting than ours. If we ever do have the pleasure of meeting some of them, we'll probably do what we've done throughout our entire history of existence. Figure out some way to meld them together to make ourselves feel better about ourselves and go on with life.
For all the so called negative press religion gets, it sure seems to be on the increase. Make of that what you will.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So, Vatican has been watching V on HULU lately?
... we're supposed to treat these clowns with respect and allow their weird Sunday-morning social clubs to have tax-exempt status in the US?
And the Catholics are supposed to be the *smart* ones, too!
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
...this could be the theological equivalent of executing a proof, thinking you've got it right, only to wind up dividing by zero. Oops. Let's just review those first equations again...
On the other hand, though, they could easily explain it away by saying only humans have souls, and therefore aliens are really just demons/not living or some other gibberish like that. It wouldn't be the first time religion has dehumanized/demonized (meh, really don't have any better terms than those right now) individuals, groups (social, religious and ethnic populations), and ideas, simply because they conflicted with the Church doctrine.
As long as whatever they decide doesn't include a Xenu figure, they'll leave the illustrious status of "Most despicable 'religion' in the world," to those who deserve it.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
...That I read the title as "Vulcan Debates Possibility of Alien Life?"
As a protestant, you, your pope, and all his cardinals can all fuck off.
Argh! Can't... find... anything... to... say... that's... more... funny... than what they're already saying!
The holy book heads' battle with science a.k.a. lucency a.k.a. anti-brainwash a.k.a. non-bullshit is much akin to a talking monkey trying to explain the passing of seasons as somehow being ultimately tied to the taste of bananas.
They're just so funny!
Except, of course, when they go postal with the crusading, and the suicide bombing, and the child molestation, and the... Ah well, maybe it's not so funny after all...
'The multiple incarnations is a heresy in Catholicism.'
For me, as for many aliens in this galaxy too, it is the Monotheism itself recognized as a most obscure heresy, catholicism included.
There you are, staring at me again.
I wonder what the writer's credentials REALLY are. If you do as little as attend a few Sunday School classes, you will quickly find out that God making man in his own image means that he made him ORIGNALLY perfect and holy.
Where is this guy getting off with such a shallow interpretation, that it is a physical "image?" Either he is clueless about the conventional interpretation that just about everyone takes, or he knows and is poisoning the well by utilizing an uncommon interpretation that he is implying to be common because the readers may not know any better.
Fiction enthusiasts finally discuss the staple of science fiction. Church and science could be reunited again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I watched that a few days ago, and one of the concluding points was interesting.. the archbishop of Nigeria mentioned that the other side (Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens) failed to show that the Catholic church is -not- a force for good in the world.
And he's right.. the two gentlemen merely showed that members of that church have done wrong - in the distant past, the recent past, and in current times (yea olde pope thinking condoms are evil and all that) - and are not a force for good in the world. But they have not shown that the Catholic church, as an institution, is not a force for good in the world.
Of course, therein also lies the catch... you -can't- prove that the Catholic church as an institution is not a force for good in the world if all of its mistakes can be written off as the wrongdoings of its members. And therein lies also the rebuttal.. if only its members can do wrong, then only its members can do good.
"Is the Catholic church a force for good in the world?", then, is a question that simply has no answer.
The question should have been about specific elements within the Catholic church, or its constituency as a whole, and not whether they're good or not, but whether they're good or evil ('not good' could, after all, mean that they're just.. not good.. not evil, but not good either).
Stephen and Christopher do answer -that- question, just as the other side argues for their take on that question, and it is worth watching. Although it is entirely too short, the audience's questions are glossed over (in part due to the time constraints - and it should be said that the audience sure knows how to make their question long-winded, by thanking the speakers, telling them their personal stories, blabla) and it's certainly not meant to be an in-depth debate. Unfortunate.
The Catholics need not confront alien life issues at all. The idea that God's truth had to be delivered to the population of this world in such a way that they could understand and make use of it is sufficient. Can any of us imagine a Holy book being delivered two thousand years ago that babbled about relativity, the Higg"s Boson or multi dimensional universes?
We can trust that the message has been delivered to others in a format that they can both understand and make use of.
If you look at history, the real debate will be what sorts of side dishes to serve with them.
I am Italian and I can clearly remember some exponent of a Vatican "newspaper" (José Gabriel Funes, Osservatore Romano) officially stating that the existence of extraterrestrials does not go against God/Religion, even if there are no proofs of alien's existence. As if he was plenty of proofs about God's existence...
There is nothing to debate...
it was proved multiple times that live in the universe exists, it's just that the one we've found is bacteria-like.
still, life.
can't they actually find something to do insead of finding something to discuss?
Of course, the aliens will have their own god, who is, like our god, the only god in the universe, but not the same god. This paradox can only be solved in one way: good old-fashioned interstellar war.
assignment != equality != identity
Any evidence that the Earth moved. He did try to use his theory of tides to demonstrate that the Earth moved, too bad it was wrong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Galileo.2C_Kepler_and_theories_of_tides Of course if you have Newtonian Mechanics, ability to observe stellar parallax, or even a Foucault pendulum it becomes pretty obvious that the Earth moves but he didn't have any of that.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Whether intelligent societies elsewhere in the universe developed religions comparably to how we did is perhaps an interesting question. Trying to apply some of our historical myths to beings who evolved completely independently from ourselves is just nonsense.
I rather like the perspective that Answers in Genesis takes about the search for alien life (see article):
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v4/n4/search-alien-life
Of course regardless of my belief, or anyone's lack of belief, what is will be and the truth will set you free.
The whole point is moot anyway until life is discovered on other planets. Does the Vatican just think that we're close to that discovery? Why debate something that is still hypothetical when making a decision now will affect absolutely nothing.
