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Scientists Begin Another Attempt To Drill Through the Earth's Crust
schwit1 writes: An expedition to the Indian Ocean is about to begin an effort to drill a core down through the Earth's crust and into its mantle. Geologists have been trying to drill through the contact between the crust and the mantle, called the Moho, since the 1960s, with no success. Either the projects have gone way over budget and been shut down, have failed due to engineering problems, or were stopped by the geology itself. This last issue is maybe the most interesting: "Expeditions have come close before. Between 2002 and 2011, four holes at a site in the eastern Pacific managed to reach fine-grained, brittle rock that geologists believe to be cooled magma sitting just above the Moho. But the drill could not punch through those tenacious layers. And in 2013, drillers at the nearby Hess Deep found themselves similarly limited by tough deep-crustal rocks." This new project hopes to learn from these past problems to obtain the first rock samples from below the Earth's crust. (Here's an eccentric introduction to the Hess Deep rift.)
That story was published by the Weekly World News. Compared to the WWN, the National Enquirer is serious journalism.
Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet. He has been cast out of heaven but will not be imprisoned in hell until after the Second Coming of Christ. I know in popular culture they like to speak of him ruling in Hell and tormenting the lost souls but that doesn't follow the scripture.
Meh. It depends on what you mean by Hell. Do you mean Hades or Gehenna or Sheol or the Lake of Fire, or something else?
See, the problem with your assertion is that it depends on centuries of theologians who conflated a bunch of these things (which are all distinct concepts, often from different traditions with different attributes), made assumptions about how they relate to each other, and tried to figure out consistency in a bunch of inconsistent passages.
What you're really referring to is the passage in Revelation 20:10, which implies that the devil ("diabolos") won't be imprisoned in the "lake of fire" until after the coming of Christ. But what is your basis for declaring the "lake of fire" to be synonymous with the English word "Hell," instead of assuming that Hell could be equated with one of the other concepts already mentioned? And how do you know the "devil" isn't in any of the others? The Book of Job notes that Satan wanders about to all sorts of places and is even brought to talk to God. How do you know Satan doesn't wander into any of these other haunts?
Some people also note that the greatest feature of Hell is "eternal torment," and the Bible identifies the most significant feature of eternal torment to be separation from God. Since most Christians agree that the "devil" (whatever that is -- word problems there too... are we talking Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub etc.? -- these guys were all different) has already been cast out of Heaven, he has already been separated from God and is thus already suffering the primary torment of "Hell," whether or not he is physically located in the "Lake of Fire."
And how do we determine that the "diabolos" (devil) who is cast into the Lake of Fire (if that is indeed "Hell") is the same as Satan or the fallen angel or Lucifer or whoever?
Basically, rather than saying what you did:
Biblically the devil is not in Hell yet
You should say:
Biblically the Diabolos has not been cast into the Lake of Fire yet. But centuries of debates and random equivalencies created by Church dogma have led to a common interpretation that this "diabolos" is the same as what were likely understood in Biblical times to be distinct entities such as Satan and Lucifer, and the "Lake of Fire" is now equated with various conceptions of "Hell" which had different terms and would have been viewed as distinct in Biblical times. Thus, according to the Biblical text combined with a crapload of random church dogma, the traditional popular culture image "doesn't follow the scripture."
Volcanos do this all of the time. This reminds me of people saying particle accelerators could create dangerous backholes, when much much higher energy particles slam our atmosphere all of the time.