Author: Papa Giorgio

But Its Constitutional!? (UPDATE: Canceled!)

Published by Papa Giorgio

UPDATE: A reader informed me that the burning has been canceled.

Great News!

A pastor, Rev. Terry Jones, is planning on burning a Holy Book, the Qur’an, this 9/11:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) – The leader of a small Florida church that espouses anti-Islam philosophy said Wednesday he was determined to go through with his plan to burn copies of the Quran on Sept. 11, despite pressure from the White House, religious leaders and others to call it off.

“We are still determined to it, yes,” the Rev. Terry Jones told the CBS Early Show.

Jones says he has received more than 100 death threats and has started wearing a .40-caliber pistol strapped to his hip since announcing his plan to burn the book Muslims consider the word of God and insist be treated with the utmost respect. The 58-year-old minister proclaimed in July that he would stage “International Burn-a-Quran Day.”

Supporters have been mailing copies of the holy text to his Gainesville church of about 50 followers to be incinerated in a bonfire on Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Gen. David Petraeus took the rare step of a military leader taking a position on a domestic matter when he warned in an e-mail to The Associated Press that “images of the burning of a Quran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan – and around the world – to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”…

…(read more)…

It is ironic that while this pastor has the Constitutional right to do what he is doing. It is anything but advisable. Similarly, the Ground Zero mosque is likewise Constitutionally protected. But it is anything but advisable. Neither build bridges. Neither engender kind feelings towards a major religious view. Both engender feelings of ill will. Death threats coming at a higher rate from the Islamic side I am sure. This has everything to do with the belief in a Unitarian god and is not a discussion worthy of this post.

Tell Them What You Think!

Address:

5805 NW 37th St
Gainesville, FL 32653

Phone: 352-371-2487

Fax: 352-371-6511

Email: info@doveworld.org

In fact, the people that say the mosque at Ground Zero (typically called the “community center” by the left) is no big deal should be saying that burning the Qur’an is no big deal as well. I assume they would argue that burning a Holy Book would be hurtful and insensible to the followers of that book. I would agree. JUST LIKE 72% of American’s and 68% of New Yorkers saying the same about the placement of a mosque. The only reason “we” argue against this mosque being in that particular spot is that it would be hurtful to those who have scars from that event (which apparently is 72% of American’s – me included). Let alone the families who lost loved ones and friends in that attack.

All the talk of the Constitution and free speech and right to worship whatever you wish to worship are all not part of our argument. Yet, this is how the argument is always framed… straw-men are built, then they are torn down. The Left does not even talk to us, they talk to a caricature of us and then defeat this caricature of us [in their own minds].

I am posting this for the same reason I have posted against the mosque. This act should not be done! It has no net good in its value. Neither does the rigidity of the mosque backers. Except, even the most crazed Christian denomination is not violent for the most part… unlike the most crazed version of Islam. So I can say that while not ALL Muslims are terrorists, almost all terrorists are Muslims.

Now why, you may ask, would I end such a nice post about reasons why both the pastor burning Holy Books (I would have problems with him even burning Anton Szandor LaVey’s Satanic Bible [which I own and have read cover-to-cover as well as Crowley’s Book of the Law. They are part of my occult section of my home library.]) and the mosque builders are wrong? I will tell you why. Because the money coming into this project will be dirty. For instance:

 




Take note moderate Muslims are worried about the same topic. This is not an issue that is right vs. left, it is moderate Muslims and 72% of American’s saying in some way the same thing.

 



UPDATED 9-9-2010: This video shows they are a fiery Pentecostal church who no doubt misapplies many parts of Scripture to supports all sorts of activity (like a slightly shorter leg becoming “longer”).


The Grand Design ~ Hawking on Gravity, Philosophy, and Creation

Published by Papa Giorgio

(A post of note is M-Theory – Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, “The Grand Design” – by True Free Thinker)

Stephen Hawking is quoted as saying the following:

  • Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing

However, what the people who support scientism do is often get categories mixed up. Something that needs explanation itself and exists in spatial time relation needs an explanation itself. For instance, Irtiqa comments after pointing out the above quote:

…he is already postulating the existence of gravity and the laws that will lead to the creation and evolution of the universe. Shouldn’t we ask about the origin of gravity and all features of the universe? Many of us scientists and thinkers doubt that full explanations of everything can be complete and self-contained, with no need for a metaphysical principle like God.

While I have not read the book, nor plan to, it seems that Dr. Hawking is defining gravity as something other than a function of the mechanics of the cosmos. Perhaps he’s placing gravity outside of the dimensions like theists place God outside the universe? IN which case it is atheism of the gaps theory.  Not to mention that M-Theory itself, if true, doesn’t explain anything away, it just adds more parameters that need explanation. The Blaze has some good insight on this, one can be found by both an atheist and theist dealing with Hawking’s new book:

Another video follows, but, an ex-atheist deals a bit with what is being discussed herein. Here is Dr. Antony Flew’s conversion reasoning:

“My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.” After chewing on his scientific worldview for more than five decades, Flew concluded, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” Previously, in his central work, The Presumption of Atheism (1976), Flew argued that the “onus of proof [of God] must lie upon the theist.” However, at the age of 81, Flew shocked the world when he renounced his atheism because “the argument for Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.”

