Godlorica

U.S. 4,866,863. Man receives patent for a religious shrine, in particular a miniature replica of the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem as described in the New Testament of the bible. In a modification, the top cover of the shrine can be raised by a mechanism activated by rolling the round stone at the entrance into an open position.

The authors of this technical paper argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a remarkable opportunity for the Creator of the universe to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. The medium for the Godly message is unique. They elaborate on this observation, noting that the message requires careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.

Read more: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510102

U.S. Patent 6,007,404: A soft-bodied doll bearing a resemblance to a caricature of Jesus. The doll includes a voice simulator for phrases from Jesus' ministry. A responsible adult can use the Jesus doll to teach young children about Jesus' historic life. The doll includes an actuator for the voice simulator contained within a body portion of doll which may be manually activated to speak one or more of these phrases. Separate voice simulators may be used with a switch permitting the supervising adult to transition the doll from use with a young child to one who is capable of understanding Jesus' teachings when the child's mental faculties dictate.

William James discusses the notion of human immortality in conjunction with theories of brain dynamics and the transmission of consciousness. James challenges the materialistic position of his day, namely, the positivistic belief that our brains are the source of consciousness. For James, the rays of consciousness infuse all forms of life and matter.An Infinite Mind lies buried in all phenomenal experience. This wider Consciousness is capable of holding all perspectives in of time and space.

Read more: http://godconsciousness.com/humanimmortality.php

Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? The author recalls asking one of his collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."

Read more: http://edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert05/gilbert05_index.html

Welcome to Godchecker - your Guide to the Gods. We have more Gods than you can shake a stick at. Godchecker's Mythology Encyclopedia currently features almost 2,700 deities.Browse the pantheons of the world, explore ancient myths, and discover Gods of everything from Fertility to Fluff with the fully searchable Holy Database Of All Known Gods.

Read more: http://www.godchecker.com/

Which religion do you feel is "closest to the truth"?

The presence of psychedelic mushroom illustrations in an Italian basilica indicates that some early Christian religious rites involved the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances facilitating mystic ecstasy. Were these ecstatic techniques a common heritage of all early Christian churches or were they practiced only within some heretic groups of Christians?

Read more: http://people.etnoteam.it/maiocchi/fabbro.htm

"The Bible tells us that God created all of the land animals on the sixth day of creation. As dinosaurs were land animals, they must have been made on this day, alongside Adam and Eve, who were also created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24-31)... The Bible makes it plain that dinosaurs and people must have lived together. Actually, as we will soon see, there is a lot of evidence for this."

Read more: http://www.answersingenesis.org/Docs/2.asp

Many years ago, I wrote a science-fiction story about an astronomer named Kalinda. While gazing out into space using a powerful telescope, she saw the most startling arrangement of stars beyond the constellation Canis Major. She immediately picked up her phone and called her friend, a Dr. Carl Sagan, for advice and counsel. Both Kalinda and Sagan were stumped by the peculiar arrangement.

What Kalinda discovered with her new, powerful telescope was a perfectly arranged array of stars in the shape of a cubical grid. About ten stars formed each edge of the cube.

To confirm her initial observations, she decided to use the Hubble Space Telescope’s camera to more clearly resolve the star grid, which was located some seven billion light years from Earth. Because peering at distant stars is like looking back in time, the images revealed a star grid that existed when the universe was 60 percent of its current age.

If our scientists today discovered such a grid of stars, how do you think it would affect society and current scientific thinking? Would the artifact have religions repercussions? How would you react? Image what a similar arrangement might have had on the writers of the Bible if the arrangement were visible to the naked eye.

"A group of children who were tested on death comprehension reflected on what it might be like to be dead with references to 'sleeping,' feeling 'peaceful,' or simply 'being very dizzy....' Younger children are more likely to attribute mental states to a a dead agent than are older children.... It seems that the default cognitive stance is reasoning that human minds are immortal..." -- Jesse Bering in John Brockman's "What We Believe But Cannot Prove"

Does it bother you that both the Jewish and Christian God and his righteous followers sometime seem to have exhibited cruelty from both a historical and Biblical context? For example, God told Saul to attack the Amalekites and destroy them completely -- "men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep...." God also tells us we must kill the disobedient child or the person who does not follow the Sabbath.

