A place to discuss how things started: life, the universe, or anything. Both scientific and nonscientific musings are welcome. (Remember, Genesis means “beginning.”)
Patience, Please
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1st post! And the Big Bang seems plausible. That last sentence was so the GAPAs don’t zap it.
Now we know how this thread begins, anyway.
2 – HAAAHAA.
okay, what is the purpose of this thread?
The Big Bang is nothing more than flatulence from Chuck Norris.
You know this is probably going to turn into another HT thread, right?
I think that practice of the Rainbow as a soccer move was started when some really famous player was going so fast while they were dribbling that they tripped over the ball in just the right way and it went flying forward over their head and they were like, “Hey, that was cool!”.
6: No, it won’t, because outside of Christian dogma or scientific theory, no hypothesis’ are taken seriously enough.
5-Oh, it’s just a gnab gib.
I have a random question 4 GAPAs Gen 0, or anyone else really. How did museblog start?
I wonder how Robert came into being…. -lol-
10 – I assume the normal way, with a mommy and a daddy.
Hey. Everyone is always complaining about the editors, so let’s talk about them! It’s already been discovered that they travel in great herds and live on a planet with nine months, and everyone already knows they live in an office with no windows or doors, so… how’d they get there?
Someday i’ll finish my book on how the world works, how people should act, how people do act, why god doesn’t exist, etc. It’s a book on philosophy. It’s more than halfway done. My publisher/ editor thinks it’s really good. It’s called, Speculations of a young philosopher: Buddhameyoga, philosophy, and what really goes on with the planet.
12- They live on the planet Muso, which is all ocean except for one island. Large purple turtles swim through the waters, and their backs are home to massive ecosystems. The only intelligent species there are fiery magenta lagomorphs.
The editors’ office is on the island, protected by nine barriers, listed below.
First: A loud voice explaining how NICE it would be if you turned back and didn’t go to all the HORRIBLE trouble of going through the barriers.
Second: Massive nets flailing around and trying to catch you.
Third: Even louder, cacophonous voices reciting poetry that makes the Vogons sound like William Blake.
Fourth: Colossal Venus fly-traps trying to eat you.
Fifth: Dozens of solar prominences spurting at you.
Sixth: Random and disgusting facts being explained in the loudest voice yet.
Seventh: Thousands of computer monitors that hypnotize you with mesmerizing screensavers.
Eighth: Gigantic robots chasing after you and firing laser beams.
Ninth: A furious bombardment of explosive pies.
The editors like their privacy, dontcha think?
9- whee says the gen- 0 er who gets to answer your question. In the wee beginings Robert started a fan page. He set up a spot for emailed-in comments known as the gaboomba. (well, actually, fan page fan mail) Then (this is e~a’s guess) Robert was wandering the web and stumbled upon wordpress and had one of those “aha!” moments but he did not leap out of the bath shouting Eureka! Rather, he began concocting this blog and put a little notice up onto the gaboomba notifying us of its existance. We wandered over here, began posting, and voila! Museblog!
I like the title of this thread!^_^
7-But that’s the thing…those subjects will quite likely come up…
Whats this all about, anyway?
(14) PC,
Uncanny! It’s almost as if you’ve been there.
13- You have a publisher/editor? Wow. You must be REALLY serious, and it must be a REALLY long book.
Am I being gullible?
19- Well, it’s actually only 31 pages so far, and the estimate is about 60. My publisher/ editor isn’t a company, but a freelancer and a friend of mine. But i am really serious, and everyone says my writing sounds like an adult. Here’s an exerpt:
It would be inappropriate to start my writings off with “In the beginningâ€, because the theory that I believe is most probable one is that the universe is a never ending cycle of an unimaginably large group of matter consisting of orderly but somewhat random components stretching out to its greatest limits and then retracting into a microscopic ball of great density over a span of many billion years. This chain is infinite and was not created by any being; it simply just existed and will forever exist, unless some force of seemingly impossible power should accidentally intervene. This is no great danger for our part of the cycle, for due to the theory of relativity, it would take such a force so much time, unless it could travel a seemingly infinite amount times the speed of light, that our planet’s matter would already be recycled into the next link of the chain.
Please don’t plagerize.
20- Don’t worry, I won’t. I didn’t really get it, not being scientifically minded in the least. But that is an IMPRESSIVE first sentence. I congratulate you.
20- I wanna read more!
I’m working on my theory of the end of the Universe. Think about it-what is there, where it is expanding? A brick wall? But I have a new idea…
since we don’t have a new religions thread yet…
i got the Gospel of the FSM, and it turns out that it’s R-rated. i’m not going to say anymore about it, because my mom (obviously) wouldn’t let me read it.
YET?!?!?!?!?! DON’T YOU THINK WE’VE HAD ENOUGH YELLING AND ARGUING ON THE BLOG?!?!?!?! THAT’S WHY THE GAPAs CLOSED THE THREAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway, I just thought I would point out that there has been to many posts in CAPS LOCK.
25 – ok, let’s just ban Fridgy from the Religions thread, then.
26-Hey, hey, hey, be nice!!! I know ya’ll don’t agree, that’s a fact of life, but just because you don’t like what someone’s saying doesn’t mean you can shut them up!
i wuz just pointing out how fridgy ranting can often create arguments that often end Religion threads. i was also just being sarcastic, if you know what that is.
I don’t rant. I reveal problems with accepted doctrines and criticize the values of certain religions, and that develops into argument. I figger the GAPAs wan’t to avoid huge Pagan Vs Christian arguments for a while, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m right ;D
FIGURE.
Sorry-just had to point that out.
18- I was there, strapped to a space-faring cherry pie. But that’s another story.
24 – The Hot Topics 2007.4 thread has been taken over by religious arguments, so if you want to talk about religions you should go there. (Hey, it’s better than the stupid abortion flame wars.)
Anyone still wondering about Evolution versus Creationism, please read this post.
Oops, wrong link. Please read this post.
30: That was on purpose. Duh.
15-ok anything else?
For orgins and beginnings I’m wondering not how but why.