The biggest question for me is: Why now? Is there something they know and therefore have to debate before it is made being public to the world? because if there would be such news it would be in the best interest for 'the church' to first have a believable reaction/interpretation of the bible before such news is made public, as it concerns a pretty big group of humans which believe in such fictional work as the bible. And ofcourse those lemmings (uh i mean people) would also maybe wonder about their faith, which can result in panic and mayhem if it isn't dealt with correctly..
If the Vatican really has a sudden outbreak of open-mindedness I strongly insist we settle the issue of evolution first!
Since he has no body, so what is meant by "created in his image" is more to do with our sentience, consciousness and knowledge of good and evil. This is how we are like him. Kind of like if we were to create a sentient program, who is "in our image" but looks like a computer.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
You know a lot of critics of the church like to hold Brunu up as an example of Catholic badness, but, the guy was a dick. When he wrote what he wrote, he wasn't just doing it to be some sort of a scientist, he was playing politics and trying to dick with the Pope. You don't dick with the Pope, or you get burned, that's the deal.
As it is, historically, it seems that the farther people get removed from the Catholic church, the more people get killed. Let's say, sure, that the Catholics killed a couple of dudes in the Inquisition. Cry me a river. But then, you get Protestants slaughtering people left and right in all the holy wars that followed, that they started, then, come the 19th century, you start to see the completely secular, and godless, communists, socialists and nazis all as supremely liberal groups, and they slaughtered people like ants.
This is my sig.
its most likely that god created the big bang. So whether or not there is alien life, God knows. But earth and our solar system is a darn special place. Gas giants at the out side a happy shining star. earth with a good sized moon. "God created man in his own image" I think the general perspective is way to three dimensional. We are Aware of Gods creation and can use, explore, interact, dream about that. Dolphin's live in life bubbles called oceans. So what if there was an Ugly alien with eyes on tentacles hiking around in the grand canyons and thinks "WOW amazing".
Looking at the present bishop of Rome tells us aliens are among us.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
We have probably all the possible theories pro and con what our human mind can come up with in our current context - and motivated with all varieties of ideological, political, etc. interests.
The honest answer is that we just simply do not KNOW.
If those "brother extraterrestrials" turn out to be turban-wrapped sand aliens, shall we "Salaam" them or "Deus vult!" them, Your Holiness?
Christians, please be aware that the intergalactic god, Zul-9 is the "one and only God". The alien crusaders are coming to spread the Word of the Great God Zul-9, and they want your churches, cathedrals and your women.
And if you silly Christians want "proof" that Zul-9 is the only God, then you can read it for yourself in the Biblio Galactica -- where it's written in clear, concise Zorgox "There is no God but Zul-9. All other gods are His sexual playthings -- until he eats them like crumpets with his afternoon tea."
Any evidence that the Cathoilc church attempts to put forward in an effort to discredit Zul-9 are words of the Devil (The evil "Byxaplaximax") and are but mere examples of obfuscation used by the Forces of Evil to cloud the One True Word of Zul-9. (It is common knowledge that the entire Bible was penned by an incredibly drunk Byxaplaximax in a weak effort to stifle Zul-9.)
To any Catholics who suddenly believe that their god may have created life elsewhere in the Universe, Zul-9 has proclaimed the following words: "Jesus H. Christ, stop trying to change up your stodgy little screed to encompass new scientific data which clearly disproves your stodgy little screed. There is no god but me, and you should know that because I've already buggered and devoured your god and he needed salt." (From the Book of the Book of St. Pogax-7).
And if there are any Catholics who cling to their religion in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they are uneducated monkeys, Zul-9 would like to remind these unbelievers that they have to "have faith".
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The aliens that you are questioning the existence of, are the gods that are in the books you so value...
They're called "angels" -- Cherubim, Seraphim, and the like.
At least some of them appear to have non-physical bodies, and some seem to have bodies that morph between the physical and non-physical at will. It's also unclear if they live on this planet, perhaps in a different dimension, or "out there". It's also somewhat unclear what their relationship is with the Creator and/or Redeemer.
What is clear (from a straight-forward reading of the Bible, that is) is that they are created beings, like humans, maybe even kin enough to copulate with humans and produce recognizably human, albeit "god-like", offspring, but that they are distinct from humankind. Some seem to be friendly toward humankind; some appear bent on the destruction of humankind.
Perhaps, but that is hardly proof of anything supernatural. It just means there are limits to our understanding.
If the natural had a beginning (e.g., the Big Bang), then where did the natural come from? The natural cannot cause the natural, i.e., it can't be be elephants all the way down. At some point you need need a non-natural ("supernatural") cause: supernatural meaning outside of Nature, outside of the current space and time system that we have (for both space and time were created in the Big Bang).
To put it another way: every effect must have a cause, just like one domino must have a domino before it that pushes it over. If you don't have a first domino, you can't have a second domino; if you don't have a second you can't have a third; if you don't have a third ....
This "first domino", or uncaused cause, is what is generally referred to as God (at least by Catholics). This is all covered by Aquinas.
I fail to see how science and Catholicism disagree. Occam of "Occam's Razor" fame was an 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar. Also if Copernicus (a Polish cleric), Galileo, and Newton can believe in God, I don't see why I can't. The Big Bang was also first thought of by Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest.
Maybe it's because I was raised Catholic, but I can't see how the question of what happens to religion if/when we discover intelligent alien life to be that funny... darn interesting maybe... but funny? Surely there's some good scifi out there about this very issue.
-chris
Robert Langdon If anyone can get to the bottom of this conspiracy, it's gotta be him! ;)
Bark less. Wag more.
I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.
