Lie #5: ‘There is no single truth. Everyone needs to explore and find a truth that works for them.’

This one’s a real hot potato. And it’s not something you hear so much from ancient religious institutions… rather, it’s simply the ‘politically correct’ way to talk about spirituality these days.

It tends to be expressed something like this: ‘You’ve got your truth, and I’ve got my truth. You find a faith that works for you, and I’ll find a faith that works for me.’

Well here’s my question:

How many conflicting versions of the truth can actually be true?

I’m not going to use this space to promote an agenda today — or to push any specific claim of Ultimate Truth. I’m just going to highlight a very simple, logical reality that each of us, in our search for Truth, must recognize. Pardon me if I offend you, but I’m going to put it bluntly.

It’s impossible for all religions to be true.

In other words, if Islam is essentially true, then Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity are not. If Buddhism is essentially true, then Islam, Christianity and Hinduism are not. And so on.

How can I say such a thing? Because if you *really* study these religions, it will become clear that each makes bold, fundamental assertions about reality that are not compatible with the others.

For example, Hinduism states that divinity is present in everything. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all assert that God is distinctly separate from what he has created. The implications of these different views run very deep, and they are fundamentally incompatible. It’s logically impossible for both views to be true.

So why bring this up, anyway?

Well first I have to make a confession. I would *like* to believe that all religions could be true. I would personally *like* to believe that all paths lead to God. It feels good. It’s a kinder view of the world. It puts everyone on equal footing.

But it just doesn’t make sense.

Truth is, by nature, exclusive. There are always more wrong ways to do just about anything than right ways. There are always more wrong answers to any given question than right ones.

True?

And you know what? This really raises the stakes. It puts a real sense of urgency in our search for truth, because it shows that if we’re not careful, we can fall for a half-truth.

On the other hand, if you diligently search, seek out the facts, and your spiritual journey brings you to a place where the pieces fit in place – if everything makes logical sense and it feels right in your heart – then you should not hesitate to share your joy with others.

OK… now let’s stop right now and make something very clear:

If we possess the truth, it doesn’t give us the right to be unkind to those who disagree. It didn’t give Bin Laden the right to declare Jihad, hijack airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center. It didn’t give so-called ‘Christians’ the right to kill people in the Crusades. It doesn’t give us the right to be disrespectful or violent.

What it does give us is the right – and the confidence – to go out into the marketplace of ideas and *see* if our Truth stands up to hard scrutiny.

C.S. Lewis was talking about this very thing when he said, ‘You don’t need to defend a Lion. You just need to let him out of his cage.’

If you really do have the truth, then you have nothing to fear. You don’t need to burn books or censor speech. Truth is its own best defense.

In our modern, sophisticated culture, spirituality gets locked up in a cage. It’s a taboo subject. Discussions about religion are not considered ‘polite conversation.’ So nobody talks about it.

The result? People don’t talk to each other. They live in fear and isolation.

Some folks harbor ideas and notions that make absolutely no sense, but because those ideas are never brought out into the light of day, they’re never questioned.

Others have great wisdom, but they’re afraid to share it with others!

How sad.

In your search for the truth, then, know that you’re not just looking for something that sounds good. As with any other kind of truth, it may *not* feel good all the time. Know that you’re looking for something definite, something that will by nature make some pretty bold claims.

Also, please understand that if someone tells you they possess the truth, they’re not being arrogant. Fact is, they’re either sadly deceived or else they’re right. You can’t put someone down for being deceived, and you can’t fault someone for being right!

The real challenge is to discern the difference.

Tomorrow I’m going to cover Lie #6:

‘The Bible is out of date, inaccurate and over-rated. People in the 21st century are way too smart for that.’

Thanks for sticking with me.

Respectfully Submitted,

Perry Marshall

Hear 7 Great Lies or Organized Religion on your computer, iPod or MP3 player:

147 Responses to “Lie #5: ‘There is no single truth. Everyone needs to explore and find a truth that works for them.’”

  1. GS Lazoff says:

    I cannot believe that I have found someone who has the same belief as I have had for the past 20 odd years. I will try caption the reasons that I personally have for these beliefs:

    To start, I am I born JEW. I was Bar Mitzvah in “Valley Beth Shalom” (Encino, California) by the eminent Rabbi—-

    Harold Shulweis. Also, one of my best friends of the time is now; Rabbi; Ronald Schulman of TV accreditation.

    For many years I had questions of the validity of the so called written scriptures. After all, who in the F–k wrote them?

    I answer: MAN. When we take into the consideration of human fault and, the willing need to bend the true for whatever reason politically desired at that given time; how I asked the rest of the world can we just accept these worse at face value and live our live unquestionably? I will not even touch the interpretations of the three sects of Judaism.

    I happen to have gone through a time when I questioned GOD ( Ha Shem). Then. I took me pilgrimage through out the whole of Israel. By happen chance I found a very quaint and accommodating (drunk) archeologist by the name of (Joseph).

    He then invited me and my three friends to visit the newly discovered FIRST City of Jerusalem. The third layer down from the existing one. In there I discovered a true power. One that was undenied by any powers of men.

    Shortly after I sought out the wall of the first temple along with the same friends. Well, after hours of being lost we found ourselves just outside a religious (Christian shop) and a feeling came over us. One so freakin’ powerful that it chilled and warmed at the same time. We turned to each other and at the same time, “We’re there”!! As we turned right, low and behold there was the “Wailing Wall.” We went to add our prayers to the wall in the traditional manner and then proceeded to tour old Jerusalem. Approximately two hours later we happen chanced to follow a guided group of people into the “Tomb of Christ.” There again was this ominous power that struck at our very hearts and souls. By we realized where we where we them took a solemn oath to try our best to teach anyone who listen that Christ was indeed the son of GOD.

    Upon my next venture to the old city, along with one of the same friends we came across Joseph and he said he had a marvelous discovery to show us. It was in fact the scripture of Christ. It had not been fully translated but, the first six lines were undeniable and, from that point on I had decided that my religion would be that of the first scriptures where GOD spoke to Abraham and said” Pry to me in your fields, pray to me from your hearts, build me no shrines or idols! In fact, the churches and temples of modern day are in direct violation of GODS (Ha-Shen, Adoi’s) wishes.

    Please feel free to post this with your lessons. The world must know the mankind has bent the truth of God and, Jesus. Jesus, whom I consider to be not only the son of God but, as the greatest Rabbi of all times; was not sent down here to just to suffer for our sins. Nor, was he sent here to create a new religion. He was in fact sent to bring Gods chosen people back into his light away from idol worshiping Romans.

    To those who have made it through my rambling. Remember this. God created with minds capable of free thought and the ability to decide for ourselves. If think of God as a parent, them look at our time line. We are be his point of view in our adolescence and with that in mind; he has given us room to scrape our knees and to learn from our mistakes.

    It is way beyond time to do so. Let us evolve. It is now time to come together and become the people of this Earth that he gave us! If we take a hard core look at all of the major religions that exist on Earth today, they all say the same things.

    Do not kill

    Love your fellow man

    do not steal No where in modern religion does it say specifically y to those who believe differently that !!!!!!!

    ” (Turn a stone and I will be there, Split a log and Thee shall see me ) These are the true words of Christ, Suppressed by a church that does not want you find out that you never really needed them to pray to GOD, Ha Shem, Adonoi!!!!!!!!

    -G.S. Lazoff
    A true believer of God and humankind

    • George Pemberton says:

      So man of your considerations are so wisely addressed!

      While working as a prison chaplain several years ago, a young inmate approached asking if he could attend service being offered that Sabbath morning. I assured him that he was welcome. He said he was not a member of that church and I said that was fine. He was welcome. He then said, “I am looking for a church I am comfortable with.” I congratulated him for looking and then found myself suggesting, “In your looking find one that God is comfortable with.” I was surprised by me comment and have thought of it often when I hear of people bashing or just honestly looking for a church or a religion or just others to worship with.

      I am agreed, all truth must be compatible with itself, from Scripture, good science, or any other source!

    • Dear Mr. G.S. Lazoff,

      I really enjoyed reading your post. I was baptized a Roman Catholic, however, I have always asked why we have statues, saints etc. I have always felt two emotions concerning Jewish People. 1. Great admiration. 2. Some anger. First, the great admiration for their endurance throughout history. Their being chosen as the Chosen people of G-d. In the second, anger. Listening for more than 60 years the Holocaust. Maybe I am mistaken, but over 50 million people were killed during World War 2. I always hear 6,000,000. What about the other none Jewish population? Do they count?
      I would like to convert to the Jewish Religion. I can and would feel comfortable with both beiefs, except for the statues.

    • Abdullah Tiki says:

      @ respected Mr. Perry Marshall
      Hello, i apologize in advance as my question is not directly related to this topic, more on the topic of “What we know about Jesus and the Ressurrection.” I couldn’t find a place to post the question though so here I am.
      First let me say your argument using language as proof of design is like nothing i’ve seen before and I think it is ingenious. Now on with the question.

      You say after stating the facts known about Jesus and the Resurrection that, “No one who rejects the resurrection offers a convincing alternative explanation of what happened. Theories abound, but no single “2nd theory” has achieved any real consensus; alternative theories all have significant problems and leave major questions unanswered.”

      However, I believe that an alternative theory does in fact exist and fits very well with the facts you mentioned. This explanation exists in the book of God’s final revelations, the Qur’an. The explanation is as follows:
      1) Jesus himself was not crucified, but it was made to appear as such.
      This explains the fact that is interpreted as: Jesus died, and was buried. With the perspective of the Qur’anic explanation, the man that got crucified, who then died and got buried was in fact, not Jesus himself. It must have been someone else who appeared to them as Jesus, perhaps by miracle, to save Jesus from this torture and death.
      This also explains the part mentioned in the Bible where the supposed Jesus says while on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It sounds to me a more reasonable explanation that the person who said that was in fact not Jesus, rather than the other conclusion that God must have removed Jesus from the trinity head…? Which is obviously very difficult for a person to get their head around.

      2) Jesus was raised by God to the heavens.
      Perhaps before Jesus was raised to the heavens he did visit his disciples, who had heard claims, which might have been false, that he was already dead and the tomb was empty. So when they saw him there they thought he was a ghost or spirit, risen from the dead. Yet Jesus went on to show them that he was no spirit, he was a man of flesh, and he ate, to emphasize to them that he was no ghost. In other words, he did not rise from the dead; in other words he never died.

      So there does exist an alternate explanation, which fits very well into the known facts. There may be other parts to the story, however I hope you will reply to me your thoughts regarding this explanation and if it raises any problems, considering the facts.
      Thank you.

      • perrymarshall says:

        Abdullah,

        The Qur’an was written 600 years after Jesus and directly contradicts the New Testament on a number of points about Jesus. If you choose to believe that it is the word of Allah that is your choice, but there is no historical support dating from the 1st century to support the claims of the Qur’an about Jesus.

        When Jesus says “Why have you forsaken me” He is quoting Psalm 22:

        1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
        Why are you so far from saving me,
        so far from my cries of anguish?
        2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
        by night, but I find no rest.

        I invite you to read the resurrection accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and then compare your #2 with what the four gospel writers actually had to say.

  2. J. Pace says:

    Dear Perry,
    I agree with much of what you say, but how can you be so certain there is a God?

    Sincerely,
    J.Pace

    • perrymarshall says:

      Thanks for your question, I do take it seriouisly. Let me give you just
      a handful of quick reasons – if you want to delve into any of them I’m
      happy to go into specific details….

      1) The existence of the universe
      2) the extreme fine-tuning of the universe, the solar system and all physical constants
      3) The existence of life, for which modern science, once you get past the smoke and mirrors, has not the beginning of an explanation for
      4) The fact that people everywhere, at all times, have sought God and desired to worship
      5) The innate sense of right and wrong and fairness that all people in all cultures have
      6) Experiences like miracles, near death experiences, very strange things etc etc — if you get 20 people in a room and everyone’s honest and trusts others not to make fun of them, there’s always 3-6 people who can describe very, very strange, seemingly impossible events that have happened to them somewhere along the way.
      7) The fact that most people whom I’ve met, who say there is no God, are always so angry and vitriolic…meanwhile people who worship and pray have joy and peace. Why?

      Huge question, seven simple answers.

      Happy to discuss.
      Best,

      Perry

      • @Perrymarshal:
        Great Job: Couldn’t have said it much better myself. (But there are plenty of exceptions to and exact reverses of your point #7, sadly. I’ve always been puzzled by how some can be unhappy on the way to heaven and some can be ecstatic on the way to hell. Cluelessness knows no boundaries, I guess.)
        – – ONE WHITE CROW

    • A.Rehman says:

      Dear ,

      I think u just only see ur body work, specially mind work u can understand that there is some one desinger who made this unbelivable universe.

      Many times before my faith was also very poor but I think that how a single single germ became a complete human being just think dear just think .

      What God just expcept from us that We just thanks to him for giving such beaufiul world , if sorrows exists in this world not just for God but these all sorrows due selfish persons

  3. Fajardo Osc says:

    my reply to lie 5:
    ‘There is no single truth. Everyone needs to explore and find a truth that works for them.’

    “truths” must be seen in its context (time and culture) and to see this out of context surely one cannot understand.
    i believe that all religion presents the truths according to their own experiences and that is the beauty of life ( multifaceted) and no one can claim to have the absolute truth: their truth as the truth. and people who do have absolute truths are fundamentalist who instead of bringing out the truth are destroying that truth they wanted to cherish

    • To Fajardo Osc:
      As I am sure you know, it is possible to be right but still be wrong, and, possible to be somewhat right but still mostly be wrong, or, mostly right but still somewhat wrong. It is which we each are, mostly right or mostly wrong, that determines the outcome we each get.

      Suppose a mountain climber is dangling off a cliff clinging to a rope in a mild breeze that turns into a strong wind. The person realizes they are losing their grip in the extra wind, that their ropes are being pulled through the cinches, so, starts dropping equipment to improve grip. The loss of weight is just enough to enable him or her to hang on as the wind increases. But then suppose a torrential flood of water rushes down the canyon; all of a sudden what was enough becomes grossly inadequate. The best solution would be to not dangle off a cliff in the first place.

