Archive for category Bob’s Meanderings

Die Heilige Zeitgeist

I have been reading “The God Delusion,” a best-seller by Richard Dawkins written about 2006.

It turns out that Dawkins founded the biggest and most successful Christian revivalist organization in Australia some years back.

Reading between the lines, he seems to have had a change of heart.

My own sympathy with Dawkins is that he is not just an atheist, he is anti-religion.Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

You will probably understand that that is related to my own decision to become Catholic, though almost nobody besides a BUGSER would see the connection.

My decision to leave the Methodist Church was because my grandfather was a circuit rider. The sermons he wrote down are full of “The Devil” and “Hell.”

Like our first ancestor in America, my grandfather was a RELIGIOUS preacher. God or Heaven or Hell or NOTHING.
No respectable upper class Episcopal compromises.

Religion is absolutely right or it is RIDICULOUS.

The closest Biblical quote to my attitude would be, “They were lukewarm, and he spit them out.”

Catholicism is a CHURCH. Mainline Protestantism is not.

By the same token religion is either true or it is a horror.

I like the fact that Dawkins, having become an atheist, CONDEMNS religion.

Except maybe one, which he doesn’t see he might be promoting.

But in his book, Dawkins advoctes the Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times.” He would never suspect it, but he is attacking the Old Religion by speaking very suspiciously in the terms of the new religion.

If you are used to German, it is ironic that “Zetigeist” is suspiciously close to “die Heilige Geist,” which means “The Holy Spirit.”

A suspicious mind will always pick up a suspicious similarity where denouncing the Old Religion uses language that is so close to new one.

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Yes, Physicists Listen to Bob!

You probably think no one listens to my talking about the 4-D universe and other highly technical stuff.

Well, following up on the articles below, I wrote a piece for a physics journal which combined several versions of string theory.

I called it Whitaker’s Rope.

Immediate replies came in from several imminent high speed physics researchers.

All of them recommended that I get some rest.

A couple took the time to suggest specific professional help.

 

 

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The 4-D Box is Man’s Next Step From the Center of the Universe

Galileo put together a device, the telescope, already used in Northern Europe, as was the microscope, and looked through it.   He brought it to Rome and so he “invented” it.

He was condemned because the Catholic Church, like all religion, put man, and therefore man’s home planet at the center of the universe.

What should have been an abstract discovery became an epochal battle, and it was summed up this way:   Religion Versus Reality.    For the sophisticated, Reality was now at the center of the universe, not man and his planet.

Now we have accepted this Reality versus Religion to the extent that even the Pope now wonders if there is other life in the universe.   Everybody put Reality at the center of the universe.

But what we see as reality is OUR reality.   It is Reality which only exists if you are in this particularly four-dimensional block, observing from inside three dimensional as your being proceeds with absolute consistency through a fourth dimension, time.

The telescope put us in our place as one small planet in a universe of soar systems and galaxies.   So we began to think, “Is there life o other planets?”

Now with the 4-D box we naturally wonder “Would an observer in another box be like us?”

And lose themselves in speculation.

But if you stick to the basic question, you don’t get confused:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Speculations about other realities are as important as the temperature of Neptune.  It has its place.

But the essential question is always the same : “is any feeling being benefited?  Is any feeling being hurt?”

That is my final version of Reality.

 

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Some Physics Without the Arithmetic

We exist in a four-dimensional solid block.

We only LIVE because we can move in three of those dimensions, but the fourth one, time, only allows us to move within it at a certain, unchanging speed.

Before you say this sounds New Age or philosophical, let me hasten to point out that it is not only the basis of Einsteinian Theory, but it is also the basis of C.S. Lewis’s theology.  There is not a radical word in it.Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

This four-dimensional picture is solid and conservative.   It is AFTER we accept it and start babbling conclusions that we begin sounding like Aristotle at his dumbest talking about why women are born to have less teeth than men.

There was an interesting overlap between Einstein’s four-dimensional physics and C.S. Lewis’ use of it for theology when Einstein attacked quantum physics by saying that “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Quantum physics said that the tiniest particles in our universe pop back and forth from out a four-dimensional box into other four-dimensional regularly, but so many of them do it that statistically our universe remains stable.

But if you admit this, you are saying that there are other universes for these particles to pop in and out of.   Einstein calls this THE universe, the universe of which his God is the master.

String theory has come along to reconcile quantum physics and Einsteinian physics.   I am not about to try to explain THAT until I understand it.

And I have my doubts about string theory for reasons that have nothing to do with the math all this is cloaked in.

I suspect string theory BECAUSE it so conveniently bridges the gap between Relativity and Quantum Theory.   I doubt seriously whether anybody else would imagine such a thing.

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Why is This Information Produced?

Interest in my articles is almost perfectly less the less the less the subject interests ME.

This is perfectly natural.  What you want to say is up there in your frontal lobe, ready to go out of your mouth.

What I really want is the inspirations that are not yet formulated back in your occipital lobe.

So Why is Information Produced really belongs here, where I am talking to myself.

This is a question which must be thought out by every interrogator, writer, newsman, teacher, manager, in fact it is a professional matter for everybody except a semiretarded unskilled laborer.

Any Name spends his life avoiding expression of anything from his occipital lobe.

 

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