For the love of God, NASA's little 15 billion dollars a year has kept some of the best and brightest minds engaged, added immeasurably to the American reputation around the globe. Let's GO and get these guys the funding that they have earned. Let's bring back JIMO, let's get nuclear propulsion programs working. Lets get Constellation rolling and get people to asteroids, to Mars, and to space. Let's do ALL of it.
If we have the Feds printing currency, we may as well spend it on something humanity can remember for a thousand years to come. Let history say, Americans lead the way into space.
LET'S GO.
This is my sig.
we would have to invent him.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
To paraphrase your argument: "Everything must have a cause except the thing that doesn't need a cause."
1) Why are you satisfied by calling the uncaused cause God? Why can't you define the Universe to include the uncaused cause and accept that not all effects have identifiable causes?
2) If you do decide to call the uncaused cause God, how do you jump from that to believing that God cares about you and listens to your prayers? Wouldn't that be like the flames of a forest fire praying to the lightning bolt that started the fire? Is the lightning bolt watching over His creation and deciding which flames get a happy afterlife?
3) Mathematically, you can have a function with periodic boundaries that depends only on itself without a beginning or end. If the Universe is mathematical and time is a characteristic of the Universe (not a supernatural clock existing outside the Universe), then the Universe could exist in a self-consistent state without any need for a beginning. Time is an illusion experienced by hunks of matter present within the Universe. The Universe, including all of time and all possible states, simply exists.
4) If you argue that what I have just describe as the Universe is actually God, then we need to have a long discussion about Baptism, Communion, Marriage, Sin, Heaven, and Hell.
'Just as a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God,' says Father Jose Funes.
Basically the Vatican is setting us up for interstellar war before such a thing is even possible. It's going to be hard to convince those in the mothership that we're actually God's chosen creatures and they should be our pets.
Colossians 1 19,20
"For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him(Jesus),through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say,whether things on earth or things in HEAVEN."
In the Greek it is interesting that "HEAVEN" is plural...
OK, sorry to break up the church bashing (always popular here), but the article is way off base. Hint: when you see a badly photoshoped image of the Pope together with the creature from Alien, you're probably not in the science section any more.
I know people who attended (I'm also an astronomer myself, although I don't do biology) and it was a scientific astrobiology conference, not a theology conference and the topic was on the scientific possibilities and conditions of life on other planets. That's life, mind you, not [necessarily] intelligent life.
The conference, which ended about a week ago, was organized as part of the International Year of Astronomy and was sponsored by the Vatican Observatory which is a small, but well-respected, astronomical research center. To imply that the Vatican has become obsessed with extra-terrestrials because they hosted a scientific conference is just a gross distortion of reality.
When my children reached the age of firmly questioning Santa's existence, I took each aside and told them that parts of the Santa story are fiction and parts are quite real. There is no reindeer, sleigh, north pole, ... and yet "he" sees you when you're sleeping and knows what you want and gifts really do arrive under the tree almost simultaneously around the globe! I then told them that WE are Santa Claus and I welcomed them to the club. "Remember: Don't spoil it for the little ones."
So if we are the hands of Santa Claus, might it not also be true that we are the hands of a creator? "Santa Claus's will" is sufficiently encoded in a few myths and jaunty songs. Is "God's will" sufficiently encoded in physics and genetics? E=MC2 and "survival of the fittest" might make nice jingles.
Careful, though, this line of thought could lead a thinking person to believe that the awakening in the hereafter will involve a lesson from a benevolent father. Don't spoil it for the little ones.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
The fundamental *ists with their *isms all tell us the path to salvation.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
let's get HUMANS walking on Mars and on the asteroids and on Titan and Europa...
Europa? But we're supposed to attempt no landings there!
~Philly
Slashdot is here for nerds to discuss the news. There are no reporters, just links to others' works.
Does it mean Vatican will get sued for copyright violations and must give up all their pirates domains and ill gotten wills?
This sort of debate reminds me of the stories of C.S. Lewis about Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia. Remember, in The Last Battle that Aslan transformed into something else and thruout the stories Aslan was mentioned to have another name (the implication being Jesus) in our world. Anything is possible for an omnipotent nearly omniscient being I suppose (if there is one)
. . .this is modded insightful when it's clearly flamebait. You may have a valid point, but calling Catholics stupid clowns is far from a logical argument and does nothing to support your conclusion that they shouldn't be tax exempt. Typical Dawkins thinking: logic only matters when dealing with science. Science was an unknown concept (it's a method of discovering knowledge, btw, not a book of answers) to Aristotle yet he considered many philosophical questions utilizing logic. Science likewise employs logic, it's dependent on it, but logic is in no way dependent on science. So regardless of how well formed you may believe your argument to be, "they're stupid clowns" is an ad hominem fallacy. I love how up-modded comments on Slashdot tend to be logical and are called out for their fallacies, but it pisses me off how this standard never seems to apply to religion. If I said Linux was crap because Linus Torvalds is a stupid weird clown everyone would be up in arms, the comment would be buried. But apply that same fallacious logic to the pope and it's insightful.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Because human little boys are just not enough and the collar is not the only stiff thing at the rectory rectum exploritorium. Furthermore, the Rat Line used for Nazis in the past and pedophiles in the present needs a drastic update as South America is getting too destabilized by the CIA these days.
Oh yeah, praise the one and only God worshiped by Catholics and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and Mother Mary, but only one using Catholic math. Since hell was invented in the Dark Ages I would not want to go there and all that shit.
I'm not Catholic, but even when I was active in the Protestant church I had resolved two of these issues.
Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God 'made man in his own image'
Perhaps Catholics interpret that statement differently. I was always taught that "in God's image" didn't mean a head, two legs, two arms, and presumably a penis since they always call God a "he." Instead, God's image means the ability for cognition, rational thought, compassion, love, and free will. Aliens, no matter their shape, would be made in God's image as well if they were intelligent. Of course the probability that there would be mutual comprehension is very small, so it's just as likely that they would be seen as the spawn of Satan.
Jesus Christ's role as savior would be confused; would other worlds have their own Christ-figures, or would Earth's Christ be universal?
This strikes me as a false dichotomy. C. S. Lewis in his Space trilogy hypothesized aliens that had no need of a Christ figure because they never "fell." In that series, the aliens all know of Christ and have a sense of fear and wonder about our planet, so mired in bad deeds yet the site of the lorious incarnation.
Robert Heinlein too gave a wonderful description of aliens (and one human) who did not need redemption in Stranger in a Strange Land. Those who strictly follow the rules laid out in the Bible might disagree, but I believe that Valentine Michael Smith exemplifies Jesus' teachings so well that he met the same fate for the same reasons: the world at large is not ready for such a radical way of life.
Your brain is not a computer.
Enjoy your superstition. It has no effect on reality.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=suicide+bomber&btnG=Google+Search&meta=lr%3D&aq=f&oq=
Deleted
"And in the name of the god, ships shall be built to carry out our warriors among the staaaaars!!!"
What would the Catholic Church's opinion matter on this topic?
I'm struggling with this because they represent a segment of our society that is steadfastly incurious and resistant to new ideas.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Lets suppose for a second the following:
1. Alien life exists.
2. Evolutionary factors made religion useful in the alien culture.
3. They looked outside their planet for alien life to answer life the universe and everything questions.
4. Hey there is "earth". Scout ship pronounces it "mostly harmless".
5. Religious types in alien culture are obligated to spread the word of god.
6. Missionary aliens arrive, destroy all churches/temples/holy men/infidels/etc and mention of religion other than their one true word.
6.1. Establish the 600 Club.
6.2. You guessed it.
7. Everyone on earth knows the divine word.
[no relation to any South Parks episodes. Honest.]
Just like orthodox Jewish believe God's salvation if for them only, and the rest of us have a place in God's plan that is somewhat inferior, we could come up with saying God created us on his/her own image, salvation is for us, and for the rest of our neighbors we can only preach Human morality, as seen on Star Trek.
Why is it that the Vatican, all of a sudden, is talking about this? Maybe it's because we're only 3 years away from 2012.
"Now if only your GOD would -=> smite =- you every time you write one of these useless rants. Seriously, only rarely have I ever seen you actually contribute to a discussion. I'm surprised you didn't credit GOD with Delphi or that the devil made Microsoft require 0.0.0.0 in the HOSTS file. Please just STFU and disappear. Cordially, Yuri Klastalov - by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 14, @11:36AM (#30098260)
LMAO - Well, well: If it isn't 'Yuri Klastalov', of the "RBN" (Russian Business Network), @ his "finest", lol!
Hey, new news "yURInal":
Please - Spare us your "KLASS"-less rants already: I know why you've put this up all over the wire about me:
http://www.bandfocus.net/Alexander%20Kowalski
(LOL, what a fool you are... is THAT the "best you've got"...? Effete & puny @ best (but, what I'd expect outta a "script kidde" like you, & those LIKE you)).
I understand though:
LMAO - You're just "ticked off" that I am one of the folks that put your INFAMOUS "botnet" & criminal enterprise in the RBN, straight outta commission, by spreading it around via "HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP" ( http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/2009/06/from-ukrainian-blackhat-seo-gang-with.html as you have tried to "irk me" with, per the 1st URL I post here where you state "I should suck your sweaty cock" here -> http://www.bandfocus.net/Alexander%20Kowalski, then we wouldn't be the ones "SMITING" your botnets outta commission then, lol (AND? Please, @ least tell the truth, in your rant online in regards to myself, & replace that 'sweaty cock' of yours, with SMALL cock, & I'd believe it, lol, because it'd be far more truthful old man))
APK
P.S.=> Hehe - Hey, just so you know? People like myself & Mr. Danchev just laugh, knowing we've helped "knock the chocolate" out of online scum is all (we WIN, not YOU & your kind - just judging by the puny effete reactions those like you have when your betters get done with you... all you have are your effete retaliations, & no more botnet, lol...))... apk
> Enjoy your superstition. It has no effect on reality.
;) ).
Really? That's a pretty delusional and irrational claim to make. Superstitions affect human behaviours, and human behaviours affect reality.
And haven't you even heard of the placebo effect? It is _scientifically_ proven to work well on a significant proportion of humans, for all sorts of problems. And most certainly better than nothing.
So it logically follows that groups of humans with the appropriate superstitions would be better able to take advantage of the placebo effect (no need for a physical "sugar pill", and someone _else_ to administer it), and thus have an advantage over groups of humans without such superstitions. For example, the placebo effect might allow a badly injured group member to perform tasks that benefit the group, that he would normally not be able to due to pain.
There are also other group advantages such as increasing the statistical likelihood of altruistic behaviour from individuals not normally prone to such behaviours. I'm not saying all atheists aren't altruistic OK? Or that all religious people are altruistic. I'm saying that certain religions would encourage their members to do "out of character" altruistic behaviors (while others might bias their members to be more prone to out of character suicide bombings
Thus, it would not surprise me if this results in some groups with "superstitions" having better "survival fitness" than groups totally without.
For some reason many people believe that atheists are somehow more rational, but I find most atheists are about as delusional and irrational too - for example they say stuff like "But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.". Which is clearly incorrect[1].
Do their delusions bestow them many advantages?
