Religion, Theology, and all that good stuff

[JACkory]

The only "evangelist" who makes any sense to me these days is Ole Anthony. I first heard his morning bible studies (which are posted on the Trinity Foundation website) about 3 years ago, and the words he said just bowled me over. They challenged everything I believed to be Christianity. It was so radical that I avoided it for 2 & 1/2 of those years.

But I've found myself drifting back to it, and it makes so much sense to me now. I have to wonder what changed within me that would cause me to embrace this teaching, which, as I see it, is much more "Christian" than any I have ever heard. In fact, it makes me question the legitimacy of all the theology I've ever studied.

My first exposure to Anthony was through a copy of "The Wittenburg Door", a religious satire magazine that he "inherited". If you're not familiar with it, all I can say is that it is brutal to the point where you wouldn't know it was published by Christians if you didn't already know. And the one target that "The Door" lambasted with the most ferocity was televangelists with their false teachings and manipulative techniques.

If you haven't read my b.l.o.g. lately, especially in the last few months, you might not know that I have zero tolerance for these swindlers. I don't know that I can explain exactly WHY they get on my bad side like they do. I'd like to think it's because they are shitting all over something that is precious to me. They've reduced the most important event in the history of mankind into the convoluted plot line in a Must See TV prime time drama. They've used as an excuse to hold the biggest telethon ever broadcast. It's cool for Jerry Lewis to have a telethon once a year...the proceeds all go to a worthy cause. But the Monster Televangelistic Telethon, a monster that consumes air time for sustenance, raises money to pay for...uh...MORE AIRTIME.

Okay, that's a little harsh. The folks who donate to these ministries aren't paying for airtime ONLY. Some of the money pays for the "minister"'s salary (which, I suspect, amounts to a figure that makes the average contributors yearly income look like a Christmas bonus from a miserly boss). And let's not forget just how essential Lear Jets and Bentleys are to the "preacher on the go". God forbid their standards of living be comparable to that of the modest middle class people who send their monthly "seeds" to these "sowers". It is a vital necessity that speakers of this importance own mansions. How do these bastards sleep at night, knowing that their maidservants are very likely paid with funds that were hustled from poor people who have been told that God wants to make them rich...at a price.

Harsh...sure it is. And no doubt much of the money that comes to many of these ministries is used in a proper manner, feeding starving folks in third world countries, helping the homeless, that kind of stuff. Which is GREAT. But this kind of work makes up such a small piece of the pie. It's not an excuse for all the other shit that is going on with these quacks.

At any rate, I seem to have drifted from my original topic, Ole Anthony. I was just saying that Anthony's fight against televangelism is what attracted me to his teaching. But soon it had nothing to do with that. The guy made sense, it was that simple.

He also has a sense of humor that is so on-spot it cracks me up. For example:

Ole appeared on the Christian talk show The 700 Club—and was permanently banned when he told host Ben Kincheloe that he prayed to God to either send him a wife or stop making him so horny.

That's just so funny, not just because of the joke, but because he had the audacity to say it on "the 700 Club". The fact that he was banned afterward only goes to show what humorless fuddy-duddys they are in Pat Robertson's camp. Who would want to be a Christian if it means that you can't laugh at all of MAN'S IDEAS about what it means to be one?

Another aspect of Anthony that I find refreshing:

On at least two occasions Ole's life was threatened by one of his students, and one particular Arkansas-bred proselyte had to be held down bodily on the floor, lest he open a can of whup-ass.

Later—at Kip's Big Boy, at Lucas B&B, at the NFL—I would tentatively ask what might have been happening that night.

"Romans. We're still studying the book of Romans," he would say.

"What particular aspect of Romans is generating this level of interest?"

"Well, we were talking about your place in the body of Christ. And I told one guy his place was to be a pimple on the ass of the body of Christ. I just said it. It just came out."

"And he didn't agree?"

"A lot of these people are clinging to their miserable little self-images. They don't understand that it's about God. It's about them, but only the part of them that contains God. They still think they're special."

If this offends you...if you really think that there's anything "special" about us because we're Christians...then we're on totally different pages. And that's okay. It's none of my business what you believe. I don't mean to make it your business what I believe. I'm just ranting.

But I did want to get the word out about Ole Anthony...not exactly about Ole, but about the morning bible studies that you can download from the Trinity Foundation's website. Even if you aren't a Christian (ESPECIALLY if you aren't) you will find much to contemplate in these 25-30 minute sessions.

