Craven, Generally to your post in order,
Some children do grow up and find out that many rituals are meaningless, and some are actually painful and can damage entire lives, but most people simply quit the club, church or whatever, chalk it up to education, and get on with life. i'm not talking about "total immersion" here if you get my drift.
"you posit" Of course they might be. How do you think that the supporters of Oral Roberts (previously mentioned) and James and Tammy Faye Baker will feel when they realize that "they've been took"
"you posit again" I disagree. A great part of the "shame" comes when they decide that they are "damaged goods". This self perception of themselves as damaged is due in a large part to inculcated Abrahamic fantasies about sexuality and the attendant valuation of women.
Negation of personal shame,
Of course not but if we are going to attempt to fix something (broken children) I would help for us to have some idea of what breaks them and what causes "collateral damage".
IMO a considerable amount of "collateral" damage occurs when we give succor and encouragement to those who live in a fantastic universe, and allow them to define our public behavior.
It behooves us to differentiate Between
what we know to be true--In accord with facts and observation
what we think is true--Possibly in accord with facts and observation
what we believe to be true--Requires no facts or observations
Frank, If enough people "piss into the wind" a horrible drought may be averted with attendent benefits to humanity.
Then again it may just make yellow snow. There are probably no absolutes, maybe :wink:
aka,
I think you confuse a lot of human nature for what you call "Abrahamic _________".
Craven, I think that I do also. I tend to regard the Bible as an astute commentary on human behavior and I often wonder how much behavior is innate and how much is learned.
Perhaps I read too much into the various rituals and conventions. There is also a chance that I read more into "Alice" than was ever intended.
But perhaps the converse is also true. That rituals and conventions are more "learned" by people than are "natural". I seriously suspect that some of the Abrahamic rituals and conventions have a little more to do with the profitability to a segment of society of encouraging certain behaviors within a larger society than they have to do with benefiting all society.
Sorry that's confusing.
What I am trying to say is that say "Catholicism" confers certain benefits on Catholics. Islam confers certain benefits to Moslems. Some of the benefits may be real, security of children, stability of the group, help and aid if required. Some of the benefits may not be real, eternal life, absolutions of wrongdoing, and purposes to life.
The larger the group is the greater the benefits to the owner-executives. To enlarge the group we get into proselytism, population control (plus or minus), genocides, and absolutism, homophobia, and control of sexuality.
Damned if I can define the line where the selfishness (self interest) of the clergy (a natural and often commendable human attribute) becomes outrageous and perhaps even harmful to the larger society, but using fantastic examples to govern (control) human interactions is a bit much, IMO natch.
dlowan, If you are still here I really sympathize with your position that some of my arguements are used to support child abuse. That,unfortunetly perhaps, does not make them (the arguements) wrong. There is another subject that also pits a personal freedom against a societal benefit. That is the generally unhappy activity known generically as "stalking". This was exemplified by the actress named Jodi Foster a few years ago. Since the "harm" in those cases is always unnerving and often fatal to the recipent of the "stalkers" attentions and since the stalker is usually mentally unbalanced (how's that for ambiguity
) it doesn't seem fair to punish him. Yet we cannot allow him to continue that activity although we probably cannot show harm or even harmful intent.
I just happen to like the expession.
To a golfer -- especially one of a certain age -- considerations about the wind while relieving one's self on the course is very important.
If people are laughing at you as you finish and get ready to tee off -- it doesn't help your drive.
Seems to me, that whenever there begins a 'christian' discussion on the forums, it turns into a a theme like "get over it, God aint real and you know it" which really irks the crap out of me.
If it says Atheist - then lets all gang up on any believer in a religion
Seems to me some folks, whenever philosophically challenged, look to stifle the dissent as opposed to addressing it substantively. Now, its one thing to belittle a person for that person's beliefs, and entirely unacceptable, but I see nothing wrong with arguing, pro or con, the relative merits or lack thereof of any philosophy, even, perhaps especially, if that philosophy claims theologic validation.
I told myself I wasn't gonna click on this thread again. Now why, oh why didn't I listen to myself. Because I'm a fool. A fool I tell you!