[1] If you accept that Communism is not a religion, then many good people have followed it and done lots of evil. Leaders can take advantage of belief systems and make followers do all sorts of stuff (good or evil). The Communist Manifesto says "forcible overthrow" and other stupid stuff which allow leaders to more easily build their Dictatorships.
If we're going to start discussing alien life we must continue a long standing Human tradition, bigotry and discrimination. To that end I must insist that, through all measures natural and artificial, Humans are the superior to all other beings. It will be shown in time, should other beings of other worlds be found, that Humans are their master they our slaves.
The Catholic Church teaches that God created the universe. Therefore, God created all life everywhere and we can expect that life found off of Earth will be similar in appearance to life as we know it. This would also imply that there is a certain predestination in the journey of life...which is what we see in evolution where the same complex functional structure evolves independently at different times in the fossil record. A fish swimming in an ocean on another world is likely to have the same overall structure that a fish on Earth has, although with differences created by the environment in which it developed.
This guy is trolling a religious message. Nice try, Sherlock!
“The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble.”
-- Ellen Degeneres
It's a very dark ride.
all is well...
From less than nothing at all there became an awareness of this and at that splitting instance consciousness and existence came to be. Both of which either exist or they don't, no in between. But what exist in consciousness and what exist in existence are variables/changing. Now if you are all that is, how do you know you will continue being? Expansion of what exist in both existence and consciousness and at some point in creation, to create life in order to experience more and to create more. Experience more as from within seeing things in part, not whole and likewise creating things with limited knowledge. When you die you go back to the whole to file your report as you are again made aware of the whole and eventually re-enter a part for additional recording to later report. But still, without existence, there can be no consciousness or place to know existence and what it contains. So the purpose of your life and the lives of other creatures and higher intelligent life is the same as it is for what some call god. SURVIVAL and as such we are all given the religion of "Survival" built-in.
There is not one religion that will counter this, as a house fighting against its foundation, will fall.
So what do you do, what is your purpose? To help provide insurance for survival....
Different forms of life have different perception and abilities and as such its a direction of helping to insure survival.
So where is the problem with so called alien life?
In the big picture, aliens don't really exist, only being different for survival insurance.
Intelligence and ability to contribute to expansion is graded on how well a life form understands self destruction is anti-expansion and not helpful.
Meanwhile, catholics in poor countries get poorer as they families grow out of control, or die of avoidable STDs, because the Church has made them fear and reject condoms.
Meanwhile, catholic women continue to be threated as 2nd or 3rd class citizens.
Meanwhile, catholic divorcees continue living as pariahs in their own communities.
Meanwhile, child abuse by catholic priests continues to be hidden, denied, and even "rewarded" with promotions to safer places.
Meanwhile... well, you get the idea.
But it is good to know that when the aliens arrive, we'll know exactly how to initiate evangelization efforts.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Catholic Church: always on top of what really matters!
-- a semi-bitter former catholic
"The Catholic Church has to refine and revise it's mission statement every time real science debunks it's faith-based beliefs. "
Debunking what? Last I checked science hasn't found intelligent "aliens" either. At least the church is open to debating the issue. As far as "mission statement" it hasn't changed.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Actually, I doubt that. It seems to me that religion is on the decline, and that it's the insanity of the fundamentalists that's on the increase.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The Vatican is currently deciding whether it wants to be the organization that dooms the entire human race to be wiped out by annoyed extraterrestrials who already have their own religion(s).
stargate is the real deal and we can say more as aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The hypothesis that no deity of any kind exists solves the problem in an unbeatably elegant fashion.
Only until contact is made.
It would be - inconvenient - for the atheist to encounter an alien believer. A believer with own intellectual and historical traditions and methods.
Methods perhaps more rigorous and defensible than his own. Someone whose brain and senses might be very different than his own.
The atheist has no need to fear an encounter with a living witness to the miracles of the Bible or solid documentary evidence.
With the alien, you just don't know what the possibilities really are.
MEANING OF LIFE SPOILER ALERT!!!
(If you like to discover it by yourself and have a big
sweet eureka-moment take all the time you desire before
reading further)
Since there are _only_ two things that effect us.
1. Evolution of Genes (i was created by my parents, not God. Duh!)
2. Evolution of Memes (=information) (Richard Dawkins invented the word in 1976)
It covers everything and explains everything. I think
it's actually far more beautiful then e=mc^2.
And the nicest thing is that it's up to _us_ to choose
how to best use evolution and information.
A religious 'debate' is an argument about nothing. No facts? well don't bother arguing then.
Religion is a terrible affliction. I truly pity those cursed with it.
would seem to imply that there wouldn't be needless suffering (Darfour, the hunger in most of Africa, the Tsunami that killed over 100k people, etc. etc.). The only rational conclusion is that god is either a trickster (trying to conceal his existence) or evil. So there.
HAND.
I've already posted so I can't mod this, but FWIW I'd mod you way way up, Mr/Mrs. AC. :)
Well said.
HAND.
Since they were going with the Tychonic System and all of that is accepted as correct in that system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system (That whole thing about the church being pro Aristotle is kind of a myth) Oh, the other thing Galileo observed were the phases of Venus but again the Tychonic system is cool with that too.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
We evolved like this and it seems to work relatively well. Human design is obviously pretty good so long as you are a hunter-gatherer living a littoral existence in a warm climate, where you can expect a life expectancy over 50 years without medicine. The error you are objecting to is self-referential; it denies evolution, so has to posit that things were designed like that in the first place since they could not have evolved.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Read Genesis carefully and literally. There are at least 3 creation myths referenced in it. In one, quite separately from Adam and Eve, human women have sex with "angels" and give birth to giants. You could argue that Genesis (and the Book of Daniel) posit visitors from other worlds. (personally I believe that magic mushrooms trump flying saucers 9 times out of 10)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm currently pondering a design for a system that uses genetic algorithms to evolve neural networks. Do I care what happens to the networks after a generation is up? Not really? At some point one may be found to perform its task at a level that would make the experiment a success. That one might get saved. The rest of them... not so much...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think that we can use our history to learn what happens when two cultures connect between them. (Terrestrials and aliens)
We have some models:
- Chinese vs Europeans: They were parallel cultures pretty independent between them who had trading. We can remember the chinese inventions we didn't got for centuries.
