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Spinmaster K-Rove
Trad climber
Stuck Under the Kor Roof
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That is news to you fattrad? You are COMPLETELY African if you go back far enough....or that is what the leading theories suggest. They could be wrong. And the scientific community is prepared for that. Thats why they are called 'theories.'
the·o·ry (th-r, thr)
n.
1. A systematically organized body of knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena.
2. Abstract reasoning; speculation.
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Spinmaster K-Rove
Trad climber
Stuck Under the Kor Roof
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JL I completely agree. That is where things get wholely speculative and where there is plenty of room for a sentient deity or an infinite IS or whatever else tickles your fancy. Personally I think the problem is that gods have been too much removed as third person observers and influences. I believe the undertones of the Bible and other religious texts much more than the rest of it. We are all part of this thing that we call God. We create it and are created by it.
So what is on the other side of the Big Bang? A singularity is a tough thing to imagine. I think its a stretch to think that all matter was infinitely small at one point, but there is so much that we simply do not know.
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Jay
Trad climber
Fort Mill, SC
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If I understand which theory you're talking about Largo, it has much to do with how much black matter exists and how much mass that black matter contains. I think Mr. Ed might be the guy to comment on that one.
BTW, there was a great book called Infinity and the Mind that goes into some similar stuff, forget who the writter is but IMO he's a brilliant logician, a great book.
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Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
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Hi, Jay--
When you say "Mr. Ed," I presume you're talking about or Equine buddy. Nothing like a fellow with a lot of "horse sense" to chime in on imponderable questions . . .
One of the great things about this is how language totally breaks down when pondering pre-big bang "reality." For instance, "infinately small." That's a howler.
JL
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Jay
Trad climber
Fort Mill, SC
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no, I meant one of the resident physicists Ed Hartouni... like he'd being interested in this thread after all this chatter.
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Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
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"that the most recent Big Bang was preceeded by an infinate number of other ones"
'Preceeded' implies a linear progression. Big bangs could very well be popping off like bubbles in a soda bottle.
Where did the thing that contains all big bangs come from?
DMT
Verily, Dingus, this is where language--or at least my language--breaks down. I think that the "thing that contains" (i.e., the soda bottle) said Big Bangs is not a "thing" at all. That's where most folks stumble over "God," who is not a "thing," and since our rational minds can only grock onto and get jiggy with "things," we're stuck with trying to describe qualities and aspects of the map. And the map ain't the territory itself.
I'm confounding my own self at this point . . .
JL
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Jay
Trad climber
Fort Mill, SC
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Lois, You sound like me about 5 years ago. I’ve heard that talk all my life. My mother is a fountain of the same. Have you read the bible? Old and New? In a version that is translated into a modern language? Without having an expert, with a religious agenda, tell you what it does and does not mean?
I wasn’t all that fond of the religious spoonfuls of my youth. I had enough of the teachings. I respectfully walked away from it when I became an adult and participated in family gatherings and other social calls. Then, years later I witnessed a bona fide miracle. Ultimately it led to another miracle that turned my world upside down. Really in as long ago as 60 years my family would have disowned me for what I’ve become. I see the bible the way I see it now because of an internal shift that was externally and powerfully driven. If you’d seen what I’ve seen and heard what I’ve heard you’d believe too. I know I’m speaking in Pig-Latin because it’s all just a surface explanation, but anyway yes I have considered all what you have said and more.
I understand there are translational issues. I’ve read up on many of the document theories too that buck many traditional aspects of the scriptures, which I will not argue with you about. Honestly I don’t know enough about it to do it justice. And I know there are a lot of mystical things and seemingly indecipherable cultural references (I get a feeling you’re not far removed from that culture though), but there’s just as many straight forward lessons to be found. The bible is deep indeed, and one cannot become perfect simply by reading it, but growth… that’s where it’s at. It’s not a place, but a vector that I seek. I ask God to help me understand it, and he does… not so weird (nor offensive) now that I know how it works. It’s between me and him for the most part. I seek wisdom from spiritual leaders too; I’m not in a vacuum. But if that leader told me the world was flat… well I just have to say, see ya.
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Ouch!
climber
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I'm glad man evolved from apes instead of birds. That cloaca thing could be more kinky than a dude would care to deal with.