For instance why where human beings created? In my opininion it’s just proof that if there’s an intelligent designer, that he/she is not actually very intelligent. I mean look at the destruction we’ve created. Was it an accident? Or was free will an accident? Or does god have a sense of humor?
Hmm. Sorry I’ve just had a two hour chat with my dad about, along w/ other things if alliens created judiasm, so sorry if I’m sounding a little wacked
22- Okay. See the bottom. But no more. It’s risky.
29- I agree with you.
34- Your pastor was wrong. Evolution can disprove creationism. From my book:
Theists are usually able to successfully dodge questions that prove their religions wrong, but Darwinism Is a very affective way to corner stubborn believers.
Surprisingly, religious people often use logic to battle atheists. They argue that it is more likely for the world to be created by a divine being than for it to be assembled by chance. There are two main problems with this:
For one thing, they don’t consider the odds of what they speak of. The odds of a supreme being appearing out of nowhere are smaller than life being made by chance.
They also don’t consider Darwinism as possible factor. Imagine a potted plant on the roof of a building. The creationist theory would be that a divine being created it there as opposed to it dropping from the sky by chance. Darwinists, however, would notice the elevator leading to the roof. The elevator would take longer, but it’s still the most likely way.
35-But do you have any good reason to purposely misspell a word? I hate it when people do that. It’s one thing if it’s a typo, or if you actually don’t know how to spell the word (though in that case the best thing to do would be look it up; there are perfectly good online dictionaries if you’re too lazy to pick up a tangible one), but misspelling on purpose is just annoying, and ter is absolutely no good reason for it that I can see. Spelling is important, and I wish people would stop abusing it.
How does everyone feel about the concept of pantheism? It does have to do with the origin of the universe, and as a pantheist I’m curious.
39- Bah. More from my book in the chapter Different types of philosophy and my views on them:
Pantheism: Belief that god is everything. In my opinion, if god were everything, he wouldn’t really have anything to control.
37 – Look. Evolution cannot disprove creationism because THEY ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS!!! If you look in the bible itself, there are TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF CREATION, but they both have something in common: God created it, and he saw that it was good. The Bible is not a science textbook! Even though evolution explains the order, it does not say where everything came from! I think God told the Israelites a simple form of creation, because they wouldn’t understand evolution! Creationism answers the who and why, Evolution the how! It’s that simple!
41- No, it doesn’t explain the origin on its own, but it does if you incorporate the Big Bang. If you want to know about origin, see #20. If Yahweh (god) used evolution, he would just be being lazy, which the bible insists he ain’t. And science runs the universe and the bible is about the universe, so the bible is basically a very, very, very misinformed science textbook.
Does anybody remember a little sentence about a guy who said the world rested on an infinite number of turtles in Muse Mail awhile back? Well, the guy’s not so crazy after all. The theory works to explain practically everything. ^-^
Koko #2, I don’t remember that letter — but I do know that in Discworld, a fantasy realm created by Terry Pratchett in the Discworld book series, the world sits on the backs of four elephants who are standing on the back of one very large turtle. Of course I don’t know for sure that its a fantasy, but I have a hunch it is.
Isn’t that from a story about William James, that after giving a lecture on the solar system, a woman came up to him and said “Mr. James. We don’t live on a ball rotating around the sun, we live on a crust of earth on the back of a giant turtle.” When he inquired what the turtle stood on, the woman replied “The first turtle stands on the back of a far larger turtle.” James pushed further, asking what the second turtle stood on. The woman answered him with “It’s no use, Mr. James, it’s turtles all the way down.”
See? I tooold you…
5- Take it to the first pie war.
6- Not so long as we can keep it civil. That is, critique notions, not people themselves. Erm… you know what I mean.
13/20- Seriously? Sweet, good for you! *fistpump*
24- Censorship is horrid, eh?
34- There is no “why?”
37- Brilliant analogy!
41- Wouldn’t the two versions of creationism, by default, show that, since both are the “holy truth” [or some other bull], but they are two different accounts, they can’t both be truthful? Meaning that at least one wasn’t the truth and the Bible is therefore not infallible? I think so.
42- Please don’t compare the Bible with a science textbook, it makes me itchy. No scientific method to the Bible…
45- xDxD
I have nothing more to say on this topic for the time being.
(43, 45),
Unfortunately, for scientists, a theory that explains absolutely everything (that is, everything you can see as well as anything you might imagine) isn’t much use. Why does Earth orbit the sun in an ellipse? The turtle theory would say it’s because that’s how turtles swim through space. But why do turtles swim in ellipses? “Because they feel like it” is the best you’re going to do. The theory doesn’t explain why planetary orbits don’t take the shapes you don’t see.
Isaac Newton showed that elliptical orbits result from the inverse-square law of gravity. That makes Newton’s theory of gravitation more scientifically useful than the turtle theory. If you saw planets orbiting in triangles or dodecagons or big daisylike loops, then you’d have to have serious doubts about Newton’s theory. Unlike the turtle theory, Newton’s theory is falsifiable.
41- Say, couldn’t god just make the ancient Israelites understand with his omnipotence? See bottom.
47- Thank you. and thank you. What are your views on religion?
Chapter three of my book:
There are certain computer games that allow the player to be the god of a certain region. This god isn’t really omnipotent, because you can only do what the game is programmed to do. Therefore, this isn’t a good model of what it would be like to be a supreme deity, because the power is limited.
Try to imagine what it would be like to be god. When you first come into being, you don’t know where you came from and you are surrounded by nothingness. What is nothingness? As far as humans know, it doesn’t exist. Omnipotence is boring and lonely, so you create something. You soon realize that anything you create is subordinate to you, so you destroy what you created.
This would be enough to drive one to celestial suicide, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that you create a world complete with a supreme evil, a species made in your own image, and lots of inferior animals. Why wouldn’t all of the beings on this planet worship you above any other instead of only a few? Why would you have to see if they would be willing to sacrifice to you if you could make it so they would for sure?
The bible says that the ancient Israelites discovered that other nations could be used to punish them. That would make it seem like all nonbelievers are merely forms of punishment and not real life forms. I’m a nonbeliever and I’m fairly sure that I’m a living thing. On the topic of punishment, the logical thing to do would be to just make the beings in question disappear, but god shouldn’t have had to do this, because his omnipotence means that he already knew not to make anything not perfect. Therefore, he is either not omnipotent or he doesn’t exist.
