Wednesday, November 30, 2005
A question from God
You may share your answer by selecting the "comments" link below.
The Bridegroom of Blood
"On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met Moses and tried to kill him. But Zipporah, his wife, took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and touched his feet with it, and said 'Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!' So he let him alone. It was then she said, 'A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.'"
Whom is God trying to kill? Why? What is a "bridegroom of blood?" Biblical scholar and author Kenneth Davis suggests that circumcision was believed to ward off demonic attack. Because Moses was presumably not circumcised, the smearing of the blood on him may have protected him as well. Others suggest that Moses' wife wasn't fond of the Hebrew rite of circumcision and had resisted it. This passage might have referred to Moses contacting an incapacitating disease that almost killed him, leaving his wife to do what was necessary. One scholar says that this episode is so difficult to understand because the biblical narrator no longer knew its real meaning. It seems to be a fragment of a once independent tradition and exhibits archaic features, such as representing Yahweh as a kind of hostile night demon, and the use of a flint knife for circumcision.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
A question from God
You may share your answer by selecting the "comments" link below.
Patent application for "Resurrection burial tomb"
Here is Figure 22 from the patent application:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/muscle-robot.jpg
Read more:
http://tinyurl.com/9q8bf
A skeptic's view of God
Read more:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert05/gilbert05_index.html
Could God be detected by gravitational waves?
Read more:
http://tinyurl.com/8ruh3
Monday, November 28, 2005
God's Debris: free e-book
Why is it Free? Frankly, this is the hardest book in the world to market. When it first came out in hardcover, booksellers couldn’t decide if it was fiction or nonfiction. Was it philosophy or religion? It’s a religion/science book written by a cartoonist, using hypnosis techniques in the writing. It’s a thought experiment. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever read. How do you sell something that can’t be explained? Imagine that you meet a very old man who knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense.
Read More:
http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/
Building a universe that doesn't fall apart
My theory is this: time is not real.... Despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.... [There is] internal evidence that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change... and we can cut through to it.... Thousands of years pass, but the world of the Bible is concealed beneath it, still there and still real.
To Dick, the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing but usually hidden from our sight. Although Dick realizes that modern scientists would scoff at his seemingly insane assertions, he promotes his odd world view as a useful metaphor for the difficulties human have when trying to comprehend reality. Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself."
Read more:
http://tinyurl.com/8jsrj
Mysterious entity: "The Aphex Face"
Researcher discovers "The Aphex Face," a mysterious entity, in a spectrograph (visualization of the sound spectrum)....
For several years, people have wondered about the mystical significance of the "Aphex Face," a haunting image found in an acoustical analysis of sound. Some called it a "hidden demon face" and gave it a religious significance. Others said it was somehow intentionally embedded in the sound as a prank. You can see the face for yourself here:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/aphex_face.jpg
And you can read about the explanation for the face here:
http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Patent for game that models heaven and hell
20050212207
Edward Gilhooly patents a "game board apparatus" having a game board horizontally divided into two sectors representing heaven and hell. The start position is at the bottom of the hell and the finish winning position is situated at the top of the heaven. The players use playing pieces to traverse spaces in the heaven and hell sectors, the amount of advancement being dictated by indicia provided on decks of question cards and answer cards.
Read more:
http://tinyurl.com/dbkk5
Do space aliens have souls?
Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world. But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan of salvation? Curious Catholics need not be space buffs to want answers to these questions and others when they pick up a 48-page booklet by a Vatican astronomer.
Read more:
Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service, Vatican City
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0506301.htm
On the Fast Track to "The Rapture"
Increasing natural disasters are raising the rapture index, leading some Christians to believe the Second Coming is near. Whether you see earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis as natural disasters or acts of God, this has been a bad year for the world and a good one for the rapture index. The index, a feature on the Web site http://www.raptureready.com/, is a measure of how quickly the world is careening toward the Second Coming of Christ. On a good day, it claims 15,000 hits.
Read more:Nancy Haught, Religion News Service
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/178/story_17894_1.html
Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study
Read more:
http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/ark/index.htm
Intelligent Design
Read more:
http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html
Dreams and the Near-Death Experience
Mellen-Thomas Benedict has some wonderful insights about dreams and the near-death experience he had. He states, "When I recovered, I was very surprised and yet very awed about what had happened to me. At first all the memory of the trip that I have now was not there. I kept slipping out of this world and kept asking, "Am I alive?" This world seemed more like a dream than that one. Within three days, I was feeling normal again, clearer, yet different than I had ever felt in my life. My memory of the journey came back later ... What happens when we dream? We are multi-dimensional beings. We can access that through lucid dreaming. In fact, this universe is God's dream.
Read more :
http://www.near-death.com/dreams.html