How do today's Protestants feel when they realize that Martin Luther said that the Jews are a "serpent's brood" and "one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them"? Why does St. Aquinas tell us we should kill people for errors in belief? Although the ten commandments forbid murder, the Old Testament appears to contain numerous murders by God or aided by God in which "innocent" women and children are killed. I discuss these matters further here, but how do you deal with such weighty and emotional topics?

If God is everywhere, then why is God so hard to perceive? One could imagine a God who would be more like a Chairman Mao or a Comrade Stalin. This God would have designed a universe with photographs of himself hung everywhere in nature. We would be compelled to believe in the existence of this God, because everywhere we turned with our microscopes, telescopes, and other devices, there would be both the evidence for his existence and of course also the secret police to enforce our acknowledgment.

Of course, science is yet to find an unequivocal "made by God" label attached to nature.

Read more:
http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article.asp?9284

The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and ‘descend’ on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind. The Watchers realize the implications of their transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.

One of their number, a leader named Azazel, is said to have "taught men to make swords. Other Watchers revealed to humans the knowledge of more scientific arts, such as astronomy. Far more disturbing is Kasdeja, who is said to have shown "the children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and demons, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it may pass away". In other words he taught women how to abort babies.

Read more:
http://ufo.whipnet.org/creation/fallen.race/index.html
(Similar stories at: http://www.pagenews.info)

God gives you the ability to change certain physical properties of your bedroom windows. As a result, you are able either to gaze out and watch biblical events as they actually happened, or gaze out and watch the world in the year 3000. Which do you choose?

What are to make of the God and religion of Gene Roddenberry, the legendary creator of Star Trek? He studied law, then switched to aeronautical engineering and trained as a pilot. In 1941 he volunteered for the US Army Air Corps, and won medals for bombing missions from Guadalcanal. After the war he became a pilot for Pan Am. After seeing television for the first time, he decided to become a TV writer, but when he found no openings, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department and rose to sergeant. He wrote TV scripts in his spare time, then went freelance.

Read more:
http://members.aol.com/heraklit1/startrek.htm

Stephen Jay Gould called science and religion "nonoverlapping magisteria," insisting that some things are properly matters of science and others are only considered as questions of faith. Archie Bunker did say one thing that SF-author Robert Sawyer agrees with: "You want to know what faith is? Faith is when you believe something nobody in their right mind would believe — that's what faith is!"

So Gould's dichotomy, filtered by Bunker's definition, leaves us with an untenable position: some questions are best answered by science, and other questions can only be addressed if you're willing to consider the irrational.

Sawyer flat-out rejects that. He's convinced that science is the only legitimate way of knowing. Not received wisdom from putative holy texts. Not mystical insight. Science.

Read more:
http://www.sfwriter.com/cgborder.htm

Woman writes paper titled "God and Calculus."

In the paper we find: "Calculus is one of the subjects being taught for higher mathematics in high schools and colleges. The purpose of this paper is to show how to use calculus in our relationship with God. I will employ parallelism and contrast to teach the values with the hope that through teaching calculus the teacher can bring his/her students closer to God."

Read more:
http://www.aiias.edu/ict/vol_27/27cc_225-239.htm

Consider two universes. Universe Omega is a universe in which God does not exist, but the inhabitants of the universe believe God exists. Universe Upsilon is a universe in which God does exist, but no inhabitant believes God exists. In which universe would you prefer to live? In which universe do you think most people would prefer to live?

Which depiction of Jesus Christ do you find more interesting? Which would you prefer to display on you living room wall?

Highway Christ in The Day by Dyala Janke
http://www.erowid.org/culture/show_image.php?i=art/artists_j/janke_dayla_highwaychristintheday.jpg

Jesus by Danny Gomez
http://www.erowid.org/culture/show_image.php?i=art/artists_g/gomez_danny_jesus.jpg

What was God doing before he created the world? The philosopher and writer (and later saint) Augustine posed the question in his "Confessions" in the fourth century, and then came up with a strikingly modern answer: before God created the world there was no time and thus no "before." To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there was no "then" then. Until recently no one could attend a lecture on astronomy and ask the modern version of Augustine's question -- "What happened before the Big Bang?" -- without receiving the same frustrating answer, courtesy of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how matter and energy bend space and time.

Read More:
http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/before_the_big_bang_there_was__.htm

"One of the reasons why religions seem irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen." -- Karen Armstrong, A History of God

Do you like this quote and find it to be meaningful?

