Friday, December 24, 2021

What Advent Means To Me on Christmas Eve!

Found this in my FB memories from 10 years ago:

The Christmas Advent season is about celebrating Christ's birth, but also His return. These are my thoughts this Christmas Eve, before the First day of Christmas on December 25, and it's march towards the 12 days of Christmas that follow:

Comment from 10 years ago when I was 43 years young:

I don't find myself fearing Christ's return as some are tempted to do. No, as I look at the Nativity Ornament so plain and simple on my tree, just an Arch, with child like toy symbols of Mary and Joseph standing on each side of the manger - my heart breaks - my Heavenly Father came to Earth not just as a helpless child, but to the poorest of the poor - never living a life of wealth upon the earth himself - coming to grow up to be spit upon, to be beaten, to be flogged, to be crucified - and yet Adam's seed was that blind - it breaks my composure as a man, I am humbled and near tears like a teenager, not a 40 something man in midlife . . .

My hearts breaks at the tragedy of what should have been - he should have been welcomed, he should have been given a seat of honor - his entire time on the Earth with us should have been one of us worshiping Him the whole time - but it was not . . .

I stop and ponder - just 20 years ago it seemed as though there was plenty of time - as though life had an abundance of it - and I was not one to waste any of it purposely, no in many ways I gave of it not knowing the cost of it - but even so would I have done things differently? Where I did good, no . . . where I erred and stumbled - no, I had to err and stumble or there would have been no revelation of more sure footing, no revelation of a better way to walk - no, some wisdom can only come with time - as much as I would like to go back and do things differently, would I have simply stumbled in a different fashion? Would avoiding the painful lessons of life yield harder lessons and even harder pain?

No, life is not about works righteousness any way, it is about faith, especially faith in the Holy Spirit . . . comforter, counselor - neither adequate translations of PARCLATOS from the NT Greek - the word literally translates "the one who comes along side to help you walk" and the imagery is of a parents holding a toddler's hand, and helping them to walk . . . has there ever been a day in my life that I did not need the Holy Spirit to hold my hand and guide me to walk? No, there has never been day . . . there has never been a day that I have not needed to be born anew/again . . . no instead there have been spiritual toddler tantrums on my part . . . no let me walk, let me do it my way . . . and my way was painful, but there was that patient spiritual parent to take my foolish little temporal hands and offer to hold them again . . . to help pull from the mud and mire I had fallen into . . . to come along and clean anew - to sanctify yet once again - to make clean what I in my stubborness soiled so foolishly . . .

Every child has to learn to operate within their family . . . they have to learn the boundaries . . . they have to learn respect . . . they have to learn what great sacrifices they never knew were made for them so often in quiet humbleness . . . so quiet you would almost think the parent was keeping a secret . . . but no this was just the nature of the parent to love you so . . . for they look into your eyes and see their own soul reflected . . . it is not so easy to turn away such flesh and blood . . . no it should be impossible to do so.

Even when the child is walking without the hands so much holding them . . . they now learn anew to hold other hands . . . first a love . . . then an offspring . . . then to return to hold the hands that once held you now that they are old and weak . . .

The lessons of the Holy Spirit are around us, they surround us, their quiet witness once listened to is so loud, its like encountering quiet for the first time in weeks, months, or years, and now the quiet causes a ringing in your ears that is so loud you cannot quiet the quiet . . .

No, I am not terrified or afraid of my Saviors return . . . no instead I find myself worried . . . does my daily walk reflect back love, gratefulness, humility . . . is my love for my Savior real . . . or am I treating my God as something less than One who deserves worship . . .

As a teenager, when I felt the Spirit move upon me, I felt this was true worship . . . this doesn't get any better than this . . . and now in my midlife I am so humbled by the nail prints in the feet that walk before me . . . so humbled by the nail print and scarred hands that hold my weak temporal hands giving them balance, showing them how to be be born anew/again . . . how to let go of time . . . how to prepare to embrace Eternity where my real treasure lies . . .

The time is growing shorter and as it grows shorter am I found faithful? This is not about law keeping, this is not about works righteousness, this is not about anything I've ever done . . . it is about . . . "Have I been faithful? Have I really loved? Is my heart like my Father's? When his spiritual eyes look into mine, does he find any of himself there?"

This is what the Advent season has come to mean to me . . .

Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Theories have limitations whether they are creationism or evolution.

 Theories have limitations whether they are creationism or evolution.

Many are raging over the series Cosmos, but being humans who observe our universe, which we can only see at the speed of light, gives us limitations (since there are aspects to the universe known and very possibly unknown that function at faster than the speed of light).

