Science and God need not be at odds!

Many scientists — 40 percent according to a 1997 poll — believe in some form of God.

This isn't big news to scientists, but might surprise people who rely on mainstream views of science.

A handful of those folks — including Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and William D. Phillips, Nobel laureate in physics and a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, argue that the natural world and the world of faith are relatively separate, yet personally reconcilable domains.

"I think that we are all comfortable with the idea there are plenty of things in our lives that we will deal with outside of the scientific paradigm," Phillips told about 70 members of the public who attended the discussion of these issues between himself, Shermer and AEI theologian Michael Novak. "And while I think faith is a particularly important part of our lives that we should deal with outside of the scientific paradigm, it is certainly not the only one."

Phillips, a Methodist, also drew from science to make his argument in favor of God's relevance, saying physicists know there are things that are "really, really improbable, but they are not really impossible according to the laws of physics ...! From what I know about physics, it's not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it."

In her booklet, philosopher Mary Midgley, who was not at the AEI event, states that science is just one worldview that has come to prevail. Science and religion need not be at odds.

"What is now seen as a universal cold war between science and religion is, I think, really a more local clash between a particular scientistic worldview, much favored recently in the West, and most other people's worldviews at most other times," she writes.

"Scientism ... by contrast, cuts [the setting of human life in] context off altogether and looks for the meaning of life in Science itself. It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning ... that makes science and religion look like competitors today."

Worldviews that transcend that competition or dichotomy are offered in the booklet by Kenneth Miller, Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy and Stuart Kauffman.

(Miller, the lead witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover trial of 2005 (in which Judge John E. Jones III barred intelligent design from being taught in a Pennsylvania public school district's science classes), takes the classic Darwinian "grandeur in this view of life" approach. God is behind it all.)

He rejects claims that the God hypothesis makes no sense, stating that "... to reject God because of the admitted self-contradictions and logical failings of organized religion would be like rejecting physics because of the inherent contradictions of quantum theory and general relativity."

Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, takes a slightly New Age tack, saying we must "heal" the schism between science and religion by "reinventing the sacred" and evolving from a supernatural God to a "new sense of a fully natural God as our chosen symbol for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe."

In other words, he suggests that we can get around the divide between science and God if we come up with a new concept for God that focuses on the wonders of nature, among other things.

This new concept is a global cultural imperative, Kauffman writes, if we are to overcome fundamentalist fears and reunite reason with humanity and the mysteries of life.

A middle ground that incorporates science more than the other God-friendly writers is offered by Hoodbhoy, a physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan.

Science hasn't necessarily made belief obsolete, "but instead you must find a science-friendly, science-compatible God," he writes. And that is possible, he claims, calling this entity a "scientific Creator."

Hoodbhoy thinks that God can be seen as operating within the laws of physics, tweaking outcomes in small ways that have big impacts by relying on phenomena we have observed already in the universe, such as the butterfly effect (in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings alters the atmosphere in a way that ultimately alters the path of a tornado).

In his own words, here are some things She (yes, Hoodbhoy uses the female pronoun) could do, Hoodbhoy writes:

"Extraordinary, but legitimate, interventions in the physical world permit quantum tunneling through cosmic wormholes or certain symmetries to snap spontaneously. It would be perfectly fair for a science-savvy God to use nonlinear dynamics so that tiny fluctuations quickly build up to earthshaking results — the famous 'butterfly effect' of deterministic chaos theory."

Hoodbhoy ends by saying that God is neither dead nor about to die. There is still plenty of "space for a science-friendly God as well as for 'deeply religious non-believers' like Einstein ... Unsure of why they happen to exist, humans are likely to scour the heavens forever in search of meaning."

A total of 5,000 copies of the booklet became available on May 2. Free copies can be obtained at www.templeton.org.
Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://Allans-Perspective.blogspot.com

Creationism vs Evolution one last time!

I response to the many letters I get from idiots that just won't let go of their Creationist beliefs, or that the world is just 7,000 years old, I have this one last argument!

Fossils.... Fossils ... Fossils ..... Fossils, Damn It!

(I win!)

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available at the web site www.God-101.com

Visit the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

Humans Evolving Faster. Sorry Creationists!