Let us say that he is simply not omnipotent, again for the sake of argument. In this case, this is certainly not the kind, knowing, thundering god described in the bible. Instead, he is an insecure, lonely, bored, paranoid deity who doesn’t know where he came from.
The god of the bible cannot exist, and even if he did, I wouldn’t envy him.
41: Hold up. Two different versions? Where?
49: Agh. The gaping holes in your logic are threatening to swallow me. You seriously misunderstand, well, theology in general. Firstly, are you talking about a god (as in polytheism) or God (monotheism)? Well, you begin by writing as if what you are saying could apply to any deity at all, but later you specifically cite the Bible. So I’ll assume you’re talking about the Christian God for the whole thing. And I’m not informed to speak for other religions.
“When you first come into being, you don’t know where you came from and you are surrounded by nothingness. “
God didn’t begin (He always existed), and He’s all-knowing.
“You soon realize that anything you create is subordinate to you, so you destroy what you created.”
Huh? Why destroy it? God loves all of His creation more than is imaginable.
“let’s say that you create a world complete with a supreme evil…”
Evil wasn’t created by God; the beings He created made evil because they were given free will.
“Why wouldn’t all of the beings on this planet worship you above any other instead of only a few? Why would you have to see if they would be willing to sacrifice to you if you could make it so they would for sure?”
Because God mankind free will out of love.
“The bible says that the ancient Israelites discovered that other nations could be used to punish them. “
Okay, seriously, I don’t know what this means. Are you saying the other nations were like tools under God’s control, used to punish the Israelites? Or that the nonbelievers are being punished? Who’s “them”?
“the logical thing to do would be to just make the beings in question disappear, but god shouldn’t have had to do this, because his omnipotence means that he already knew not to make anything not perfect. Therefore, he is either not omnipotent or he doesn’t exist.”
Again, God didn’t make imperfect things. Satan brought evil into the world, and everything was made imperfect. And now we’ve all got to deal with it.
50- Well, there’ll always be the critics. won’t stop me, though.
Satan did not bring evil into the world! Dammit, how many times do I have to explain this? Satan is the adversary of God, who disagreed on a few points and got thrown down to hell for it.
Sorry to double post, but christian rationale for explaining their inconsistent religion is full of holes itself. What post 49 is dealing with is an idea of God different than what Christianity teaches. It’s deeper than simple theological meanderings and it relfects monotheistic and politheistic philosophy throughout the ages. I don’t necessarily agree, but some points are insightful.
47-Yeah, but it seems like practically no one on this Blog is capable of such civility…sorry, but you know…
51: Hey, just think of it like this: I’m actually helping you with your book. What you’re trying to do here is convert the masses to atheism, right? Or at least point out that it’s plausible? Then you’ll want to make your arguments convincing to the average person, someone who may even have had a religious upbringing. As it is, it looks like the only people who’ll agree with you are the ones who are already decided in their beliefs.
41-amazingly enough, i agree with you. evolution cannot disprove christianity, because nothing can prove or disprove it. But one does not have to disprove it to know that it is wrong. Can you disprove the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? No. Does the Flying Spaghetti Monster exist? again, no. Same with God. Can you disprove his existence? no. does he exist? no. That being siad, science cannot explain the beginning of the world. and if god is a good explanation for you, go ahead. but. can i just ask you this. if god existed forever, and is all knowing, he still must have created the world at a certain point. no matter when he created it, because he has existed forever, he must have existed for an infinite amount of time before he created the world. why did he chose to create the world when he did? and… wouldn’t it be a bit boring doing absolutely nothing for an infinite amount of time? and best of all, since he existed for an infinite amount of time before he created the world, there must have been an infinite amount of time until he created the earth. which really means he never can have created the earth, because one can never get to the end of an infinity. “oh, here we are, time to make the earth. oh wait… we were supposed to wait an infinite amount of years. ao i guess we’ll have to wait another Google-plex years.” etc. see, science cannot explain the creation of the earth, or time, but neither can Christianity. the people who wrote th bible obviously weren’t familiar with the concept of eternity.
This was a bad idea, it’s going to turn into a new religions thread, even if we do our best not to. It can’t be helped.
Some people certainly love to argue. I wouldn’t say “it can’t be helped,” though. You’re all Musers and MuseBloggers. If you don’t like the way things are going, find a way to get them back on track or cool them down.
I’ve tried before. People don’t listen to me, or at least not in the middle of an argument.
52 – Satan thought he was better than his creator, which he wasn’t. The creator said he wasn’t, and satan got mad and went out to ruin god’s creation. How mean!
58 – Basically, you’ve moved all the bawling on the last evolution thread over to here instead of the new evolution thread.
Well, it certainly isn’t ideal. But I guess it’s an improvement, in a small, somewhat annoying way.
You could try to drown out the static by starting a different “origins” discussion of your own. There’s no reason all discussion has to come to halt just because a couple of people decide to go after each other.
61- Also all of the arguing from the religions thread, which has been pent up, so now it’ll be really bad. *looks for somewhere to hide*
62: Well you did give the “go” command with the Genesis reference.
57-63: How about one of these topics?
The origin of:
~abstract art
~writing a will and having life insurance
~formal education
~the stock market
All I did was try to think of things that I wasn’t sure how they started. I’ll research something if discussion ensues…
37)
I think you’ll get along great with FS. Both seem like ATHEISTS
But that’s OK. As long as you don’t bash other people’s religions. (Yes, I do consider atheism a religion.) I’ve noticed that atheists usually act like they’re dancing around in the light while everyone else is stumbling along in the dark acting like idiots–especially the ones who believe in Christianity.
Strangely, most other religions consider themselves in the light (not dancing) and accepting other religions as good and righteous ways of life. (Excepting cannibals and random other creepy things)
Just get off yer high horse, you two (ag and FS) and don’t try to convince us that you’re right and we’re wrong. We don’t try to do that to you. (at least, I don’t….. I hope.)
Thank you for letting me rant at you.