      You are right; every religion DOES contain at least some truth; if not, nobody would believe in it; the average person may be stupid, but they are not THAT stupid. But just as it is true to say that nobody believes in a perfectly false religion, it is even more true that nobody believes in a perfectly true one, either: in fact, perfectly true, even if we had it, would seem false to us: not because it is, but because we are; the average person may be smart, but they are not THAT smart. But we don’t need perfectly true; we just need true enough; that is all that matters; but anything less we also need to avoid like the plague. There are many ways to get rescued by the fire department from a burning building; naked, clothed, asleep awake, conscious, unconscious, out the window, out the door, out the roof, out the wall, pockets stuffed full of money and family jewels, or empty, at night, in daylight, or whatever. The main thing is, to get rescued; everything else is just an ok dispensable variable, ideal or not, by comparison to the alternative of NOT getting rescued. When we can tell what the only way IN GENERAL to get rescued is, then if a religion is absent that, whatever other good things it proposes do not matter; it’s like sprinkling water droplets on a forest fire and expecting it not only to go out but provide enough water to grow a new forest: not gonna happen. And most religions simply aren’t true enough. Some religions contain lots of truth, and that is good; if so, I would never tell anyone not to follow it, in so far as it is true; and that is why many elements of many religions are in perfect or partial agreement; it is easy even for people living in wholly different cultures in different places and different times to agree on some things, because they are so obvious. But since when is truest truth obvious? Much truth that matters a great deal is not obvious till it hits us upside the head or bites us in the ass, unless we go searching for it, and sometimes not even then. Mere truth is not good enough, as experience tells us every day. Most things and conditions and situations are only true conditionally; sometimes they’re true, sometimes not; the things that are mostly true most places and most of the time, but still not always true, for everyone, everywhere, everytime, are in fact the most dangerous of all, because they fool us into a false sense of security to trust most in them, then, suddenly change on us and leaving us holding an empty bag; what we need is to cling most of all and as much as possible and as soon as possible to things that are always true, no matter what happens. And I agree, there are not too many things like that; thus they are not obvious at all, which is why there is such great agreement on obvious things and so little agreement on unobvious things; but the always true things are hiding in the unobvious things, so it is that group that turns out to be most important to search through.

      Everything we can imagine is in some way, shape, or form at least a little bit true, even if only real in the world of cartoons; but eventually the paradigm always shifts, so what we need to know is, will the truth we are depending on and relying on still work in extreme conditions as well as just in mild conditions, when anything might seem to work? Have you ever noticed that air conditioning works best when you least need it? Have you ever noticed that the peak frequency for the deaths of refrigerators and freezers is peak summer; right when the need for keeping your food coldest is greatest. I’m not saying let’s not use technology; I’m saying its failure right when we most need it demonstrates time and time again we need a better way. What good is a house which will only stand when there are no earthquakes or typhoons? As long as it will stand in easy times, is that our only standard of success (just don’t lean a shovel against it)? What good is a car that will only work if the roads are perfectly smooth? What good is a rifle that will only shoot without jamming when it is perfectly clean, when in battle, everyone and everything is dirty? Any of us can literally fabricate stories and there will always be elements in it in general principle or specific detail that turn out to be true or “truish” either by accident or by contrivance; but that is not what is important; what is important is, what is most true, and what is truest, and, can it save us from the full range of all dangers we know we face or shall face? If it cannot do that, then we know we need another, and if we don’t know if it can do that, then we know we need to search to see what other options there are. The way to tell if something is true enough to supply you with what you need is to stress test it, in reality or in virtual reality simulation, and see if it still survives without crumbling.

      I agree fundamentalists have a lot to learn; much is destroyed in the name of fanatical do-goodism, I agree; but so does everyone else have a lot to learn. In my experience, nearly nobody truly knows what they are talking about, least of all those who most think they do but who have not got beyond the point where they understand that everything always reverses and there is an exception to every rule. Mostly, truest truth is destroyed simply by not looking for it. I agree we should all do far more studying and all do far less condemning and asserting things before we can prove them. The trouble isn’t skepticism, it is not being skeptical enough; insufficient skepticism leads us in to all manner of errors, into accepting both religious and scientific myths, depending on our predisposed bias. When I saw that, I went into extreme isolation till I knew I knew what I was talking about. It isn’t easy, but truest truth can be known. Trouble is, most people convince themselves it cannot be done, because they never see anyone do it, even among those who claim to have it, while they themselves are busy waiting around expecting someone else to do it for them. But it is nobody’s job to do our homework for each of us but each of ourselves. Trying to escape that hypocrisy, searching, I found THE RULE of The Rule of rules; ‘Every condition eventually reverses, including reversing.’ There is no rule or law or person, place, time, or thing, this rule does not apply to, there is nothing and no one that is not governed by this law; it will be either our death or our life, our choice. That means eternal heaven and hell are coming, and that God is real, and that eternal salvation is by trust in that principle alone, not by anything else we can do. It is beyond question save to those that are ignoring the most commonly experienced rule of physics, The Rule of rules: ‘Every condition eventually reverses.’ Ignore it to your peril.
      – – ONE WHITE CROW

    • Brandon says:

      I recently had had a similar argument. My classmate was arguing that in the 1400s it would be a true statement to say that the earth is flat because it is ‘true to them’
      In the 1400s was the earth flat?

      Also how can two mutually contradictory statements be true
      for example, an atheist would say there is no god or any form of higher power.
      While a religious person would say that their is a God responsible for the creation of the universe

      these to statements, according to my understanding of your argument would both be true simmultaniusly

      however, how can their be both no God and a God

      Their cannot because both people exist in the same reality, and the mind does not affect reality simply by thinking.

      You can believe all you want a cup filled with water is empty but it is still filled with water

      Therefore if the Atheist is right that there is no God then the religious person would have to be wrong in saying there is a god.

      In the context of this argument God would refer to a being whom created the universe, not an element of the human mind

      • perrymarshall says:

        Nobody believed the earth was flat in the 1400’s. This is an urban legend created in the 19th century for the purpose of making people in the middle ages look stupid. (I’m serious.) People have known the earth is round since 500 BC.

        Your friend seems to not understand the philosophical law of non-contradiction.

      • Gyan says:

        Even Physics has learned to live with the contradiction. Entire Quantum Physics is the study of contradiction. For those not familiar with this: scientists now know that small particles behave sometimes like waves and sometimes like particles.

        Believers of absolute truth have done most harm to this world. Belief in having in their possession the real truth has led men to subjugate people, nations and races.

        Belief of absolute truth is not logic, it is faith, but now it has taken the garb of language of logic, to suit the times. To such people I will only say, open your hearts, and minds.

        How can one man, whoever he is, claim the monopoly over truth?

        Everyone has to find it. If somebody tells me that he is showing me the truth, why should I believe him?

        Miracles won’t convince me. Come to India, I will show you miracles a dime a dozen!

        Nobody has the right to claim that only he or his religion alone knows the absolute truth. In his heart of hearts he also knows that he is lying!

  4. David Thomas says:

    Hello all.
    Having met so many people of different faiths all believing that they have the TRUE faith, I am disheartend to see and hear them in conflict over small details. What can i say or do to make them see that they are all following the same God but under different banners and that God does NOT want them to argue the toss about these details but wants them to spend thier time and energy following Christs teachings. IE: To care for the weak and helpless, to provide resourse to those who have none.
    Further more that God and christ do not want another $100M temple built. As in thecase of later day saints etc.
    One Love.
    David.

    • I agree; there are at least as many potential specific paths to God as there are people; but, there is only one door out of this place worth a damned; everything else is full of holes, so spinning, so, sinning.
      I agree; the devil is in the details; but so is God, just one proof, the Eye of The Needle. There is ‘a snowball’s chance in hell’ of ‘hell freezing over’, so, we had better stop shovelling the shit and start ‘threading the needle’.
      – – ONE WHITE CROW

      • To David Thomas:

        You are completely right about building monuments; history shows that usually herculean/cyclopean megalithic monolithic ashlar construction in a religion means it is heading rapidly towards extinction among a population. Look at Europe. Look at Egypt. Look at Cambodia. Look at Central America. Easter Island. Greece. Italy. I don’t recall anywhere Jesus saying, “I want you to build gargantuan expensive worship Jump-4-Jesus Trampoline Centers in my name.”, or, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” “And my commandment is, by your gigundous ginormous temples they will know you know me.” Even truth becomes extinct in a population when the population loses focus on what is most important. Many sciences have been discovered and lost many times. Our only consolation is, truest truth is built into nature itself; it cannot be completely lost, like fiction can; it can only be forgotten till someone finally gets fed up with suffering enough, and goes looking for a better way.

        The Gospel of JC IS a ‘Social Gospel’, as it is referred to, but it is NOT only a ‘Social Gospel’; in fact, mostly it is not; it is ALSO a Natural Law Gospel, and it is ALSO a Supernatural Law Gospel, and it is only the latter that will actually ever save us. The world is broken for a reason; it is so we will not just seek for a better life here and now, but also for what this world cannot possibly ever offer; we become contented with settling for setting as our goals the best we can hope for in this life; that is a terrible mistake; not just because we know we NEED better than that, but also because as our universe expands, the membrane keeping eternity out gets thinner and thinner; eventually the bubble will burst, and it will ‘burst our bubble’ if we are ‘living in a fool’s paradise’. We are ALWAYS ‘living in a fool’s paradise’ so long as we place our hopes only in the compromise trade-off physics prevailing in this kind of universe. Science is the Social Gospel. Science is the way to sustain ourselves here & now; Faith is the way to sustain ourselves there & then; but for that to work there & then we must be prepared by it here & now; since the most enduring realest reality is the realest reality, that means faith is the realest science. However, for here and now, science is the best most people will ever have, so, for them, let’s teach them to rely on the very best superstition has to offer for the benefit of the decaying body, and then teach them faith by science, not by its absence, for the benefit of the eternal soul.

        Whether WE are the ones feeding and caring for ourselves medically and to sustain biological need, or whether someone else is, or whether we are learning how to sustain ourselves, or whether or not we are educated, healthy, and rich, if we are not tapped into the supernatural law Gospel, we are still headed to hell, which means we are really poor, weak, and foolish after all; and then what use is all the altruism? Is the goal to make sure that though as many as possible are still going to hell, then at least they had a full belly and finally got that well dug on their farmland, or dressed in the latest styles & exuding designer perfumes when they went there? When you can prove there really is only one way, it is not elitism to tell people truest truth; it in fact would be elitism to mislead them from it and to not remind them of it. In math and science, there may be many ways of deriving the right answer or set of answers, but, there is still only one right answer or set of right answers, to the exclusion of all others in the infinite range of all possible answers; why would we think the right religion or religions, if they//it are//is true, if we found the right one or ones, would be any different?

        I agree though, ‘The quickest way to Mankind’s heart is through its stomach.’ People will not listen or care if they are too distracted; but people can become just as distracted by being filthy rich as filthy poor. So, the Social Gospel is a great place to start, and the better if we can convince the rich to donate to the poor; even Jesus both fed and taught; he did not just do one or the other. But great places to start are often horrible places to finish; 40-year olds still using training wheels on their bicycles, instead of graduating to an automobile, just ain’t right. But if we are only working for the body, if this is all there is, then the wisest thing for the wise to do in the present circumstance is to set a good example for the rest of us and commit suicide. But there are right and wrong ways to commit suicide. And I am working on a proof for that, too. It turns out that performing the right way to commit suicide is the only thing that will ever save us. Jesus found it, Jesus did it, and history has been kind to him. And he never wrote a single book or built a single monument.
        – – ONE WHITE CROW

  5. David Thomas says:

    Hello all.
    I have an unshakable faith in God through personal experience and through studying the factual chemical science of life.
    I am now committed to spreading the word of God and if any one wants to ask about or discuss the scientific fact make my email address available and i will endevour to reply to every one who wishes answers.
    One Love
    David.

  6. William Nailen says:

    Comment:
    I disagree with your statement that if you study different religions you find fundamental differences. I have found only similarities. Of course, if one looks for something (such as differences or similarities) one is apt to find them.

    • perrymarshall says:

      William,

      Religions are only similar on the surface. Yes they all have somewhat similar moral dictums. But philosophically and theologically they could not be more different at the core.

      Hinduism says that all things are in God, and God is in all things. Hinduism recognizes 330 million gods. Islam says there is one God, Allah. Christianity says that God is one and exists in 3 parts, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that Jesus was the Son of God. Islam denies that Jesus is the son of God. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all emphatic that God is separate from His creation. Eastern religions merge the two together.

      Buddhism says that the core problem of humanity is that we have desires. Christianity says that the core problem of humanity is that we have sinned and we are therefore separated from God. Buddhism says that there is no god.

      These differences are HUGE. To say they’re all the same is to make a superficial judgment. The implications of these theologies are as different as the cultures they produce.

      • david thomas says:

        HI everyone.
        I certainly agree Hinduism is an exception with religions.
        With their many gods in conflict the conclusion is nothing will change.
        Interestingly the philosophy seems to be one of.
        Do as I say and
        Not as I do.
        Correct me if I am wrong.
        But the rest I have seen (excluding satanic faiths}
        are about harmonisation and self improvement.
        Still, there IS only ONE true GOD who created this environment.
        Buddhism has god as part of creation and not separate.
        Yet still about harmony and self improvement.
        Which is arguably a step in the right direction.
        Remember NOT all Daisy’s open at the same time and
        by climbing one hill another will become visible until ?
        Eyes are opened.
        One Love.
        David.

      • I agree there are big differences between different religions. But please also keep in mind that there are a great many cases where two different religions are talking about and referrring to the same principles in nature, but, using different figures of speech or examples to prove or model or describe them, so, modern readers are often baffled not by their real disagreement but merely by their superficial disagreement. It takes a long time for a researcher to reconcile the same principle but said two very different ways.

        As for the differences between Budhism and Christianity, for the example you give, of desire and sin, one is speaking of consequence, the other is speaking of the cause; but, both are in fact referring to the very same obstacle everyone has blocking them from reaching enlightenment, bliss, or Nirvana, or, being “born again”. But I agree, the properties each of these is alleged to have are, or, can be, quite different. And, Budhism acknowledges infinity, but, ascribes it to nature, rather than to a personal God. Both religions are recognizing real properties and aspects of observable and inferred reality, but, ascribing them to different phenomenon and assigning different names to them. It is just a question of first reconciling the concepts, seeing what is the same and what is different, then, seeing what model most closely matches with observable reality. That is all we can do. If God is just, he will honour even the honest and diligent life-long search, even if we never directly find what we are looking for; and if God is not just, then, it is not a heaven I would want to go to anyway, so, there is nothing in my control worth worrying about, save one thing: am I honestly searching, and, am I making regular progress? Everything else is out of my control.
        I find that Budhism is a very wise religion, but, that Christianity takes account of things Budhism does not, like the need for a better substitute. Desire is not evil, but, what we choose to fulfill it with when we are using inadequate substitutes is. There is really only one sin, relative to eternity, because there is really only one thing that can keep you out of heaven: rejecting by not accepting or rejecting by actively consciously rejecting, THE RULE of The Rule of rules: everything and its opposite eventually reverses, including reversing. If we really accept that, then our lives will show it. If I had not chosen to be a Christian, I would have choose to be a Budhist.

