mitchellmckain

Obviously I agree with Jeigh that there is no reason to say that marriage has improved, yet I would like to share organicbmx's optimism that some improvements may lead to a better intitution in the future.Actually there is a lot of advantages to arranged marriage. It avoids all the market characteristics of the dating game with false advertising and the attitude of consumer dissatisfaction. Unconditional love has to play some role in marriage for it to work because people, all of them, have their flaws. Yet unless people participate completely 100% voluntarily the abuses possible in arranged marriage are quite horrific. Of course like many comparisons of cultural forms this exchanges some difficulties for others. Besides, this kind of voluntary arranged marriage was tried in Rev. Moon's Unification church and the success rate has not proven to be much better than the norm outside the Unification church.

Obviously you are right. Marriage is not just about children and you are right that the real issue of gay marriage is about who has the right to be married and obviously the ability to have children cannot be the determining factor. As for birth control, I would not dream to dictate such a personal matters to other people and I am utterly appalled at U.S. interference in the the birth control measures of other countries. But it is true that me and my wife have not practiced any artificial means of birth control. I am Christian but not Catholic and although I admire the Catholic church in many many things I find this particular attitude of the Catholic church to be a bit obnoxious and an anathema, but I would defend their right to believe it with my life. To tell the truth my post was an attempt dig beneath and understand my own feelings about gay marriage and I agree that it is one sided or "flawed" as you say for you have made many good points. Obviously it is more about my own ideal of marriage which may be too far from any practical reality and more importantly too much idealization and not facing reality can be as much of a destroyer of marriage as anything which I mentioned in my first post. As I said before, I don't care what other people do behind closed doors or even what they choose to call the themselves but unfortunately things are not quite so simple. There are a great many people out their who feel that they have the right to dictate what you can believe and want to legislate it. How would you feel, if in the process of pursuing your career and you were asked to take a test and if that test determined that you did not think that gay marriage was right or that homosexuality was a choice rather than fixed at birth, and because of that you were denied any advancement of your career? Sound wild? Well surprise because they have already been doing this sort of thing in California. I can hardly fault your caution because this topic has blown up in my face before in other forums. It is not an easy topic to discuss rationally between the extreme points of view on the issue.

This is topic may be too hot to handle. It deals with things which are very personal and so it has a tendency to offend people. And yet if we cannot discuss it then what are our alternatives to calling names and violence? I want everyone to recognize that people really have different views on this topic and ask people to keep it impersonal as you can. Share your views but don't call each other names.I definitely think that any group of people should have the right to be a family and get legal recognition for that status. But marriage.....I think marriage is about children. Perhaps in our self centered, sex obsessed society, this has changed or been forgotten. Marriage has become about satisfaction with ones sexual partner and children are just complications. And that is what has destroyed marriage. But that means that homosexual marriage is symptom of this destruction. It is only because this is what we have made marriage into, that it just seems natural that homosexuals should have the same right to this degraded institution as heterosexuals.I know that those in favor of homosexual marriage want to argue that homosexual couples can adopt children and thus there is no difference from couples bearing children. But I think this is rhetoric and nonsense. Single people can adopt children too, so I don't buy this argument and I don't see that adoption makes homosexual couples equivalent.With birth control and abortion, parenthood has changed from a lifestyle commitment to a choice much like buying a car and as such it is difficult to see any difference from adoption. But that does not really mean that they are equivalent. Adopted children often go looking for their birth mother and father, because the relationship between parent and child is more than just who raised you. And the opposite is true as well. Adopted children often feel deprived by the fact that their biological parents and those who raised them are not the same. The fact is, that adoption is not ideal but is making the best of a bad situation.So, I think marriage should still be about the lifestyle of parenthood - the commitment to be ready to take care of and raise the children that are concieved and born in the relationship between a man and a woman. And so I think that if homosexual couples want a piece of the degraded institution that is all about self satisfaction then perhaps we should call it something else. Just a suggestion, because I really don't know what to do about this. As I said, the real tragedy is already a forgone conclusion.I have been asked many times if I think that anything is wrong with homosexuality and my answer is always the same. I don't think that there is anything more wrong with homosexuality than there is with heterosexuality. But that is because I frankly dont think much of either one. I find the whole idea of sexual preference to be offensive. The dating game has become a marketplace full of all the deceptive advertising and customer disatisfaction that we find in the consumer market. Sexual preference, whether is it a choice between blonde and brunette or a choice between male and female treats people like product or produce and sounds just like a choice of ones favorite type of food or flavor of ice cream. To this nonsense about some people being born different I say that I too was born different because I cannot stand broccoli. The point is that I think homosexuality is just a symptom of the way our society has become self centered and obsessed with self satisfaction.Look I don't think we can legislate morality without destroying religious freedom. The fact is that the belief that homosexuality is wrong or a sin is primarily a religious belief and forcing that on everyone would be a violation of religious freedom. So the rights of people who practice homosexuality should be protected by the same laws which protect religious freedom. But if sexual preference is going to be given a status equal to sex and race then it is only fair that I get the same protections for my preference for zucchini over broccoli. I cannot help the fact that I love zucchini and cannot force myself to eat broccoli, I was born that way.