Have a nice day!
umm. i have no idea any of those things.
someone told me a danish guy invented the stock market. i feel kinda ashamed. and us being a pillar of anti-capitalism too. but i can check. umm. okay… that was completely wrong. stupid sean.
from wikipedia.
Braudel suggests that in Cairo in the 11th century Muslim and Jewish merchants had already set up every form of trade association and had knowledge of every method of credit and payment, disproving the belief that these were invented later by Italians. In 12th century France the courratiers de change were concerned with managing and regulating the debts of agricultural communities on behalf of the banks. Because these men also traded with debts, they could be called the first brokers. In late 13th century Bruges commodity traders gathered inside the house of a man called Van der Beurse, and in 1309 they became the “Brugse Beurse”, instituionalizing what had been, until then, an informal meeting. The idea quickly spread around Flanders and neighboring counties and “Beurzen” soon opened in Ghent and Amsterdam.
In the middle of the 13th century Venetian bankers began to trade in government securities. In 1351 the Venetian government outlawed spreading rumors intended to lower the price of government funds. Bankers in Pisa, Verona, Genoa and Florence also began trading in government securities during the 14th century. This was only possible because these were independent city states not ruled by a duke but a council of influential citizens. The Dutch later started joint stock companies, which let shareholders invest in business ventures and get a share of their profits – or losses. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued the first shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. It was the first company to issue stocks and bonds.
The Amsterdam Stock Exchange (or Amsterdam Beurs) is also said to have been the first stock exchange to introduce continuous trade in the early 17th century. The Dutch “pioneered short selling, option trading, debt-equity swaps, merchant banking, unit trusts and other speculative instruments, much as we know them” (Murray Sayle, “Japan Goes Dutch”, London Review of Books XXIII.7, April 5, 2001). There are now stock markets in virtually every developed and most developing economies, with the world’s biggest markets being in the United States, Canada, China (Hongkong), India, UK, Germany, France and Japan.
sure. i’m willing to go off topic if that makes y’all happy. personally, i like argument and conflict but whatever.
45- Oh, that sounds familiar, though I don’t know from where…
65- “accepting other religions as good and righteous ways of life”
Umm… almost all the Christians I’ve talked to tell people of another religion that the other person’s wrong and their god doesn’t exist, and don’t just accept that they don’t believe the same things as they do.
That’s the main problem I have, when people tell othere’s that they’re incorrect in their choices and when they automaticly assume that their religion is the right one. For instance:
[in english, reading Antigone and disscussing the greek gods]
Person1: Well, that’s dumb, because those god’s don’t exist!
Rest of class: *agrees*
Me: *grinds teeth* Well how do you know? It’s not your place to question their beliefs
class: *ignores me*
Grrr…
56 – God created time.
(I’ll pause to let that sink in.)
After God created time, he created the earth. Nothing boring about that.
I like time. Shall we talk about time? There are lots of time travel theories that I can tell you about if anyone’s interested.
67-Not all Christians are like that. I love reading the Greek myths about their gods.
Oh dang it. Is FS on this thread? We misewell just close this thread down now. He is just going to try and stir things up and everyone knows it. I don’t want to argue, I want to discuss.
70 – Since FrigidSymphony’s time zone is seven hours ahead of MuseBlog’s, he is not on from about 3:00 PM on. You will be FS-free in the late-afternoon.
50- Wait; hold on. You say:
God didn’t begin (He always existed)
And yet…
Huh? Why destroy it? God loves all of His creation more than is imaginable.
Why would God wait forever to create?
Evil wasn’t created by God; the beings He created made evil because they were given free will.
And
Because God mankind free will out of love.
Why would God decide that free will is good?
72 – Why would God decide that free will is good?
This question was asked to my pastor and here is what he said:
“We have one world with no free will/evil on one side, and another side with free will.
no free will
_________
no satan
no evil
free will
_________
satan is there
evil is an option
but……….there is something else to be added to each category.
no free will
_________
no satan
no evil
no love
free will
_________
satan is there
evil is an option
love is an option
If everybody always followed God, it wouldn’t be true following because we had to. If your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse said to you, “I really love you,” and you said why, and they said, “because I have to,” that wouldn’t be true love would it? With lack of love present in the world, love is made infinintely better.
Does that make sense?
Is this the new religions thread or something?
Different name, same thread.
69-Oh, yes, let’s talk about time travel!!! Did you see this past weekend’s Non Sequitur? If not, look it up…it talked about time travel. Personally, I don’t agree with that, and think that you could most certainly retain your memory of what would then be the future, you just couldn’t do anything about it, because then you would’ve had no reason to go back in time in the first place, like in Time Machine…have you read/seen that?
77 – I read that. Twas very weird.
When you go into the future, why would you want to go back? You’d just screw things up and mess with cosmic balance.
Random factoid:
The record for the most time travel by any one human being is [I don’t remember the name], who by staying in space for a combined total of 721 days, has traveled 1/50th of a second into the future.
77- Nope and nope!
I like this theory:
Say someone went back in time and met Thomas Edison. However, TE had absolutely no intention of making a lightbulb until the time-traveling person had told him all about it and how it worked. But whose creation was it? Not TE’s, because he hadn’t known about it the time-traveler had told him. But not the time-traveler’s, because he had only learned about it because Thomas Edison had made it.
It makes my head spin, but it’s fascinating.
79 – You forgot one thing. It’s not physically possible to go back in time. Physics only allow forward-in-time time travel.
Even if that was possible, what if some psycho went back and murdered his mother before he was born? And then came back to the future to find out that he himself did not exist?
80- Well then he would not exist, and therefore wouldn’t be able to murder his mother in the first place. But of course the reason that he didn’t exist was that he murdered his mother. *falls off chair*
And I called it a theory merely for lack of a better word.
81 – It’s a bad paradox I read in a time-travel book.
68-could you explain to me how that makes any sense whatsoever? and how my point is not equally valid without time?
74-yeps. course it does, provided you believe god exists.
on a different note,
forward time travel is of course possible, but is there any chance of backwards time travel?
66: Ooh, thanks! That’s pretty interesting!
67: I think it was the text wrapped around the table of contents in an issue of Muse.
Do you think time is a river or a lake?