        Also, God IS in all things, in some ways (God created all things from himself), but, not in others (what God created does not have all his attributes, especially in quantity); the fact that God is in all things in some ways does not necessarily mean we should worship all things: they are two different discussions.
        Also, “worship” is a word people use not understanding it; in its most general sense, it just means you are devoted much more to it than anything else. That means some do not worship God even though they go to church or temple or synagogue, etc, because they spend more time watching TV, or whatever. the truet test of what we are really worshipping, is, what do we do most consistently with most of our freetime (outside gainful and non-gainful work, etc). If it is not seeking God, or, helping people, and preferably some combination of both, then, we are on the wrong track.
        ONE WHITE CROW

      • Sampath KR says:

        Hinduism is not a religion which has hundreds of Gods. All the so-called Gods are none but great men/women who have performed great deeds for the betterment of the society and people around them. They were glorified, feted and idolised and with the passage of time, they were begun to be worshipped as Gods.

        One of the most remarkable facets of Hinduism is it recognises individuality and free spirit long before the Western world embraced it and grants each individual to experience God in his own way. When you see God in yourself and in every fellow individual, world will be so much a better place because every individual will be respected.

        For example, Lord Hanuman is a trusted lieutenant of Lord Ram in his battle with Raavan. He has so many admirable qualities like bravery, imagination, steadfastness, etc. When you idolise Hanuman, you seek to imbibe yourself with qualities which he represents. Unfortunately, the practice got corrupted that people started to ignore the traits of Hanuman and idolise only Hanuman as a person in much the same way, Gandhi became to be idolised as a symbol and a person while his traits were ignored.

        In course of time, probably in centuries, Gandhi will also be added to the legion of Gods. So friends, in truth every religion is similar in its core ideal of Love towards each other. Each individual only seeks to preach it in a different way.

        • alexk says:

          I would disagree with the concept that every religion is based around a core of love. Ones I know of: Islam and many sects of Buddhism.

  7. A.Rehman says:

    Dear Sir,

    I am electronic engr. and muslim , my question for is that if prove it all from holly quaran that God just wnat to labour from human ,

    I think u must have study all religions before , any way my question from u is that if some one is ur enemy and told u good thing or any good tale will u follow it or u just opposes it .

    Dear I think all religions in world just give good things at all , this is depending upon us how we see it .

    waiting for ur reply

    A.Rehman

    • To A. Rehman:
      Your question seems to be:
      “If someone is my enemy, but they tell me a truth, then will I reject it for prejudice, or accept it for postjudice?”

      My enemies are only those that do not care about truest truth, for they are also even their own enemies; and who hates themselves are hard to be friends with. And that means my enemies are often those in my own religion and culture, not just those without, and it often means my friends are those out of my own religion and culture. Jesus said: Many will come from foreign countries (and thus by implication, foreign religions) and shall enter The Kingdom of God, while those who suppose they were the children of God (and who supposed the foreigners were not) shall be cast into hell. And experience says the same thing; we say: ‘Strangers are just friends we haven’t met yet.’ But also, ‘Friends are just enemies we haven’t met yet.’ Those who love the same things in general are friends even if they have never met; those who love different things in general are enemies even if they have never met yet. The battle or the friendship is merely delayed by space and time; but that is no real barrier in eternity; eventually, all divergent paths cross and converge, and all convergent paths diverge and eventually converge, so that everyone is polarized.

      Some principles are true or false depending on perspective, as you say; but at least one is not. Every principle which depends on perspective for it to be true, has holes in it. If we keep choosing to put our life in a sieve, then should we be surprised or angry when it runs away? What we need is to trust in perspectives which are perspectiveless; so that no matter how we look at them, they are always true, and equally true. But what is always true is hard to see, because it has no edges, which things with holes are full of, which reflect light back at us. But do not be ‘blinded by the light’.

      No one and no religion has a monopoly on truth; but, some religions are more advanced than others, and, one religion does have a monopoly on truest truth. It is only recently I could say that with honesty; but I proved it myself, so I cannot deny it, and so far I can find no better disproof against it than I found proof for it, and, have been able to prove that there is no room remaining in physics for it to be disproved. I could still be wrong, but it would first require we toss all of physics, and electrical & mechanical engineering into the landfill, so I am pretty sure I am right, because we can all see how well those things usually work.

      If you have proofs from the holy Qur’an for various truths in the sciences, then that is fantastic; I do for the Bible as well; many others do for their holy books; and those singular or sets of proofs might ALL be somewhat or completely right; they are seldom definitive enough to rule out any of the other claims made by other religions, though; physics says that everything is at least a little bit true somewhere sometime, and, that everyone is at least a little bit everything, everywhere, everytime; but mostly, nearly entirely, in fact, so that the rest is essentially negligible, we are right here right now; what we need is proofs that narrow down the possibilities for what TRUEST truth is, otherwise, we are ever lost in confusion and with just a handful of truths that are exceptions to rules and so always have holes in them that will let us down right when we are most vulnerable. Mere truth is not good enough; what we need to focus on obtaining is truest truth, the truth that will always be true no matter what happens, no matter who we are, no matter, where or when we are. It is a tall order, but it is there.

      Additionally, the only problem with relying on any religious text before confirmation is, that all books contain information that depends on external reality, i.e., natural law, the laws of physics and chemistry and biology, geology, etc, to confirm them. All books are full of referentials that point outside themselves, and which must be understood outside themselves, to make any sense. Many modern religious believers forget this, what ancient readers in those religions took for granted as obvious; the books should not be worshipped, but the realities they refer to should be found and responded to correctly. If a book speaks of a tree, we can consult dictionaries, encyclopedias, and experts; but the best way and ultimately only way to know what a tree is, is to exit our study inside the library or lab or house, and go see if we can find those objects with those properties described in the book, in the real world. There is nothing wrong with seeking proofs from our holy books, and we even should try to, and I would never discourage anyone from doing that. But, we need to realize the limitations of doing that. It is best to seek proofs outside our holy texts, confirm then outside them & independent of them, then only afterwards, see how well they align with each other, and correct the one off the other, and vice versa.

      Our ancestors often did a very good job of finding truths and of preserving the truths they found, and we should honour and respect their work and effort. We should never wholly disregard it, and in all the work we do, we should always keep an eye on it. Every culture should respect its own ethnic and religious origins, except where we can tell it is completely dangerous or ridiculous, or, except where it is holding us back from advancing and improving. However, not all cultures are created equal; some cultures are regressive rather than progressive; and all cultures which are regressive might become progressive, or vice versa, and yet still retain many if not most of their cultural ideals. And, we can discover truth today as well as they could then; should what we find be disregarded, and only pay attention to what is written since ancient times? Or, should we only care about what we find, and ignore what they found as if it were all garbage? Clearly both those attitudes would be wrong. We need to do both as much as possible, ignoring neither. Our ancestors were right about a great many things, just as we are, and also wrong about a great many things, just as we are; and we can correct each other, and then both move forward and correct each other even more for things we beforehand could not have even imagined. Being right is good, but, being right does not always (in fact, it usually does not) equal being right enough; and what we need is right enough.

      I have vast collections – – hundreds of thousands – – of wisdom sayings from every culture and every institution on earth, including Arabic//Muslim, and would recommend everyone else truly interested in truest truth do the same, and study ‘the bejesus out of’ them for years before you come to think you know much of anything. If you do, you will notice large-scale patterns they all tend to fall into; The Rule of rules: ‘Every condition eventually reverses.’ Then if you study that, you will see there is something missing, conspicuous by its absence, even though your study of the rules says that every rule always has an opposite, at every scale; so then where it the opposite of this one!?! Then you find truest truth: THE RULE of The Rule of rules: ‘Every condition eventually reverses, including reversing.’ And then you see that everything else is just illusion, just smoke and mirrors, because everything else belongs to a reality that in the grand scheme of things from the perspective of eternity is fading fast.

      There are very few religions or sciences that teach The Rule of rules, save only indirectly, but there are some; there is only one religion and zero sciences I have ever found that teaches the complete version of THE RULE of The Rule of rules: Christianity. Islam and Judaism also teach forms of it, but, too incomplete. That is no offense intended against other religions; I am just reporting what I found. The primary difference being, the version of Judaism the Old Testament teaches DOES actually teach the complete form, but modern Judaism as actually practiced rejects it; and Islam teaches forms of it as well, in that it believes in eternal heaven and hell and only one true eternal God with every attribute set at infinite; the problem is, both Islam and Judaism reject the idea of salvation by faith alone, not faith plus good deeds or good deeds without faith. Christianity alone teaches salvation by trust in faith alone without works, and in fact that is what the physics says is the only thing that is true enough to save us eternally if we trust in it.

      I would try to be open to anything anyone tells me that I can tell is true, and patient with what I cannot immediately tell is true, because I have in many cases in my own work been brought back to and then obliged to accept what I had long ago abandoned, finding it was true after all, after having thought it couldn’t possibly be true. But some truths rule out the possibility of other propositions being true; no matter how long we try to reconcile them, there is no reconciliation if one of them is false. And all proofs in compromise physics are mere propositions compared to rules that have no exceptions.

      It is easy to be at least a little bit right; all you have to do is open your mouth; no matter what comes out will be at least slightly true for at least someone somewhere, having done no investigation or study whatsoever. But what good is that for everyone else? Everybody starts here, in superstition, but most abandon it seeing it is worthless.
      It is harder but still easy to be mostly right; all you have to do is look around before you open your mouth. But what good is that for all the people who are exceptions to all the rules, which abound? And if we are still operating in rules with exceptions, then we will always find at least one other rule of equal force that completely contradicts it, but which is equally true, at often unpredictable times of when the switch will occur, so then though we know, we still are in very great danger of being destroyed anyway; so then what do we do?!? Most everyone is here, in science, in various degrees; but seeing nothing better, this is where most of us stay supposing there is nothing better. But there is.
      But it is very hard to be right enough; it is very hard to find just one rule that has no contradictory opposites, so that the farther we push it one direction we are not opposed, as is the case in physics now. Being right enough is trust in THE RULE of The Rule of rules, deriving all, not just some, of its important properties: ‘Every condition eventually reverses, including reversing.’.
      I wish you all all the best in your continued search for truest truth.
      – – ONE WHITE CROW

      • Tamer Fawzy says:

        Regarding the point of salvation by faith only, I see that each one of us is not living alone in the world, we are living in a world in which we are forced to interact with others, so good deeds are inevitable to maintain the purpose of our creation, even the good deeds that don’t involve helping others. For example as a Muslim we learn that praying is increasing our faith in God, fasting teaches us how to defeat our desires that lead us to sinning and in the same time teaches us to be sensitive to the poor who can’t find enough food, charity is reducing the distance between the rich and the poor, generally speaking good deeds are as necessary as faith, if you’re living in this world without making it a better place so indeed you’re not having a proper faith in God.

  8. Richard Ruquist says:

    Regarding Lie #5, Moses in the Oral Law gave us instruction on how you resolve conflicting laws, which can also be applied to conflicting truths: you just find the underlying truth that resolves the conflict.

  9. No truth works for you, unless it can save you from the reality that is. To know if it can, you have to know what that reality is first. Here, is reality:

    SOLOMON’S SYLLOGISM:
    AKA:
    RUSSELL’S FIRST REGULATION:
    In present physics at every scale throughout the universe:
    Premise: 1.The only constant is that there is only change.
    Premise: 2.The only absolute is that there are only relatives.
    Conclusion: ERGO: eventually, in future physics throughout the multiverse: the nature of change itself will change, from all relativity, to all absolutivity: all there will be is absolutes, i.e.,
    Corollaries:
    1. constant purpose & person but variable physics instead of the other way round,
    2.1 eternal life in
    2.2. an eternal heaven or
    2.3 eternal death in an
    2.4 eternal hell,
    3. the cycle of temporal cycles will end once for all, never giving those not already aligned with that FOR another chance to accept it based on direct observation changing their minds, other than the chance we all have right here & right now (i.e., Experience is a hard teacher: she gives the tests first, the lessons after. Yet we have those equations now, and so we have those conclusions now, and so we should trust them Here & now before they arrive)
    4. only one true God, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omniphilent,
    5. salvation only by faith not works,
    6. justice no longer delayed,
    7. miracles,
    8. lions and lambs and cute fluffy bunnies (the meek inheriting the earth), dogs and cats living together, etc.
    9. Tooth fairy, Santa Clause, Easter Bunny, pink elephants, and, even flying pigs. Every cliché you can imagine.
    Science says: Oops! I guess we missed that one!
    So (ERGO) we see that:
    RUSSELL’S SECOND REGULATION:
    ‘Science is just the one form of superstition that happens to work when we least need it; faith is just the one form of science that happens to work when we most need it.’
    So choose. But choose wisely. For as the true grail will give you eternal life, any one or number of the false grails will take it from you.
    “The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” – T H Huxley (English scientist)
    The great triumph & comedy of science, rather.
    The great tragedy of science is that it thinks it has no faith, and so places its faith in the wrong one.
    “…it doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are — if it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” –Richard .P. Feynman
    “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your experiment is. It doesn’t matter how carefully you collect your data — if it is based upon a faulty understanding of what is being tested, it’s most likely useless.” –L.D. Hosford :-)
    The beautiful truth of science is in its capacity to terminate with supreme efficiency beautiful lies. The ugly truth of science is that it itself is the biggest ugliest lie there is; the most effective place to hide one. The most believed & beloved lies are those that are so nearly entirely true, that it is very hard to tell they are wrong. Only those who truly love the truth will ever find and correct The Last Error, The Error of errors, and answer The Last Question.
    HAWKINS’ THEORY OF PROGRESS:
    “Progress does not consist in replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right. It consists in replacing a theory that is more obviously wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.”
    For, the most effective efficient place to hide a lie is always in what never fails you till you need it most, for then if you do not see its loophole you will cling to it till that very end, and at the very end, your very end, that little hole expands to envelop your universe till you cannot but fall into it.
    (Pssst! This proof is also in the Bible, multiple times! Citation/reference: Ecclesiastes 3:1-17, and etc. I’ll let you find the others.) Well, we’ll just pretend we don’t see it or hear it. Let’s stick our fingers in our ears and sing The La, La Song!
    I find it fascinating (and hilarious) that two of the most commonly cited sayings by naturalists & materialists, evolutionists & atheists, when combined, decisively & irrefutably prove the very thing they think is foolishness! But, It took me twenty years to notice, so, let’s be gentle. Today (11/10/09) I am done. Twenty years of work and twenty thousand pages of text boils down only to a tiny dissertation of which this is the synthesis, and I give it to you for free (for what cad would charge for The Freedom of freedoms?):
    Here is JESUS’ FIRST & LAST LAW:
    Here is Jesus’ Justification, Judgement, Joinder, Juju, Jinx, Jig, Joke, Jingle, Jeopardy, Juggernaut, Jugular Vein, Junk, Jewels, Juxtaposition, expressed in his very own living and breathing equation (for it contains and predicts but also: Science – – ‘Everything and its opposite eventually reverses, it is just a question of degree.’ – – is just a hyper-special-case of superstition, and superstition is just a special case of faith, and science is full of holes):
    ‘Everything and its opposite eventually reverses, including reversing.’
    And, the real definition of faith is, trust in eventual eternal ‘reversal of fortune’, and in the one and only one that brings it.
    World, meet God; God, meet world. Try to make it fail to predict the fault at your own risk. It has infinite fail safe redundancy built into it, across every scale and every range; no single point failure. If you attack it, it will ‘crack you to pieces’; if it attacks you, it will crush you to dust. THIS is Jesus’ Kung Fu, and it is strong. Trust in J. The Wicked Witch is dead. Click your heels together, and chant, “There’s no place like home.” Here comes Santa Claus, Here comes Santa Claus… You better watch out! You better not cry! You better not pout, ‘cause I’m tellin’ you why: Santa Claus is comin’ to town! Close your eyes. Clasp you hands. Bow the head. Bend the knee. Remove your shoes. Stop beating the dead whore. Strip naked. Twirl in circles. Dance. The place on which you stand is holy ground. Why? Cause a pig just flew by. – – One White Crow.)