Below are a couple of copied blogs that I managed to import from My Space, since they deleted the blogs and then enabled users to download so they wouldn't get sued, but there is no longer an address for them.

I am working on creating one from my Earthlink webspace to recreate them, but even Earthlink is making it harder to access former webpages to update.  SO until I figure out the technical glitches to overcome, will re-post some thoughts to FB NOTES:

BLOG #1
++++++++++

Subject KY Student Says Scientific Phenomena Proves God's Existence

A Western Kentucky University student claims that he has scientific proof that God spoke the world into existence, exactly as is written in the book of Genesis.

Samuel Hunt, 34, said he's documented his theory through a series of experiments compiled in his book "The Law of All That Is."

Hunt said through a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence, light is produced from bubbles when sound is passed through a liquid.


"I want to give Darwin an answer, the world an answer. Everything is contained in Genesis. Now there is mathematical proof that parallels everything in Genesis," Hunt said.


Professor of Psychics and Bio Psychics at WKU, Dr. Wieb Vandermeer, said Hunt's theory is interesting but he doesn't buy it.


"Sam Hunt claims that God created the world, but where does that take us - If God would be speaking every time there is light," Vamdermeer said.

http://www.wbko.com/home/headlines/6010621.html


Date Created 2/28/2007 2:45:00 AM

Posted Date 2/28/2007 2:29:00 AM


Body


From an interesting discussion in Nashville.General:

Doug Smith

 wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:52:03 +0000, SpaceMan Spiff wrote:
>> 

 - an interesting theory!
> May not be entirely off the mark.  
> Einstein's famous theory states that energy is convertible to mass.  It
> also states that a simply unbelievable amount of energy would be required
> to create a universe worth of mass, but if one believes in an all-powerful
> God then one could certainly see where He would probably have that much
> energy!  
> The question is, whether when the Bible says that one day, He
> created the earth, do you believe it means He snapped his fingers and, in
> one of today's 24-hour days, it was all there - or do you believe He
> directed its creation through a sequence of events and a period of time
> much, much longer than a 2007 24-hour day?  (if the Earth wasn't rotating
> around its axis when it first came to being, is it not reasonable to
> believe a "day", as it existed then, could have been MUCH, MUCH longer
> than 24 modern hours?)  
> I believe evolution and creation are not mutually exclusive, and that God
> directed the former.

If you went to and talked to the Orthodox Jews in West Nashville, and 
asked them about the Genesis account, they would say, "Oh, you're 
talking about the book of Mysteries . . . you're not supposed to 
understand that!"  At least that's the response I got from a young man 
who used to work at a Convenient Store near Centennial Park.

Only Fundamentalists would argue for a literal 6 days of creation.  Most 
scholars hold that that a day is simply representative of a long epoch 
of time.  One of the reasonings for this, is you don't even have an 
evening and a morning until the 4th day, in the Genesis account.  Also, 
when in Genesis it speaks of the flood lasting 40 days and 40 nights, it 
is understood this is not literal, but rather a way of saying, "a long 
time."

In the big bang theory, the Universe had all its present mass, but 
compressed to a space slightly bigger than a proton, just before the big 
bang.  So it would hold that a trigger, or even a voice, was needed to 
cause the bubble to expand.  When you think of data compression on your 
computer or zip files, this would be a fair analogy.  You can unzip a 
file to a space larger than it occupied, and have a program up and running 
on the OS.  In some cases, you can even unzip an OS to a Hard Drive.  If 
one thinks of the Universe in this fashion, then the theory becomes even 
more intriguing.  Then tie in quantum physics to where you are no longer 
  dealing with elements, but rather wavelengths of energy at the 
sub-atomic level, and all of a sudden Pythagoras' old notion that music 
best represented the structure of the universe, and realize that music 
and programming have much in common, well the theoretical conclusions 
just begin to get started.

A good read for much of this can be found at 

 - I 
loved listening to Michio Kaku on the Art Bell show, and as the 
co-founder of the string theory, it was enlightening for him to show how 
light is like a ripple on the pond and suggests the 5th dimension that 
exists out of the 4 dimensions that we already know.  When he begins to 
talk about more dimensions than 5, I then realize, someday, I need to 
follow in my little Brother footsteps, and go back to study in Math and 
Physics to really get a better picture.  However, since he's the 
Engineer in the family with an MS in Statistics from OSU, when a concept 
eludes my grasp, I usually talk to him.