Sorry all you Creationist Dudes, not only are we evolving, but we are doing so at an ever increasing rate!

Anthropology researchers at the University of Utah have found the pace of evolution has accelerated in the past 50,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, according to research leader Henry Harpending, a professor of anthropology at the university, Human races are evolving away from each other and are very different from what they were 1,000 or 2,000 years ago,

(That explains, in part, the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants.)

"The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence," Harpending said in a release.

The findings were published in Monday's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers looked for genetic evidence of natural selection, or the evolution of favourable gene mutations, over the past 80,000 years by analyzing DNA from 270 individuals in the International HapMap Project, which is an initiative to identify variations in genes that cause disease.

They studied 3.9 million chromosome mutations from 270 people in four populations: Han Chinese, Japanese, Africa’s Yoruba tribe and northern Europeans, represented largely by data from Utah Mormons. Harpending and his team examined the speed at which chromosome mutations broke up and recombined and found that about seven per cent are undergoing rapid, recent evolution.

The main result of these findings is to deflate the commonly held befief that human evolution has remained static over the last 50-100,00 years said Dr. Harpending.

"Our study denies the widely held assumption or belief that modern humans appeared 50,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we are all pretty much the same," he said. "We show that humans are changing relatively rapidly on a scale of centuries to millennia, and that these changes are different in different continental groups."

The researchers noted that rapid population growth, along with big changes in culture and ecology, have resulted in major genetic changes, such as skeletal and dental changes.

In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin.

Human migration into new environments has also led to adaptations to colder weather, such as less skin pigmentation to allow for more vitamin D absorption.

The genetic changes have related to numerous different human characteristics, the researchers said.

Many of the recent genetic changes also reflect differences in the human diet brought on by agriculture, as well as resistance to epidemic diseases that became mass killers following the growth of human civilizations, the researchers said.

For example, Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria.

In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults.

In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry.

The changes have been driven by the colossal growth in the human population -- from a few million to 6.5 billion in the past 10,000 years -- with people moving into new environments to which they needed to adapt, added Henry Harpending, a University of Utah anthropologist.

"The central finding is that human evolution is happening very fast -- faster than any of us thought," Harpending said in a telephone interview. "Most of the acceleration is in the last 10,000 years, basically corresponding to population growth after agriculture is invented," Hawks said in a telephone interview.

Beneficial genetic changes have appeared at a rate roughly 100 times higher in the past 5,000 years than at any previous period of human evolution, the researchers determined. They added that about 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, relatively recent evolution.

Even with these changes, however, human DNA remains more than 99 percent identical, the researchers noted.

Genes have evolved relatively quickly in Africa, Asia and Europe but almost all of the changes have been unique to their corner of the world. This is the case, he said, because since humans dispersed from Africa to other parts of the world about 50-100,000 years ago, there has not been much flow of genes between the regions.


Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com and the blog "Perspective" at http://God-101.blogspot.com

CONNECTIONS!

These documentaries by James Burke are among the best series of programs that have ever been produced. (Equal to the "Cosmos" series by Carl Sagan!)

Although they were made over twenty years ago the subject matter of these works is timeless and it's presentation is flawless.

The first in the series; "The day the Universe changed," was a ten part series presented here in full and it dealt with the impact certain inventions had in changing history.

The next few; "Connections," Connections II," Connections III," and "Re-Connections," all look at how our modern world is interconnected and when one event occures, how it can have far reaching implications and be connected to other events in ways that we did not, and could not, know!

I am going to present a short clip from this series every day, Monday to Friday, and I promise you that following them will be well worth it! Enjoy!

Episode 1-1



James Burke, the creator and host of 'Connections', explains the Haber-Bosch Process Connections was a ten-episode documentary television series created and narrated by science historian James Burke.

The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978.

It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrates how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events built off one another in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.

The series is well-known for Burke's impeccable narration (especially its dry humour), historical reenactments, intricate working models, skillful use of classical music (most notably Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi, or "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana), and shots on location as far afield as Penang (Malaysia).

The popular success of the series led to two sequels, Connections² in 1994, and Connections³ in 1997, both produced for TLC.

Modern soldiers demonstrate the use of steel-tipped pikes by the Swiss against Charles the Bold in one of the many reenactments used in Connections.Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress.

Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting in rational self-interest with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally lead to.

The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.

To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past (usually Ancient or Medieval times) and traces the path from that event through a series of seemingly unrelated connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world.

For example, the program traces the invention of plastics from the development of the fluyt, a type of Dutch cargo ship.

Burke also explores three corollaries to his initial thesis.

The first is that, if history is driven by individuals who act only on what they know at the time and not because of any idea as to where their actions will eventually lead, then predicting the future course of technological progress is futile conjecture.

If we are astonished by the connections Burke is able to weave among past events, then we will be equally surprised by what the events of today eventually lead to, especially events we weren't even aware of at the time.

The second and third corollaries are explored most in the introductory and concluding episodes, and they represent the downside of an interconnected history.

If history progresses because of the synergistic interaction of past events and innovations, then as history does progress, the number of these events and innovations increases.

This increase in possible connections causes the process of innovation to not only continue, but to accelerate. Burke poses the question of what happens when this rate of innovation, or more importantly change itself, becomes too much for the average person to handle and what this means for individual power, liberty, and privacy.

Lastly, if the entire modern world is built from these interconnected innovations, all increasingly maintained and improved by specialists who required years of training to gain their expertise, what chance does the average citizen without this extensive training have in making an informed decision on practical technological issues, such as the building of nuclear power plants or the funding of controversial projects such as stem cell research?

Furthermore, if the modern world is increasingly interconnected, what happens when one of those nodes collapses? Does the entire system follow suit?


Connections (1978)
The Trigger Effect
Death in the Morning
Distant Voices
Faith in Numbers
The Wheel of Fortune
Thunder in the Skies
The Long Chain
Eat, Drink and Be Merry
Countdown
Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

Connections2 (1992)
Revolutions
Sentimental Journeys
Getting It Together
Whodunit?
Something for Nothing
Echoes of the Past
Photo Finish
Separate Ways
High Times
Déjà Vu
New Harmony
Hot Pickle
The Big Spin
Bright Ideas
Making Waves
Routes
One Word
Sign Here
Better Than the Real Thing
Flexible Response

Connections3 (1997)
Feedback
What's in a Name?
Drop The Apple
Invisible Object
Life is No Picnic
Elementary Stuff
A Special Place
Fire from the Sky
Hit the Water
In Touch

Follow this series with James Burke daily, Monday thru Friday, here on "Perspective" at http://god-101.blogspot.com/

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at http://www.god-101.com/

Sputnik

Fifty years ago today the former Soviet Union slapped together a little chrome ball with four antenna's on it and stuck it on top of a surplus intercontinental ballistic missle and shot it into orbit.
A half a century ago this was our first artificial satellite and it circled the planet going beep, beep, beep, more for effect than purpose.
It did, however, hearald the coming of all that we hold dear today, including the Internet, G.P.S., global communications and the information age. It also started the "Space Race" and led to our landing on the Moon.
It will be interesting to see what the next 50 years will bring, or the next 500 for that matter!

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at http://www.god-101.com/ and the blog "Perspective" at http://god-101.blogspot.com/

The Battery is Dead!

Guest Post by Grant Slater - AP News

Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 800 kilometres roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 80 kilometres of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.

"It's a paradigm shift," said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor's invention. "The Achilles' heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary."

Clifford's company bought rights to EEStor's technology in August 2005 and expects EEStor to start shipping the battery replacement later this year for use in ZENN Motor's short-range, low-speed vehicles.

The technology also could help invigorate the renewable-energy sector by providing efficient, lightning-fast storage for solar power, or, on a small scale, a flash-charge for cellphones and laptops.

Skeptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.

"We've been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it," said Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics. "Depending on who you believe, they're at or beyond the limit of what is possible."

EEStor's secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material.

The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

Batteries rely on chemical reactions to store energy but can take hours to charge and release energy. The simplest capacitors found in computers and radios hold less energy but can charge or discharge instantly. Ultracapacitors take the best of both, stacking capacitors to increase capacity while maintaining the speed of simple capacitors.

Hebner said vehicles require bursts of energy to accelerate, a task better suited for capacitors than batteries.