Just another thought.
*****************
Divine Light?
A new book seeks God in the details of quantum physics
02/28/04
DALE SHORT, Contributing Writer
"If this light bothers you, we can sit somewhere else," Lee Baumann tells me. We've just settled onto the couch of his suburban living room, and the big picture window is blazing with late-afternoon sunshine.
"Light is fine with me," I tell him. And because light is generally no big deal, neither of us realizes the irony of the exchange.
The premise of Baumann's new book is that light is a big deal. In fact, he asks, what if light is... quite literally... God?
On first approach, the idea sounds like the kind of musing that rises with the smoke of a hookah at a late-night gathering of grad students convened in a shabby apartment to debate the mysteries of the universe.
Which is why, Baumann explains, he's spent 20 years assembling his evidence: experiments in quantum physics textbooks, and quotes from some of the great scientific minds of our time. The result is the book God at the Speed of Light: The Melding of Science and Spirituality.
The concept is spurring discussion on Internet boards and (by sheer chance, according to the author) has even infiltrated Hollywood. The director of the network TV series Joan of Arcadia credits Baumann's book as one of a handful that influenced her concept of the show: a modern takeoff on the Joan of Arc story, about a small-town teenage girl who is regularly visited by God.
How did Baumann arrive at his God-as-light theory? In a word, slowly.
"I grew up in a fundamentalist church," he says, "but in childhood I had some experiences that started me questioning the idea of a higher intelligence, and in college I questioned it even more."
Baumann is a trim, 40-ish man with graying hair and a short beard, and the cadences of his speech sound, not like a preacher, but rather a physician or teacher, both of which he happens to be. He left private practice to work as a corporate consultant in the medical field.
"By the time I began my clinical practice, I was definitely a religious skeptic. But over the years, when I'd read books about physics and about near-death experiences, I kept pulling out all these spiritual or supernatural elements, trying to classify them, which eventually led to writing the book."
In a nutshell, Baumann's argument deals with what he calls "the three omni's":
"Light has been proven to be omnipresent, which means it's everywhere in the universe at once. And as an entity for which time doesn't exist, light is omniscient because it's aware of everything in past, present and future.
"For the third part, light's omnipotence, I have to take physicists at their word because it's a very complex concept. But basically, when scientists try to measure the energy levels of electrons or atoms, they come up with infinities, which makes the equation meaningless.
"They have to perform what Stephen Hawking calls a 'mathematical trick' to eliminate the infinity aspect and let the equation work. The technique is called 're-normalization.' You can find out more about it on the Internet, but basically it means that light appears to have infinite energy.
"And of course, omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence are the same qualities that we use to describe a supreme being. Add the fact that people who undergo near-death experiences repeatedly experience the sensation of entering into a great light, and the concept is just very convincing for me. Very logical."
This is probably a good time for a brief public service message, for readers who are over 40: If you haven't kept up closely with developments in science since you finished school, your concept of how the universe works is as obsolete as the eight-track tape and the vacuum tube.
The orderly cosmos described in our old science textbooks was the brainchild of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), famous deviser of the theory of gravity (apple falling from tree, etc.) and father of the many universal laws that proceeded from it. Today's textbooks refer to his immensely influential view of things as "the Newtonian universe." Think of that system as a place for every galaxy, and every galaxy in its place.
But then came the 20th century, which gave us Albert Einstein and ushered in the branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. Einstein and his colleagues made literally earth-shaking discoveries that (a) brought us atomic weapons, and (b) poked Newton's theories full of black holes. The same mathematical formula that made possible Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed us a drastically revised world that, at the level of the atom, is all but incomprehensible to a logical mind.
In this new universe, order and symmetry and the neat proofs of geometry are, it turns out, not the rule but the exception. Light and matter coexist, uneasily, with pockets of anti-matter so dense they consume even light rays into their black maw.
The very unpredictability of physical events has become its own branch of science, known as "chaos theory," and detailed for the lay reader in James Gleick's popular book Chaos.
This frightening and confusing universe is not some random speculation, Baumann emphasizes, but is drawn from the known facts as the world's leading experts now understand them.