    • Since you have introduced the idea that reality must be known first, may I suggest that string theory has all the necessary ingredients to know reality and to ultimately describe consciousness and even god. Consciousness comes from cosmology as I have suggested in a Google Knol:
      http://knol.google.com/k/implications-of-a-conjectured-multiverse-string-theory-in-26-dimensions#

      Briefly the compactified extra dimensions of string theory form a Compact Manifold, a subspace at or below the Planck scale, that permeates the universe and controls all matter particle interactions by string connections as verified experimentally: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/42632/title/Strings_Link_the_Ultracold_with_the_Superhot

      In other words the Compact Manifold omnipotent. In the Knol I propose that it also has a primal consciousness and indicate how it has instantaneous omniscience. Need I say more?

      • Brian Crockett says:

        I really can not believe all the weird stuff in this thread. Rants against science, String theory as evidence of God. Do you people really believe this crap. It’s I believe in God so let’s stuff him into the infinitesimal dimensions described in string theory because there is no other place he could be. Your God must indeed be tiny and impotent if he’s a millionth the size of an electron.

        • Science is awesome; it is among the best things that ever happened to humanity looked at from a purely materialistic point of view. Hunger has never been less, and the creature comforts have never been greater. The problem becomes obesity & too much, not too little & hunger. The problem becomes depopulation and immigration as the world industrializes or deindustrializes and informationalizes, not overpopulation and immigration. If science teaches us anything, it is that reality is often exactly or partially the opposite of the predictions we would have expected, thinking conventionally. Even the poor in wealthy industrialized countries live better than kings did hundreds and thousands of years ago. Messages and their corrections and updates that once took weeks and months to travel a thousand miles now take seconds to travel the globe. Living in California I can eat grapes grown in Chile off of plates made in China wearing clothes made in Sri Lanka & Bangladesh, and in China and Europe they are eating Citrus and Garlic grown in California. Technology totally changes the way we live every decade, changes that would have taken hundreds or thousands of years in the past. We live in truly amazing times, and I am glad to be here right now as opposed to some other time or place.

          The problem is, looked at from an eternal point of view, science and all the good things it brings to life is among the worst things that could have ever happened to us. And I don’t mean “us” in terms of those of us who are supporters of any particular religion, or, even of the one I consider correct, or, of those in power in religion, that it draws the attention of followers away to pursue other more glitzy proposed solution sets to life’s problems. If a religion has chosen to make itself irrelevant, then having its followers leave and patronize someone else is exactly what SHOULD happen. I am ‘all-for’ people going to wherever the real answers and solutions are, no matter what institution that happens to be for whatever problem and question and in whatever given time period, and no matter what institutions that means crumble and deconstruct and implode as a result. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

          What I mean is, as good as it is for here & now, science ultimately offers empty solutions, because it does not cross – – cannot cross – – the eternal boundary condition that science itself says is coming. Science plainly predicts its own boundary conditions and limitations to be finite, and we should not trust it any further than that; but it also means that within this life, we need to start preparing for the switch, just as parents prepare their children for being adults, before they are adults, not just letting them be childish while they are children, but pushing them towards adulthood; we are all headed for eternity, and if we are not ready for that change, we will find ourselves in a place we do not want to be, with no further opportunity to escape, but, a place we nonetheless chose.

          For the few that are already unapologetically eternally-minded, just the act of living in the environment and cultural milieu of technological scientific advance only helps them to understand better, placing their discoveries in a better context of better analogies to make sense of it in terms we can all understand better, and underpinning it in real observational and empirical experimental science. But for everyone else, the vast majority, who are never its inventors but always its fans, science in fact trains them into trusting in what will fail them at the very time they need it most of all. There is no more unstable or vulnerable civilization than a highly technological one; in uniformitarianistic times, it does really, really well, but in times of catastrophe, you have lots and lots of people thrown back into the need for 3rd world pre-industrial age lifestyle and living-earning, but with only 1st world post-informational age skill-sets. In times of global catastrophe, backwards 3rd world countries suddenly find themselves advanced and advanced countries suddenly find themselves totally unprepared. It is a perfect set up for utter collapse and catastrophe, provided the catastrophe is big enough; like I said, science fails us right when we need to rely on it most, though I admit it is really good all the rest of the time, so I am not saying let’s not do it or let’s abandon it. I’m saying let’s realize that all it takes is one really big disaster to take it all out at once, and then what?

          I’m not saying let’s all go live in caves, and use our computers as hammers to drive our tent stakes; I’m saying at least that we all need to go camping far more often, (which the Bible advocates as a required national annual holiday, by the way), leaving all our techno-gadgetry behind; far too few in the industrialized world do that. Science is good, in its own context of applicability; but that context is limited. Science is a special case; as long as we realize that and live like it, then fine. But far too few do; they are gung-ho for the future, but forget from whence they came, and, are not being honest in assuming we will never have to go back there. But in every natural disaster, in every localized hurricane or localized big earthquake, or tsunami, we are reminded how fragile civilization and law and science actually is. Low-tech mechanical machinery usually works just fine in disaster, but, their computer controlled systems don’t do well in direct hit solar flares, or intense water or wind, and power lines don’t do too well in hurricanes, and if enough of the grid goes down world-wide, the years it could take to put it back up might make its going back up impossible, because the average person gets their food from thousands of miles away from where it is grown; starving people strip copper and rip loose whatever they can find to sell for scrap (it happens in Afghanistan and Iraq right now all the time, and we are not even in a global disaster yet); past a tipping point, and nobody knows exactly where that is, all the back up systems in the world, ‘all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men’, cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And, highly technological civilization as we know it, using more and more rare-earth elements, even on a rocky planet like ours with abundant heavy metals, many experts agree is a one time shot; if we don’t get off world and become more “weedy” as a species before some global cataclysm strikes, be it manmade global thermonuclear war, or, large asteroid strike, or nearby supernovae explosion, then we never will, even if we survive the disaster as s species and even if we don’t run out of oil or coal or radioactive minerals before it happens; we would be stuck with the earth and moon and possibly mars, by chemical rockets, and that’s it: inter system travel would probably prove impossible after that. Worldwide, production of many elements is down; mines have ores of increasingly less concentration of the elements sought for over time, requiring more and more advanced extraction and processing techniques to obtain in useable quantities; you can always discover more deposits, digging deeper into the earth, but it requires more costly and more advanced extraction techniques that technology even of a few decades ago would not be able to extract; without a global cataclysm with significant volcanism to restore the world-wide ore deposits, if civilization were to collapse too low, putting it back together again, above rudimentary machinery, may prove impossible. And we know from geologic history without question that occaisionally, global disaster, not just local disaster, strikes, be it ice-ages, rising or lowering of sea-level, earthquake-ages and volcanic-ages, or asteroid-ages, or, some measure of ‘all of the above’, do occur and recur; it is just a matter of time before one of these happens again.

          (((In fact, geology says planet earth is between ice ages right now, in an unusually long warm period; science depends on established education which depends on established agriculture; ice ages don’t allow the latter, at least not for so large a population as the world supports now, or, if so, agricultural belts shall shift around the world as rainfall patterns shift drastically, upsetting economies. But it is not manmade; global warming and cooling is real, but, it occurs from the inside out, not from the outside in, and it is totally natural and cyclic, completely out of mankind’s ability to slow or stop it. If we stopped driving every car, and never burned another chunk of coal, and never ignited another puff of methane or propane, and if we totally gutted our economies to do it and went back to living in caves, global climate change would still occur. (Reducing toxic pollution is one thing, which we SHOULD do, but carbon (if atomized) is not toxic; plants grow better with more carbon dioxide, and modern stacks permit nearly emission free coal burning; the problem with coal-burning remains the radioactivity of the ash, not any longer the carbon.) All the carbon-credit carbon cap-and-trade stuff is bad science, is a fanatical religion whose adherents are trying to get the rest of us to pay tithes to in the form of increased taxes and reduced carbon consumption, a bullshit hoax designed to relive not global warming but to relive us of the heavy burden of carrying all that money around in our wallets; it is just another rip-off by politicians who can never spend enough money, not even when we are broke.)))

          The best farm lands in the world today were once either under miles of ice or are ancient volcanic ash fields which generally improve soils, once they stop; until then, they bury crops. Ice Ages are caused by Fire Ages; increased undersea & underland volcanism; the oceans warm, the evaporation increases, the rainfall increases, the higher colder elevations get more snow than can melt in a summer, and so glaciers build up in only a few years and begin to cascade into valleys, and voila! We are in a new ice age, not by a warming or cooling sun, not by industrial carbon emissions, but by the core of earth heating up, generating an internal-combustion engine-like radiator cooling cycle to set itself up till the excess heat in the oceans is dissipated. A study just came out a few days ago [01/12/10] that shows the oceans are warming from 3000 feet down up to the surface, not from the atmosphere to the surface to 3000 feet down! HOW could humans POSSIBLY do that!?! There are 3 MILLION large and small volcanoes on the world’s ocean floors; nearly all are dormant at any given time; but if only a tiny percentage of all those became active or inactive, it can completely explain climate fluctuation both in the present, and the past. Science in regards climate change is being infiltrated and commandeered not by sound environmentalism but by a new religion that will not be satisfied until we all engage in its rituals and worship its popularized saints, without a shred of proof that it is valid. And it is being done to set up a world government by taking control of what controls and decides everything; energy. Anyway…

          Science is what tends to arise in the rare opportunities when life on planet earth is having it good by comparison to conditions we know once prevailed on earth not so long ago; using science to perpetrate hoaxes on the world-public to fund a globalist world government agenda is what happens when science corrupts its way; what will science do when the norm returns? Humanity will survive in some form, yes, but, will civilization and science survive humanity scrapping and fighting to survive that!? Honesty says we cannot be so sure. Science is good, but even at its best, science cannot save us; science is awesome, but we still die, in uniformity or in catastrophe, and does it matter to the one that dies whether they died by their own bad habits or by a new hoax or an old one or by accident or by natural disaster? Science is good, but we who are honest know we still need a better solution, and that better solution will not be exacted merely by having better and better forms of science. Science is good, and better science is better; but better science alone will not save us, because we are in the end still bounded by the laws of physics, and those laws are trapped in entropy; disorder inevitably increases in a closed system; everything is slowly attenuating and dissolving away; without a fundamental change in physical law, we are doomed as individuals and as a species. What we need is a miracle, so what we should be looking for is a miracle, and for whatever or whoever can supply it. Anybody who speaks or acts differently just hasn’t thought it through carefully enough yet.

          But, while science fails us right when we need it most, were they to accept it, faith will succeed them right at the very time they need it most. Science (everything eventually reverses) and faith (everything eventually reverses, including reversing.) are parallels in origin & source, but, in destination still diverge to points not just 180-degrees apart, which are actually just parallels, but 90-degrees apart, which are true opposite perpendiculars. Faith is a higher order form of science, because both stem from the same general roots of observation and yield the same general branches of prediction; the difference is, faith yields so different an eternal result, that it whispers to us and asks us and compels us and in the end forces us to behave very much differently than otherwise we would, if we truly accept it, which is the difference between worldly wisdom and eternal wisdom; what is rational from the one point of view and frame of reference is utter foolishness from the other, and vice versa, though they emerge from the same place, empirical experimental and experiential observation, they converge all who follow each of them into two totally different places, whether those following them know it or not.

          Real faith, correctly defined, is not anti-science; real science is not anti-faith, at least not at first; faith and science are in fact initially different forms of each other; they both arise in the same place: empirical testable falsifiable repeatable objective experimental observation (show me an exception to: every condition eventually reverses; therefore, every condition eventually reverses, including reversing.); but we are deceived if we think they are equal and lead to the same place; likewise, we are wrong if we think that faith leads nowhere useful and that only science will save us if anything will; it is the realization that science is just a special case, and that what we call reality is just a special case, so we had better bother to take some time to find out how to get prepared for the inevitable let-down trusting entirely in special cases always eventually brings, and do so. For whatever can happen, eventually will happen. Superstition and more careful observation leads to science, and science and more careful observation leads to faith. The solution to the failure of superstition is not less skepticism, but more; the solution to the failure of science is not less skepticism, but more.
          – – ONE WHITE CROW

          • Richard Ruquist says:

            William,

            Your rant about catastrophes together with your ONE WHITE CROW label suggests that you may be an American Indian Prophet. And so I share your concern with modern technology making us highly vulnerable.