                     Stupendous Man

                     



PS> I am a member of the League of Stupendous Gentlemen! ;)
++++++++++

BLOG #2
++++++++++
Subject Why Science can neither prove or disprove God's existence . . .
Date Created 3/12/2009 2:15:00 AM
Posted Date 3/12/2009 1:59:00 AM

Body


Another forum debate leads to a great blog post:



 Matrix Caesar :
The soul does not exist. Reductive materialism is the only thing that makes sense.
 SpaceMan Spiff :
Are you sure about that?



Right now, everything science knows is limited by the speed of light. Christianity has always held that God is omnipresent. David Hume, in trying to prove the superiority of British Empiricism (what we today call the scientific method) over European rationalism, took British Empiricism to its logical ends and wound up with total skepticism.

He held that the weakness of observation of patterned events in nature is that you only needed one instance, where nature behaved once contrary to the pattern, to put the ground of certainty found in the scientific method into doubt. He held there was no such thing as absolute certainty, and it took Kant's response to bring us to where we are today. We make judgments about noumena (the thing as it really is), using phenomena (what we know via the 5 senses), and therefore are limited in knowledge (hence the reference to the video clips provided above for reference). Derrida is helpful here in that know/ledge is what you know on a ledge, hence there is always a limitation to knowledge, and it is why deconstructionists always argue against structuralists, in that even definitions are never concrete. You can never find the root of a definition without having to refer to another point of reference for further definition, ending in an unending spiral/circling of never being able to get to the true point of a definition.

For example, until the 20th century, it was a scientific fact that the atom couldn't be split, and by the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, it was accepted that the Milky Way was the Universe. All those accepted scientific facts had to be rewritten in the later 20th Century, and new facts and new definitions emerged, proving David Hume's skepticism and challenge to absolute certainty, and thus Kant was right to say, only pure mathematics and physics have certainty because they are based in the mind, but when it comes to noumena, what we ultimately have is theoretical judgments.

Those judgments longest observed and judged to be true are accepted as fact, but those not yet proved, but plausible, remain theory. However, as the example with both the atom and the universe as long-held scientific facts, can be proven to be an inadequate theory with enough time, which was Hume's point.

If Christianity is right, which I must put forth as one of my assumed presuppositions, that God is omnipresent, then God is faster than the speed of light, and hence Science would not and could not have any evidence beyond that presented in the Shroud of Turin. NASA was frustrated with the Apollo missions, because radio waves sent at the speed of light, took 1.3 seconds to reach the moon, and then 1.3 seconds to return, thus not allowing instant communication like we enjoy (or actually appear to enjoy, thanks to relays and delays - always fun at the call center to hear my voice on speakerphone and delayed on the customer's end) here on Earth. It takes 44 minutes for that same signal to reach a probe on Mars and then return. If the Sun were to go out, it would take us 8 minutes here on Earth to realize the Sun was no more. The light you see from the Milky Way at night, is actually the Milky Way as it was 26 million years ago; the light you see at night, whether with your eyes or a powerful telescope, is not the Galaxy as it is, but as it was.

For such a small finite mind, you are too sure of your assumptions, and could use a little more faith!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCwVoOKxj1k&feature=share&list=FLPWdj_kaI3-GhzsRePZZBog&index=246 (See Video 3 to playback in comments below from FB)  

++++++++++ Original NOTE/BLOG from May 5, 2014 along with comments can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/10224341685078811/ - I have migrated over here to Google Blogger since Facebook has removed NOTES in a list from Profiles & who knows when they shall outright just delete them.

+++++++++++++++

Has Science Discovered God? - https://y-jesus.com/more/scc-science-christianity-compatible/#.XX4BAihKgdU +++++++++++++++ Believe in God in 5 Minutes (Scientific Proof) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQVm8RokoBA&list=PL-91YjfIn8oh2bxxtMbCe1e5jrKANzm8W&index=3 +++++++++++++++ If God created the Universe then who created God? - Best Answer Pt.1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVzeojdXbpQ&list=PL-91YjfIn8oh2bxxtMbCe1e5jrKANzm8W&index=6

+++++++++++++++ In the beginning God or Big Bang? - Best Answer Pt.2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXRa8orKf0k&list=PL-91YjfIn8oh2bxxtMbCe1e5jrKANzm8W&index=7 +++++++++++++++ Kent Hovind wins debate against bill nye (Short Creation Debate) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrmHMpyIcdY +++++++++++++++ The Holographic Universe and the Father of the Heavenly Lights . . . https://haqodeshim.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-holographic-universe-and-father-of.html