"I admit, the concepts are so far out they don't make any sense," he says. "So a little humility goes a long way, for all of us. You always have to be prepared to change your hypotheses. But the main concepts have been accepted now for decades, and this is the best knowledge we have."
The notion of light being "aware" of anything, much less the future, sounds to the skeptic like a touchy-feely, New Age invention. But it's proven scientific fact.
Baumann's book gives an overview of two historic physics experiments performed to determine the nature of light. One, the "double slit" experiment, proved that light waves behave differently when they're being studied than they do in isolation. The other, known as the "quantum eraser," went a step further, showing that light waves can actually anticipate future experiments and alter their behavior accordingly, "which, from a Newtonian standpoint," Baumann adds, "is something that could never, ever occur."
The larger implications of light's metaphysical shenanigans are even more mind-boggling. In God at the Speed of Light, Baumann introduces the concept with an analogy from physicist Nick Herbert:
One of the main quantum facts of life is that we radically change whatever we observe. Legendary King Midas never knew the feel of silk or a human hand after everything he touched turned to gold. Humans are stuck in a similar Midas-like predicament: we can't directly experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch turns to matter.
In other words, our everyday lives are technically an illusion. The objects and surfaces that we perceive as real are only the temporary intersection of our consciousness with the "true" universe, made entirely of energy.
"Which raises the question of this wooden floor," Baumann adds, tapping it with his heel. "If we weren't here looking at it, would this floor still exist? Well, it would, but it exists only as a nebulous, ill-defined mass of wave forms. It's not until some type of measurement or observation occurs, and you have what's called 'the collapse of the wave function,' that the nebulous mass of waves solidify into concrete, particulate matter."
Likewise, Baumann had no idea that the publication of his book (by the A.R.E. Press, which stands for Association for Research and Enlightenment, part of a Virginia foundation honoring the work of the famous clairvoyant Edgar Cayce) had solidified into the consciousness of a TV mogul until he was searching the Internet last fall for mentions of God at the Speed of Light.
One of the Google hits was the text of an interview with Barbara Hall, a Hollywood insider best known for her role in creating such shows as E.R., Chicago Hope, and Northern Exposure, promoting her new TV series Joan of Arcadia.
"I was totally blown over," Baumann recalls. "She named my book as one of a few that had helped inspire her to create the new series. Since then, things have just gone wild with the book's reception. It's been great."
He makes it a point to catch every episode of Joan, and so far he's impressed: "It's great family entertainment, and it has a good spiritual basis, good values. And of course, the actors are phenomenal - Mary Steenburgen, Joe Mantegna, and all the rest.
"I think there's really been a hunger for spiritual subjects since 9-11," Baumann says. "People are viewing their priorities in a new light. If they weren't questioning their lives before, they began to when they saw the scope of that tragedy. Why would a loving God allow something like this to happen?"
But Baumann's concept of God as omnipresent, familiar light which, at the moment of death, steers our true path home to the afterlife raises troubling questions of its own.
Such as: If a tunnel of light is the typical near-death experience, what do blind people see when they die?
Baumann doesn't hesitate. "There's a writer named Kevin Williams, who's compiled an extensive collection of case histories on his website neardeath.com, and it turns out that blind people see light, just as sighted people do."
So if light is God, why does too much God give us skin cancer?
This time, Baumann hesitates. "Good question. Light definitely has destructive properties, especially the ultraviolet spectrum, which is part of light," he says. "On the other hand, lasers are a form of light too, and they're used in medicine today to destroy those same kinds of cancerous growths. I don't know. It's hard for me to relate destructive qualities to a loving God."
And perhaps the biggest question of all: if light actually represents good and darkness represents evil, what about recent data that suggests the universe has far more dark material than light? Is goodness, by definition, a losing battle?
"Another excellent question," Baumann says. "I'm still struggling with that. One thing I've found fascinating is that scientists have examined regions of space that are total darkness in a total vacuum, and they've found that each cubic meter of darkness contains more than 400 million photons. They're non-visible photons, electromagnetic radiation. But they're light particles still, in total darkness.