The persistent poetry of a poster in another forum finally prompted by to respond likewise, and although I claim no talent for poetry at all, here it is.I do not know, that I accept. And so I live my life on faith. By imagination I explore possibilities, using reason to discern and clarify, choosing to believe what makes sense, judging by consistency with what I see, and hear and feel, rejecting nothing, seeking balance and wholeness, of life and being and self. My mind and senses experience otherness. And so I believe in others like myself, like separate universes which I can visit. But there is otherness larger than the rest, embracing all of my world and life, closer, yet too big to see fully, making sense out of my senseless life, finding balance and wholeness, of life and being and self.

If you have any kind of email volume why limit yourself to just one. That way you or your contacts can work around any limitations of one of them by using another. I use hotmail, yahoo and gmail, in addition to the one that comes with my internet connection. But I have an automatic preference for gmail when I want to send email to someone, but I do not give this address out quite as often, except to people I really trust.

Actually the sun produces positrons as part of its main reaction in the center. In order to change Hydrogen into Helium, it has to change two protons into neutrons. The positrons are what carry off the positive charge. It is just that these positrons are not likely to make it out of the sun. Instead they soon run into an electron and annihilate to produce photon(s) (most likely). Actually this is excessively optimistic. In fact, the efficiency cannot exceed 50% for the simple reason that for every particle of antimatter produced you have to produce a particle of matter. But I doubt the efficiency is anywhere near as high as 1%, which means you need at least 100 times as much energy to produce an anti-matter equivalent. They cancel each other out all right to convert the mass of both into the equivalent quantity of energy in some other form usually photons (radiation) according to the formula E=mc^2, which is a lot of energy. This happens because matter (and anti-matter) is an especially concentrated form of energy. But if the solar system was made of antimatter, the only difference besides calling matter, anti-matter and visa versa, is that we would probably be mirror images switching right and left, and switching clockwise and counterclockwise in all things. Yes but what you are probably unaware of is that a collision of two objects traveling toward each other at near the speed of light (86.6% of the speed of light) would be just as catastrophic in the sense that it would produce the same amount of energy as if one was matter and the other antimater (but traveling very slowly). Of course the details would be different. The antimatter explosion would be more likely to produce deadly life killing radiation but any such collision of objects (big enough to notice) within our solar system would vaporize all the planets anyway. However because of the radiation a much smaller quantity of matter/antimatter annihilation would spell our doom. But then at higher speeds the collisions of normal matter can produce a lot more energy. For example two object traveling toward each other at 98% of the speed of light would produce an explostion 5 time greater (5 times as much energy) as the collision between matter and antimatter at slow speed. This is because at such high speeds the kinetic energy (energy of motion) exceeds the mass energy of the objects by 5 times. This is, in fact, how scientists create antimatter in particle accelerators (atom smashers). Which suggests that the high velocity collision between normal matter objects is not as different from matter-antimatter low velocity collisions as I thought.

I recently put my internet connection through a Linksys router to give internet access to the laptops in the house. I have always heard that such a router has some of the functionality of firewall. So I was wondering if anyone can give me more details.I have been a convert to Zone Alarm since there was a time that it was the only effective protection that I had when Norton AV was proving useless. I have since then adopted Avast AV and SB tea timer and have been impressed with their performance as well (I also tried process-guard but as a programmer it proved to be too much of a nuisance). But Zone Alarm has been interfering with work related software (and with the communication with the router) and has started to become a nuisance as I constantly have to disable it all the time.I can see some of security features of the router and differences from Zone Alarm, I am just not sure I understand what it all means or if I really grasp the big picture in relation what threats are really out there. On the router, I see the option to block Anonymoust Internet requests, filter and some other things. There is also options to block various types of protocols for VPN. I hesitate to be too specific. I certainly do not see the kind of program control I see in Zone Alarm.So I guess the real question is, what are the relative importance of these differences in regard to the types of non-target oriented threats (I don't anticipate having enemies) found on the internet.