            A big enough solar flare will send much of the world back to horse and buggy days for the great numbers of electrons it would stimulate in the atmosphere or ionosphere would create an EMP that will destroy most unshielded transisters and even melt the modern very high voltage transformers like in China and California.

            But based on prophecies in the Bible and from the Mayans and Nostradamus, it seems that a nearby supernovae is just as likely. And astronomers have recently found the obvious candidate. T Pyxidis is much closer than they had previously thought.

            It is a white dwarf in a binary star system that has been accreting mass and having novas every 20 or so years until 1967 when the novaes stopped. Now being 3260 light years away it is right on the edge of being able to destroy our ozone layer according to scientific understanding. But being in the southern hemisphere it may just enlarge the ozone hole already there.

            But it should generate an emmense number of electrons being the equivalent of 1000 solar flares at that distance. And being about 3000 light years away and possibly having exploded some 3000 years ago, prophets with the proper insight, like Nostradamus and the Mayans and yes, Jesus, are able to see it coming, although I have not figured out how they can determine the time of arrival of its light, actually a gamma ray burst.

            Richard

    • Conway Redding says:

      William Russell, the only comment a sane person can make about your screed is, “You can’t be serious!”

  10. Sir: you may well be right that: “string theory has all the necessary ingredients to know reality and to ultimately describe consciousness and even god.”
    I too am impressed with the parts of string theory I can actually understand. However, that is the problem; not all of us have advanced degrees in classial and relativity physics, astronomy, quantum mechanics, and hyperbolic topology. What we need is a way to prove these things to the common man, with what is obvious in common experience; or, to start where you are approaching the subject from, but then to reduce it to the common man’s experiential understanding in the end anyway: otherwise, its salvicative properties, if it has any, and if we need any, are only available to those that lived and died after advanced science came along, which is a serious flaw in your approach, unless you plan to eventually integrate both sets of proofs, which would be ideal anyway. It would be my plan, too. I too once started to approach proofs of God from your perspective till I realized that it was ultimately flawed, unless we are only trying to prove that super-smart people can get into heaven. Otherwise, we have to be prepared to find a way to show that all of those who lived and died long ago could have been able to find the truth as well as we can, even without telescopes and microscopes and computers and such. The proofs I have been working on take account of that.
    Bill in Riverside CA

    • Richard Ruquist says:

      Bill in Riverside CA,

      Ahh, but you do not need to know the mathematics of superstring theory(SST)to understand what it means.

      The high priests of SST, those who can work out the math,
      I am unable to do so, seem to not understand its profound implications.

      Or they do, but refuse to mention them
      for fear of loss of credibility and academic standing.

      Or, they are so entrenched in atheistic thinking
      that such profound implications do not even enter their minds.

      No problem for that leaves the field open for the likes of you and me. They then can come in with their math to dispute what we say. However, I have tacit agreement from one well-known string theorist whose name will be withheld to protect his reputation.

      Richard in Grafton MA

      • Ok; I agree that there are situations where you don’t have to understand every aspect of a set of rules and principles but still be able to draw reasonable inferences from it. But it might be a really big mistake to have to rely on others to tell you what they mean by their own work, then make extrapolations of that. Isn’t it better to be able to explain the reasoning from start to finish? If you do not understand the foundations, then there is a very real possibility that you also don’t really understand it well enough to say for sure that the conclusions you are drawing from it really emerge from the premises without somehow imposing them, however unconsciously. It is a good way to get eaten for lunch in a debate to not know your topic inside and out and upside down and backwards.
        However, I also agree that consulting experts in the field who also agree with your derivations of what it means IS a really big step forward towards reaching consensus. But if your expert is not willing to put his academic reputation on the line, then he is obviously not truly convinced enough yet, or, is being funded and does not wish to risk it. Ok, I understand that; when you’ve got a mortgage and kids in college, etc…. So, will he reveal//publish it when he retires or something? For this reason I work a profession that in no way relates to my research, on purpose, so when I make public announcements of discoveries, or publish, nobody at my work could give a rats ass either way. I agree, not everyone can do that, though.

        • Richard Ruquist says:

          Well, Bill, I am just doing the best I can with my limited intellect and training. I trained (PhDed) in electromagnetic theory at Harvard and worked in the BMD defense establishment on Star wars until they kicked me out for revealing it was inherently vulnerable. Well that’s beside the point except that being at Harvard let me know just how limited my intellect is.

          What I am trying to do is a synthesis of physics and religion. So much of physics lacks fundamental understanding, like quantum mechanics for instance, that I am able to derive meaning as well as others. The mathematicians who develop these theories often do not understand the implication of their mathematics. In addition since I am a believer, at least in afterlife and scripture, I as a scientist may have unique insight, which I believe is what helped me put the Multiverse cosmology together. Besides I have been working on such ideas for almost 40 years.

          Richard

      • Conway Redding says:

        Oh, but you do need to understand the math to understand the implications of string theory, and what seems to be in process of happening now is that those who don’t understand the math, and therefore don’t really understand string theory, are now constructing all kinds of shaky metaphysical edifices on the shifting sands of their limited understanding, and pretending, because they’ve mentioned string theory in there somewhere, that their metaphysics is as rigorously logical as the math underlying string theory. I suppose it’s not to be wondered at, because the same thing happened with quantum mechanics, which the New Agers have clasped to their bosoms as providing a basis for believing their many absurdities. As for the anonymous string theorist with whom you have a tacit agreement, Richard, how has he become so cowardly as not to own up to what he believes to be the case? For a scientist not to want to admit the truth publically, puts me in mind of the apostle Peter not wanting to confess in public that he knew Christ.

  11. Dylan De Leskie says:

    Awesome article here Perry. This is a real good one, all you gotta do is think about it for 2 minutes and you know relativism is a pile of crap. If every religion is the same why do they all contradict one another, make different claims about God, history, philosophy?

    Sometimes serious intellectual discussion requires stepping outside the politically correct box. Most people know relativism doesn’t work though, they just accept it because it’s practical, nice etc. We can be grateful for that!

    The odd gullible bleeding-heart, people-pleasing liberal will continue to insist that everyone can be right! (except of course for the Christians who degrade women, exploit land, kill the innocent, blah..blah..blah…) If these people didn’t murder their own children, we could take them seriously. But if people are willing to kill their own kids, why wouldn’t they be willing to kill the Truth?

    Dylan D

  12. Maciej Miszczyk says:

    There might be only one truth, but no-one is able to posses it during his life. Searching on fields of religion, theology, philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism etc. is essentially a good thing.

    All the religions (not only ‘organized religions’; all the spiritual systems) say ‘we know the truth, listen to us and you will be saved’. It is not true. Salvation does not depend on faith. Only cruel God would be exclusivist in case of salvation – while every religion claims to be true and all of them claim to have proofs on it and most of them say that disbelief leds to hell, then choosing your faith would be like playing russian roulette.

    • The realest reality is the most enduring reality, the reality that lasts the longest.
      Did you know that all the laws of physics in the universe have holes in them, exceptions where they are either suspended, cancelled out (or, rather, very, very close to it), or don’t exist? That means all the laws of the universe are full of holes; they are not real reality, because they cannot and do not endure. The center does not hold, because we are not at the real center.
      But there is one rule that is the exception to the rule that all rule have holes. And, it can be known in a lifetime. It is very short and simple, and, you already understand it, know it from your own experience, but, fail to identify it for what it is. That rule is this: ‘Every condition eventually reverses.’
      In other words, every antonym, or, pair of partial or complete opposite terms, in some form in some way or another, becomes or helps cause to come into existence some form or other of its opposite.
      But if everything eventually reverses, then reversing itself shall one day reverse, leaving a set of conditions that are the inverse of that long list of pairs of reverse oscillations: leaving an eternal, pure, bifurcated, incorruptible, unalterable, perfectly just result where instead of being subject and slave to ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ and actions speak louder than words type of physics, we will then be subject to what we here place our greatest focus on; if we seek heaven, that is where we will go, and if we do not seek heaven, then we are already automatically seeking for its opposite, know it or not.
      So we are saved by what connects us to the realest reality that is coming, eternity, by what saves us, which is no longer actions, but words: faith.
      Everything eventually reverses is the basis of all science.
      Everything eventually reverses, including reversing, is the basis of all faith/ Faith is not mere belief; in fact, it is more than the exact opposite of that; faith is in fact a higher order science. But though the Bible defines faith for us, we equate it with mere wishful thinking even superstition, exactly the opposite of what faith really is. Faith in fact reduces, in the end, science to little more than superstition, because science – – as we presently know it – – fails to predict the fault that if everything eventually reverses, then, eventually reversing also reverses, leaving an immortal, not mortal, result.
      This is the basis of Christianity; it is in fact its proof, built into the very laws of physics; at every scale of the universe, everything is spinning and spiralling into decay towards eternal reversal, which is a kind of reverse. We can of course ignore it and pretend we don’t know it, but it is in everyone’s experience: we do so to our peril. We do not have to like it, and we may not fully understnad it, but we do have to accept it, or, reject all of science.
      True, everyone SAYS their religion is true; only one religion can PROVE it is true. I agree it is hard; but you can do it. It is nobody’s job to do your home work for you if you are in school; it is nobody’s job to do your work for you if you are in office or factory; why would we think it is someone else’s job to do our homework for us in regards to eternity? Nobody can help you find or lose God in all the noise better than you can. It is just a question of if you want to. Trust in REAL faith, the scientific version. Everything that has holes in it spins; this is the only thing that has no holes, so it is the only thing that does not spin wildy out of control whoever grabs it: it alone is solid ground, it alone is the eye in the storm: move with it, and so stop. Everything around it is mere illusion. The Bible calls this equation by a name: Jesus, Saviour, the one who reverses our fortunes in eternity to come, if only we will grab hold of the only thing that’s real. We grab it by asking, and seeking, because that is the kind of physics we are aspiring to, the physics that is coming, ready or not. Escape Russian roulette physics, and escape gambling casino physics, into reality, out of the hollogram, by this equation, and this equation alone.
      – – ONE WHITE CROW

  13. Dylan:
    I agree: relativism is crap; but we cannot prove absolutism either truer or better and best unless we are allowed to wallow at least a bit in relativism. All we know, we know by contrast or not at all.

    also: There are some who associate themselves with every institution who do evil in the name of that institution: that is a constant across the board. It in no way means they either represent, or, are as a class representative of, the ideals that institution stands for. I know it is frustrating to see that everything is mixed up all the time: there are no purely evil enemies or purely good friends, like in the movies, so it is hard to choose sides, unable to see what is what. However, the right side is there to be found, if we just keep looking, and not rely too much on others to arrive at our conclusions, but seek only to please ourselves, and accept nothing but certainty, and try again, refine again, even after we think we have it, and discover even better resolution. That is all there is. until we see past the smoke and mirrors and dog and pony shows and fire works, that is all we are going to see. If you have not already, I direct you to read my comments on SOLOMON’S SYLLOGISM in this string.

    Anyway, if we were to follow that kind of logic (that criticism) consistently, to presume that if any do evil in the name of an institution, it taints the entire institution, it would mean we would have to toss out every institution and start completely over. Maybe we should. I just want to make sure you are aware of what it would require if we were consistent with your criticism; the same criticism applies equally to all other instititions, including your favorites, whatever they are, so, all those would be destroyed along with those you despise.

    As for the whole killing of their own kids issue, I agree. I think anyone should be allowed to abort their infants if they really want to, since they would make terrible parents anyway, unless suitable foster parents or adoptive parents can be found. However, if we are going to allow that, then whenever anyone mistreats the child murderer, they should also have no protection under the law, just like they did with their own children. If the most innocent are not safe, then no one is or should be.

    But civil and criminal law itself is founded on a flawed conception of reality; it presumes that as long as we all agree on who and what to exploit, then it is ok, and we punish anyone that disagrees with that set of who to protect and who to exploit. It is just a different version of the same crap we had before there were laws at all, just that an increasing quality and quantity of exploitation is heaped on an increasingly fewer number of creatures and people. What we need is in fact a different substitute, an entirely different kind of physics, and that will only come about by a completely different kind of thinking: not reverse thinking, but inverse thinking. but in the meantime, the only thing worse than organized chaos is unorganized chaos.

    ONE WHITE CROW

  14. Brian Crockett says:

    So how do we determine which worldview is reality?

    To answer my own question there is a way. It’s been used for centuries with great results. The evidence of this methods success is all around you everyday.

    How can we know anything?

    Observation. Look with your senses, Look with the modern tools that extend your senses.

    Next, Use reason to try and guess at explanations for what you observe.

    Thirdly use experiments to try and confirm or deny your guess.

    Continually repeat and update your guesses as new information comes forth.

    These few steps have lead us to all the great advances in knowledge we have seen over the last few centuries.

    What we haven’t found is the soul or God. These are conspicuously absent.

    This is the only way to true knowledge that we as a species have found. Pouring over old books of dubious reliability will not provide new insights to reality.

    There is no way to determine which religion has truth. But this method shows the physical reality and through it we can imply the likely hood that certain of our beliefs are true.

    For example

    If there is a soul it must contain the memories and personality of the living person. If it can exist after the destruction of the physical body then it implies that memories and personality are immutable, unchangeable as the storage is not related to the physical body. We have yet to discover any brain structure or energy that could do this. Observation shows us that memories and personality are not immutable. Injury and drugs can change both memory and personality. This implies that a persons essence is closely related to the physical brain. Any change to the brain changes the persons essence. Therefore it is most likely that destruction of the physical brain brings about destruction of the persons essence as well.

    This means no soul, no life after death and no most likely no God.

    While no method can confirm certainty about religious matters we can see that the method described above can be used to give us insight to the probability that a religious belief is true.

    • perrymarshall says:

      If you want to pursue this thought further, here’s a good starting point, on my other site: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/blog/design-evil-suffering/comment-page-1/#comment-3476

      If you are looking for scientific evidence for God then you’ll find it there. See the other articles on the site as well.

      • Brian Crockett says:

        “The very existence of communication indicates an intentional, top-down process. Effective communication by definition cannot exist without truth.
        Thus truth exists and an intentional super intelligence exists, because communication exists.”