Okay, another video (you may need to avert your eyes from his “crazy” eyes):

Dr. William Lane Craig touched on this “Theory of Everything” that Stephen Hawking has been wanting for quite some time. In a Q&A he responds after the initial question:

Question: Dr. Craig, given that, in the past, in its quest for simplicity physics has often discovered previously unsuspected connections between seemingly unrelated constants like electromagnetic constants and the speed of light and given that, in his 1997 lectures at Harvard University, physicist Ed Witten said that most of the recent string theories have no free parameters, that is, no variable constants in the model––all the constants just follow from the mathematical structure of the theory itself, O.K.?––given that, don’t you think it’s even probable that future discoveries in physics will reduce, or even completely eliminate, these seemingly strange improbable coincidences that you appeal to, to give evidence for God’s creation and tweaking of constants in the human universe?

Dr. Craig Responds: No, I don’t see any reason to think that that’s probable at all, though I would like to hear more about Witten’s claim with respect to string theory. I’m not aware that that’s a feature of that model––that it eliminates all need for fine–tuning. I would very surprised to hear that were the case. I mean what you’re really talking about is a so–called “Theory of Everything.” But what that would ultimately show would be that the laws of physics are not really just physical laws at all but, somehow, they’re logically necessary, which, I think, strikes me as extremely counter–intuitive, that this is the only possible universe that could exist. So from what I’ve read, I think that the idea of ultimately finding some sort of a “Theory of Everything” is really a fantasy. I think we’re always going to be stuck with a certain amount of contingency that just is put in at the beginning.

Dr. Craig continues elsewhere to zero in on this “M-Theory” model (A thorough scouring of this can be found here where this was excerpted from, Beyond the Big Bang):

Ekpyrotic Models

We come finally to the extreme edge of cosmological speculation: string cosmology. These models are based on an alternative to the standard quark model of elementary particle physics. So-called string theory (or M-theory) conceives of the fundamental building blocks of matter to be, not particles like quarks, but tiny vibrating strings of energy. String theory is so complicated and embryonic in its development that all its equations have not yet even been stated, much less solved. But that has not deterred some cosmologists from trying to craft cosmological models based on concepts of string theory to try to avert the beginning predicted by standard Big Bang cosmology.

The most celebrated of these scenarios in the popular press has been the so-called ekpyrotic scenario championed by Paul Steinhardt.[xvi] In the most recent revision, the cyclic ekpyrotic model, we are asked to envision two three-dimensional membranes (or ‘branes’ for short) existing in a five-dimensional space-time (Fig. 9). One of these branes is our universe. These two branes are said to be in an eternal cycle in which they approach each other, collide, and retreat again from each other. It is the collision of the other brane with ours that causes the expansion of our universe. With each collision, the expansion is renewed. Thus, even though our three-dimensional universe is expanding, it never had a beginning.

[…no picture supplied in original post…]

Now apart from its speculative nature the ekpyrotic scenario is plagued with problems.[xvii] For example, the Horava-Witten version of string theory on which the scenario is based requires that the brane on which we live have a positive tension. But in the ekpyrotic scenario it has a negative tension in contradiction to the theory. Attempts to rectify this have been unsuccessful. Second, the model requires an extraordinary amount of ad hoc fine turning. For example, the two branes have to be so perfectly aligned that even at a distance of 1030 greater than the space between them, they cannot deviate from being parallel by more than 10-60. There is no explanation at all for this extraordinary setup. Third, the collapsing and retreating branes are the equivalent of a 4-D universe which goes through an eternal cycle of contractions and expansions. In this sense, the cyclic ekpyrotic model is just the old oscillating model writ large in five dimensions. As such, it faces exactly the same problem as the original: there is no way for the universe to pass through a singularity at the end of each cycle to begin a new cycle and no physics to cause a non-singular bounce. Finally, even if the branes could bounce back, there is no means of the physical information in one cycle being carried through to the next cycle, so that the ekpyrotic scenario has been unable to deliver on its promises to explain the large-scale structure of the observable universe. These are just some of the problems afflicting the model. It is no wonder that Andrei Linde has recently complained that while the cyclic ekpyrotic scenario is ‘very popular among journalists,’ it has remained ‘rather unpopular among scientists’ (Linde 2002: 8).

But let all that pass. Perhaps all these problems can be somehow solved. The more important point is that it turns out that, like the chaotic inflationary model, the cyclic ekpyrotic scenario cannot be eternal in the past. In September of 2001 Borde and Vilenkin, in cooperation with Alan Guth, were able to generalize their earlier results on inflationary models in such a way to extend their conclusion to other models. Specifically, they note, ‘Our argument can be straightforwardly extended to cosmology in higher dimensions,’ specifically brane-cosmology.[xviii] According to Vilenkin, ‘It follows from our theorem that the cyclic universe is past-incomplete’,[xix] that is to say, the need for an initial singularity has not been eliminated. Therefore, such a universe cannot be past-eternal.

Summary

With each successive failure of alternative cosmogonic theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated. This beginning of the universe, of space and time themselves, reveals the contingency of the universe. The universe is evidently not necessarily existent, as Hume suggested, since it is not eternal, and therefore its existence does cry out for explanation. It is no longer sufficient to dismiss this problem with a shrug and a slogan, ‘The universe is just there, and that’s all.’

Of course, in view of the metaphysical issues raised by the prospect of a beginning of the universe, we may be confident that the quest to avert such a beginning will continue unabated.[xx] Such efforts are to be encouraged, and we have no reason to think that such attempts at falsification will result in anything other than further corroboration of the prediction of a beginning. In the meantime, the beginning cannot be wished away. Given its origin ex nihilo, the demand why the universe exists rather than nothing presses insistently upon us.

Here is Dr. Craigs presentation (2hrs, 21 minutes long):

Beyond the Big Bang (Ekpyrotic Models Discussed) from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.