If it’s a river…
Someone who went back in time would change the course of the future.
Example in fiction-
Back to the Future: When Marty goes back and changes a bunch of stuff, everything has changed when he gets back.
If it’s a lake…
All time happens simutaneously. It only seems like a river because we’re moving forward through the lake at a steady pace. If you go back in time to try to change something, whatever you do while you’re there produces an outcome so that everything beyond that happens as it originally did, as you first experienced it.
Example in fiction-
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: When Harry and Hermione went back to save the hippogriff and Sirius, they had already experienced the effects of what they did, although they didn’t know it.
The lake theory makes much more sense to me. Which is why I was confused watching the movie The Kid. Why was the main character (I forget his name) so suprised when his younger self came to visit him? Shouldn’t he have remembered the experience from his childhood, when he went to see his then-older self?
84- I think it’s a lake. “Time doesn’t run in a straight line.”
You’re killing me. Stop with all of the impossible puzzles! *hides in a corner, hitting his head against the wall*
Sorry, Glassboro! Don’t you just love to turn your brain inside out thinking about time, though?
I really want this book I saw on Amazon called Time: A Traveler’s Guide. I think it discusses a lot of these sorts of paradoxes. Anyone read it?
No, but I will now!
73 and 74- Why would he decide love is good? It’s all arbitrary.
Maybe if I listen to Pinball Wizard enough I can get it out of my head. *sings “Ever since I was a young boy/I’ve played the silver ball./From Soho down to Brighton/I must have played them all./But I ain’t seen nothing like him/in any amusement hall./That deaf, dumb, and blind kid/sure plays a mean pinball” to himself*
84 – oh, that’s a fantastic topic. like, for example, in DBZ. when Future Trunks travels back in time, he ends up saving the world in that time. but, when he went back to his own time, nothing had changed because while he did save the timeline that he went back to, his timeline had not changed at all. i got a bit confused at the part where Trunks said that Cell had killed him and taken the time capsule, when he was standing alive right there. weird.
~~~
i think time is not a river. i mean, wouldn’t people in the distant future be, like, popping back and forth from their time to ours to change things that happened to them so they could make their lives better?
~~~
on another hand, i like the idea of time in The Lost Colony. if you travelled into the past, then any amount of time could pass while you’re going through a wormhole or whatever. e.g.; when Artemis traveled through space and time to go to Hybras and save the 8th Family, when he returned, 3 years had passed on Earth, even though it only seemed like a day to him. also, what he did affected the future/present, but only because he brought Hybras to the present and save the demons. the time it took for him to travel was probably months on Earth, but it was almost instantaneous for him.
“In the beginning, God created the Universe. This has caused a lot of controversy and is widely regarded as a bad move.”
HG2G!!!
93- “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” It doesn’t say how, Douglas Adams was a radical atheist (though he does go on to explain the how different alien species believe it was created). And it’s in The Resturant at the End of the Universe.
Douglas Adams is an atheist. in the book The God Delusions, it turns out that the author converted Adams from christianity.
84 – Yes, the lake theory makes sense, but if someone went back and delibreately sabotaged history as that person knew it, then it would be more like the river theory.
I like the waterfall theory best. You can go forward, but you can’t go back because that screws things up.
I have a new theory! I have found the origin of the HPBs! They come off a tree. I have a picture of the tree. I shall send it in later.
Why would God decide that Free will is a good thing? I think that there are plenty of reasons. Have you ever read the Screwtape Letters? That explains it pretty well. He wants to make us His sons, not his mindless slaves. He’d rather have people who loved and obeyed Him because they really wanted to and respected him, like sons would, not people that did what he said without thinking, like mindless slaves would. Satan wants us for mindless slaves though, because he doesn’t care about love.
97 – Yes! You put it in a better way than I did.
97- It’s still arbitrary.
there is no proof of god because:
godiss exists because of faith. with proof, there is no faith. therefore, if anyone finds proof of godiss, godiss will not exist because there will be no faith in himir. however, many people do not believe in godiss because there is no proof. however, with proof there will be no godiss, so no-one will have any reason to have faith in the now non-existent godiss, which is what creates the godiss in the first place.
faith = godiss
proof = no faith
no faith = no godiss
gender-neutral, as i suppose you noticed. did that make sense, or are you too confused already?
100-yep. and Christians would say thats the way he wants it to be be because if there was proof of god, then everyone would believe in him, and “that wouldn’t be true following. “-72, e2mb.
however, as i previously stated, there can be no proof of god, or disproof of god. However, this is really irrelevant, because any god that i decide to make up right now, say i wish to worship the… flying spaghetti monster. Which i didn’t make up, but someone did. He said so. However, there is no way to prove its existence. Because the flying spaghetti monster doesn’t want you to see it, or see any signs of its existence. or say… Zeus. can’t see him, because his power is so great that looking at him will kill you. So basically no way to prove a gods existence, or disprove it, but it does not matter because any god i decide to make up on the spot has the same characteristics. have i made my point?
anyhoo, your example is a bit flawed. this is still a response to 100 btw. what if this “godiss” didn’t need faith to exist. and stop calling god gender neutral things. the bible refers to him as a him, and therefore he is a him. (i know the “hims” are capitalized, but im too lazy)
How many times do I have to say it, Satan is not evil! Anything non-christian was labelled ‘demonic’ from year 0 onwards that the definitions ‘pagan’, ‘heathen’, ‘demonic’ and ‘satanical’ are practically synonyms. Anything disagreeing with the absolute strict dogma taught by the Church became evil, whether it actually was or wasn’t. All the moral and theological arguments and discussions surrounding Christianity are nothing more than lies designed to make a power structure seem acceptable as a spiritual lifestyle, which it isn’t. Anything telling you to feel guilty for doing normal, human things shouldn’t be acceptable. It’s like hinduism, which I despise for its atrocious caste system, and islam, with its horrible treatment of women.
101- ARG!!! For crying out loud! Of course god can be disproved!! That’s what all of science has been doing since the renessiance!
102- Caste system? Where have you been for the past fifty years? The current president of India is an untouchable!
102 – How many times do I have to say it, Satan is evil because the church refers to the head of all evil as “Satan”!
