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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IN_GOD_I_TRUST who wrote (23535)	12/27/1998 5:13:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 39621

Steve others have looked into your myth and found it unacceptible. You are proclaiming truth without an inkling of its real content. Maybe someday you will look beyond the bible and find real truth instead of myth.

To: IN_GOD_I_TRUST who wrote (23535)	12/27/1998 8:30:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

re: SO it's up to you Always has been. It is very difficult for one who does not already know physics to understand physical cosmology, or one who doesn't know matrix algebra to understand dynamic programming, but at the bottom of these everyday mysteries there is a stack of text and exercise books that one can, at length, win through, and in time, understand any scientific theory or experiment, but always on an affirmation of having at a moment's notice to abandon it, and to work for its replacement with a more stable and believable structure. The Temple of science is not build on sand, or of ragged stone and warped beams, hewn by 10 thousands of conscripted servants in the hills of Lebanon. If you seek a ruined Temple built on religion to house an ark you may seek them in Jerusalem and even thrust a prayer into a crannied nook, for all the good that will do you. The Temple of Science is builded of sounder stuff, of polished and elastic leggos, each stone quarried and carved by many and snapped into position ever higher on the mound of knowledge tempered with peoples' minds. Should one of the pillars fail, it is easily replaced with even better, stronger stuff. Some scientists (and philosophers) are constantly engaged in looked for even minor cracks and leaks in the underbasements and foundations, while many of the brighter bolder and more creative spirits atop the edifice, are reaching ever more upward -- for the stars. I have seen the learned astrophysicist from Estonia descry the endless webs of galaxies flung across the universe here in our isolated little world of science, I have seen his hand sketching out what you might well, had you a mind to, identify as the tracings of the hand of God. Do you have the faintest idea of what I am talking about? Had Paschal lived to see these colossal voids, he would have been crystalized by fear. When I read the puny physical speculations of the authors of old, or the snarling fury and mindless credulity of the worshippers of that pitiful, maddened, manque' Saviour, I think with Hume: "The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day [ca. 1750] cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity:* and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience." --- (On Miracles) I want no part of a god who would contract for eternity with a mutinous and disobedient gallimaufree of tribes and then would abandon them purely because they acted after the deal the same as they did before it. Not much due diligence there. I want no part of a savior who would sacrifice and betray his people for ideas and ambitions he hardly understood. If I am to worship a god, I demand one powerful and smart enough to rule the universe. I demand a God big enough to create and to control all of the stars in their circuits. I demand a God big and powerful enough to suppress warfare and impose if need be universal peace and a golden age on mankind. JHVH and Jesus never even understood gravity, ignition, evolution, crop rotation, selective breeding (though Jacob may have), artificial insemination, the big bang, black holes, neutron stars, or contract bridge or short squeezes. If they had, they would have left handbooks of chemistry and physics and a few practice hands that would have saved all of that boring lab time to compile the constants. Until someone upgrades gods I'll just do without. I've got things to learn before I die. I'm not going to cower on my hands and knees on cold granite floors and die from chilblains. * though it is true that astronomers and telescopes from all over have come to our neglected little university atop what physical geologists call the tallest mountain on Earth and have peered farther than anyone into that emptiness and have never once reported, unlike the poet-pilot, that they reached out and touched the face of God. *( Pace, Acquine*