Thanks Red Badger.
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Posted on 12/28/2022 11:14:08 AM PST by Red Badger
My last project. It’s called The James Webb Space Telescope
It has produced some great results
Exactly!
Good, cuban leaf. Your Genesis analogy is thought provoking. A cat has no moral compass. It’s amused when it finds and kills a mouse, mole or baby rabbit. It’s a creature in the wild — the same as Adam and Eve were before before their “fall”.
You can look at the fall positively. We earned our freedom at that moment and our newly gained thought processes brought us both pain and joy.
Sure the 12 year old smacked the car into a tree. But he learned that he is his own master now and is responsible for what he does — both good and bad.
I’ve always wondered, if the universe is expanding following the big bang, what is it expanding into? What lies beyond the furthest edge?
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Agree, fishtank. In my view, much of the supposed "wisdom" of inter-galactic astronomers is as reasonable as Astrology. But it still makes for entertaining speculation and fun to argue about. Look at this thread. More than 100 comments! FReepers were entertained by this topic.
Pre-Covid, when I needed to get up at o'dark thirty to drive to the airport, I would to listen to the Coast-to-Coast radio show and its enchanting interviews with all kinds of pseudo-scientists and story-tellers -- anybody selling a book on paranormal stuff, aliens, etc. I'm convinced many of the people calling in to ask questions of the guest were paid actors -- their commentary was so convincing.
* * *
The truth is that knocking down dumb theories and wild conjectures can also be fun.
One of the best lessons in debunking was done by Mark Twain in his humorous -- but highly effective -- essay "Is Shakespeare Dead?".
In the essay, Twain totally destroys the notion that the historical Shakespeare of Stratford actually wrote the plays history says he did.
The essay is lengthy (a good evening read) but teaches lessons in how to intelligently tear bogus theories apart with humor.
Here's an excerpt from Chapter 4. Conjectures.
The historians “infer” that he got his Latin in that school—the school which they “suppose” he attended.
They “suppose” his father’s declining fortunes made it necessary for him to leave the school they supposed he attended, and get to work and help support his parents and their ten children. But there is no evidence that he ever entered or retired from the school they suppose he attended.
The next addition to the young Shakespeare’s Stratford history comes easy. The historian builds it out of the surmised deer-stealing, and the surmised trial before the magistrate, and the surmised vengeance-prompted satire upon the magistrate in the play: result, the young Shakespeare was a wild, wild, wild, oh such a wild young scamp, and that gratuitous slander is established for all time!
It is the very way Professor Osborn and I built the colossal skeleton brontosaur that stands fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high in the Natural History Museum, the awe and admiration of all the world, the stateliest skeleton that exists on the planet.
We had nine bones, and we built the rest of him out of plaster of paris. We ran short of plaster of paris, or we’d have built a brontosaur that could sit down beside the Stratford Shakespeare and none but an expert could tell which was biggest or contained the most plaster.
We’re okay with imagining space as being much bigger than it seems at first.
We’re not so familiar with imagining time the same way. We measure it mentally in terms that we can grasp with our experience. It is unimaginably larger than that.
What we see through our instruments is only a speck in time. This could be the reason that we seem to ourselves to be unusual as a planet. It isn’t that similar planets don’t exist; it’s that they don’t appear to us to exist right now.
The very fact that the Universe and everything in it exists at all is proof that God exists.......................ergo sum
We are like the story of the blind men and the elephant...............
https://americanliterature.com/author/james-baldwin/short-story/the-blind-men-and-the-elephant
A smiling, benevolent God who is fascinated at this soap bubble He has made, and that we call The Universe.............
We are like a newborn child, whose entire universe is itself and what it can see...................
The longer I'm alive the more I realize that humans are a failed species. The planet is very lovely.
Spoken like someone who knows God like a brother, and is equal to Him.
Many Christians are arrogant enough to believe that they are the only ones who interpret the Bible correctly; and, that those other Christians are going to hell.
I am pretty sure that the Bible was never intended to be a Technical Manual Of The Universe, and that the creation story is merely an allegory.
Nobody truly knows the mind of God, and nobody is equal to Him. But God did give us minds capable of reason and a universe full of clues as to his intentions. And if that’s not enough, he sent us quite a few messages as well, which include the fact that this universe is a temporary thing meant to pass away, and since that’s likely to happen long before we could ever visit another star, it seems like a very silly thing for God to do to make a bunch of habitable planets that nothing living will ever set foot on.
Thanks Red Badger.
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Uh, Shakespeare lived, he wrote well-known plays, and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in groundless speculation. Period. Hilarious that you use that as a case against speculation.
Life exists, extant. They either got off their planets and acheived interstellar travel, or they did not and snuffed themselves out.
So the question is, if any carbon-based water-dependant sentient group (who either likely partially or completely merged with silicon-based devices, as the singularity will occur here on Earth long before interstellar travel), achieved interstellar flight, did they come here, or did they ignore us, or are they running the clock?
Or, did it happen in a different galaxy, say SPT0418-47, and the nimrods are content to move from place-to-place within their neighborhood using Direct Fusion Drive or nuclear pulse or light sail at a reasonable speed-of-light, but don't see the purpose in intergalactic travel. When you look hard at Drake and Goldilocks [CHZ], that seems a like a reasonable concern. An abundance of primitive life in almost every Goldilocks zone (panspermia), an ever-dwindling amount of sentient life per the needs of 'rare earth', the moonshot that creates bipedaled carbon-based humanoids; and of course they all end up separated by most of the universe.
You said:
“Many Christians are arrogant enough to believe that they are the only ones who interpret the Bible correctly; and, that those other Christians are going to hell.Many Christians are arrogant enough to believe that they are the only ones who interpret the Bible correctly; and, that those other Christians are going to hell.”
I’m sure you know, scientists don’t all agree on how they interpret the data. Likewise, doctors, lawyers, politicians. In religion, likewise, Judaism and Islam, for instance. But you’ll give all these a pass, I suppose, but not Christian theologians?
Why is it, you don’t allow Christian theologians to disagree on how they interpret the data?
You said:
“I am pretty sure that the Bible was never intended to be a Technical Manual Of The Universe, and that the creation story is merely an allegory.”
We agree on the first thing you said, the Bible is not a book about science, or geology, for instance, it is a book of theology. But not on the second, Adam and Eve were as real as Noah was, and Abraham, Moses, etc. See, even you and I can disagree.
That image is missing Pluto!
That is precisely why I am sure there are other civilizations out there.
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