Rarely am I willing to provide someone else’s words without providing my take. Whether because no one agrees with me entirely (probably for the best) or for simply restating the issue to emphasize its importance, I am unsure. But I will leave this video uncorrupted, at least for now. Continue reading A clergyman’s take on natural disaster
Category Archives: Cosmology
Zen and the Art of Freediving
Today I stood between mountains of coral that towered next to me. Beneath thirty feet of crushing water, I sunk like a rock to the bottom and firmly stood with my feet planted on the sandy ridged bottom. Beneath the turbulent waves, I felt only gentle swaying with little current. Fan corals rocked back and forth alongside me. I could walk on the sandy bottom, pressing off each tiny dune in the sand for traction. With my arms spread wide, the walls of the reef were nearly within reach of my fingertips. Several large barracuda rested just above the sand, watching my every move with their teeth spilling from their jaws. Continue reading Zen and the Art of Freediving
Senseless violence
I once believed that religion and violence could be separated. I once believed that people simply used religion to justify their craving for violence. They used it to justify it to themselves and to everyone else, to rouse a riot or to begin a war. I thought religion preached non violence and it was counter intuitive to follow a path of destruction.
I am struggling to see that peaceful coexistence anymore. The reason is not because religion is inherently violent which most often it obviously is apparently not. Instead, I believe it to be a result of the fundamental basis of believing in something that is unprovable, immeasurable, and unseen. Alongside that illogical thinking comes a senselessness that violence fuels off to become justified.
No one has ever been able to tell me what god is. No one ever can put it into words so that I can understand. Everyone just tells me it something you know, something personal that you may feel. Continue reading Senseless violence
Time to graduate
Illogical thinking is the cause of war. So does that mean logic and reason would result in world peace? I believe it would.
Animals follow simple rules of nature. Animals have a desire to reproduce and a desire to survive. They have adapted to environments to best suit their needs and grow to allow them to spread their genetic code. These are traits of every productive animal. That is, it was consistent until education and logic. Humanity is the first and only species on this planet to have overcome these animalistic cravings. That is not to say that everyone has overcome them. The world is littered with people who believe these rebellions to be satanic, preaching birth control and other modern advancements as evil. But I do believe that the overcoming of primitive urges will be the cure to every problem the world faces. I am no hippie. Hear me out. World peace is a product. But the change itself is the real goal. Continue reading Time to graduate
Post Script
I feel the need to clarify some things written in a post titled “My reason for god” as well as state some things I forgot to mention and highlight some other points.
To me, god is not defined in the undefined. God is not limited to what we cannot explain. In that, we would simply be admitting to inadequacy. Instead, I believe in those points, god can be evident. However, what I really see as god is a belief that this is all too strange to have been an accident. With that said, I believe that thought can be left at that. I do not have claim to have conversations with this force nor do I claim to be able to define it. I simply filled in the three letter word in place of my amazement of existence.
When I was younger, I abandoned the term god for that word above, existence. Continue reading Post Script
You were predetermined to read this
“Our time is burdened under the cumulative weight of successive debunkings of our conceits: We’re Johnny-come-latelies. We live in the cosmic boondocks. We emerged from microbes and muck. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control. There may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere. And on top of all this, we’re making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.”
Carl Sagan
Over the past few hundred years, science has proved an extraordinarily humbling practice for humanity. From our conceited belief that we were placed here on a globe in the center of the universe by some supreme being to the realization that we are in fact a result of a collection of physical processes, we have progressively realized our insignificance. From a divine purpose to purposelessness, we have seemingly lost our way by finding the truth. It is a scary proposition that we could be entirely alone and are portraits painted by the unfolding of physical events. I understand; it seems to strange that it could be true. If life is truly so pointless, then what is the worth in living? Continue reading You were predetermined to read this
The end of illogical thinking
I want you to just imagine for a moment. Imagine every word I am saying. Pause with each sentence and see the image I challenge you to see. I want you to separate yourself from this world and imagine yourself as god-like. First you are observing yourself from behind, watching you at your computer.
Then imagine the world. You are between the earth and the moon, floating in a black emptiness, looking down at our blue-green lush planet with white clouds swirling about. It is an amazing celestial body, surely one of the greatest. It is floating in this vast darkness just as you are, with no hand of Atlas holding it nor a web to keep it suspended. It simply floats, orbiting an even more massive body that illuminates our earth and provides it with the energy that allowed life to flourish.This is our home. This is where we and everyone who has ever existed was born, lived, and died. Alongside the young species of man are millions of other creatures. It is an extremely vast community, one that we struggle to see as a whole. Imagine for a moment that there are no Saddam Husseins or Osama bin Ladens or Adolf Hitlers. The world is peaceful and everyone is amazed with their predicament. We are united on this globe. Everyone, all seven billion of us are content for these moments in peace.
What would you do with fifty billion dollars?
On Thursday, I jumped on wikipedia with one window open with a set of pages learning about anything from protein structure prediction to looking at creation of life from a technological basis. On the other window I was exploring space elevators and space cannons. But what I was really interested in was the space elevator, mostly because it would be awesome.
Continue reading What would you do with fifty billion dollars?
Interstellar travel
I was rereading the Wikipedia page “Interstellar Travel” earlier today and was very frustrated about their discussion of impossibility. I guess this could be a recurring theme in my life. The only thing that is impossible is that something could be impossible. Everything instead can be discussed in the range of probabilities. It is possible for me to walk through a wall. Seriously I can do it, it just is highly improbable. But the writers of this article talk about interstellar travel as if it should be relegated to science fiction. Why then are hundreds if not thousands of physicists and engineers around the world searching for better methods to accomplish such travel? Someone has hope and at the expense of increasing my rank of nerd, I am one of them. I almost wish Wikipedia was not ever changing so that we could reflect like a textbook on the progression from impossible to reality. Impossible has become a word that is illogical to use. Everything is a theory. At one point in time there was a theory that it was impossible for a human to pass the sound barrier. Since that belief we have created a commercial airliner that could travel faster than that. And now there are physicists (who may truly be insane) that believe that the “light barrier” is only fictional.
MY reason for god
I used a simple demonstration to illustrate my amazement with humanity, with life, with existence. I did not need an athlete with seemingly super human abilities or a man who could recite the first one hundred thousand places. All I did was hold my hand out in front of me, fingers extended, and contract them all at once. What this showed was not just the amazing human ability. It is true, the complexity of such an action is incredible. From streaming of that signal to the nerve to the release of calcium with the muscle tissue, the “walking” of the motor protein myosin along the filament actin. All this truly is incredible, but is all explainable and in that regard is not god-like.