A really big question

[Randyvine]

Agreed one hundred percent. Most genuine prophets don’t, but the religion gets started anyway. 

Thing is, you can’t have it both ways. Either Jesus was God and knew that, or he wasn’t. If he wasn’t, then the bread and wine might have been intended, as you suggest, simply as a commemoration and a reminder of his teachings. But if he was God, he had to have known exactly what he was doing: instituting what would become a timeless religious ritual.
 

As far as non-Judaic faiths went, he seems to have regarded them mainly as time-wasting mumbo-jumbo rather than objects of hatred. He never tried to disprove any Gentile’s faith, or convert them to his own. As for the religion he himself was brought up in, he certainly did not set himself up against it. Remember what he said when people asked him about that?

(You may have noticed that most of my Gospel quotes are from Matthew.)
 

I didn’t know that, but it does not surprise me. It would be socially disastrous if some Israeli citizens began insisting that they were more Jewish than others, and persecuting their fellow citizens because of it. I’m not sure whether it’s really ancient DNA they’re concerned about, though, or more recent admixtures. Some European and American Jews probably have no ‘Semitic’ genes left in them at all (yes, that’s quite possible). I have a Jewish South African friend who looks like her Mum and Dad could have been part of the Lebensborn programme. Tiny button nose and all. Though an elderly Lebanese Arab who met her knew at once she was Jewish; she was shocked that he could tell. He would not tell her how he knew. He was our host that night, so she couldn’t really press him.
 
 
Oh, go on with you. It’s a delight to talk about stuff like this with a believer whose mind isn’t firmly shut and locked.

Anyway, the honour is mutual, though mine has a U in it.

"Oh, go on with you. It’s a delight to talk about stuff like this with a believer whose mind isn’t firmly shut and locked."

Yeah I know sorry about that but I am a bit awe struck. So much so that from now
on I'm using that u as well. At first I went: "wait does mutual have a u in it?"  lol

I guess there isn't a law against DNA testing but there are some strict guidelines
in place as far as the reasons for the test to be conducted. And tracing family
history is apparently barred or seekers are given a heavy dose of the run around
that never ends. You know gov. crap the same everywhere, so that gives good reason
to wonder what they're hiding. Are the Rothschilds really Jewish? And they're always
hiding something. Or maybe they take pride in making themselves look that way. Or
yeah, many peoples could've just decided it would be easier to just blend in I guess.
It may sound funny ( Just blend in. Oh and here put this on in stead.) that way but
as I'm sure you know. Somethimes life can only be what you make of it.

[Astyanax]

The problems that arise from "the universe trying to understand itself" are;

* that it appears that the universe had some sort of finite beginning, and therefore there are causality problems with a preconscious universe organizing itself towards consciousness.

But if the Universe is evolving into God, it will (once fully evolved) be omnipotent, transcending space and time, and could very easily go back to the beginning of time and create itself. I mentioned St Anselm’s proof of the existence of God earlier; this is quite close to it – another instance of the proposition that if the concept of God can exist then God, too, must of necessity exist.
 

* we see no structures from which such universal scale self-consciousness could arise. Of course you could point to our consciousness, but that is only a fairly recent occurrence and we do not have the energetic capability even as a group, to control our own environment, let alone an entire universe.

How do we know what’s evolving in some alcohol-sodden dust cloud megaparsecs away? The Universe is still young; give it time, lad, give it time.
 

* there is the problem of time and distance, where even the fastest known methods of communication from one extent to its diametric opposite are likely to be equivalent to something more than twice the age of the universe (if possible at all).

Again, not a problem for an omnipotent being, surely? Aren’t you the believer here, and I the sceptic? Where’s your faith in miracles, man?
 

The conclusion that can be drawn is that the universe cannot understand itself.

Hypothesis non probatum. 

[Randyvine]

ChrOnaut

"* there is the problem of time and distance, where even the fastest known methods of communication from one extent to its diametric opposite are likely to be equivalent to something more than twice the age of the universe (if possible at all)."

Now this I'd like to use to interject a thought that must be more common I would think.
Regarding time and distance being hypothetically effected by size/mass. Forgive me
if I say something off but something seems way off to me concerning speed of light
and the distance of any given celestial object we know is there because of it's light.

Or maybe we can't be sure the planet or star we see in the night sky is still there.
There in lay another part of the really big question. To surmise lets say a star
is fourteen light years away form planet Earth. How do we know that star is
still there where we see the light telling us the star IS there, is delivering four
teen year old information?

I'm sure more than we know could happen to the star in fourteen years. Do we now
have a universe that is trying to understand itself by lying to us about everything we
see or think we see? Then add size to that thought and suddenly my eyes cross and I
pass out. Wake up screaming MORE SCIENCE, we need more science damn it, thru 
watery eyes and a quivering lip.