103 – That’s nothing. The Aztec rulers were unlookables. If you looked at them, you would lose your head!
waah! What happened to our– KikidoyoumindifIblatantlystealyourword– prettyful talk about time-traveling? Seriously, I would respond to some of these more recent posts, but all the points have been said at least 10 times already.
96: Waterfall theory… interesting! It’s like river theory, but with gravity! XD So the actions of the time-traveler would still alter the course of the future as we know it (as in the river idea), but it would be literally impossible to travel backwards in time. I like it.
97: Yes, send it in. You’re making me very curious.
104: No, the church refers (or used to, anyway, thereby conditioning the terms we use today) to anything non-christian as evil. So pagans, muslims, jews, buddhists, aliens, crab people… In fact, the earliest christian drawings of Satan are almost identical to those of the pagan god Pan.
94-Adams does give several possible ways of how this happened. One is that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
102 & 104-that’s a lie. The Catholic Church is just that–catholic, meaning “universal.” everyone is called by God to come to heaven. EVERYONE! we do not say that jews or muslims are evil. we do not hate buddhists or pagans. we are called to love one another always, no matter the religion. we do not have to agree with their beliefs, but we do have to love everyone. there is a passage in the bible that says something like “Love the sinner but hate the sin.” I cannot remember what verse it is, but there it is. anyway, this is not a religion thread, so lets stick to the subject.
100- I do not agree with you. There is plenty proof of God. Life, the universe, and everything is proof that a God must exist. Sure, I believe that the Big Bang was the beginning of the Universe as we know it, but what was before that? God. If you think of how complex our universe is from the largest galaxies to the tiniest atoms, you know that some all-knowing God must have designed it. There is no other explanation. You think that atoms designed themselves? I didn’t think so.
As for God existing even with proof, it is completely possible and true. There is proof that Muse exists, but that proof doesn’t stop faith that Muse exists, does it? No, it simply strengthens that faith. Muse exists with or without proof, with or without faith. It is the same way with God. He exists even though there is proof beyond measure, and faith in Him is strengthened, not destroyed, by that proof.
Oh, sorry, my last post should’ve read “102 & 106”, not “102 & 104.” Oopsie.
Anyways, let’s stay on topic.
let me rephrase 108. all that is evidence of God, but the real proof won’t come until we go to heaven, if we go to heaven. sorry about that. anyways, back to “origins and beginnings” please.
“Well, do you know how the universe began, for a kickoff?”
“Yeah, probably not.”
“Okay. You take an ebony bath. And it’s conical…”
Yeah, everyone knows that sequence.
On Adams: For the record, had you looked up his speech to American Atheists, you would learn that Douglas Adams was a reformed Christian, having gone straight for many years. He was a radical atheist and a thinking person. As well as having a keen sense of humor, a genius-sized brain, and the conviction that the Big Bang was just a gnab gib.
Piggy: Do you know anything about the history of your religion? Christians, mostly Catholics, have been killing non Christians ever since the birth of your religion. The very religion first took hold as a means to incite violence (first use of Christianity by Emperor Constantine). And the Catholic Church has been preaching hatred towards non Christians and the evilness of non Christians for 2 millenia. Recently certain Christian groups are doing the same with homosexuals and foreigners.
Now for philosophy. Why does anything need to be before the big bang? Why couldn’t the big bang just have been the beginning? And if the Big Bang needed something to come, then so did God. You cannot argue that the BB needed something to make it happen, but that God didn’t.
The world and the state it’s in is perfect proof that the Christian God doesn’t exist. Look at all the suffering, all the injustices…
The Christian religion itself is a relatively recent invention. It is a period of human history where men will be taken in by great lies. In the middle ages, everyone, even educated people (especially educated people, actually) firmly believed that all the sacred stories were true and that the bible was to be taken literally. The impact of the Christian religion on human society has been that of supplying a means to control the masses, who will willingly believe in whatever bullcrap is given a nice spin and told from an authoritative source. Remember Orson Welle’s martian scare?
And something I posted already, this argument proves why a judgmental God (such as the Christian God and most others) cannot logically exist. I’ll stick to Christianity for this, but the logic can be used for other religions.
The Bible states that God has a plan for everyone. It also states that God is infinite, and that he knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. Of course he does: he is God (I’m using “he†for the sake of convenience).
If God knows everything, then God knows how your life will unfold. And yet he proposes to have a plan for you. Well, logically speaking, that plan cannot be different from the life you realize. Why would God have a plan for an individual that he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, would not be realized? Obviously, he wouldn’t. Thus, if you go to heaven, it was God’s plan for you; if you go to hell, it was his plan too; if a fetus is aborted, well, God never had any plan for that fetus. In essence, you are determined to go to heaven or hell before you’re even born.
Some have tried to refute this by downgrading God (and contradicting their own scripture) by proposing that perhaps with free will, God does not know which choices you will make. If this is true, then God has limited knowledge. If he has limited knowledge, how can God even know that he is God? There could be a God above God, in which case he is not God at all. Furthermore, if God does not know everything, then the universe essentially exists above him. If God is not equal to or above the universe, he is an entity within it. If he is an entity within the universe, he is no different than a human being, and has no more right to be a moral authority than anyone.
Another possible refute might involve parallel universes, but this still falls short. God would still need to know how life would unfold in each of the infinite universes, and thus people would still be bound to their fate. Furthermore, the notion of parallel universes essentially shreds up the soul: an infinite number of person A would go to heaven, and an infinite number of person A would go to hell.
Think about it.
108- Quite simple. The big bang was just one link in a chain of many that have been going in forever. Infinity is possible, but you have to try hard to grasp it. Christianity is for those who don’t try.
111- Wow. You are such an inspiration. Can I include your name in my people i thank in my book?
112: Sure, although many arguments against God in the Christian sense are old and used many times, just as many arguments for God. The new arguments are those against Christianity itself.
agbagagbg i am insulted. i am a very scie tific cristian .
pies
*pies with gigantic pie, than gives a hearty thump on the back* Sorry, but you can be a scientific christian, but not a christian scientiffically. The two oppose each other.
piggy- um plus what fs said catholics killed cristons durning the reformation even after us reforms stoped.the inqution anyone?