"The idea of getting rid of the batteries and putting in capacitors is to get more power back and get it back faster," Hebner said.

But he said nothing close to EEStor's claim exists today.
For years, EEStor has tried to fly beneath the radar in the competitive industry for alternative energy, content with a phone-book listing and a handful of cryptic press releases.

Yet the speculation and skepticism have continued, fuelled by the company's original assertion of making batteries obsolete - a claim that still resonates loudly for a company that rarely speaks, including declining an interview with The Associated Press.

The deal with ZENN Motor and a US$3 million investment by the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made big-payoff early bets on companies like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., hint that EEStor may be on the edge of a breakthrough technology, a "game changer" as Clifford put it.

ZENN Motor's public reports show that it so far has invested $3.8 million in and has promised another $1.2 million if the ultracapacitor company meets a third-party testing standard and then delivers a product.

Clifford said his company consulted experts and did a "tremendous amount of due diligence" on EEStor's innovation.

EEStor's founders have a track record. Richard Weir and Carl Nelson worked on disk-storage technology at IBM Corp. in the 1990s before forming EEStor in 2001. The two have acquired dozens of patents over two decades.

Neil Dikeman of Jane Capital Partners, an investor in clean technologies, said the nearly $7 million investment in EEStor pales compared with other energy storage endeavors, where investment has averaged $50 million to $100 million.

Yet curiosity is unusually high, Dikeman said, thanks to the investment by a prominent venture capital group and EEStor's secretive nature.

"The EEStor claims are around a process that would be quite revolutionary if they can make it work," Dikeman said.

Previous attempts to improve ultracapacitors have focused on improving the metal sheets by increasing the surface area where charges can attach.

EEStor is instead creating better nonconductive material for use between the metal sheets, using a chemical compound called barium titanate. The question is whether the company can mass-produce it.

ZENN Motor pays EEStor for passing milestones in the production process, and chemical researchers say the strength and functionality of this material is the only thing standing between EEStor and the holy grail of energy-storage technology.

Joseph Perry and the other researchers he oversees at Georgia Tech have used the same material to double the amount of energy a capacitor can hold. Perry says EEstor seems to be claiming an improvement of more than 400-fold, yet increasing a capacitor's retention ability often results in decreased strength of the materials.

"They're not saying a lot about how they're making these things," Perry said. "With these materials (described in the patent), that is a challenging process to carry out in a defect-free fashion."

Perry is not alone in his doubts. An ultracapacitor industry leader, Maxwell Technologies Inc., has kept a wary eye on EEStor's claims and offers a laundry list of things that could go wrong.

Among other things, the ultracapacitors described in EEStor's patent operate at extremely high voltage, 10 times greater than those Maxwell manufactures, and won't work with regular wall outlets, said Maxwell spokesman Mike Sund. He said capacitors could crack while bouncing down the road, or slowly discharge after a dayslong stint in the airport parking lot, leaving the driver stranded.

Until EEStor produces a final product, Perry said he joins energy professionals and enthusiasts alike in waiting to see if the company can own up to its six-word promise and banish the battery to recycling bins around the world.

"I am skeptical but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong," Perry said.

Waco still Wacko!

Bill Nye, the harmless children's edu-tainer known as "The Science Guy," managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own, but don't tell that to the good people of Waco, who were "visibly angered by what some perceived as blasphemy," according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College's Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption.

But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars."

The lesser light, (the moon) he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector of sunlight.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled "We believe in God!" and left with three children, thus ensuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they'd always suspected.

This story originally appeared in the Waco Tribune, but the newspaper has mysteriously pulled its story from the online version, presumably to avoid further embarassment.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God at www.God-101.com

(This blog is about stuff, and I have to put stuff like this in it because.... if I didn't see it in print right before my eyes I wouldn't believe that people can be that fucking stupid!)

Smash-up on the Galactic Interstate.

Four galaxies are crashing into each other in one of the largest collisions ever seen, scientists say.

The galactic crash was spotted by astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which detected a fan-shaped plume coming from a cluster of galaxies nearly five billion light-years away.

When fully merged, the new galaxy will be up to ten times as large as the Milky Way, astronomers said.