[BeyondKnowledge]

If religion is as polymorphous or Protean as all that, then perhaps we should stop regarding it as a category – meaning something you can make any general statements about. I have already made it clear that I disagree; I made some general statements about religion earlier in the thread (see post #42).

I think religion is an instinct, and should be filed under the category of ‘things that are part of being human.’

It seems to me that you look at religion through the lens of anti-religious prejudice. If you really want to ‘explain it all’, you fall at the first hurdle because your only explanation appears to be nothing but ‘it’s all wrong and you lot are stupid to believe it.’ Humble thanks, O Wise One! I’m no more religious than you are, and I can recognise an attempt to start a new religion when I see one.

Yet for all the bluster, you can’t even prove one religion false, can you? Go on, try. Pick any one you like. 

We’re waiting...

I will not pick on any religion in particular because they are all correct and wrong equally. They attempt to explain the unknown by making up things. 

God just is. The books are just stories made by people. People are fallible both intentionally and accidentally. It is much like trying to measure our solar system with a tape measure and calling it acurate. It can be measured but not with that instrument.

[BeyondKnowledge]

If you believe banning guns is a good idea? Then at least I understand
where for comest thou. People kill people no distraction no deflecting
and no blame game. Hand guns, religion, the military NO! People kill
people that's it done. Any way any reason doesn't matter. We kill
each other because it is in our hearts to do so. Only when that
changes does it stop.

Commonly available guns work at a couple of miles or so max and right now. A knife has even shorter range. Religion can kill at any distance and any time including over thousands of years.  

Yes some humans have a liking for destruction of other humans, but why give them unlimited range in distance and time?

[andy06shake]

 

I’m not so sure. For an object to be an object, it must hold together. And the four fundamental forces that hold everything together have their practical limits. For the strong force, that limit is reached very quickly as you move away from the atomic nucleus. The longest-range of these forces, gravity, is the weakest; it’s not really that good at holding objects together.

Chr0naut points out above that weak as it is, gravity would suffice to collapse the Universe into a singularity if left to its own devices, which implies that no object can grow beyond a certain size without turning into a black hole – the theoretical size of which (measured in our cosmos rather than from inside the hole itself) would be zero.
 

The limit is not the size but whether the mass inside the radius exceeds the threshold.

So the larger an object gets, the lower its average density needs to become a singularity.

So there is no known maximum size.

But there are limits on how much mass can be packed into a given size...

The universe expands, meaning the density is too low on large scales for that to happen.

[chr0naut]

But if the Universe is evolving into God, it will (once fully evolved) be omnipotent, transcending space and time, and could very easily go back to the beginning of time and create itself.

Biological evolution, as currently conceived, requires natural selection acting over multiple generations. I would wonder what sort of evolutionary pressures could there even be that would be applicable for an immortal non-physical supreme entity?

Retro causality only seems to be a solution, but a God must already be elevated to Godhood to be able to elevate itself to Godhood. How do you get to step 1?

And time has different conceptions to different people. Temporal reversal would not be like running a movie backwards, that is a misunderstanding of what 'physical' time is.

If you invert the temporal variables in any physical equation, say, describing the expansion of gas filling a confined space, things proceed in a way different from the reverse of the initial release of the gas - they don't move back into the point from which they were released, because all other variables and forces remain unchanged. The force vectors and particle paths described by physical equations, and that make a gas disperse, would continue to make the gas disperse even if the temporal values were inverted.

And that same 'physical' time is a property of spacetime. 1 second is equivalent to 299,792,458 meters measured along the temporal axis in a multidimensional universe. Yet even that is a relative approximation. As the writers of Dr Who described it, "it's all wibbly-wobbly and timey-wimey".

I mentioned St Anselm’s proof of the existence of God earlier; this is quite close to it – another instance of the proposition that if the concept of God can exist then God, too, must of necessity exist.
 

My guess is that high-order organization requires a high-order organizer. Absent that, entropy appears to reign, driven by seemingly chaotic pseudo-randomness (it is pseudo-random because it is still rule-bound).

How do we know what’s evolving in some alcohol-sodden dust cloud megaparsecs away? The Universe is still young; give it time, lad, give it time.
 

Entropy and probability.

The universe seems to self-organizing to find stasis at the lowest energy configuration, not because it is directed to do so, but that is just where things stop.

Again, not a problem for an omnipotent being, surely? Aren’t you the believer here, and I the sceptic? Where’s your faith in miracles, man?
 
Hypothesis non probatum. 

The miraculous only appears miraculous to us. God appears to have discernable method in how thing happen to happen.

But I will caveat all that with, 'I surmise'.