Why is it that MBers are completely incapable of discussing anything even vaguely related to religion without it turning into a religion thread, despite the decision to avoid religinions threads?
117: There was a decision to avoid religion threads? Look, it’s difficult to have an ‘origin and beginnings’ thread without talking about religion, because apart from the scientific explanation, the only other so-called answers are offered to us by religion. Then what happens is that someone doesn’t agree with what the religion says, and dislikes the dogmatic attitude of someone who does believe it, and then attempts are made to disprove the religion in its entirety, or to discredit it (what I do).
Still,
– Nobody is forcing you to use this thread to discuss the origin of the universe. You could discuss the origin of, oh, fashions or ice cream or metal music without bringing religion into it. MBers just seem to be drawn to deep, controversial questions.
– Even if you’re talking about the origin of the universe, it’s possible to discuss religion without fighting. Example:
MBer A: “I favor the Biblical account of a universe created by a supreme deity.”
MBer B: “I disagree. IMHO, God had nothing to do with it.”
And there you have it: positions laid out, feelings unruffled.
– One thing I wonder about is why so many adherents of the Biblical account dislike the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Before scientific evidence made the Big Bang dominant, many cosmologists thought the universe had always been around. Then astronomers found evidence of a beginning. That sounds more like Genesis to me. What’s the problem? Is it just that it happened uncomfortably long ago (13.7 billion years)? Just curious.
119-Good points!
119: The problem is that the concept of God, therefore the creator of it all, is something omnipresent, therefore at odds with science.
111 – That post sounds suspiciously familiar to something I heard on Religions v. 2007.1.
Well, frankly, I find both concepts equally hard to believe, because both point to something that was just…there. It had no beginning, it had simply always…been.
On a slightly different note, when my dad explain to me the difference between Agnostic and Atheist, I converted. I am now officially an Agnosticist (I’m not exactly sure how you say it, but either way, I’m Agnostic.)!
119-okay lets talk about ice cream!
We could discuss origins and beginnings of our names!
125-OK, I’m a type of HAWK with a red tail, and some scientist dude called my species my name because of that, so that’s how my name came about. Meaning your name could be “HUMAN”. Or “CLEAR HUMAN WHO BORROWS THINGS.”
Look. We both know perfectly well that you’re just being stupid for no reason. I really meant that as an idea. I meant how we chose our names.
Which name should I talk about… Well, Traggle is a combination of the words tribe and gaggle…it’s a name me and my CTY friends came up with at Carlisle ’05, and it’s what we call our group of friends…
Very nice. I like that name. Should I explain the origin of Glassboro again?
Yes…please explain Glassboro…
Again. All right, here goes.
My off-blog name is Rowan. Rowan University used to be called Glassboro State College. Last year, my band teacher at school started calling me Glassboro because of this. He was a really good teacher, with his first two rules of class being: 1) Mr B****** is always right. 2) If Mr B****** is wrong, see rule #1.
Cool. Does anybody want to hear about how I came up with my various alter egos?
123- You would say that youre an Agnostic, not an Agnosticist.
I want to get back to the time-travel talk.
The origin and beginning of my name is this: It is my name. My alter egos all cam from books, except Lecea, Blue Beads, and Chocolate Marzipan . Lecea is my name, latinized, Blue Beads are what Lewis and Clark traded with the indians, and Chocolate Marzipan is a combination of two very tasty sweets.
My name came to be because of a book I read where the girl was named Momo. I liked it, so I named myself Momo. My friend says I am a pig (not literally, of course), so I call myself a pig. And I lost my brain at birth, so I am brainless. It all adds up to Momothebrainlesspig. How wonderful.
COMEHERECOMEHERECOMEHERE!!!!!
I found out that agag was the name of an amylkyte king captured by saul in a raid. The amylkytes were famous for attacking the hebrews, making them blasphemous. Fitting, eh?
However, samuel, angry at saul for not destroying the Amylkytes when he had the chance, hacked the captive agag to pieces.
l looked over some old posts. l miss FS.
Wow, some of my first posts on this thread were about my book. l’m almost done now.
I realize that this thread is entirely mort, but I was hoping to revive it. What does anyone think about the inflationist universe theory? There was a great article about it in the January Muse, and I found a nice site. I don’t want to devote this post to a long rant about how my science teacher stubbornly insists that the big bang was “when the universe was compressed into a point singularity” and refuses to allow me to write alternative theories on my tests, but I almost feel tempted too. Moving along. Do y’all think there are other universes? I always thought that the universe was all-inclusive, but I guess that that’s the multiverse these days. Sorry, before I hit submit, one last thought. Imagine a lack of time and space. That disturbs me so much…*shudders*. Anyway, I should probably go do my actually fun math homework now, but I’ll post more later. I really like this topic! *rereads her post* Gosh! What an awful lot of fluff. Okay, well, I promise I’ll write something more substantive soon. Finally, has anyone seen Cosmos by Carl Sagan? I love that series!
141- Oh flamabulatious day! Somebody else here likes Cosmos! I got it on DVD for the Winter Holidays!
I like that it’s sort of got a story to it, even though it’s a documentary.
And the Spaceship is AWESOME!
I’ve watched practically the entire thing! I love the episode about the speed of light with the vespas that turn blue and red!
I guess I should have guessed that you were a fan from the name. That scene is pretty cool.
Wouldn’t it be strange if you actually were in a place where the speed of light could nearly be reached on a motor scooter?
The begining of the first episode is great, isn’t it? On the seashore, and he’s going “We’re going to investigate the mysteries of the universe, we’re going to ask questions that have no easy answers, we’re going to travel in a ship that can take us anywhere. Come with me.”
If I had been standing there, I would have shouted
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
144- “Yes! Yes! Yes” I also adore the segment on natural selection! And I agree, the beginning is wonderful. I know what you mean about him making it seem like a narrative, not a series of facts. I think thats an enormous part of its appeal for me.
It would be incredible to be able to go at the speed of light. Particularly on a vespa! *is hopeful in a pointless and pathetic way*
I’ve tried several times to create stories based on that show, but all my attempts seem unbearably lame in comparison.