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Fingerlocks
Trad climber
where the climbin's good
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 8, 2005 - 05:52pm PT
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Two prominent traits of religions, if you look at their variety and history, are that humans are very motivated to have religious beliefs and they are equally motivated to create new ones. Even religions that kill their own followers cannot keep them from creating and believing new religious ideas. There are uncounted religions that are dead and gone, but they have been replaced by endless waves of new ones.
Doesn’t this imply that religions are a lot more about psychology—both individual and social—than they are about the sundry beliefs of what is “beyond” our normal world? We won’t be around to see it happen, but there is excellent reason to expect that a time will come when nobody believes anymore in any of the religions now current. Either there will no longer be people, or they will have moved on to very different beliefs.
As we develop technologies that let us rebuild life including ourselves, maybe it will all just start to seem less mysterious. Maybe people will decide that having an unexplained “intelligence” behind the scenes leaves things, well, unexplained. And if there is no comfort in an unexplained vagueness, they will quit looking for it there. Huxley’s “Brave New World” was a society where everybody had been engineered, and medicated, to be so happy and socially adjusted that nobody had a thought to spare for old religious ideas. Religions had all disappeared except for the consumer consumption religion of “Fordism”.
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WBraun
climber
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FingerLocks and Healyje
The minute one "creates religion" then it's not religion anymore.
So the "creating" argument is a totally worthless waste.
You might as well talk to your dog then!
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Ouch!
climber
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What is the oldest religion and how did it start?
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WBraun
climber
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Nobody can be God. God is one. And religion is also one. If God is one, then how religion can be different? Just like state laws. If the state is one, the law is also, everyone. Now the ordinary law, just like "Keep to the right," if somebody says, "No, this is Christian law. Hindu law, 'Keep to the left,' " will it be accepted? If I say, "I am Hindu, I am coming from India. My law is 'Keep to the left.' " In India, the same thing, "Keep to the left." And many other countries also. So here, because all these laws are made by rascals, in some country you keep to the left, some country you keep to the right. And which is correct, that is unknown. That is unknown. Therefore for the foolish person, "This is Hindu religion,' " "This is Christian religion," and "This is Mohammedan religion." Religion is one. How it can be Hindu religion, Christian religion? No. Religion is one. God is one. Therefore religion is one. Because religion means the law or the order given by God. That is religion. Simple definition.
Now, "Supreme I cannot see." You cannot see. Therefore Supreme's name, another name is Adhoksaja, "beyond the perception of your experimental knowledge." That is called adhoksaja. Adhah-krta aksaja jnanam yatra. By your experimental knowledge you cannot understand. The same thing, that if you say, "I do not see the President of the United States. Therefore I do not believe this law, 'Keep to the left.' " No, no. If you don't believe, that is your business. But as soon as you violate this law, immediately you are under prison. You have seen the President or not seen, it doesn't matter. The law will act. Similarly, you believe in God or do not believe in God. It doesn't matter. The God's order, the God's law, will work on.
And for this purpose the material energy is there.
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Jay
Trad climber
Fort Mill, SC
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Well Lois it is rather personal and I do feel a little weird sharing it on the runout, mank protected slabs of the ST forum. I’ve been going back and forth in my mind what I should say. If you want more detail I’ll be glad to send you some direct packets. Unless for some reason other people express they want more detail too.
About my religious upbringing, it was Judaism. It wasn’t fundamentalist other than you couldn’t be a fundamentalist (i.e. Nazish) nor believe in Jesus as the Messiah. Most importantly you couldn’t do anything to piss off your mother. Other than that it’s all fair-game, as far as strict beliefs go that is. Long story short I became a climber and as an adult I thought of that as my religion more than anything else.
Enough background. The 1st miracle was my wife’s deliverance from a 22 year smoking addiction. She tried to quit 100s of times (that is not an exaggeration). Some dude we barely knew heard her say “I’m going to try to quit again.” To me it meant 3 to 7 days of hell. To him it meant pray in the name of Jesus. Over the next week she didn’t smoke, she didn’t even so much as become vaguely irritable (that alone is a miracle, believe you me). Weeks went by and she never had any withdraw symptoms, neither emotional (miracle) nor physical (miracle). I started to get a little perplexed about this simple 20 second prayer from some weirdo born again Christian, who claimed to know more about my God than I did! What’s up with that? The insolence!