        This seems like a non sequitor.

        You’ve anthropomorphized “Truth” as an entity and then jumped from that to there must be a god with no real logical connection between the two. Most Christians would then make the final illogical jump to if a super intelligence exists he must be the God of their particular version of the bible.

        I see tons of these so called logical proofs for god. Each one I’ve seen turn out to have some logical flaw that invalidates them. Most likely it’s because the author starts with the assumption that god exists and is desperately trying to find some way to prove it.

        So where is the burning bush? God showed himself to the people of the bible, Jesus performed miracles. There was no “if I show myself it will prevent free will” then. (Which never made sense anyway) So why is faith the over riding criteria in most religions?

        If you ask a Christian for proof after you argue away all the illogical arguments it comes down to “If you open your heart to him he will make himself known.” The way I read that is that if I pretend really hard to believe eventually I will. Which sort of makes sense psychologically. It’s also handy that if it doesn’t work I just didn’t pretend hard enough.

        So again why does God hide and reward belief without evidence? It would not deny free will because I could still chose not to worship him or even disobey like Adam and Eve who knew him personally.

        • perrymarshall says:

          Brian,

          I understand your frustrations but I am not arguing that evidence would bar opportunities to have faith.

          I believe that the existence of information is 100% inference for the existence of a creator. Please review http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/proof (audio and transcript) or http://perry.fingerprints.s3.amazonaws.com/index.htm video.

          An alternate argument is based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/blog/incompleteness

          These are arguments that you can punch with as much force as you want and they will stand. I suggest you take this material seriously, and I will be happy to pursue this discussion on my other website http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/blog. However please read the supporting material first.

          • Richard Ruquist says:

            Dear Perry,

            I tried to log on to your incompleteness discussion but was not allowed to despite registering and even changing my given password. So I have to reply to you here.

            You make the following incorrect statement about Godel’s theorem:
            ” Any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever came up with will always rest on at least a few unprovable assumptions.”
            Assumptions are unprovable by definition.

            That’s not what Godel’s theorem is about. His theorem proves that any consistent computable formal theory which can prove some arithmetic truths cannot prove all arithmetic truths. Therefore a consistent set of assumptions for all of mathematics is impossible.

        • @Brian Crockett:
          I too never met a proof for God I liked, so I set out to see if I could find any better ones. I only found one. But all it takes is one unbreakable fact. I was fully prepared to walk away from my birth religion, had I not found anything substantive. And for a while I did. But I kept looking, just to be sure I did not overlook something. I did. We all did. what we all know is most easily overlooked. When a rule has no exceptions, it is the easiest thing in the world not to notice; yet it is that very kind of rule we need most of all to try to find. That is why we are responsible before God; if we rejected what we did not know, then we are not really rejecting it; but if we reject what we know but just don’t know we know, yet the proof for it is in everything we look at, and what is more, we use it all the time in all we do, proving we accept it as true and that we know about it, well, then the fault is our own for not bothering to try hard enough, and that kind of ignorance of the law would be no excuse in any court of law, so why would it with God?
          EVERYTHING EVENTUALLY REVERSES, INCLUDING REVERSING. It is every bit as scientific as any other prediction science makes, except the difference is, no other law of science is proved as well as that one is: i has no known exceptions, which means God and eternal heaven and hell are on their way, since those are the reversed conditions of what we have here & now. We don’t have to like it right away, but we had sure as hell better start finding a way to adjust to the idea, while there is time to choose the one we wish, rather than the one we don’t wish being chosen for us.

          I know that may make you angry; it did me also for a VERY long time. I know how frustrating it is, because
          I’ve been there. But finally I came to see it is true. We know all kinds of things we choose to pretend not to know. The proof is there if that is what people really want; but most people don’t want it. People reject God in the final analysis for emotional reasons, not rational ones.

          God plays hide and go seek with his real children; his real children will seek till they find Him; those not, will give up and go play with some other shiny sparkly distraction, showing they were not really His in the first place. Your choice.

          I know. It raises more questions than it answers. I cannot answer all your questions; nobody can; all our questions are often uniquely your own, so only we ourselves can answer them. Go and do your own homework.

          I agree that many arrive at a proof for God by presuming God, which means it is not a proof at all, but just a presupposition being re-exposed, like playing peek-a-boo with yourself: I agree, they need to grow up. However, there is nothing wrong with seeking to construct or prove the existence of a device or being we can all see we need; We need a being or at least a physics that can guarantee eternal peace and love and incorruption; but the only physics that could do that, is one with properties so identical with those typically and classically ascribed to God (all the omni-‘s), that we would not be able to tell the difference, so should start treating them the same for purposes of the search. If Edison was justified seeking the lightbulb, not because he knew for sure it could be done, but because it is clearly better and needed whether or not it can be done, then we are all justified seeking God a google-plex times over.

          I agree most Christians are dunder-heads who have no clue what they are talking about. That is also why I sought better answers than those they typically give, as I was and am as frustrated with them as you are. but then I realized it is my job to prove it to me, no one else, since I am the one that has to live with the consequences of annihilation on death or eternal damnation on death for being wrong. What am I going to say, I trusted so and so, and they were wrong, so let me into heaven anyway? I realized it is my job to find our for my own damned self. (pun intended). I agree, I got tired of pretending, so I went and derived how to make sense of the Bible for myself, and I accepted nothing I could not prove, until it proved to be nothing I could not accept. However, that is the beauty of faith as a way to get to heaven; it is very common for the very smart to not be very good, and, for the very good not to be very smart. If only the very smart, very rich, and very strong can get into heaven, then, I’d prefer hell. But it is not just pie in the sky; that faith is the right way is provable by reversed physics, which all physics in you and around you and all of us says is coming. the only relevant question there is remaining once we realize that, is, what are we going to do about it? not seek god at all? Seek to please God by good work, as if to impress the one who already has and can do everything? or, will we accept salvation by faith, and then do good works in gratitude? The latter is the right answer, even if we only had our own friendships and family relationships as an example. We are friends with God if we share the same greatest passion, just as humans are with each other. Do you love truth, mercy, justice, not just when it is in your favor, but for all? Do you hope and seek heaven in your imagination? Then you are trusting in Jesus already, and may well find yourself being admitted, while others are cast out supposing they are saved just by reciting a canned stale prayer and then going and living like the devil.

          Let your emotions guide you into all truth. The more you Play Devil’s Advocate, even after you suppose the devil has won, the more you see the bible wins after all. It requires absolute skepticism, being skeptical even of your skepticism, and then being skeptical of that, too.))) But correct them with reason, or they are your doom.

          I came to trust the Bible after a very long process where discoveries I was making wholly independent of it I was finding wre already in there to an astonishing degree of correspondence, so much so, that I could no longer ignore the degree of parallel and still consider myself honest. The statistical correlation is so great, there is only one religion on earth that matches it closely enough: Christianity, though in many ways Judaism and Islam are close, and though many other religions also say some very wise things, which in fact turn out to be leaving off where the Bible is just getting started. But when we don’t understand the basic principles it is grounded in, we will not have a clue what it is saying. The Bible is not Religion 101. Study creation first, like the Bible says, so that when you read the Bible, it will speak to you, instead of over you. Jesus said (paraphrase), “If I tell you of things in your common everyday experience and you still won’t believe me, then how could you believe me if I told you of things out of this world?” The things out of this world (God, heaven, hell, salvation by faith not work) are proven by the things in this world, projected int o a reversal in eternity; science is nothing if it is not prediction, and faith, the higher science, predicts the worst and best is to come; there is no proof outside the kind of physics we are in right now, and we have it uniquely now: it is now or never, for those of us who want proof. I suggest you study SOLOMON’S SYLLOGISM until you either understand it, or, until you think you can refute it, and that just means you haven’t studied it enough. But try. It is in the trying that you will finally see.
          – – ONE WHITE CROW

          • Brian Crockett says:

            EVERYTHING EVENTUALLY REVERSES, INCLUDING REVERSING.

            This is an unsupported assertion. Even if it is true it does not logically follow that the reversal of physics (Whatever that means) would lead to a god. If it did lead to a god there is no logical connection that we could use to determine it’s wants and desires or even if it knows we exist. Maybe the universe was created for a another species some where else and we are just an unknown known byproduct of creation. We have the tendency to attach undue importance to ourselves. We used to think we were the center of the universe. Now we know we are less than a dust mote in a back corridor of a giant stadium.

            Does reversal mean entropy? time? charges? negative gravity? repulsive nuclear forces? It’s just gibberish.

            As a father if I play hide and seek with my children and one does not wish to play and goes to investigate the shiny things on the freeway, I damn well will not let him. It does not logically follow that an “OmniPhilent” god will create children and allow them to suffer a hell simply because they are confused or not believing. If he is all the other Omni’s as well he knows we are going to hell, has the power to stop it, set the game up originally so we go to hell.

            Why the sick sadistic game of hide and go to hell? What is the purpose of faith in the context of belief without evidence? Why the religious russian roulette? Pick the wrong religion and suffer unimaginable torment for eternity with no surcease and no hope.

            What is the purpose of faith????? Why would an Omni god put belief on top of the pyramid of desirable traits for us?

            Maybe it’s because early holy men stumbled upon this idea as a means of converting and controlling the populace.

            Believe in my invisible pink unicorn and all will be better. Do not and the absolutely worst thing will happen to you. If bad things still happen it’s not the pink unicorns fault you did not believe hard enough. Believe harder and all will be well. Things still bad? you must believe harder still. Things finally start improving thank the unicorn. They go bad again you must have slacked off on your believing. Now that you believe in the unicorn you must do what I say as only I know what he wants. What he wants is for you to send me your money and your virgin daughters. It was/is good to be a holy man with lots of gullible converts.

        • To
          Brian Crockett:

          I don’t want to put words in perrymarshall’s mouth, but, by “communication”, is probably meant something closer to “information”. Communicated//transmitted or not, it is still information either way. For example, DNA contains information more compressed and advanced than any other information storage or retrieval system known in technology and science; yet all of the science and technology we know is less advanced than that, was created by intelligence and very hard work. So if DNA was not intelligently designed, science has to come up with a simpler more reasonable explaination than that it was intelligently designed. Also, DNA and RNA is very unstable under the very chemical conditions that would have prevailed on early earth, breaking it down to its simple components rather than permitting it to build and replicate. Naturally occurring amino acids is a very long way from life, or, crushing up already existing living cell wall lipids and mixing them around and observing that they will often self-realign into the same patterns they were in when alive, but now dead, which is all lab experiments have ever generated, is also a long way from life. And notice how even if life were generated in a lab from non-living materials, all it would still prove is that intelligent life can create life, since labs are not naturally occurring. We can propose advanced space aliens created life on earth, and that advanced space aliens created them; it simply pushes back the question of origins to the first advanced life that existed after the Big Bang; what intelligence created THEM? Since we are then in a place where no life in the universe could have created them, it would have had to have been some life form OUTSIDE the bounds of the universe as we know it. Ok, so then maybe THEY were just super-advanced life-forms TOO, right? Ok; but no effect is ever greater than its cause, and, no effect is ever equal to its cause, either, because of thermodynamics; if the lifeforms are getting more and more advanced the further we go back, that implies at best high resolution conservation, and at worst devolution, not evolution. Also, eventually you arrive at a point where you are essentially having to appeal to a lifeform with infinite attributes (AKA, “GOD”) to explain what we see anyway.

          People often confuse whether the evidence on our planet supports intelligent design as the best origins explaination, with whether that intelligent designer is moral and ethical in how its plan for the life it created is being carried out; they are two separate issues, proven two separate ways. They each stand or fall on separate merits, and we can possibly prove the former but not prove or even disprove the latter. Its possible to have a dad, but also to have a dead-beat dad. Not having a good answer for the latter in no way negates the proof we already have for the former, but skeptics and cynics often take it that way. People will often reject the evidence for intelligent design out of hand, because they have an emotional problem feeling abandoned by the one that allegedly loves them, so therefore, they conclude, he/she/it must not really exist. Not necessarily so. Some parents leave their children for selfish reasons, others, to go to work to support them, and others, go fight just wars to make the world a safer place for everybody. We have to give God the benefit of the doubt and suspend judgement on that till we know if he is away for a valid reason or not, just like we would want for ourselves if our reputation were called in question, before an investigation is complete.

          Anyway:
          Just like cars and computers don’t just happen, neither does life, and life is far more complicated than they are, so even less likely to arise by chance or even by a set of laws in the universe which tends towards life (which, by the way, we don’t see in operation anywhere. If so, where? Wherever the unconscious laws of physics will generate even single-celled life even once, they will easier ALSO generate cars, computers, houses, airplanes, space ships, submarines, aircraft carriers, cell-phones, etc, in superabundance. Where is this magical place, that I might open a store and sell stuff I got there for free!?! Sounds like heaven to me! So let me get this straight; science proposes this magical place where stuff just happens, in order to avoid concluding there must somewhere be a magical place with magical beings where stuff just happens. Curious reasoning, that.)

          And as far as we can see, the same elements that exist on earth, and the same laws of physics, but under every possible arrangement you can imagine, exist somewhere out in the universe; but it takes intelligently organized laboratory controlled accuracy to generate life from a soup of chemicals, not like anything we see occurring anywhere out there, or anywhere in earth, either, except in things that are already alive. Nobody has ever been able to disprove The Law of Biogenesis: ‘Life comes only from life.’ So, whether God created some other species that created us after a long chain of other species between kept creating each other, or, whether that God created us directly, is kind of irrelevant: we are still left with having to appeal to a being with infinite attributes to explain what we see. The only alternative is to believe in some unproved pseudoscientific fairy tale that contradicts everything we actually observe.

