Tag: God

It Doesn’t Compute

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Most of life is about paying the bills.  We work most of our days to pay for food, shelter and raising children.  And for the most part we don’t think too much about all this.  After all what we do is the human analog of what very living creature on Earth has to do to keep its species alive into the future.  And none of them question why exactly all this goes on.

But when you get to a certain point and the end of the race is in sight and maybe you have a little more time on your hands than you used to, you might start asking some questions about what all of this is.  This is called philosophy or religion or maybe just plain curiosity.  One day you look around and think, “How the hell did this whole thing get started and where the hell is it going to end up?”

And it’s a good question.  The pessimist’s answer is the whole thing is just a complete accident.  Life itself is just a random occurrence that probably will just peter out and end when the sun dies in several billion years or maybe even sooner than that if some things go sideways for us here.  Who knows?  Maybe we ourselves will be responsible for the end of life.  Some madman may decide it would be fun to figure out a way to kill off every last bacterium and virus and make it so that none could ever reappear on Earth again.  It seems like a stupid idea but there are lots of crazy people and who’s to say that a really smart crazy man might not take it into his head to do something like that.

But there is definitely a sizable chunk of humanity that believe that we are here for a reason.  They believe in some kind of God.  Not necessarily the personal God of the Bible.  Some think there is some sort of universal spirit that is associated with all life or maybe just human life.  And it’s safe to say they have no way of ever proving what they believe in is real.  I’ve heard lots of people trying to prove God’s existence.  And I don’t think anyone has ever come up with anything that would convince an atheist that he is wrong.

No, the belief is not based on proof.  But at the same time, I don’t think for the most part it’s wish fulfillment.  I think it’s a form of intuition.  Some people look around and say I just don’t believe that all of this is the result of random chance working out over the course of several billion years.  It’s like that old idea that if a billion monkeys typed on a billion typewriters (word processors) for a billion years that they would come up with the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.  I think it’s a case of not letting large numbers intimidate you.  I can understand that over the course of geologic time mountains can turn into valleys and stars can explode.  But how does that create Mozart or Shakespeare or even you?  It doesn’t compute.

Now Prove Me Wrong

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So, Camera Girl works double time for a week and I just spend two days eating thousands and thousands of calories of delicacies over the long holidays but I’m the one who’s exhausted and complaining!  I guess we each have our own strengths and weaknesses.

So, mission accomplished.  Two days hanging out with the grandkids and all the rituals were observed.  I even bonded with my sons-in-law.  They were good sports and tolerated all of my quirks.  They uncomplainingly watched my showing today of W.C. Fields classic “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  They even laughed at several of the most absurd scenes of Ambrose Wolfinger with his cellar full of singing burglars, his career as a “memory expert,” his criminal adventure as an unlicensed manufacturer of apple jack, his passion for professional wrestling and his trials and tribulations dealing with his truly awful wife and her mother and brother.

The kids fell right in with the silliness on display.  The only protest came from my six-year-old granddaughter who recognized both Fields and the actress playing his wife from the previous showing of the other Fields movie where they played a husband and wife, namely “It’s a Gift.”  Princess Sack of Potatoes wanted to know where the son and daughter in that previous movie had gotten to in this movie.  I explained that even though Fields and the actress were playing husband and wife again they were different characters.  I think this situation didn’t sit well with her.  Apparently, she felt that her suspension of disbelief was being abused and she wanted those interesting characters returned.  I did my best to smooth over this outrage but it took half the movie to return her to willing participation.

And as everyone was heading home, I was thinking what a strange world we live in.  All the silly rituals and behaviors that we associate with happiness and family.  Three generations of people playing penny ante poker or watching movies from ninety-some-odd years ago or eating peasant foods from a country none of us has ever lived in.  It’s all just a hodge-podge of things that make up a stream of experiences that we all share together travelling down the years.

And for me, those are the realest things in the world.  All the other things I read about “on-line” and the important progress that is being made by artificial intelligence, global convergence or whatever else they call what they are doing with government money are utterly fake.  Watching my two youngest grandchildren trying for the first time to master the silly game of getting a wooden ball on a string to land in a little wooden cup was more meaningful than listening to two physicist talking heads debating about whether dark matter was faker than modified gravity.  These high powered (we hope) intellects should be concentrating their efforts on solving the world’s energy problems.  The physics they need to be studying is defining the criteria for engineering a safe fission reactor.  Humanity needs to snap out of its stupor and produce an ecosystem of abundance and prosperity that fosters human happiness and maximizes human intellectual potential.

It’s amusing to hear people who “believe in science” stating categorically that there is no God and that the universe and life are just meaningless accidents.  And their proof is “The Big Bang.”  They declare confidently that the universe began x number of billions of years ago with all the matter and energy of creation appearing out of nowhere and all of that creation is still expanding at an ever-greater acceleration into empty space with entropy leading to the heat death of this universe in y billions of years from now.  But if you ask them where the big bang came from, they just shrug their shoulders and say that is unknowable.  In essence they are saying they don’t know anything about the beginning and end of the universe.  So basically, they’re saying, “and then there was light.”