146-That sounds fun! What where they about?
I saw Cosmos a while ago. I don’t remember a terrible lot about it. There were definitely some interesting bits.
148- Carl Sagan makes it all seem interesting by incorporating history and more philosophical speculations with bare fact, or atleast that’s what I’ve found. Plus, he has a spiffing voice for this kind of narration! I love the part where he plays the process of the evolution of life sped up using the little animation!
149- Yes, I love that little animation. Plus, he pronounces coelacanth right, which not many people know how to do. (See-lo canth, not ko-ela-canth or see-lee-oh-canth)
147- This girl named Alexa, who gets to go on the “journeys” after the Spaceship ends up where she is. Basically, she and this robot are kind of Sagan’s sidekicks. There’s this bad guy who can also travel through time and space, and he makes trouble for them, sometimes.
149- Ooh, that was a really cool part!
I also liked the History of the Universe set in one year. That was cool.
150-That sounds like quite a bit of fun plot! You should post some of it!
Oh and I plead guilty of being about to join the ranks of the thousands who pronounce it wrong. Thanks for redeeming me! 
151-Yes, Yes, Yes! I remember that, and it was super spiffing!
151- Yes, that rocked. The Mars scenes, although now very outdated, were also spiffy! They may not be about the latest missions, but they’re about the essence of Mars missions, about looking for life and exploring the unknown.
We should definitely celebrate Dr. Sagan’s birthday (Nov 9) here on MuseBlog.
153-Shaya! I agree. *pleads with the maganinomous GAPA who moderates this post to have it added to the calendar*
Oh yes, we should! *gathers galaxy pies*
After all, he did say “To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
156- Oh, thats a good line…
Yeah, because if you really mean “from scratch”, you have to make it from atoms up.
My brothers wouldn’t let me on the computer, so I watched Episode Two again. Yes, that Evolution sequence is flamabualtious.
Although, we are a bit off topic. Perhaps there should be a separate Cosmos thread.
The Origin Of Love
When the earth was still flat,
And the clouds made of fire,
And mountains stretched up to the sky,
Sometimes higher
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs
They had two sets of arms,
They had two sets of legs
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked; while they read
And they never knew nothing of love
It was before… the origin of love
The origin of love.
And there were three sexes then,
One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back,
Called the children of the sun.
And similar in shape and girth,
Were the children of the earth.
They looked like two girls
Rolled up in one.
And the children of the moon
Were like a fork shoved on a spoon.
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son…
Oh, oh,
The origin of love
Now the gods grew quite scared,
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
“I’m gonna kill them all
With my hammer,
Like I killed the giants.”
And Zeus said, “No,
You better let me
Use my lightening, like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales
Dinosaurs into lizards.”
Then he grabbed up some bolts
He let out a laugh,
Said, “I’ll split them right down the middle.
Gonna cut them right up in half.”
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire…
And then fire, shot down
From the sky in bolts,
Like shining blades
Of a knife.
And it ripped,
Right through the flesh,
Of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth
And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole,
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay
And Osiris, and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm,
To blow a hurricane,
To scatter us away
In a flood of wind and rain,
And a sea of tidal waves,
To wash us all away
And if we don’t behave
They’ll cut us down again
And we’ll be hopping round on one foot,
And looking through one eye.
…
Last time I saw you,
We’d just split in two.
He was looking at me,
I was looking at you, oh
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had, blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression,
That the pain, down in your soul
Was the same… as the one down in mine.
Oh, that’s the pain,
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart;
We called it love.
We wrapped our arms around each other,
Trying to shove ourselves back together,
We was making love,
Making love.
It was a cold dark evening,
Such a long time ago,
When by the mighty hand of Jove,
It was the sad story
How we became
Lonely two-legged creatures,
A story:
The origin of love
That’s The Origin of Love.
– Hedwig and the Angry Inch
——-
This is a sad, beautiful song, and story.
The 13th verse/paragraph is what makes this one of my favorite songs… everyone should go listen to it…
I think that first, all the Elders of the Carrot sat down and had a long discussion. They sat on giant, never-melting eclairs, floating in space. (Space already existed, see. Everything was after space.) They decided to create planets to whirl around the sun, which they had created a lot earlier. They had a long argument about which one of the planets should house life. It was between Venus and Mars at first. Then they decided that Venus is good enough, which is why Venus decided to erupt in boils (volcanoes), to prove it was not good enough. They decided to make it Mars. But just when they only created grass, many who had voted for Venus said that anything, just not Mars. The other Elders said, jokingly,
“What, you want that little wimp, Earth, to host life?”
They said,
“Anything but Mars.”
The Elders then destroyed the life on Mars, but a tiny hint of it remained, which is why, to this day, Mars remains the main candidate for life on other planets searches. The Elders then created life on Earth. They thought the Earth needed as much improvement as it could get, so they planted so many different lifeforms on it. However, the Elder who had been most for Mars, a man named Joe Green, placed a curse on these Earth men and women-they will be vain, they will always wish to know the future, and will be too curious for their own good. They will open ever Pandora’s Box, and pry and poke into every bit of Space that the Elders wanted left alone. And last but not least, he scattered little pointless but torturing clues of life on every planet. He also talked the dwarves living in Madagascar to manufacture flying saucers that the dwarves were to release every so often to arouse the curiosity of humans.
A woman named Eret, born 500,000,500 years after all this, discovered the secret of the Elders while working on her painting. The paint that popped out of her palette wrote on her canvas this story. She aroused many people, telling them of all. They did not believe her. At least, most of them didn’t. But for good measure, the Elders took her to Anke, the dungeon they had built a long time ago. There she sat, designing spaceships, thouroughly convinced she was in Paris. When the Elders punish, they punish hard.
I am interested in the origin of the whole “stuff in museums comes to life at night” motif.
162-I don’t know…it would be interesting to find that out.
I know there was a Zack Files (Dan Greenburg) story about it, but I think that it existed before it.
163- There was, but I found an essay about the Smithsonian from the 70’s that used it, and it apparently appears in some Lovecraft stories from the 30’s.
164-You’re a much more devoted researcher than I am.