          I agree that is a far cry from then jumping to a conclusion that any particular version of any religion is true; and I agree that our search of the universe is very young; for all practical purposes, it has not even started yet; we may well find life on other worlds eventually, and even intelligent life. This discovery would not necessarily contradict the Bible; it claims there IS intelligent life out there, and calls them angels. And I also agree that many people who believe in religion DO make MANY unwarranted leaps in reasoning which would be hilarious if they weren’t expecting us to take them so seriously; but so do those in science; hypotheses get disproved everyday, and even well-tested theories are sometimes modified every few centuries or decades. That is just how life works; if we cannot take the heat, we need to get out of the kitchen. I agree though, it would be really great if there were a way to vet out all the stupid arguments that get repeated over and over by nuckleheads on both sides, so we can move on to debating new ones that might actually have more merit. But realizations like this DOES start to set reasonable bounds and narrow down which religions are MOST LIKELY to be true; it gets us thinking, and the wheels turning; it starts to rule out any religions that do not take this infinite regression derivation into account, for example. With other realizations, we can rule out still more and more propositions, and finally narrow down the set of possible religions to just a few, or, to one, or, to none, in which case we realize we should start our own. Whatever. But you always have to start somewhere, or, be just as guilty as those that jump to religious conclusions, by jumping to secular ones. And some people suppose that they are justified in not looking just because looking around and seeing that other’s looking has not proved very successful must be good evidence that it cannot be proven at all. That doesn’t mean very much, because many discoveries or devices have finally been gotten to work after centuries or decades of searching for the right way. But there is a far better far simpler way to prove it than this method. But, we will often find ourselves having to use hobbled methods before finding the one that lets us run directly from point A to point Z.

          I agree that the world’s religions are full of false proofs for God. I have also seen plenty of false proofs for evolution and for many other concepts in both philosophy and science and every specific field. I am sure you have too. That in and of itself does not invalidate any of those fields; it just invalidates those that trust in them on the basis of those false proofs. But, as annoying as it is, if you believe in something for the wrong reasons, it will STILL work if it is able to work at all, whenever we try to get it to work in whatever ways it CAN work. I might think a car runs because there are ghosts trapped in the engine, and ghosts like to chomp on gasoline, and their farts make the car go forward; but the car still runs even if I am an idiot, as long as my beliefs or actions based on my beliefs don’t violate its ACTUAL OPERATIONAL principles, not just that my stupid THINKING of how it works is violated by how it actually works. The same thing is often true in both science and religion; thank God for ‘user-friendliness’ built-in on purpose in both, even if the engineers roll their eyes in disgust at us.

          Beginning with the conscious or unconscious assumption that God exists, I agree is a great invalidation of many alleged proofs for God; you will always arrive back to where you started, in one form or another: the key is to start where you REALLY are, not just where you THINK you are, and see what can be derived from THAT. I found at least one proof from which God emerges that does not presuppose he is there; and all it takes is one to upset Agnosticism’s & Atheism’s & False Theism’s Applecart.

          And I also totally agree with you that if God ever had a reason to reveal himself directly to mankind in the past, the same reasons he would have found justified to do it then surely still exist today, so then where is the direct contact from God for US today like THEY allegedly had then, if God really exists, loves us, and etc? Also, the Bible if true is written in such archaic language, even in modern translations, that it is more than long overdue for a new edition and rewrite to clarify all the things that are unclear. Christians often argue that the purpose of miracles then was to prove that the Bible was true, but that after it arrived, or after it was finished being written, we did not need miracles anymore. I agree, that is bullshit. Unintelligible truth is as good as no truth at all. And, every new generation needs reconfirmation of whatever God reveals, with miracles, because they are totally different people with a totally different experience. It is not right to expect people with different experiences – – those who didn’t see something wonderful or terrible – – to respond the same way as those who DID. You are 100% right about that. I agree with you. You might be surprised to learn the Bible agrees with you. But what it ALSO says, and what after fighting it for decades I finally had to come to accept, is that everybody DOES have the same experience, in mundane everyday experience, but that we ignore it, and, if we paid attention to it, we would see that God is there, that he cares, etc, but also that he has perfectly logical reasons for hiding, as you say. God plays dice with the universe, and also plays hide and go seek. It is not about freewill; freewill exists, but, the reason God hides has more to do with not wanting our choices to be made under duress, or, only because we are trying to get God’s stuff, but because we really love what God loves: truest truth. If we still seek what seems to have no benefit or no power, but which we can still tell is true, then when truest truth regains its power, shows itself to be what it really is, we have proven ourselves worthy of it. Wealthy people often pretend to be poor, or average, to look for a mate they know loves them for them, or, to see who likes their business idea for what it is, not just for their influence or money. And police often remove all outward appearance of authority, to go undercover and find out who is really honest and who is not; and undercover work does not just capture the dishonest in their own web, but also exhonorates the innocent. What? So when WE do it, it is ok, but when God does it – – not to show himself who we are, but to show US who we are – – it is all of a sudden wrong? You are wise. You know. You tell me.

          I agree it is a great set of questions, one I have struggled with for years. I feel your anguish and annoyance over this. And the conclusion I have come to, after looking at what the Bible says about it, as well as what I could derive on my own, is two things: that first there are certain time periods in history that reoccur with equal frequency, where God always intervenes, whether we like it or know it or are expecting it or not. Study Biblical Chronology of when the prophets came, or when God interacted with mankind, and you will see the claim is that they came in clusters around very specific very regularly repeating moments across history, like clockwork, approximately 800 years apart; it is too regular to be chance: it apparently has something to do with periodic realignment of large-scale very slow cycles in the universe that makes visions from God more likely. Then, there is also the capacity of us to force God to show his hand and reveal himself; everyone can choose to become a miracle worker, but most do not realize it, nor do most know how, so we hardly see anyone ever becoming one. This is what Jesus did, and what several of the other prophets did. But, just like other technologies have been lost, so too, this is a lost art. I am working on restoring it to humanity. It is not easy. It has nearly all been lost, even using the Bible. But it IS there.

          Anyway, faith actually isn’t the overriding or primary consideration in most religions; hard work is. There is nothing wrong with hard work; but since when has it ever actually saved anyone? It ‘delays the inevitable’ (death), yes, but that is all it ever does. Christianity is the only religion that emphasizes salvation by faith. But the Bible defines faith in a way totally opposite to the way most Christians and most atheists portray it. And I agree it is very confusing, because so few of those speaking on the subject have any clue what they are talking about, as is evident from listening to them for a while. That excuses none of us from the need to search for ourselves till we are convinced we know what truest truth is; it is our own responsibility to do our own homework in the matter till we are convinced we are right, then look again and again and again to be sure we are convinced correctly, regardless of what anyone else does or says about the matter. It is true that there is a lot of stuff in religion in general that it asks us to believe that there is no way to prove; but so does history; that does not mean it happened or that it did not happen. And most claims in most religions are not important claims, but associated or corroborating or informative claims; even those who believe in those religions would say there is important stuff and not so important stuff, which if you are aware of and act on matters, and other stuff it does not matter if you ever knew of it or not. Then there is the religious texts, which may say something totally different than what its followers are saying and doing. So it is important to distinguish between what religion says is critical and what it says is optional, what its texts say or at least seem to say, and what independent corroboration in logic and science says is optional and critical; sometimes the three are the same, and other times they are totally different.

          You don’t need to pretend to believe in God for God to seem real to you. Some do that, but, they don’t have to; they are just being lazy. The proof is there if you really want it. And faith is not belief in belief in belief in what you know ain’t so. The definition of faith is, trust in what you know by proof, based on the reverse of what we have seen and experienced before, is coming that will totally change the fortunes of everyone, forever after, but, that just hasn’t arrived yet. Science too is trust in what you know by proof is coming, because we have seen and experienced it before, but that hasn’t arrived yet. So science and faith are very closely related, but there IS a difference; faith is predicting an event that will only ever occur once, AS the end of all cycles; science is predicting events that will occur again BEFORE the final cycle alignment arrives, because we have seen them occur before, and know their causes still persist, so we have no reason to believe they will not continue to occur that way. But faith is the same thing; we have no reason to believe that final reversal of fortunes will not occur, because, its causes still persist; we observe them everywhere; everything we observe is a cycle and all cycles spin and reverse; so everything we observe is spinning and spiraling and reversing. That is science; science is prediction, and prediction depends on cycles of specifically and generally repeating events. Faith is in fact an extrapolation of science. Faith rightly defined is a higher order form of science, the highest. Faith is the natural extension of science, and it leads to supernatural derivations. Faith says, ok, let’s think about this: if everything reverses, then eventually even reversing will reverse, leaving a set of results which is by definition the exact opposite if the ones we have now. Good and evil mixed together becomes good and evil separated forever; actions speaking louder than words becomes words speaking louder than actions; no perfect beings observed anywhere becomes one perfect being observed everywhere; but if we were to say the opposite of seeing none were to be seeing 2, or 5, or 24, or 1, 234, 565, 432 perfect beings, then we realize that no matter how many we might say or propose there are theoretically, we realize that by definition, they would all know exactly the same things, and be able to do exactly the same things, so would always react exactly the same ways to the same stimuli, so, would always do exactly the same things at exactly the same times in exactly the same places in exactly the same ways to and for exactly the same type of people; but when two or more things we propose theoretically all behave the same, indistinguishably, then we have to treat them all as if they are the same being. So then there can only be one perfect being, one being whose attributes and character traits are all set at infinite best; for all practical pragmatic purposes. Sounds like God and heaven and hell and miracles and salvation by faith alone, not work, to me, is the only viable consequence of the realization of that perfectly rational and reasonable extrapolation & extension of science, which science tends to ignore. And yet notice we did not have to presuppose God’s existence at all to derive it; we simply observed what we see, and extrapolated it in ways that are perfectly logical, given what we all, in every place, in every time, observe in everyday common experience. The problem is, we take for granted what we see, and conclude that despair is the only real truth. Not so. But some of us like to try to pretend that we don’t know. It’s real convenient that way. Till real reality arrives, anyway.

          We all already know the beauty of science, since we all use it and its results all the time, and know how much harder life would be without it. So I will not go into all that. But the ugliness of science, being less spoken of, I will mention briefly. It is two fold: one, it is full of holes; not only do the rules not apply everywhere with the same strength, but, we do not know for sure that they have always been that way, nor that they will always be that way, since we were not there to observe. Just because the laws of physics have always been a certain way for as long as we have observed them, does not mean they always will be; they may change the very next instant for reasons we do not understand and could not have predicted. That’s what the definition of a miracle is. So, Science says miracles do not contradict science; science PERMITS the possibility of miracles, and once we see the logical extension of science, Faith, we see that Faith REQUIRES the actuality of miracles in eternity, and, the possibility of miracles in tempority, i.e., here & now.

          ‘The truth IS out there.’ The truest truth is not hidden, is no secret, is right here, right now, with us, all around us, and in us, and whether you know it or not, you know it; it is just a perfectly natural and perfectly logical extrapolation, interpolation, and extension of the science you already believe in. Also, the irony is, there is no science or proof possible outside of cycles; cycles is rules with holes; there are no rules with exceptions in heaven (in hell all there is is rules with exceptions, but where only our worst nightmares will manifest; no matter what we imagine, the only thing we will get is the worst possible form of it, even if we try to imagine nothing); in heaven there is no proof, because in heaven, we can call any reality we wish into existence with the mere request for it the opposite of how physics operates here & now; (ie, like Genesis says, God SPOKE creation into existence, as if reality on his side of reality were run on voice activation technology) then there is no way to know if it only happened because we asked for it, or if it would have happened anyway even if we never asked for it. There is no proof possible in that kind of physics; but there you also don’t NEED proof. So, your complaint that there is no proof, is fallacious; not only is there proof, if you want it, this right here right now is the ONLY kind of physics in which you CAN EVER have proof, so, any proof you will ever have is now, or you will never have it at all. And whether or not you will ever have that proof is entirely up to you. I just gave you the rudiments of it, and you can do the rest of it if you really wish for yourself; if you don’t care enough to have it, then you won’t; it really is that simple. We are here so we can choose for or against God not of duress, but for love or hate of truest truth. Your choice to find it or ignore it, as it is everyone’s choice.

          Don’t let the idiocy of ‘true believers’ interfere with you seeing that the foundations of what they believe is not only true, but makes everything else look like smoke and mirrors and dog and pony shows in comparison to it. It is all up to you. You can do it. God has more faith in us than even the best of us has in him.

          ‘All it takes is one white crow to prove that not all crows are black.’
          – – ONE WHITE CROW

      • Dear perry ;

        how you look to muslims and you don’t look to islam ? we can find a christian criminals , as we ca found muslim criminal !!! I chalange you that the only truth in this earth is islam , really amazing you beleive the big bang and you don’t beleive the quran who speak about the creation of the world before all this scientist !!! the world is expanding and he will be closed like a book that’s what said the quran , you beileve scientist who speak about piercing stars and you do’t belive the quran who speak about that before 1400 years a go !!! how objective you are !!! islam is God word mean peace and peace was the ultimate truth on this earth !!! don’t waste you time be objective you will see that the quran is the truth .

        best regards

        • Dylan De Leskie says:

          I’m going to allow Perry to respond with a better answer than me. But I just want to say that peripherally, Christianity is rooted strongly in history while Islam isn’t. For example, The Koran says that Jesus was not crucified and that he fled to India! Secular history that has nothing to do with upholding the Christian faith (i.e. historians Tacitus, Flavius Josephus and Pliny the Younger) all indicate that he was in fact crucified. The four gospel accounts have 45,000 original transcripts with a 99.5 percent of cross-accuracy (compared to Homer’s Illiad for example that is based on 3,000 fragments).

          Also, the talmud, although it speaks of Jesus deragatorily, records his death being by crucifixion, same with the ancient Roman documents as mentioned above etc.

          So we know this actually happened. Where did Muhammed (whose revelation did not come along with witnesses) get the idea that Jesus fled to India? It’s simply not backed up historically. It is made up!

    • Richard Ruquist says:

      Brian,

      A Multiverse String Cosmology based on superstring theory predicts a structure that may store all memories cosmically.
      The structure depends on the existence of a Compact Manifold that comes from the compactified extra dimensions of superstring theory.
      http://knol.google.com/k/implications-of-a-conjectured-multiverse-string-theory-in-26-dimensions#

      Of course there is no way to observe this while alive. But we will all someday have the opportunity to experience it.

      Richard

    • @Brian Crockett:
      I hate to be condescending, but I have to say it: How Cute! you are where I was 20 years ago~ ah the memories! But, we all have to grow up sometime. A little learning leads you away from God, but a lot more brings you back to Him.

      Well done on expressing the kid tested mother approved scientific method. This is a great place to start, but a horrible place to finish; what our senses are good for in the end, we realize, is to confirm for us how unreliable they are. But you are exactly right; we do have to start somewhere, and, THIS IS PRECISELY that spot. This very method proves God exists, heaven and hell exists, and salvation by faith, etc, IFF you follow it to its logical conclusions and generalization. see above, SOLOMON’S SYLLOGISM. But I agree it does take lots of intense focus and many years, probably, for most peiople, to finally see it and accept it fully, so, I commiserate with your situation of frustration.