How hard is it to quit smoking? I just watched my step dad die of lung cancer last month and he couldn’t quit. He smoked just hours before his death. I don’t care what anyone thinks about it I know that it was a miracle she quit the way she did.
Skipping lots of detail…
Basically my wife started becoming one of them, not a bible thumper but trying to live it in her own way. I wasn’t bothered, actually I liked this more peaceful person she had become. Even though I wasn’t one of them they were nice people mostly and I never felt threatened so I went to church to support her. Well all the while I kept asking God (whom I still had a general belief in from my roots) what to do about my wife’s new spirituality. I heard what I thought was God telling me to read. I wasn’t sure about it though but it kept happening. I kept hearing a gentile voice on the inside say, “read, read, read,” so I did.
The 2nd miracle was a few months later I was reading the book of John and He, Jesus Christ revealed himself directly to me. I was alone in my kitchen and He came into the room. It was by far the most powerful experience of my entire life. It lasted about 20-30 minutes. Many things that I won’t go into detail here happened but basically it went way beyond blowing me away. If there’s one word I could use to describe what happened, it’s power, extreme power. The bible, even though I still didn’t know that much about it, in an instant made perfect sense. The world still didn’t but as far as I was concerned it was all new to me and it didn’t have to make sense. I’ve have not been the same person. I’ve looked in the mirror many times wondering who I was. I have no regrets though and it’s been wild too. It’s not easy living up to this life I found myself in the middle of, but I will press on because of what I now know. It’s easy for me to believe, easy. Before it would have been impossible, but the impossible happened and now I’m different.
Jason
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Ouch!
climber
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Could you describe the way Jesus looked? Was he fair with blue eyes or of dark complexion with brown eyes?
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Jay
Trad climber
Fort Mill, SC
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Did I say I saw him? He was more like in my personal space rather than my eye sight.
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Ouch!
climber
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Sorry. I just assumed you did since he revealed himself directly to you.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I've been away for a week of climbing in Tuolumne Meadows and am catching up on the Forum... yikes, this thread is already huge, I am amazed that the interest in this subject does not wane.
So playing by Largo's rules (which are totally arbitrary): I believe in the ability to understand the PHYSICAL universe by what has come to be known as "the scientific method".
Understanding the physical universe has had a profound affect on humans and on all that is influenced by humans, e.g. the environment of earth. The philosophical implications of understanding the physical universe are also profound; these implications are probably of more interest to participants in this thread than a rigorous explanation of scientific fact.
Scientific method systematizes an emperical proceedure of observation and experimentation. However, emperical facts are not the whole story, the facts are related one to the other to form a logical explanation of physical phenomena. This explanation gives rise to hypothesis which can be tested and shown to be false. The hypothesis cannot be shown to be true, but to be consistent with observation.
The observations must be repeatable. The theory (explanation) must be logically rigorous.
Because of the limitations of observation, theory is provisional. It is no surprise that as new observations become possible that old theory may not correctly explain them. The old theory is a correct description of a physical universe as seen by experiments with finite resolution and precision.
Whether or not you "believe" in the scientific method, it has been responsible for the modern era of human existence on the planet and beyond. It works.
Now the direction of scientific investigation is somewhat unpredictable. Usually it begins with simple questions: "what am I seeing when I look up at the night sky?" might be a paraphrase of Dingus' spiritual musings. But the question can be addressed by observation and experimentation and theory.
Planetary objects differ from the stary background. Lots of different explanations. The angels where thought to direct the motion of these objects. Very predictable angels at that... with the earth at the center of the universe the motion of the planets could be described by cycles within cycles within cycles... with the sun as the center of the universe, it is somewhat simpler to describe the motion as ellipses with some "laws" describing the motion...
All this becomes a consequence of motion in a gravitation field once you realize that the same force governs falling bodies on earth as keeps the planets rotating in orbit... the universal law of gravity given by Newton; who used it to derive the Keplerian laws of planetary motion... but Newton knew it was not the whole story, what caused the "action at a distance", the force of two masses on each other?
In time observation revealed that the starry sky was mostly galaxies, collections of stars, and that these where receeding from earth. The expansion of the universe was explained by many different theories. The "big bang" theory predicted that the universe should be filled with photons released when the universe was cooled from its initial high temperatures to a point when electrons and protons bound together as hydrogen... calculating the rate of cooling by the expansion the temperature of these photons was determined to be 3 K... which was observed by a team at Bell Labs trying to figure out what the "noise" in their radio receivers was coming from as they looked at communication satellites... it is not so much that this observation "proved" the big bang hypothesis but rather the competing theories where shown to be false.