The Yezidi people of a small Middle Eastern religion worship a pre-Islamic peacock god with links to Mithraism and Zoroastrianism. Peacock gods are everywhere.

Read more:

http://www.ziarah.net/peacock.html
http://tinyurl.com/d9hsz
http://www.sohailagallery.com/peacock.html

Stare at the three dots in the center of the image (below) for 30 seconds then focus on the white space to the right. While staring at the white space, blink a few times. What do you see? Many see a startling, lifelike, and detailed image of Jesus.

The Religious Life of an Animated Sitcom. In this article, historian Dr. Gerry Bowler catalogues reference to God and religion in the Simpsons. The Simpsons is a cartoon satire that disarms the viewer and encourages a slightly askew but ultimately clearer look at the world. Despite the show's continued popularity critics have been many, particularly among the religious. Presidents seeking to court the religious right, preachers from their pulpits and defenders of traditional family values have all attacked The Simpsons. The author examines how God and religion are treated on the show and why the reputation of the show amongst the faithful is so poor.

Read more:
http://www.snpp.com/other/papers/gb.paper.html

A scientist has calculated that there is a 67% chance that God exists. Dr Stephen Unwin has used a 200-year-old formula to calculate the probability of the existence of an omnipotent being. Bayes' Theory is usually used to work out the likelihood of events, such as nuclear power failure, by balancing the various factors that could affect a situation.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1164894,00.html

In an attempt to resolve any disagreement surrounding the meaning of the word "God," a team of "metaphysical engineers" have devised a new computer-modelling virtual environment in which to test the plausibility of different conceptions of God.

Here's how it works. You are invited to select attributes that you believe God must have. Metaphysical engineers will then model this conception of God to check out its plausibility.

Read more:
http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/whatisgod.htm

"Gwen Tighe thought her child was Jesus. Temporal lobe epilepsy unites us with God"

Controversial new research suggests that whether we believe in a God may not just be a matter of free will. Scientists now believe there may be physical differences in the brains of ardent believers. Inspiration for this work has come from a group of patients who have a brain disorder called temporal lobe epilepsy. In a minority of patients, this condition induces bizarre religious hallucinations - something that patient Rudi Affolter has experienced vividly.

Read more:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2865009.stm

A few days ago in Godlorica, we discussed the "Bridegroom of Blood" story -- the most mysterious tale in the Bible. The second most enigmatic story deals with the Nephilim in Genesis 6:1-4. In Genesis 6:2 we find that the "sons of God saw that daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose." Scholars speculate that the "sons of god" might have been angels who took wives from the daughters of humans. The offspring of these angel-human marriages, were the Nephilim, the "heros that were of old, warriors of renown." The Nephilim are mentioned only once again in the Hebrew scriptures, and the word also literally translates to "the fallen ones." The Nephilim had superhuman powers. Notice that they should have been destroyed in the great Flood, but we do find them in Canaan during the time of Moses, according to the book of Numbers.

Some have speculated that the strange Biblical reference to Nephilim may represent a deep, past, collective memory of the time when Neanderthals coexisted with Homo sapiens. We know that Neanderthals inhabited Europe and the Middle East during the late Pleistocene Epoch, about 100,000 to 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthals were the first hominids to intentionally bury their dead, and they had larger brain cases than modern humans. Examination of skeletal remains indicates that Neanderthals were a physically powerful and war-scarred race. While controversial, some researchers suggest that the Nephilim might refer to either Neanderthals or strongly muscled but possibly sterile hybrids produced by the mating of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Even today, scientists do not fully understand the Neanderthal's evolutionary origin and final fading from the world scene.

Artistic renditions of God and His prophets range from beautiful to haunting to downright scary. Are images of God meant to uplift the spirit or inspire a sense of awe? When does an artist cross the realm from terror into horror? See for example the following works:

Mary and the Seven Sorrows:
http://georgekrause.com/santos/1.htm
Jesus Christ:
http://georgekrause.com/santos/6.htm

What interesting images of God or other higher beings have you found on the web?

What is the desired reaction of an author who asks a question, "Was Jehovah a praying mantis being?" Joe Lewels is not kidding. He frames his question in a context of mysteries about why God would not reveal his frightening countenance to his chosen ones like Moses. He points out that a sect called the Mandaeans believed that the physical world was created and ruled over by a Lord of Darkness variously known as Snake, Dragon, Monster, and Giant.

Read more:
http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v07/n05/graying-mantis.html