"Could black holes be the evil of the universe? It's an interesting theory, but obviously nobody has the answer. I suspect it's just a matter of time until someone finds sound scientific answers to that. But right now, it's just speculation."
A typical audience at one of Baumann's lectures on the subject, these days, is composed of some true believers who share with him, afterward, their own near-death experiences - as well as some true skeptics, who tell him he makes some interesting points but they can't quite buy his theory.
"That's fine," he says. "They're in the same place I was, many years ago. I mean, most of these physics concepts are so unbelievable that no rational human being can accept them, the first time around. I reviewed some of these experiments thoroughly, 15 or 20 times, before I finally understood what the ramifications were.
"All I ask is that people keep an open mind."
Baumann's next book, which he's researching now, is another foray into the intersection of the scientific and the spiritual. It's a medical analysis of the trance-state "readings" done in the first half of the 20th century by Edgar Cayce, the clairvoyant whose foundation published God at the Speed of Light.
"Cayce is a fascinating figure," Baumann says, "and fortunately he was smart enough to hire a stenographer to document every trance state he was in, some 8,000 or 9,000 of them. Basically, in this self-induced hypnosis he was able to access the, for lack of a better word, collective unconscious, the source of all knowledge in the universe. He would diagnose, at a distance, people with medical conditions and prescribe treatments, some of them so futuristic that, even now, alternative medical groups are having trouble accepting them. But his success rate, at times, was phenomenal."
All of Cayce's readings are available on the Internet and CD-ROM. Baumann has actually traveled several times to the library in Virginia Beach to see the original hard copy.
"When they published my book, I barely knew who Cayce was, and now I'm really caught up in the implications of his work," Baumann says. "I'm beginning to believe there's no such thing as serendipity."
He laughs and squints out the window into the sunlight, sitting there with God smeared all across his face.
@Wilso,
(Dowlan, Edward Vernon (45) Christian Brother and school vice-principal - Pleaded guilty 1996 to 16 counts against 11 victims between 1971-82. Originally charged with 76 counts, but 60 dropped in return for guilty plea. Offences occurred while Brother Dowlan was teaching at St Patrick's College, Ballarat, St Alipius' Primary School, East Ballarat, St Thomas' College, Forest Hill, and Cathedral College, East Melbourne. 9yrs8mth (maximum) sentence reduced on appeal to 6yrs6mth. One victim suicided in 1991. Victim's mother filed a suit for damages against Dowlan and the principal of St Patrick's College Ballarat in 1999.) Hi Wilso do you know who this mother is? I am gathering proof against Dowlan
@Peter B,
You are responding to a post which Wilso made almost six years agio. While it is not impossible, it is highly unlikely that Wilso will see and respond to your post. In fact, it you look at his last post, just above yours on this page, you'll see that it might be unlikely that he will see your post.
@Setanta,
Hi Set. Saw it. I don't have any knowledge of the case in question.
@cavfancier,
Yea, but couldnt it have been a girl watching over us? Does it have to be a masculine character who does our nurturing? I think christianity's lack of a female deity takes away from what a religion really could do. If God had a wife he would be more powerful. Behind every great man is a busy woman.
@jesusBastard,
The Catholics have Mary as a deity. The Saints are all deities as well as Jesus, even in Protestantism -- monotheism doesn't actually exist. Unfortunately, you're addressing one of our best, and one of my favorite, A2Kers who has passed. A minute of silence for Cav.
@Wilso,
Main, Eric, Uniting Church - Found guilty of rape and sexual abuse of multiple parishioners in church enquiry. Confession on tape. Defrocked. via email
I wish to know what happened to this Uniting Church Minister from Geelong, for New complaints have come forward.
And this is the Minsister who Raped and abused me sexualy
I like to know who else has be effected by this Monster
Please Post a message is I can contact you.
JD
@Sirpepper,
Sorry to hear of your bad experience. I hope you find him.
cavfancier, timberlandko, Lightwizard... sadly gone...
and many others that don't post here anymore.
This is like Spoon River Anthology!
@fbaezer,
Ditto. How are you, Francisco? All is fine here. T.