The big bang theory has the WHOLE universe coming into existence at a point in time. There is nothing else... no concept of what is "beyond" the universe, there is nothing "beyond" the universe.
There is the problem with the "fine tuning"... how do we get the universe that we have. This problem was addressed by having an epic of "inflation" in which the universe had a very different character, but one that eliminates the fine tuning problem, making the current universe very probable. However, we do not yet know the nature of the physical laws all the way to t=0, but "science marches on"....
Observations of galactic rotation curves implied that there was a lot of mass which did not radiate but had gravitational influence on the motion of stars in galaxies and galaxies in clusters... the "dark matter". There are many hypothetical sources of the dark matter, each being tested through experimentation and observation.
Even more startling observations suggest that the universe is expanding, that something is pushing it apart. This is the "dark energy" which has a repulsive force on matter. No one has an understanding of what the "dark energy" is, but its affects are measurable, it is physical.
The current cosmology has 70% of the universe dark energy, 25% dark matter and 5% the stuff we're made of... we're an impurity in the universe.
The successive insights into the physical nature of the universe has "us" being less and less central. Not only are we not the center of the universe, we are not made up of what most of the universe is... this may seem improbable, but it is all consistent with observation AND theory, that is, explainable in a rigorously logical fasion.
Evolution? well it is a well formulated scientific theory which is testable and has considerable predictive power. Darwin anticipated the mechanism of inheritance, which we now know to be DNA. Evolution explains all of life, it is fundamental to understanding biology. If you like "irreducible complexity" try formulating a rigorous definition of it... I'd like to see one and then subject it to experimentation. Behe and others fail to provide such a definition. They give "examples" illustrating the concept but have not yet defined the concept. It is not at all clear that they would adhere to the scientific method in their explanations of how life came to be... invoking a supernatural power fixes all problems, but is ultimately untestable and therefore unscientific.
I don't think that being a scientist necessarily requires you to be an atheist, but I do believe that the realm of the "physical" universe and the "theistic" universe are separate... I believe that once the the physical universe is affected by something, that thing is measurable and becomes, by definition, a part of the physical universe.
As far as what you can do with your mental state, my belief is that you are playing around with the complex mechanism of the brain... basically playing "video games"... there is no more significance to such exercises than getting to the next "board"... which can be highly amusing but not profound... just my opinion.
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Jay
Trad climber
Fort Mill, SC
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Sorry Ouch I thought you were being a smart ass again. Maybe you were but I reread my post and I can see why you thought that.
Thanks Ed for the post. Anytime a real scientist chimes in the game is restarted back to square one at at least shifted to a new level. I think evolution and creation, at least for now should be separate topics. How’s that for a bible believer.
Lois, I shared that knowing some folks will think I’m wacky. I would think I’m wacky too if it didn’t happen to me. Even though I am a little self conscious about it, I figured what the heck, this is a climber’s forum. Everyone here’s a little wacky. If I can suffer the misery of a bigwall and go back for more I can surly put up with people’s raised eyebrows for a little while. I’m not all that worried about it, climbers in general are an accepting crowd, most will probably just say, “Whatever floats your boat.”
BTW, my point is not to convince anyone that my experience should be real to them. Like I said it was personal. My point in sharing that is my desire to communicate a process; that when you read that crazy book called the bible God will talk to you. You may not hear him right away, you may not always understand him, but the process is there. It’s about listening and allowing him to be the teacher. If you didn’t understand that process it’s easy to miss out. The process again is read while asking him for wisdom and understanding. If Healyje ever gets back to reading the bible that’s his business, I’m just trying to hand over some personal advice based on experience.
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can't say
Social climber
Pasadena CA
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Generally I stay out of these type of discussions, not because I don't have opinions on them, but because they rarely change anyone's mind, no matter what logic or evidence is presented from one side or another.
But Jay said: "My point in sharing that is my desire to communicate a process; that when you read that crazy book called the bible God will talk to you"
So I have to ask, Jay, if I read the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, the Tao, and whatever other religious tome I might pick up, will each one's god talk to me?? Please advise
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