"Most galaxy mergers are like small pickup trucks filled with sand colliding," explained Kenneth Rines, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"This big merger is like four big rigs full of sand colliding and flinging sand everywhere.

In this case, each grain of sand represents an individual star!"

Your "cosmic" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

(With permisssion from; "Encyclopedia Galactica!")

Penn and Teller; The Bible is Bullshit.

Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) www.God-101.com

Saturday Morning Confusion!

Here, my children, is a major truth of life that I ran across today and should serve you well in your journey through this mortal plane!

Science and politics have co-existed in an uneasy relationship for a very long time. The reason is simple!

In science, "Truth" is meant to be independent of human preferences and agenda's, and its discovery occurs through the scientific method of conjectures and refutations.

In politics and religion, "Truth" is often a claim made on the basis of some outside authority............. church, charismatic leader, majority opinion in a democracy and selective evidence. etc. etc.

Politicians since Archimedes in ancient Greece have sought the advice of scientists in the making of public policy.

Yet there is a difference between open and closed societies in how scientific and religious advice is sought and given.

In protecting the delicate balance between science, religion, and by default, politics, we must understand where all three are coming from.

We then form our opinions on that clear and undeniable conclusion that only science affords us!

Let the creationists put that in their pipe and smoke it.

After all it's better to have them smoke it, than to let them burn us at the stake!!!

Your "let that confuse you" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

No more egg on your face.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, now even you can learn how to cook.

As long as you know how to boil water, science has taken care of the rest for you.

The
“British Egg Information Service” has developed a new self-timing egg that tells you when it’s cooked — using heat-sensitive ink.


The egg has a heat-sensitive ink that displays only when the correct temperature is reached, meaning when your egg is done. The eggs come in hard-boiled, medium, or soft varieties, meaning you have to buy the kind you want or else the ink is useless.

Your "what will they think of next" scribe;
Allan W Janssen

Oh God

While I disagree with Dr. Richard Dawkins contention that there is no God period, and would rather take a more agnostic point of view, however, I do agree with a lot of what he has to say.

This is an exerpt from his book "The God Delusion," where he makes some valid and pointed arguments.

America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers.

The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds.

More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the 'Armageddon' that is to presage the Second Coming.

Sam Harris, in his new short book, Letter to a Christian Nation, hits the bull's-eye as usual:

"It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ...

Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious.

The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."

Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised?

My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare an emergency.

Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular Republics.

Science education - and hence the whole future of science in this country - is under threat.

Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the 'breathtaking inanity' (Judge John Jones's immortal phrase) of 'intelligent design' continually flares up in local bush-fires.

Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards.

Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to this threat from the American Taliban.

Dr. Richard Dawkins


Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html

Therapy for the Mind!

I just ran across an absolutely delightfull site call "Meme Therapy" which looks at the world and everything in it from a science fiction point of view.
You may think this is rather juvenile, but remember that most great dicoveries were foretold in science fiction stories.
As a matter of fact they often helped create these discoveries! All sorts of interesting topics are covered here by world renown scientists and academics and range from physics to cosmology to philosophy to theology to psychology to....... well you get the idea!

I will give you the web address here http://memetherapy.net/ Two comments I was very impressed with are here for your consideration!

The first is by an academic and writer named Steven Leigh who writes on the subject of "Should scientists criticize religion?"

I’m not a believer in any religion, but I find both science and religion utterly fascinating. I don’t find that there is necessarily an inconsistency between someone being a scientist while believing in a God or gods.

Science is a path to understanding this universe in which we live — whether I believe in God or not, that’s still a compelling quest.

Personally, I don’t see the need for a Creator-being who constructed it in the first place, but I can understand a scientist who does believe and who considers science as the tool-of-choice for examining the underpinnings of the world.

I don’t see any implicit disconnect there — the dichotomy comes when someone regards the ancient mythology of their religion as irrefutable ‘fact’ and refuses to accept any evidence science gives them.

This universe and this world don’t become any less beautiful or intriguing because we understand them better; neither should someone’s faith. In science, we explore the evidence and adjust our beliefs accordingly; religions should do the same.

If I were a believer, I’d be of the opinion that God left us this wonderful puzzle and gifted us with the intelligence to figure it out, and that we’re doing exactly what She wants in using science and logic to understand how it all fits together… because by understanding the world, we also come to understand Her.