I tend to think life is not an accident.  From my point of view, what I experience in my small piece of the universe is the point of the whole thing.  A little kid playing with a ball and cup toy is the reason for the big bang and everything else that has been put in motion.  Now prove me wrong.

How Many Macromolecules Can Dance on the Head of a Pin

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Here’s a very interesting discussion of Levinthal’s paradox.  In a nutshell, the paradox is related to the almost infinite possibilities in the ways that a macromolecular protein can fold into its primary, secondary and tertiary shape versus the effortless way that proteins function in living thing.  The author says the degrees of freedom inherent in a large protein molecule have been modelled and there are supposed to be 10300 different shapes that the protein could assume.  Now the point is that this number is so absurdly large that the chance of any particular protein molecule assuming the shape it needs in order to perform its biochemical function in a living cell within a short enough time to sustain the metabolic requirements of life seems impossible.

Well I must admit that is a ridiculously large number.  Someone did a guess at how many separate atoms there are in the observable universe and he came up with 1082.  So that gives you a feel for the absurdity of 10300 .

Basically this argument is supposed to demonstrate the unlikeliness of the genesis of life occurring again elsewhere in the universe.

I guess I’m not sure what I think of this.  While the large size of macromolecules render their physical properties subtle and hard to predict, nevertheless, they do possess these properties and these are exactly the properties needed to sustain life in the world we live in.

If they occur on Earth then they could occur elsewhere.  Now the point really is how could life occur in the first place if the exact sequence of amino acids and nucleic acids needed to make up the macromolecules of life are so absurdly complicated and the random forces involved in creating these exact molecules would be so blind?

It seems what the paradox is hinting at is God.  Well, I won’t argue with that.

Christmas Day 2023 – Quotation

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King James Version

Luke:  Chapter 2

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

2(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

3And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

4And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

5To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

6And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

7And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

8And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

9And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

10And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

11For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

12And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

13And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

14Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

15And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

16And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

17And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.

18And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.

19But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

20And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

Man and God – Part 1 – The Existence of God

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I want to preface this by saying that I have no formal training in theology, church doctrine or divinity other than twelve years of Roman Catholic schooling and the associated doctrinal education that entails.  Nothing I say can be construed to be orthodox doctrine within any sect of Christianity.  I’m sure that several of my beliefs would be considered heretical by some Christian theologists so don’t assume anything I say is dogma for any church you might belong to.  But it is what I believe and I think it’s time people start connecting the dots with what their scriptures say, what they understand it to mean and what the clerics in their churches say and do.

For all of recorded history and as far back as we can discover, man has tried to understand his place in the universe.  Earth Mother, Sky Father, elemental forces, spirits of animals, ancestors, natural objects like mountains, rivers, stars, planets, the sun and moon, all figured into the speculations and rituals of the humans who have inhabited Earth for countless generations.  Even our predecessors, the Neanderthals had burial customs that may have had a religious meaning.

But since the Age of Enlightenment the elite of our civilization has told us that God is dead.  But by that they mean that he never existed in the first place.  And within our lifetimes organized efforts have been put in place to stamp out belief in God.  The Soviets did everything they could to enforce atheism throughout the Soviet Union and the satellite nations that they controlled.  The modern academy inculcates a hatred of Christianity that borders on the monomaniacal.  And the LGBTQ mafia and their government allies confront and persecute any traces of orthodox Christianity wherever they can.

So, it is no wonder that church attendance is plummeting and surveys polling religious belief show a growing trend toward atheism among the young.  Sensing their ascendancy, the Left now asserts that religion and specifically Christianity has been discredited and will soon disappear, being completely displaced by the godless social justice cult that they adhere to.  And as if to prove their mastery of religion they now claim to be able to observe on brain scans the phenomenon which believers experience when communing with God in prayer.  From this scientific result they deduce that humans are confusing a natural neurological phenomenon with a supernatural experience.

This is the attack on the faithful from without.  At the same time, forces within the religious community are also wreaking havoc on the position of religion.  The monstrous horror that is the Catholic Priest Pedophile outrage has done more to discredit the Church than anything its enemies could have ever hoped to do.  I include in this of course the cover up of this horror by the complicit Church hierarchy which only serves to hammer home that the Roman Catholic Church has ceased to represent the traditional religious views of its hundreds of millions of adherents.  And the other Christian denominations to a greater or lesser extent have also lost much of their legitimacy through advocating almost exclusively a message of social justice and adopting a spirit of “tolerance” that effectively eliminates the tenets of their faiths.

I don’t paint a rosy picture.  And I don’t intend to.  Because I don’t have to.  Belief in God is not a delicate thing that has to be nurtured.  The need for God is one of the fundamental psychological needs of the human mind.  What has to be done is eliminate the mistaken information that confuses the minds of people.