MORNING BIBLE STUDIES at TRINITY FOUNDATION

[JACkory]

btw, that last bit wasn't directed at anyone here. It was more in a "general" way, ie, addressed to all "Christians"

[Rit]

it's good to see you opening up your views on what makes a "christian".

always good to make sure that your tenets of faith aren't merely just an excuse for the dramatizing of your ego banging its head against the ceiling of its own understanding... if you're going to preach to anyone about it, that is.

that, my friend, was directed at all Christians here.

[JACkory]

I think that ego is a strong thread in the coil that tethers us to a world of suffering...It's good to know that coil will be cut by the Reaper's scythe. The older I become the less enamored I am of time and space.

[upinkzeppelin2]

jackory said:

If you haven't read my b.l.o.g. lately, especially in the last few months, you might not know that I have zero tolerance for these swindlers. I don't know that I can explain exactly WHY they get on my bad side like they do. I'd like to think it's because they are shitting all over something that is precious to me. They've reduced the most important event in the history of mankind into the convoluted plot line in a Must See TV prime time drama. They've used as an excuse to hold the biggest telethon ever broadcast. It's cool for Jerry Lewis to have a telethon once a year...the proceeds all go to a worthy cause. But the Monster Televangelistic Telethon, a monster that consumes air time for sustenance, raises money to pay for...uh...MORE AIRTIME.

Okay, that's a little harsh. The folks who donate to these ministries aren't paying for airtime ONLY. Some of the money pays for the "minister"'s salary (which, I suspect, amounts to a figure that makes the average contributors yearly income look like a Christmas bonus from a miserly boss). And let's not forget just how essential Lear Jets and Bentleys are to the "preacher on the go". God forbid their standards of living be comparable to that of the modest middle class people who send their monthly "seeds" to these "sowers". It is a vital necessity that speakers of this importance own mansions. How do these bastards sleep at night, knowing that their maidservants are very likely paid with funds that were hustled from poor people who have been told that God wants to make them rich...at a price.

Harsh...sure it is. And no doubt much of the money that comes to many of these ministries is used in a proper manner, feeding starving folks in third world countries, helping the homeless, that kind of stuff. Which is GREAT. But this kind of work makes up such a small piece of the pie. It's not an excuse for all the other shit that is going on with these quacks.

At any rate, I seem to have drifted from my original topic

And I'm glad you did. VEEEERy well said, JAC. Kudos.

[Thorngrub]

jackory said:

I think that ego is a strong thread in the coil that tethers us to a world of suffering...It's good to know that coil will be cut by the Reaper's scythe. The older I become the less enamored I am of time and space.

The following is an excerpt from A.A.Attanasio's blog. I have taken the liberty to italicize portions of this excerpt; I have done this to those passages I thought to be especially significant.

Keep in mind this is an excerpt, lifted out of context from its complete blog entry. Also keep in mind, the blog entry itself depicts several photographs of the "cemetary trees" (for instance) which help the reader understand what Al is saying.

I will provide a link to the original, complete article directly following the excerpt.


excerpt from
The Mystery of Death ,
by A.A. Attanasio

"Death is a tree. It grows toward the light. And the light-within branches through the body like a tree.

Somewhere in the future, you are already dead. The moment that we believe is the last moment is, actually, the first. This is so, because time does not exist as we think it does. Being-in-time seems an elusive and ineluctable flow of instants from past to future. This is an illusion. Our nervous systems (our perceptual apparatus: the sensorium) has evolved to interpret energy patterns causally. This way of perceiving reality is useful only in a strictly limited way, which facilitates the survival and reproduction of the organism.

Out of the grove of snakes, a new intelligence opens: time exists precisely like space. The future is already there. At the place where you die, you enter existence – and what you currently believe to be the past is a set of fake memories and counterfeit documents. This is not a conjecture. It is a consequence of physics. Look into retrocausation. Read about Ludwig Boltzmann. And Arthur Eddington’s concept of the thermodynamic arrow.

That arrow flies along the trajectory of the second law of thermodynamics, from lesser to greater entropy. It poses the biggest question in physics now: Why is entropy so low in the past? Entropy is the quantitative measure of energy spontaneously dispersing or spreading out and calculates how much energy has flowed from a constricted state to one more widely diffused. The most constricted state, the lowest entropy, is the big bang itself. Entropy near the big bang remains very low. And why that is the case presents to physics a stupendous cosmic mystery – with devastating consequences.