- Mexicans vs Europeans: They were independent cultures and the europeans were superior militarly and with the intentions of conquer. Here one of the cultures won over the other, and finally the religion and the culture is more european than native.
I think that something like this would happen in case we meet some foreign neighborhoods.
pictures or it didn't happen
There is no Jehovah, only Zul-9.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
How do you know E=MC^2? Did you figure it out yourself, or did someone in authority tell you it was true?
I did calculate it myself when I was a sophomore in college. The mathematics of it actually aren't all that hard.
How do we know Abraham Lincoln was a president of the US? Did you see him become president? Or did you rely on the authority of some written documents to tell you that he was?
As evidence we have written history, photographic evidence, copious reliable documentation, archaeological evidence, birth records, and much more - most of which is available for you to peruse yourself. There is even DNA evidence from known descendants. Furthermore there is not a single claim to a supernatural act in any of the above and I can tell you exactly what evidence would be needed to disprove the claim that he was President.
How do we know Julius Caesar was an emperor of Rome? Where you there or are you relying on documents the earliest of which come from around 1000AD?
See the above, minus the photographs and with fewer surviving records and other bits of evidence. Again, no supernatural claims exist with regard to the existence and historical record of Julius Caesar and I can tell you exactly what it would take to convince me that he was not actually the emperor of Rome.
How do you know that person A murdered person B even though you haven't found the murder weapon? Is it because you performed some scientific test to determine it or is it because the bag lady across the street and said she saw him enter the apartment just before it happened and the neighbor said he saw him leave with a bloody knife?
It depends on the nature of the evidence. If the "bag lady" also claims to have seen a ghost rising to heaven or some other supernatural act, her credibility is rightly going to be suspect. Witnesses alone are rarely enough to convict someone of a capital crime.
Religion has all the evidence that everything else we rely on has.
WRONG. Religion makes no falsifiable claims. There is no way I can disprove the assertion that Jesus Christ was the son of "God". I can accept the assertion or not but I can not disprove it. Science and history actually do make falsifiable claims. I can find evidence to disprove a theory or a historical narrative. It might not be easy to do so but it is possible and I can tell you exactly what evidence I would need to disprove a scientific or historical theory. The worst abuses of religon come when historical fact is conflated with religious dogma. Much of the evidence from 2000 years ago is of course lost so it makes it easier for the charlatans who sell religion to dupe the unscrupulous and naive.
Thank you for that comment.
I hadn't heard of Horus in those terms, but Mithras is also has an uncannily similar story to Jesus. What a coincidence, eh?
HAND.
Perhaps a very long time ago on a distant world, a small group beings convened to debate the possible existence of the vatican.
If you don't approve of cherry picking, then I encourage you to read your fucking bible. It condones genocide, slavery, opression of women, etc. etc. Do you agree with those views? If not, why not?
Btw, Mithras is also alarmingly similar to Jesus. (And I'm sure there are more examples from roughly 2K years ago.)
Oh, why am I even bothering? Grow a dick and log in.
HAND.
>> Except it may not be a good answer. There is more to life than what you can prove scientifically.
> As of now, yes - but who knows what will be possible in 1-5-10-50-100 etc. years.
Godel says that there will *always* be true but unanswerable questions, if for no other reason than the fact that we will never have more than a finite number of axioms.
Moreover, there will always be questions about high-energy physics that we can't answer simply because we don't have that much energy available. Yeah, we might someday be able to use an entire star's mass as energy, but questions about the Big Bang could very well require every bit of energy in the universe to answer definitively.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
Seems to me this is just another example of a religious institution redesigning where their God fits into the gaps in current scientific knowledge. /puts on tinfoil hat /puts hat away
What makes me curious though, is if this is being driven by an unannounced discovery? I've always wondered what the process would be if we really made contact with a higher life form, or even definitive proof of of a lesser life form. Would NASA hold off telling the public and instead talk to religious leaders first to let them have time to integrate the findings? Fear of panic? etc...
Northstariarry, did you learn about religion from the Internet? You just linked to a huge assemblage of random Wiki pages, most of which do not back up your arguments like you intend to imply. Here, this is how you use links to support an argument, rather than as an intellectual shotgun, hoping that if you throw enough links out there, some of them will support you.
I mean, you link to Islam when you say that people deny Jesus' status as prophet? Seriously? They're the ones who think Jesus was *only* a prophet (and here's Wikipedia on the subject, since you only seem to believe Wiki links)! And you link to "Jewish Christians" to say that they deny Jesus' status as Messiah, when that's quite the opposite! It's the non-Christian Jews who think that Jesus is not the Messiah (again, maybe *you* should read the Wiki articles on the subject).
Or take the Paulicianism link. Although they claimed to want to "restore the pure Christianity of Paul," Paul himself condemned the very idea some 600 years earlier, when he wrote his first epistle to the Corinthians (see 1 Cor 1:11-16, which was dictated to a scribe and then signed by Paul himself in 1 Cor 16:21).
