A really big question

[MONAD Ops]

Sounds like a rather gnostic interpretation with hints of Sophia's fall if im not mistaken...

Yes as well as with the Creation stories or theory about how GOD brought LIGHT to this region during the precursor activities which made LIGHT beings like humans. 

I have wondered when he said LET THERE BE LIGHT where did he come from before getting here.

Was it a location outside of here...

[BeyondKnowledge]

Yes as well as with the Creation stories or theory about how GOD brought LIGHT to this region during the precursor activities which made LIGHT beings like humans. 

I have wondered when he said LET THERE BE LIGHT where did he come from before getting here.

Was it a location outside of here...

At the time that was written, that was cutting edge science as far as human knowledge went. They did not even have the words we now use to explain the beginning of everything. Now we would call that the Big Bang. As far as outside to exist in, they did not cover that in the Bible.

They do go on to explain the development of this solar system, the planet Earth, life on Earth, and so forth.

It is interesting how that all fits with the current scientific understanding of how it happened. 

They did get some parts right.

And then it starts falling apart. The whole knowledge is bad thing. Then where did Cain's wife in the land of Nod come from?

[Randyvine]

Sounds like a rather gnostic interpretation with hints of Sophia's fall if im not mistaken...

You are not mistaken my good man. I know because I just had to look that one up. :)

"Hint's of Sophia's Fall" thought you went all paperback on me for a second. lol

[Randyvine]

Religion at worse, kills very many people that don't believe as they do. No matter if
it is just an argument about which book is the true instructions. They don't even
consider all those books were written by people. 

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.

[chr0naut]

This is a very interesting thread. It brings so many ideas together about the nature of the universe and creation. 

Spoiler alert: I will explain it to you. Everything.

The universe is everything. The laws that regulate how things work are timeless. They just work. They do fail under certain extreams but that may be just our understanding of them and not knowing all of them and how they interact.

Space is the property of the universe that allows everything not to be in the same place. 

Time is the property of the universe that allows everything to not happen in a single instant.

Many years ago, people on this insignificant rock tried to explain this. They not only had a lack of understanding about many more things than we do now but they did not even have words to describe some concepts we are discussing. 

For this reason, they made a name for how everything works. It had to be simple. This name  was God. 

God was created by man to explain everything. I am not saying God does not exist. God is everything and everything is part of God. This was before the corruption of organized religion was invented, 

Science is trying to understand and explain the concepts of God (the universe). Many scientists don't know it because they are part of it. This is the observer effects what they are observing problem.

The universe made you and everything according to rules. You see everything in the universe the way you do because you are part of it.

In a way, humans questing the nature of the universe (God) is just the universe (God) trying to understand itself. 

I hope this inspires more thought and discussion.

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.

* 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.

* 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).

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

[BeyondKnowledge]

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.

* 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.

* 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).

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

You are assuming that the universe is as we preceive it. It may be something entirely different and we just think it is as we currently understand it. 

Have you considered we all could be one entity? It was lonely and board so made an area to exist physically in. This area has rules and materials in it. It made many copies of itself in this area, each one self aware but not aware it was only a copy of the whole. It has such fun watching what is basically a huge ant farm. All those tiny copies doing things physical lifeforms do. That is until those little existences ends, then it returns to the original form to add to all the other life experiences of all the others before it.

This is just one of the possibilities I have read about.

[Astyanax]

Well, sufficient mass will gravitate together (eventually) and enough mass will collapse to a singularity. Were it not for expansion, collapse would be the fate of everything.

Good point. But even if we neglect ‘dark energy’ and limit ourselves to considering the expansion due to leftover momentum from the Big Bang, the density of the Universe is apparently too low to cause collapse to a singularity, or indeed to retard the rate of expansion to zero. This being the case, we are yet to encounter an upper size limit for objects; but see my reply to Andy below.
 

As, however, expansion appears to be the modus, all matter will spread out further and further until it is no longer possible for any one part to communicate with another and so the universe dies lonely, in the dark.

Poor Universe. To die all alone like that, without even a night-light at its bedside for comfort...
 

Or perhaps, a sufficiently advanced intelligence would cooperate to differentially collapse parts of the universe, perhaps even calving new universes sufficient for the start of new 'goldilocks zones' for life, that may also yet allow for emergent intelligence and the continuum can proceed in generating novel forms.

They’re at it already. We call their construction sites black holes. 

Nice post!
 

*     *     *

 

If we stay strictly physical, there's no known law of physics that says objects must stop growing at a certain size.

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.
 

Something larger can exist in principle. But we can't interact with or verify it from here.

I wonder. If part of that something was ‘within’ the Universe, it would seem at first glance that you could measure that part alone, which might, in turn, allow you to learn something about the whole. That’s how we reconstruct long-dead dinosaurs from a fossilised jawbone and a couple of vertebrae. A little less naively, there isn’t really an ‘outside’ to the Universe, so any object that exists has to be within it. If big enough, it would determine the size of the Universe itself.
 

And if we cannot observe and measure something... It kind of stops being physics and starts to become philosophy.

In particular, metaphysics. But you pose an interesting conundrum. Are black holes metaphysical?

I’m okay with metaphysics; an open mind should acknowledge the limits of empirical knowledge. You have thoughts, don’t you? You could argue that the electrical activity of your brain is the physical manifestation of thought, but the thought you have is definitely not merely the electrical activity it generates; it has a quiddity of its own that transcends the physical. It is, moreover, perceivable to others besides yourself and can even be written down. Consider that last part carefully: a thought expressed as words on a page is surely not to be found by examining and measuring the physical attributes of the paper and the ink (pardon the antiquated metaphor, but I am in fact an antique). Yet the thought is surely there, expressed on the page, for another thinking mind to grasp and manipulate.

There are nonphysical objects of which the laws of physics tell us very little, and nothing of relevance. As Nietzsche famously mocked Descartes, ‘you think, therefore you are, are you? But what is this you that thinks?’ His point was that we do not consciously will our thoughts; they arise spontaneously, out of nowhere, and do not imply a thinking self.

[Astyanax]

There is no evidence to suggest that Christ came here to start a religion.

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.
 

And the way he was towards the religions of the time, it could be interpreted that he hated religion.

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 wonder if you've heard how the Isreali gov. doesn't allow DNA testing in Isreal? The reasons why being said is because many claiming to be Jews even today are of a bloodline going back to canaanites.

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.
 

You're a good person to talk to Astyanax. I'm honored

 
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.

[Astyanax]

Sounds like a rather gnostic interpretation with hints of Sophia's fall if im not mistaken...

Yeah. One magical movement from Keter to Malkuth.

[Astyanax]

Religion is anything from training wheels to genocide.

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...