There is only one God there and the main thing which changed is not God but mankind. It is well known that the liar assumes that everyone is lying and the treacherous see treachery every where they look. But not only has the perception of mankind changed but also the effective means of communicating with and motivating mankind has changed as well. There is no doubt that God comes down off His high horse to speak to us where we are at, for if He did not He would not get anywhere with us, ever. This was precisely where Jesus deviated from the teachings of the Jewish rabbinal tradition (the Pharisees). He was willing to go where the sinners were and speak to them in a way they could understand. The Pharisees reviled Him for this, and you are no different. You make ignorant judgements from a moral high ground about a world of which you have no experience or comprehension, to condemn what is absolutely good and pure. Two thousand years ago you who have shouted "Crucify him", because all of your morality and self-righteousness is based on ignorance and self-deception, just like the Pharisees. I am a Christian, but obviously I am no fundamentalist to believe that the Bible is the only source of truth or that its interpretation is obvious. I still believe that the Bible is the word of God, but obviously it was written by human beings doing His will. So the intruments in this were human beings of the age in which it was written and they could only write it in the language which they knew, within which was contained their culture and their way of looking at the world, by which the language itself was limited and constrained. If we have learned to see more clearly since the time it was written then we have the ability to see past the cultural limitations of the writers to the message that God put there for us. And so the Bible remains the word of God for all to receive if we but have the will to read and the desire to understand. I am also no Calvinist to believe that all is fixed and changeless. I do not believe that God as well as men are determined by their natures. God exists both outside of space-time and within it, and His presence within time is capable of everything that a man is capable of including change, learning, risk, sacrifice and self-limitation. God has no limits except those which He Himself chooses. He CAN make a rock so heavy that even He cannot lift it. For in creating the rock, His decision that the rock shall be immovable is equivalent to deciding that He will never move the rock, and having decided this He requires nothing to force Himself to abide by His own decision and as the creator of the rock His decision become a law of the nature of the rock. All of this is, of course, within space-time for otherwise talk of moving a rock makes no sense. Thus God is ruled by His will and not by His nature. So God can change within time as He wills, but as I said before what has changed is primarily man and not God. Also being outside of time, in the end He has not become or learned anything which He was not or did not know already at the beginning. There is only one God, but He is infinite, and therefore there is no contradiction in knowing Him as three different and distinct persons, but this is NOT the reason for the change you perceive in the Bible in going from the Old Testament to the New.

There are 3 basic ways that black holes are detected. The most common is by the energy released as they devour matter drawn off of a star in close binary orbit. Capable of transforming this 40% of this matter into pure energy these things can be as source of very high radiation. Next is by the effect they have on the orbits of bodies or material around it. The orbit reveals the mass and if the mass is large enough then a black hole is the onlything it can be. The third and least likely method is by the distortion of the light from objects behind it. There are extremely large black holes in the center of most (if not all) galaxies and globular star clusters.