And the Septuagint is merely a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures used by Jews of the day. The Masoretic text is from the 8th Century, when Christians had been using the LXX for hundreds of years (examine your own wiki links sometime, please; you can find that picture in with the article on the Masoretic text). Further, you claim all sorts of things about the cannon, but give a very misleading idea of how it came to be. Yes, many books (some heretical) were circulated for a long time. The reason the cannon is cannon is because they selected those books which nobody had a problem with that were widely used. So they threw out any dubious accounts that were just from one congregation. And a few books that seemed reliable, but not universal, were relegated to 'Deuterocannonical' status (these are the 'Apocrypha' that were removed from most Protestant Bibles some decades ago, but which are easy enough to find--and books like Sirach are quoted liberally in the NT). This is why we have collections of the Gospels by the 2nd century. This is why we have many, many translated early copies of important books. This is why nobody cares about disputed authorship: because the authors don't matter. Believe it or not, some of us are quite familiar with many of those oddball books and when you get down to the details, they tend to prove very little other than the fact that some nut tried to start his own religion or denomination hundreds of years after the fact.
Now, indeed there have been decisions about what goes on the list, but they're not at all like the ones you're implying, where they result in this massive change. The core list has been stable for a long, long time. It's true that people don't appreciate all this history (and many do not know of it), but it's not at all like you're implying.
"And unicorns don't appear anywhere in the Bible, AFAIK"
* "God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."--Numbers 23:22
* "God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."--Numbers 24:8
* "His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorn: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth."--Deuteronomy 33:17
* "Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"--Job 39:9-12
* "Save me from the lion's mouth; for thou hast heard me from the horns of unicorn."--Psalm 22:21
* "He maketh them [the cedars of Lebanon] also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn."--Psalm 29:6
* "But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of the unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil."--Psalm 92:10
* "And the unicorn shall come down with them, and the bullocks with their bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness."--Isaiah 34:7
Shamelessly cut & paste from God, errr I mean Wikipedia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
C. S. Lewis wrote a series of books about this exact premise. In his stories, there is indeed life on other planets, but the life there is not fallen as it is on Earth. The first one is entitled "Out of the Silent Planet," and the collection is known as the "Space Trilogy".
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Even though you're posting AC and consistently misspelled one of the key words for the topic at hand, you're fairly coherent, so I guess you deserve a brief rebuttal.
That was, in fact, exactly what I was trying to do. The OP was making a blanket statement that the Bible was historically accurate and complete, and I wanted to make the point that there's been a whole goshdarn lot of disagreement over the past three millenia about what belongs in it.
The links to the Islam and Jewish Christians articles may have been misplaced, but the point remains that there were plenty of people in the area at the time who didn't see any reason to believe in the resurrection, and were no doubt writing their own religious texts. The same is true of the Paulicans: it doesn't matter if Paul said something different than what they said. They're an example of resurrection-deniers.
The point is, again, that the Masoretic version and the Septuagint differ, and someone made a choice . There isn't one single version that everyone has always been reading from. And unless I'm mistaken, Protestants use the Masoretic text for the OT.
The reason the canon is the way it is has plenty of politics and power struggles mixed in to it.
You seem to have misread one of those articles. Deuterocanonical books are those that are used by the Catholic Church but which are not a part of the Hebrew Bible. They're canonical. Apocrypha, on the other hand, are not. The KJV (a Protestant Bible) originally included the Catholic Deuterocanonical books under the "Apocrypha" heading.
I'm not claiming to be a Biblical scholar; most of what I sort-of-know is half-remembered from confirmation classes way back when. The point stands, however, that the Bible is neither complete nor entirely historically accurate.
...is this: suppose that we make contact with some alien species, and it just happens that they are overwhelmingly superior to us - a civilization that's thousands of years more advanced and kicks our ass in technology, morals, arts, everything.
Now suppose that this civilization is completely atheist. They are angel-like beings but with no God; they consider religion a trait of pre-historic (in their POV) civilizations. Just like, say, our modern opinion about cannibalism. Their scientists and philosophers have long demolished all pro-religion arguments, finishing this debate in such clear terms that any educated human would understand and find impossible to not agree.
*If* this happens (notice I'm just supposing), religion is in major trouble and the only option for resistance is fanatism.
"Somebody had to create the computer too. So that's just bringing more into the equation. This whole computer simulation thing is the same as everything else - it's just another religion, no matter how you twist it around."
The universe is not simulated, YOU are. That statement is not religious, it is simply the result of carefull observation and ruthless logic. The only magic* computer required is the universe itself and the algorithm it runs is infinitely recursive - your mind simulates the universe that simulated your mind with your brain.
A mind is a mathematical entity that emerges from the interactions of organised matter, you could say it's the byproduct of the universe observing itself. Human minds create a 3D repesentation of the universe and call it "commonly percieved reality".
The bottom line of all this is our minds are incomplete. We will never fully understand ourselves, let alone reality.
magic* - the universe "just is".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Whatever conclusions they come to will be completely non-falsifiable and compatible with whatever sort of alien life that we could potentially encounter!
I stole this Sig
Cod be praised!
Of course, the aliens are witches and heretics, and need to be purged from the galaxy in great crusades.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I would like to point out that the Mormon religion already takes into account the existence of extra-terrestrial life. They believe that Christ under the direction of God the Father created many worlds and that Christ is the Savior of all of God's worlds and all the inhabitants therein. As to why Christ came to this world it's because it was the only world so wicked that it would crucify it's Savior. While you may disagree with this doctrine it is interesting that the church already has doctrines in place that allow for any eventual discovery of extra-terrestrial life.
A scenario similar to this was the first thing that popped into my mind, too. Mine involved aliens going door-to-door with copies of the Watchtower.
Well the vatican is looking into possibility of alien life. The batting average of the the Vatican is 0 for 1000's. They have been wrong on every possible astronomical observation for at least the last 500+ years. Why should we even care about this? The late Carl Sagan has vastly more competent in this than the Vatican (who I think still thinks the Earth is flat).