But that’s my "perfect world," I know it’s not reality. I don’t feel that any scientist should be shy about stating their findings and presenting their evidence, even if it might ‘contradict’ someone’s cherished religious beliefs.

Next is a piece from an old freind of mine, Les Jenkins, who hosts the site stupidevilbastard.com and made these comments on: "What's the strangest thing you believe in?"

At first glance this question appears simple enough. I can think of many fascinating subjects I have read about over the years; nanotech, “gray goo”, 11-dimensional space, relativity, the possibility of time travel, quantum entanglement, wave particle duality, virtual reality.

There flows a never ending stream of ideas that wells up from the spring that is the Mind of Man.

I could have selected any item from this list, or more, and would have provided a reasonably interesting response. How does one choose from such a fantastical array of knowledge?

Technology can indeed appear strange or magical to one unfamiliar with a particular field of study. Some feel that medical wonders, from stem-cell research and genetic engineering to face transplants, are the definition of the word “strange”. Others may perceive the political and ideological mindset of their “enemies” to be the pinnacle of the eldritch.

But, to ask an atheist what he “believes” to be true introduces quite a different “texture” to the question posed. The meaning of the word “believe” may easily be misconstrued. I am often bewildered by the multiple usage of some words from the English language.

To some, “belief” is only given to that which has overwhelming evidence to support it, such evidence that there is no point to even use the word “believe”. Does one say: “I believe the sky is blue”? No. We say: “The sky is blue”. We can test this statement through many types of observation, experimentation, and verification. We know the sky is blue.

Some use the word “believe” in the same manner that they use the word “think”, e.g. “I believe I’ll have another beer!” - the two words are interchangeable here.

Then we come, of course, to the most common meaning of the word “believe”, that equivalent to “faith”; acceptance of a proposition without any need, or desire, for supporting evidence whatsoever.

I avoid the use of the words “believe” and “belief” because of their imprecise usage. There are, however, certain words I’ll use in spite of their misuse. For example, I have no qualms stating that I’m an “atheist” even though that word has been intentionally misused and demonized, perhaps since its inception. An atheist is simply one who does not believe.

To be an atheist one need only answer “no” to the question “Do you believe [in God(s)]?” No further assertion is made.

I prefer to use the verb “know” instead of “believe” and, like Great Lady Science, accept that knowledge can be transitory and must evolve as new evidence is discovered.
Ironically, my answer to the question “What is the strangest thing you know to be true?” would bring me back to the issue of faith.

The strangest thing I know of is the ability of the human mind to accept the most incredible of statements by the simple application of the magic word “faith”.

How is it that, in the 21st century, we still have people that believe the world is only 6000 years old in light of the evidence from various fields of science in support of its vastly older age? How can one ignore mounds of fossil evidence for the progression of evolution and only see the “gaps”.

What is it that allows the brilliant scientist who, otherwise, demands empirical data to advance his theories, to assert that there is a god when no one has presented any evidence to corroborate the existence of said deity?

Is it a mental blind spot, a type of intellectual laziness used to avoid investigating fully the reason one believes one fable over another?

This strange thing called faith intrigues me. I have studied several of the mythologies of various civilizations throughout history and I find the subject fascinating.

The majority of us appear to be so desperate for answers that we will accept any concept of reality that we are subjected to at an early age. We indoctrinate our children into a system of thought handed down by our progenitors and our children will usually teach their own children the same vision; the meme propagates.

The evolution of religion presents the prime example of this strange ability to close the mind to healthy skepticism and reason. I wonder if we have herein evidence for the existence of a parasitic meme, one that propagates from the pulpit and lives in symbiosis with those that hunger for its anesthetic affects.

I look forward to a future where such strange ideas as faith and belief have faded into obscurity and disrepute as have the gods of old. A future where the unknown is regarded as an opportunity, not an enemy to be feared and obscured by the blinders of myth.

Hope you found this as interesting as I did and if you would like to learn more about "religious meme's" go to the site for my book www.God-101.com "The Plain Truth about God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!)
Look up the chapter on meme's called "Thanks for the meme-ories!"

Your Entertaining Scribe;
Allan W Janssen