To appreciate that mystery, research the findings of WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe). 1,000,000 years after the big bang, the arrangement of matter remains astonishingly smooth. Such a regular distribution of matter is extremely unstable, given the attractive force of gravity, and generates a highly dynamic supply of potential energy. Why doesn’t that hot matter clump up? Why doesn’t it tangle tightly into black holes? Why instead does it create a colossal source of low entropy, on which the apparent direction of the Thermodynamic Arrow depends? (Roger Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind estimates the probability of such a smooth arrangement of matter at 10−10e123!)

The odds against such an even distribution of matter directly after the biggest explosion in the history of the universe is so inconceivably huge that many strange things are far more probable – including the very strange likelihood that ‘the future’ already exists and is deciding what will occur in ‘the past.’ Among those decisions is your undecomposition at the moment of death and subsequent emanation through spacetime toward the lowest entropy.

Three things to remember: light propagates without a medium - you are light (consciousness) that made specific observations at the moment prior to your undecomposition - and observations of final states determine different histories of the universe. Right now, in fact, your current observations are determining which history, among a vast number of possible histories, will happen as your ‘past.’ (Perhaps at this point you begin to grasp why the stonemovers warned you not to enter this place of sorcery!)

Why should we entertain the obviously absurd idea that ‘the future’ determines ‘the past?’ Recall from your studies of the thermodynamic arrow that, according to Boltzmann, probability increases exponentially with entropy. It follows that the objective direction of time does not exist, because the probability of producing the world we see around us is far less likely to have emerged out of the exponentially lower entropy of ‘the past’ and far more likely to come from the reverse of the normal temporal perspective.

Facing the truly colossal odds of the lowest entropy that WMAP reveals at the earliest history of the universe, other theorists have suggested scenarios as strange as what I’m proposing and - like snakewalking ‘backward’ in time - far more likely than the early state of our cosmos: all the particles that constitute the Sun and the planets could have spontaneously flown together in one instant to create our solar system exactly as we see it today and that event would be far more likely than the low entropy in proximity to the big bang. Also more likely than a big bang producing a super-smooth distribution of matter is the probability that your brain assembled spontaneously and you and you alone exist, experiencing everything as a virtual reality.

The Prince of Darkness, Dr. Realitätsprinzip, steps forward and refutes the snakewalk by asserting that the low entropy at the beginning of time simply (the good doctor much admires that word: ‘tis a gift to be simple) - simply indicates that there is something as yet not understood missing from our cosmological model.

Thank you, Doctor. The Prince of Darkness is right, of course. There is and always will be something missing from our rational understanding of the universe, because the universe exceeds our ability to grasp it rationally. (Check out Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Ludwig Wittgenstein.) But the snakewalk is not a rational walk in the park. The snakewalk is divine intercourse.

Part of our foreplay here in the grove of cemetery trees before we enter the Body of the Goddess is to set our sorrow down. Bereavement, the most immemorial leaching of our human spirit, disappears when we look closely at the physics of reality. Where are you when you are in ‘the future’ a moment ‘after’ you die? You are disembodied consciousness, light propagating without a medium in what Stephen Hawking calls imaginary time.

That means that when you are not in spacetime, physically embodied, you are moving in a direction of time perpendicular to the thermodynamic arrow. Examine the relationship of imaginary time to the wave-function of the universe (as described by Hawking and Hartle), and you’ll see that, unlike the thermodynamic arrow, imaginary time has no beginning or end, no apparent preferred direction.

The crest of the snakewalk occupies imaginary time and the trough exists in the physical world. The snakewalk oscillates from our far more probable ‘future’ to our far less probable ‘past’ until we arrive (after many oscillations, many incarnations) at the singularity of the big bang. In fact, the Hawking-Hartle quantum cosmology of imaginary time postulates that ‘the past,’ in particular the phase transition from imaginary time to the big bang and the start of the thermodynamic arrow of conventional time, is controlled from the far ‘future’ in a self-consistent loop.

So, we are snakewalking backward - until we reach our mother’s wombs and then launching again into imaginary time to another death that initiates another life…

Our ultimate destination is the big bang, itself a quantum event: its initial size, immeasurably smaller than an atom, exists in a probability state, a cosmic wave function, which the physicist Richard Feynman called the sum-over-histories.