As an example, the problem of pain.  Countless people have wrestled with the idea that somehow God could eliminate pain and suffering but chooses not to.  When confronted by the reality of innocent children suffering and dying from agonizing medical conditions or through brutal cruelty, they deny the reality of a loving God who would allow such things.

I have thought about this often myself.  The paradox is that of pure goodness and omnipotence juxtaposed with unjust suffering.  As an answer I’ve heard that free will prevents God from stopping evil men from inflicting pain on the innocent.  Of course, this doesn’t explain why natural disasters are allowed to occur.  So, we are stuck with a paradox.  But the answer is simpler.  How do we know the limits of what God can and can’t do?  If you read doctrine of the various churches, they state that God is omnipotent.  Well, what does that mean?  Human beings have no experience of any absolute.  We live in a world that we interpret with our senses and our very limited brain.  God may be so powerful that we cannot even fathom what he is capable of but that doesn’t mean he can control every drop of rain and every quake of the Earth.  It is my belief that the concept of omnipotence is the major stumbling block to belief in God.  Omnipotence sets up this idea of a game that’s rigged against us for no reason.  That is the problem that I think needs to be removed.

But what do we know about God?  What is clear from scripture is that God loves us.  That he says over and over again.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

1 John 4:16

So, if God loves us, he does not want us to suffer.  If nevertheless we do suffer innocently then it’s because it can’t be prevented.  To me that’s clear.  Whether that means there is a malevolence like the devil or a cold lifeless random universe outside of God’s purview then that’s what there is.  But I don’t have to understand everything.  I just need to know that I’ve got someone out there who cares for me and mine.  And who has interceded to provide help and knowledge and maybe even tip the scales a little in our favor whenever he can.

To me that’s the nature of a personal God.  He is a father to us and we have some of His spirit in us too.  And that’s not all that different from feeling the influence of the parents and grandparents that raised us and taught us and gave us understanding when we needed it.  And that is like the ancestors who passed along the laws that we live by.  God’s spirit allowed them to see how his people must live and so they wrote down these laws and provided the leadership needed to teach the people how to live.

Today many people will say that all of this can occur without God existing, that a tribe will coalesce around a leader whose mind naturally resonates to the needs of his people and will formulate the laws they need to thrive.  I know no way to prove otherwise.  But that is unimportant to me.  I do not seek to convince anyone.  I believe that there is a force in this world that impels us to do good.  And what seems like a proof of its existence is that it works against the flow of the world, the flow of which, if it does not actually work to achieve evil at the very least is completely unaffected by the suffering of humanity.  Countless stories exist of individuals laying down their lives to save a stranger from harm.  This impulse is a direct contradiction of animal nature which except in the case of parental love would put self-preservation ahead of any other consideration.

God’s exact nature can only be inferred by His effect on those that experience Him.  But I think that where genuine communion is experienced the effect is remarkably positive on the individual involved and even for the surrounding community.

The problem we are experiencing today is the lack of actual Christians in the churches.  Many of the leaders of the churches are not Christians.  They do not actually believe in God and their congregants sense this and are confused and angered by the hypocrisy.  And for the young this is amplified by the atheists that they meet up with in school and elsewhere that ridicule faith and accuse it of bigotry.  These young people are under enormous pressure to denounce Christian morality in order to avoid condemnation by the LGBTQ gatekeepers in school and the workplace.

But the first step is to re-establish the existence of God.  That takes two things.  First, convince yourself that there is no logical reason that precludes His existence.  That I’ve tried to provide above.  Then find belief in God within yourself.  That you have to find yourself.  But it’s definitely something that should be explored.  As I stated earlier there is a strong urge in humans to find the force in the universe that resonates with our happiness.  If you find a quiet spot and look inside yourself you might be surprised what you find.  Start out by not calling it God.  Start out by looking inside yourself to see what’s there.  Then take it from there.

 

An Interesting Read from the Dark Enlightenment

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I seem to find some pretty strange but interesting stuff.

https://theanti-puritan.blogspot.com/2017/12/dont-hang-on-my-every-word.html

This is on a website called The Anti-Puritan who is I think an Anarcho-Capitalist.  He has some relation to the Dark Enlightenment, possibly that just means they think Enlightenment Civilization is a dead end.  Anyway, it was interesting and I thought I’d provide a link and I’d love to get some feedback from any readers interested in discussing the gist of what he is saying, regardless of whether it’s supposed to be serious or just an observation of how our world is devolving into meaningless existence.

I think it’s interesting that even folks who don’t seem to have any religious beliefs come back to religion because human beings need to believe in something absolute.  If it’s not God, then they make a god called communism or science or social justice.  I think there’s something true in that.  If you’re interested in talking about it go ahead.  If the comments get long we can always take it to a forum topic.