Full article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925423-600-three-cosmic-enigmas-one-audacious-answer/ ://http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Exciting perhaps but far fetched this has a long way to go before being accepted in the scientific community, especially considering the amount of work done on the theory of black holes. The following comment, also troubles me. This may just be bad journalism but it seriously makes me question the believablity of the whole article, because there is no contradiction or paradox in this effect. This is a purely optical effect and the object would actually redshift and fade from view (as the photons reaching you from the object quickly become less frequent) at the same time. The actual event (during which you would supposedly see such slowing down) occurs so fast that all you are really going to see is the object vanish. So what descriptions like the one above about the object "frozen on in time" at the edge of the black hole, really means, is that it is theoretically still possible after thousands of years to detect a photon arriving from that object before entering the black hole, just because it may take some photons that long to escape from the gravity of the black hole. The gravitational time dilation has the opposite of this optical effect. Gravitational time dilation will only exacerbate the time dilation likely to be experienced due to velocity. It is extremely difficult to enter a black hole slowly (by which I mean at non-relativistic speeds). What the time dilation means is that the clocks on an object approaching the black hole will slow down according to a distant observer. This does not mean that the object will slow down. Instead it means that the person on the object with the clock will experience an even shorter ride than the already extremely short ride he could expect otherwise (without the time dilation). Just as a person traveling to another star at relatistic speeds experiences a shorter trip than the people watching from earth. I have done simulations of trying to oribit a black hole or pass near a black hole and the everything happens so quickly that I have to have the simulation automatically slow down the time scale by a factor of millions in order to see anything at all. And that is even without the gravitational time dilation which will make it worse. Part of the difficulty is that these objects are so small. One with the mass of our sun would be only 6 kilometers across. Although there are bigger black holes, the bigger ones would be no easier to see than the small ones because proportionately higher gravity. If you are close enough to a black hole there is most definitely something to see because of the distortion of light around it, including a second image of everything in the sky in a ring around the black hole (called an Einstein ring). Actually there are an infinite number of such images in concentric rings but the others are too small to see with your eye. BUT if you are close enough to see anything like this, you don't really have any time to see anything at all.

I would like to point out that cannibalism is not any kind solution for the problem of growing population and diminishing resources. We would do better, objective speaking, just killing off the excess population and using them for fertilizer. NOT, that I am in any way in favor of such a thing.Human meat, while nutritious (everything the body needs, ha ha), is not a very healthy food due to the concentrations of poisons. With the amount of drugs we feed to livestock the concentration of poisons in their meat is bad enough. But the shere diversity of drugs people put into themselves combined with the length of life would make human meat far more toxic.On the other hand poisoning ourselves in this way may help reduce the population problem in the long run.

The Harry Potter books are hard to beat, enjoyable for adults as well as children. I have read them all at least twice. BUT, I think the "Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" and the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia will make better movies for one simple reason. The Harry Potter books are too long. There is just too much stuff to put in the movies and it makes them jumpy, which is why I voted for the first movie as the best. It was the smallest book. I must admit however that the Goblet of Fire was much better than the Prizoner of Azkaban and although huge portions had to be skipped it did not feel quite as jumpy as I had feared. On the other had a friend who had not read the book felt that the even the gaps in this movie made it hard to understand what was going on.The Chronicles of Narnia are much much shorter and give the film makers the freedom to add their own creative detail. I was delighted to see them add the scene of the bombing of London to the movie "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe," which was not in the book, but made perfect sense since that is in fact where the story really begins. I really cannot wait for my favorite "The Magician's Nephew" which takes place in three different worlds.

Surely you could pose this question as a slightly more difficult moral dilemna, such as the survivors of a plane crash on a barren snowy wateland.... Or in fact there is a related and timely moral question regarding organ transplants. This seems to me to be the moral equivalent of cannabalism. It turns people into meat and creates situations where people can be preyed upon for the purpose of selling their internal organs or even the situation where people may sell their own internal organs. I would be tempted to call all organ transplants cannibalism and bann it except for that fact that it would change nothing and may even make the problem worse. Now that the technique exists, there will be people willing to break whatever laws that may exist for the right price. So all that I can say is that for me personally it seems to be an excessive moral price for life let alone for something that is not even life threatening. But that does not mean that I would ever judge anyone who does, as long as the law is strictly followed. On the other hand, anyone who buys or sells human organs illegally should be exterminated like the vermin I think they are. Don't be silly. Bush is one of the cannibals. He doesn't mind spending human lifes for his own profit. If the human race falls that far due to his greed and stupidity, cannabalism will only afflict the poor not the fat cats like Bush. Doing a French revolution kind of thing and eating the fat cats is a far worse senario and one I have no wish to see.