      God IS conspicuously absent, I agree: we all agree; what we don’t agree on, is what that means, because some of us are not aware we are ignoring what we already know and its implications. Since we are in a physics where ‘everything eventually reverses’, and since right now actions speak louder than words prevails, that just means that in a future state of existence there GOD will be conspicuously present, IFF that is the kind of physics we want, based on what we choose with our words, since THAT is the kind of reversed physics which will prevail when it arrives. Otherwise, we will go to a place where not only is God absent, but everything here that even remotely resembles what we call good.

      Trust me; you neither have to nor should trust me; read the proof for yourself. Study it. Think about it, and look around you. If you wish to be diligent, you will come to see it is true; then it will take a lifetime to fully understand it, like it did and will me. Anything that brings eternity is worth the effort.

      Non-existence is not an option; the brain and body LIMIT consciousness (for purposes of this test), they do not create it; we are all eternal; from this tiny blip in eternity we call the universe onwards, the only thing in question is where we will choose to spend it.

      Between Einstein and Solomon, the Jews have the laws of physics locked. All the rest of us can do is go, Ohhhh! Ahhhh!
      I studied for 2o years in hopes of discovering something new, and while I did find tons of stuff that was ‘news to me’, it was not news to the ancient ones, I found to my great chagrin; after I found it outside the Bible, I realized it seemed strangely familiar, and then remembered having read just another variant form of it in the Bible; it was there all along, plain as day, once the varnish and dust was chizeled off, 3000 years before I found it. It turned out to my amazement and embarassment that while I thought I had been rejecting the Bible for being stupider than I was, I found I was rejecting the Bible because it was so much smarter than I was, that I didd not even have a clue what it was talking about. Oh well; we live and we learn. Then we get the triple-ply super absorbent diaper, or whatever.

      While it is true that “Pouring over old books of dubious reality (reliability?) will not provide new insights into reality.”, it is ALSO true that we do not know which old books are dubious until AFTER we study them, and study scholarly opinions and archaeological opinions and scientific opinions about them; both sides, not just one, for controvertial point after point, and then make our own decision. We could just simplify and assume that anyone living long ago couldn’t possibly have been very smart, ignore all the old books, and go derive it all ourselves. That is what I did. That’s ok, too, if we would actually do that. But most who reject the old books without any real study also don’t derive it all themselves either: the reality is, it is usually just an excuse to justify laziness and foregone conclusions concerning the matter. (Present company I am sure is excluded.)

      Hang in there. You can do it. The truth IS out there. Nobody can prove anything to us, but ourselves. Do you believe in God?, is one of the wrong questions; one of the right questions is, Does God believe in us? The answer is yes.
      – – ONE WHITE CROW

      • Brian Crockett says:

        Actually I think you must like to be condescending. I read the Solomon syllogism of all the logical proofs for god this is the one of the silliest.

        Like all so called proofs for God I have seen it’s full of flawed or unproven premises, unsupported assertions, Non sequiturs, etc. They sound good until you start to analyze them logically. Some you really have to think about to find the flaws but this was hardly a challenge.

        The best argument I’ve seen so far is the fine tuning argument. It’s biggest flaw is that we don’t know enough about cosmology to determine if it’s valid. Like all logical proofs there is no way to get from a creator exists to a God of any particular religion. So even if the fine tuning or any other argument proves the existence of a god or gods there is no way to determine it’s characteristics or it’s desires. None of the holy books that I’m aware of can be shown to divinely inspired and therefore trustworthy. None of the prophecies or miracles can be verified. Non of the so called scientific knowledge they contain is unambiguous enough to be remotely convincing.

        See my critique below

        In present physics at every scale throughout the universe:
        Premise: 1.The only constant is that there is only change.
        (BC unproven Premise)

        Premise: 2.The only absolute is that there are only relatives.
        (BC unproven Premise, logically unsound, nonsensical)

        Conclusion: ERGO: eventually, in future physics throughout the multiverse: the nature of change itself will change, from all relativity, to all absolutivity: all there will be is absolutes, i.e.,
        (BC Non Sequitur derived from faulty premises, If true reversal may be trillions of years away, Does not follow if reversal God Exists, If God exists does not follow God is christian god or any other god described in any religion.)

        Corollaries:
        1. constant purpose & person but variable physics instead of the other way round,
        (BC unproven Premise, Unlikely that physics will change)

        2.1 eternal life in
        2.2. an eternal heaven or
        2.3 eternal death in an
        2.4 eternal hell,
        (BC Logical train started from invalid premises and non sequitur, therefore all that follows is invalid)

        3. the cycle of temporal cycles will end once for all, never giving those not already aligned with that FOR another chance to accept it based on direct observation changing their minds, other than the chance we all have right here & right now (i.e., Experience is a hard teacher: she gives the tests first, the lessons after. Yet we have those equations now, and so we have those conclusions now, and so we should trust them Here & now before they arrive)
        4. only one true God, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omniphilent,
        (BC omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent are logically self contradictory)

        5. salvation only by faith not works,
        (BC non of the above if true would lead to this conclusion)

        6. justice no longer delayed,
        (BC non of the above if true would lead to this conclusion)

        7. miracles,
        8. lions and lambs and cute fluffy bunnies (the meek inheriting the earth), dogs and cats living together, etc.
        (BC I’m not even going to comment, too silly)

        9. Tooth fairy, Santa Clause, Easter Bunny, pink elephants, and, even flying pigs. Every cliché you can imagine.
        (BC I’m not even going to comment, too silly)

        Science says: Oops! I guess we missed that one!

  15. Richard Ruquist says:

    Dear bouneb zine el abidine,

    As I understand Islam, Abraham is considered the father of your religion. May I suggest then that you read Abraham’s Book of Creation: http://www.kabbalah.info/eng/content/view/frame/3899
    which tells of the creation of the universe in accordance with what we scientists have come to know as String theory. Both 26 D and 10 D string theory are discussed and even the compactification of the extra Dimensions are specified. All this is found in a book of judaism. So Judaism has the modern truth of how creation happened.

    • Moreno Pazin says:

      Dear Richard
      Upon reading your link you have further provoked my interest in the Kabbalah but as I have no scientific training I would appraciate a simple explanation of your theory connecting the ancient ‘creation’ text to String theory.The numbers you mention do not seem to sum up.

      • Richard Ruquist says:

        Moreno,

        By the numbers not adding up in Abraham’s book of creation, you must mean that the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters but the multiverse has 26 dimensions. I interpret each letter to be a dimension based on the 10 dimensional universe where 4 dimensions expand into 4D spacetime as 6d(dimensions) curl up into the Compact Manifold.

        So in the case of the 22 letters, each standing for a different quality, I interpret them to be the 22 curled up dimensions of the Multiverse leaving 4D expanded dimensions of the 4D Multiverse spacetime. So adding that 4D to the 22d curled up dimensions, we get the 26 primordial dimensions of the Multiverse.

        Now there is still a bit of disconnect or non-correspondence between my string theory and the Book of Creation. Abraham seems to be saying that the Multiverse has a 4D spacetome and a 22d Compact Manifold; and that each universe within the Multiverse has a 4D spacetime along with a 6d Compact Manifold.

        I was not able to derive that dimensional split from string theory. Rather I had to go with Vafa’s 12d string theory for each universe along with a 14d string theory for the Multiverse, with each having a 4D spacetime.

        But that particular dimensional split had some other benefits, like allowing for spacetime curvature in each universe as proposed by Einstein’s General Relativity.

        You see in Vafa’s theory he first has to compactify 2 dimensions. Here compactify means something different from curl up. It takes 2 dimensions to curl up to allow 1 dimension to expand, just as Abraham said. So 6d dimensions curl up to get a 3D space. In Vafa’s case the initial 2d compactification is not into curled-up dimensions, but rather into a grid-like structure where the wires, so to speak, of the grid are at or below the Planck scale. Being 2d the grid is flexible allowing for space curvature ala Einstein.

        Hope that helps,
        Richard

  16. Ryan Nay says:

    I’m not a Buddhist, but Buddhism is more or less compatible with other religions and belief systems. It’s not like the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc) that all preach about a jealous God, a divine day of judgment, heaven and hell, etc. It doesn’t have a very specific theology like Hinduism or Shintoism or Scientology. It’s really more of a philosophy on life so I’m not sure if it should be grouped in with the others here.

    But I’m not a Buddhist. I don’t think Buddhism has all the answers.

    Likewise, I don’t believe anyone has all the answers, and that’s another reason I disagree with this “Lie #5.” Just because something is often used by religious apologists doesn’t automatically make it a lie.
    What you say is true: if Islam is true then Hinduism can’t be true. If Christianity is true than Norse mythology can’t be true. And so on and so forth. But you lose me when you assert that “there is no single truth” is a lie. Because I agree with that.

    I resist the label atheist because I resist all labels but if someone insisted on labeling me in religious terms they would probably call me an atheist, or rationalist. As an “atheist,” I think it’s absolutely vital to question all things. Even those things that we think can be taken for granted. Good ideas can be defended. Nothing is sacred or above criticism or consideration. For this reason, I will probably never agree that there is any such thing as a single truth, an ultimate truth, or anything else that would preclude asking questions and using our powers of logic, reason, and rationality.

    Maybe there is one truth out there, one system of belief that answers everything perfectly and makes the most sense. But I doubt it, and if there is then I haven’t found it.

    Until then I will maintain that anyone claiming to have all the answers never does, and the more insistently they argue that they have the answer the more they ought to be ignored.

    • Richard Ruquist says:

      Ryan,

      I was an atheist from my college days to age 33. Until then I was an Episcopalean but not really a believer.
      In my third yar in college an Anglican priest who I had befriended came to realize that I was not a believer, and when confronted, I agreed and decided to be an atheist, as a matter of belief.

      What turned me around initially at age 33 was the possibility of OBE- Out of Body Experience. If that was true, then almost anything taught in all the religions and even the occult could be true. So I began reading scripture in both western and eastern religions as well as more secular writings like Theosophy and channels and prophecy.

      I became particuliarly interested in the various yogas for personal development. At the same time having married a jew I went thru years of instruction to become one. But eventually both my family and I migrated to a Siddha Yoga Ashram.

      So the point of all this is coming from the perspective of an atheist, all religions are either essentially true, or there is no afterlife, and therefore no basis or reason for any religious belief. So if you get to read this, I would be pleased to discuss whether or not there is a basis for religion.

      Richard

  17. Ryan Nay says:

    oh… nevermind I get it. This isn’t a site that is seriously giving reasons not to be a Christian (I thought that it seemed a little heavy handed)… it’s a site posing as a site giving reasons not to be a Christian but that in reality is peddling Christianity. As I read more of the “lies” it became more and more obvious that the site has no understanding of the non-theistic point of view that it’s trying to answer.

    You can disregard/delete my last comment. I thought that I was speaking to reasonable people. I was wrong, forgive me.

    • perrymarshall says:

      Thank you for your condescending remarks.

      If you wish to discuss the merits / demerits of the non-theistic point of view instead of broadcasting your cynicism, let us know.

      • Conway Redding says:

        Perry, one man’s cynicism is another man’s realism, or, as Ambrose Bierce put it in his definition of the word “cynic”: “CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”

  18. Ivan Chen says:

    Hi Peter,

    I’m a christian, and i can’t agree with the concept of singular truth the judaism offered.
    If you study quantum theory, you will understand the plural truth, of what they say : “everyone must seek his own truth”. Simply because truth or faith can’t be taught, it has to be discovered, experienced, and thus make it very personal.
    It may sound absurd at first, but imagine this, 3 blind ppl said the “truth” about elephant. one who hold its ear say that elephant is wide, one who hold its tail say that elephant is thin and long, one who hold its foot say elephant is like a tree. Whos right? You can say that everyone is wrong or their statement is incomplete, but i can say too, that everyone is right, in some parts elephant is just like what they say.
    Don’t get me wrong but, if we can understand another religion, see through their eyes, you might see bible more clearly.
    As what Budhist ppl say, Jesus is a Buddha as a Hindu follower says that Jesus is Khrisna’s incarnation – which both may true in some respect(Its stated in Hindu that once in every centuries Krisna will incarnated to give elightment when the religion goes wrong, in Hindu, Buddha is the 9th and Jesus is the 10th incarnation).
    everything is make sense and everything is true.

    peace and God bless you brother

    • Richard Ruquist says:

      Ivan,

      I like your approach to religion. I became a jew after reading the New Testament over and over in a workplace noontime bible study group and finally realizing how really Jewish Jesus was. It helped that I was married to a jew, but she was going to Friends Meetings when I first met her.

      While taking years of study before the Rabbi would convert me-
      actually from being an atheist, although I was raised Christian- I learned the principles of Moses in the Oral Law on how to resolve laws or commandments that were or seemed contradictory.

      Moses taught that if two laws contradict each other, rather than claiming that both laws are incorrect, you must find the underlying truth that makes both laws true.

      I very much took that teaching to heart but applied it to the contradictions between different religions. As you strongly implied, there is a common truth to all religions and I would even include science, since I am a scientist. In fact, that teaching has driven me to find religion in physics and vice versa. I think I have succeeded.

      Richard

  19. Markku Ollikainen says:

    Have you thought about the fact that your scientific approach is influencing the results you get.
    Christian approach starts from the Bible. The Bible gives you the worldview, the boundary values of the framework in which the further study is meaningful. After that you study God’s creation and it’s dynamic interrelations.
    Education based on Greek philosophy makes man and his observations, feelings and thinking the centre of the study. Man tries to grasp the whole picture by enlargening his area of study.
    Can he know all and have all the absolute knowledge, everything about life and universe consciously in his mind to draw the meaningful conclusions? No, he can not. This is the reason behind conclusions that are full of scientific jargon but finally unmeaningful, because they represent only partial understanding and are thus partial truths.
    If you have TRUTH it can be only one in one world and one universe, one existence. If you have many, even opposing truths they are partial truths which can exist simultaneously.

  20. Richard Ruquist says:

    Markku,

    I start from the science side because I am a scientist, not a theologist. If I started from the Christian bible, my perspective would be limited by Christian thinking that only Christianity has the truth. Yet according to Jesus the most important commandment in Christianity is same as in Judaism. In fact to love god with all your heart, soul and mind is central to the practice of Judaism, but not Christianity, despite what Jesus said. Can you explain why?

    Richard

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