The Tree of Death grows toward the light.

Every possible configuration of the particles that will condense out of the original energy of the big bang exists in the sum-over-histories, and each configuration is a worldline - sort of like the numerous branches we see here in the grove of snake trees reaching for the light of the sun. (BTW, the crest on the crater wall we see beyond the trees is Pu’u Mai - the clitoral hood of Kohelepelepe! I believe She’s excited to see us.)

The flash of death is not our departure from spacetime but our arrival. From there, we undecompose and radiate through the sum-over-histories toward the singularity at the big bang. There’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Along the way is an immense but less than infinite number of pathways, all the possible histories of any given life and of all possible lives. Light combs out through them.

The transmigration of consciousness drifts not into the ‘future’ but the ‘past.’ Past lives, then, are histories we presently choose by the observations and determinations (actions) we make. So, if you’ve always felt you’ve lived before as Cleopatra - maybe that’s where you’re headed. If there is a Cleopatra in ‘the past,’ you may be the one destined to create her. And among the sum-over-histories, there may be many of you who will exist as one of the extensive numbers of ‘Cleopatras’ extant in the manifold configurations of our universe.

The light-within branches through the body like a tree.

All the atoms of the human body take on mass (and inertia) from the Higgs Field - from emptiness. The body is the world. And the terrible darkness of the world trembles inside the body, pumping blood, darkness to darkness. At once impersonal and intimate, the world is a journey of forgetting.

When asked to remember, we dream. Dreaming is the light in the body, in the dread darkness of the world. Dreaming illuminates the impossible, which is the road of astonishments up and out of this world. At the crest of the snakewalk in imaginary time, we dream -and our dreams are our observations, which collapse the wave-function to the trough of the snakewalk: one worldline among the sum-over-histories.

When we are dreamers, when we are light snaking among the waves-without-medium of imaginary time, the force of awareness selects the worldlines we will live. Our dreaming shines from the moment of death all the way to our fetal enchantment in the undivided life of the womb, retracing the events we experience as we collapse through life into the singularity of the gamete - a trillion cells imploding to one, one molecule of DNA, splitting into egg and sperm and releasing our light and our life to imaginary time."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
link to complete article:
www.aaattanasio.com/
*You must click on the link SNAKEWALK, upper left corner*

It should take you directly to this startling and lucid explanation of life and death. An explanation that is not conjecture, mind you. . .

[Thorngrub]

thorny said:

The Prince of Darkness, Dr. Realitätsprinzip, steps forward and refutes the snakewalk by asserting that the low entropy at the beginning of time simply (the good doctor much admires that word: ‘tis a gift to be simple) - simply indicates that there is something as yet not understood missing from our cosmological model.

For instance, that gravity did not take shape until after entropy gathered an X-amount of force...

[Rit]

too much.

[Thorngrub]

C'mon Ritty. You can do better than that man.

[Rit]

This line from that article was amazing, i admit:

"Dreaming illuminates the impossible, which is the road of astonishments up and out of this world."

[Thorngrub]

Yeah, there's a motherlode of amazing sentences and observations in that blog.
A.A.A. is tha MAN

[Thorngrub]

"The Mystery Of Death" blog (which I recommend you click on the link(s) provided above and read the entire thing for yourself, when you get a chance) is certainly quite densely packed with astonishing information. It does take a while for the mind to process it all.

[JACkory]

[phil]

Vatican says aliens could exist

By David Willey
BBC News, Rome

The Pope's chief astronomer says that life on Mars cannot be ruled out.

Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space.

Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, is a respected scientist who collaborates with universities around the world.

The search for forms of extraterrestrial life, he says, does not contradict belief in God.

The official Vatican newspaper headlines his article 'Aliens Are My Brother'.

'Free from sin'

Just as there are multiple forms of life on earth, so there could exist intelligent beings in outer space created by God.
And some aliens could even be free from original sin, he speculates.

Asked about the Catholic Church's condemnation four centuries ago of the Italian astronomer and physicist, Galileo,
Father Funes diplomatically says mistakes were made, but it is time to turn the page and look towards the future.

Science and religion need each other, and many astronomers believe in God, he assures readers.

To strengthen its scientific credentials, the Vatican is organising a conference next year
to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the author of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin.

[rocknroller]

Pope Benedict is an extraterrestrial. ;D