This idea has little or nothing to do with religion other it would make people with closed minds think that it may be possible. Rather than saying if the Pope doesn't think they exist why should I? In this day and age people (or at least average mentality) should be thinking for themselves rather than having some outdated religion thinking for them.
Why do grown adults in this day and age need to preserve the idea that the words of Genesis are somehow literally true, and that there's a creator God who stood apart from everything and created it as a separate thing? Why do they need to take everything that we now understand about the Universe and shoehorn it into an ancient tribal conception of the way the world is?
I've heard otherwise rational people say, "well, of course Genesis isn't 'literally' true! For example, one of God's days might actually correspond to 2 billion years! That would square with the way things are!" Such people need to be slapped repeatedly with a noodley appendage.
The Universe is just the way it is. Life developed within it over billions of years as a product of natural processes. It's a continuous and complete thing. What's the problem with just accepting that we're here, and life has certain requirements, and our job is to live in harmony and fulfill the requirements of life in the most responsible way we can, given our capacities? Do we need to do everything as a show, or to please some celestial daddy? Is that really the only reason that we act in the world?
To my mind, it is much more breathtaking and invigorating to realize I am a product of and participant in something so infinitely vast and self-sustaining, without need of any kind of intervention whatsoever.
Fact is, the point of religion is entirely psychological, and for that it needs to have a certain continuity with the reality we know through our sense and experience, and to a great extent that reality is now determined by scientific discovery. The Catholic (aka inclusive) church is breaking under the strain of new knowledge, and its psychological framework is increasingly untenable. They are desperate to preserve the church itself and its central tenets at a time when people are more than ever aware that it's all a load of symbolism.
I think it's absolutely foolish the way they're bending over backwards to try to get reality to fit into their storybook conception of things. Reality isn't a story. Reality is visceral, omnipresent, and immanent in itself. When we engage with it directly, all that narrative goes away, and really I think religions should be stripping down to essentials and helping people to face reality as it is.
Of course, there are already good, austere schools that serve that end well, with an emphasis on living ethically and developing the mind through meditation and other practices, so as to be as happy, helpful, and fulfilled in life as is possible. My hope is that such schools will gain precedence over the primitive and superstitious religions that still hang on to the idea that we're all living in a book with God as a character. Reality is much deeper and more noble than such a childish outlook allows for.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Looks to me like American's or someone know about the existence of alien life and they want the vatican folks to prepare themselves and the goats (christians) for this reality
I Want To Believe
If the Vatican insists, Chuck will kill the Pope with a roundhouse kick.
... discovering unarguably intelligent alien life would be the intra-religion schisms that it would provoke between the different human theological camps.
Watching the "designed in Bog's own image" bandits would also be entertaining, as they try to come up with an image of a Bog which can simultaneously have humans and the BugBlatter Beast of Traal as images.
The one result, theologically, that would be really disturbing (I say this in the spirit of Popperian falsifiability, not because I think it's probable) would be if our alien friends with the 7-fold rotational symmetry (or whatever form they have) turned out to have a religion that was directly translatable into, say, the tales of the Norse Pantheon.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Well, the whole "big bang" theory in my mind still seemed rather odd. As far as my understanding go, all existence was in one big super-dense super-hot pinpoint of "something" until it exploded into a universe, and the expansion continues as time goes on.
OK, so where did that pinpoint of something come from. And where - if any - did the something before that come from?
Religion is often used to describe things that science hasn't yet done so for. Essentially the "because God wanted/did it" is the end-answer to unanswerable questions. But that doesn't mean that science and religion have to be at odds. As more and more complexity is discovered in the design of life, etc, the more I have to think "how could that just be a random accident." And if the answer is that existence is so unimaginable immense that even the tiny odds of that "accident" can come true, then how come by that same concept a superintelligent, superpowerful being cannot exist to act as the overseer of human destiny?
OK, so said being may not exist to the expectations/specifications of the religious community. But as said community always seems to state that the ways/intent of God are beyond the understanding of men, then that pretty much captures that whatever we have on "record" is imperfect at best anyways. Of course this is just IMHO, but there are plenty of famous quotes in science that says more or less the same thing.
I was wondering of in Heaven human would be mixed with various species of aliens, or if there is an heaven per planet ? Or per alien race ? Or are we in distinct areas of one big heaven ? Just curious, can any believer let me know the details, I want to know what to expect. Thanks a lot.
Brice Le Blevennec, Digerati
Oh really?
Then how do you hand-wave away Mary's 'Immaculate Conception', the [alleged] resulting in baby Jesus, and this whole upcoming Christmas?
Then there is the whole pesky issues of man being created in God's image, the Son of God[the a fore mentioned Jesus] being a man, etc.
Pretty dump question.
No, dumb answer.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
take 500 random humans, put them on a desert island in isolation, and in a couple of dozen generations they will have an advanced religious mythology, definitely involving demigods if not a monotheism (and a couple of nonbelievers for good measure)
repeat this experiment, and you will get a different religious mythology, but you will still have a religious mythology
if you had a magic wand, and you waved it, and christianity, islam, judaism, hinduism, sikhism, etc. were magically stamped out, new religions would spring into being overnight to fill the void. and it is a void: there is a place in every human society that religion inhabits. there's no doing away with it. ever
in other words, i don't believe in god, but i believe that belief in god is inescapable in the part of a large part of society
so you need to make peace with belief in god. not because god is real, but because no matter what you do, a lot of people will believe in it, and you can't ever change that, its inevitable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seriously, this topic was at 666 comments and some heartless bastard had the nerve to post the 667th? http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/5710/666b.png
What a rotten party, have we run out of beer or something?