Notice how people come along and say things like "its all about power"? Ever seen the movie "Donnie Darko"? If you haven't, you have got to! Anyway in the movie there is this pseuo-religious group that reduce all of human experience into a spectrum ranging from fear to love. I think the reduction of human activity to the quest for power is just as ridiculous, a lot like Marx's reduction of human activity to economics. One can with equal absurdity reduce everything to just about any facet of human experience like parenting, education, communication, sharing, sex (Freud), ecetera.... There is always a two bit ideological group putting forth a flattening of human experience into a simple line that can fit into their little minds. My favorite is entertainment. No one cares if what you do is right or wrong as long as it has enertainment value. All of science, politics and culture derives from human efforts to combat boredom. Or how about this one: All of human society and culture ultimately derives from the human males' effort to make himself feel more important because of an innate feeling of inferiority. "What about females? Are they immune to this?" Being male myself, I wouldn't presume to speak for females. But while the females have the babies and feed them, the males have to do something to seem useful and make the females take notice of them. If the really useful stuff like food or jobs are in scarce supply then they have to think up a good "story" to take their place. But for pete's sake don't take this theory too seriously. After all it was introduced as an example of how we can oversimplify our perception of things, and no matter how profound the such a perspective may be it is still oversimplifying. (As a matter of fact: I hate stereotypes and spend just much time feeding my baby son as my wife does) Generalizations are as reliable as politicians and you can ignore them most of the time but that doesn't make them any less real or any less annoying.

Well I think this thread has proved my point that many people put more faith in science fiction than in science. Many people do not even bother understanding what limitations are implied by the theory of relativity before they are looking for some crazy way to get past the speed of light. Relativity does not restrict our ability to travel long distances in space. You can go accross the galaxy (100,000 light years) in as short a time as you like provided you can supply the enormous energy required and endure the tremendous acceleration. HOWEVER, if we restrict ourselves to reasonable accelerations and energy then it will take a few years to get anywhere (like the nearest star 4 light years away) just because it takes a couple years just to get near the speed of light at a reasonable acceleration (1 g = 9.8 m/s^2), but once this is done we can cross large distances fairly quickly.4 light years will take about 4 years on board ship10 light years will take about 6.5 years on board ship100 light years will take about 19 years on board ship1000 light years will take about 62 years on board shipSince there are over a hundred stars known to be within 20 light years, a 10 year trip can get us to many destinations. And if we can manage higher accelerations we can cut these times down tremendously. For example at four times the acceleration 39.2 m/s^2 we cut these times in half. But anyway the problems here are with engineering not with relativity!What relativity does mean for interstellar travel is that it is basically a one-way trip, in the sense that you cannot come back in time for dinner, or even for your friend's next birthday. Although you can get where you are going pretty fast, time passes much faster for those you leave behind. during the 4 light year trip about 6 years will pass on earthduring the 10 light year trip about 12 years will pass on earthduring the 100 light year trip about 102 years will pass on earthduring the 1000 light year trip about 1002 years will pass on earthRelativity isolates the locations from one another so that what happens at one location cannot effect another location for a long time. This makes things like government and trade very difficult and unlikely over inter-stellar distances. This rules out star trek and star wars but not interstellar travel.

Man do I agree with you. I am a born again Christian but this is another issue on which I have a parting of ways with my bretheren. I believe that learning to think for oneself and make well balance decisions for your own life is a much more important thing to teach your children than trying to insure that your children make the "right" choice. It is why the fact that me and my wife belong to different religions does not bother me, or even the fact that my wife takes the children to her church. I think a wide exposure to different points of view can only help my sons make better and more informed choices of their own.

I am not opposed in principle to the teaching of religion in school. It is an important part of human life and I am all in favor of children being more informed so that they can make their own decisions regarding it. But obviously this will never happen in the public schools, because there are far too many fanatical opinions in regards to religion and until different churches and religion can at least recognize the value of each other, then there obviously can be no official place for it in the public schools. Otherwise it is inevitable that this will just be used by the dominant religion in the area to supress religious freedom by putting pressure on students in favor of their religion. As a direct consequence "Creation science" or "Intellegent design" has no place in the schools because it is religion and not science. I don't think science is everything, in fact, science looks at the world in a very restricted fashion, and people who try to make it the answer to everything are making a religion out of science, and when they do that they aren't doing science any more than the Creation scientists are doing science. Both are rhetoric, and confusing rhetoric with science is something to which I am very opposed. I am not saying that none of the research involved is valid, although its use in the rhetoric of "Creation science" is not making any of this easy to recognize as such. But Christian churches and organizations have to butt out of science and to drop the pretense that their conclusions are in anyway scientific. That won't get them their ridiculous political agenda which amounts to intolerance of science. But truth be told I think this all derives from Christian laziness and complacency. They want to railroad their children into a Christian way of life rather than make the effort required to make their case with their children in a free thinking environment. Frankly, I think that if they cannot make the case of their Christian way of life to their children, it is because their life is only superficially Christian anyway. A superficially Christian life like this is a lie and a deceit and the children won't won't buy it because they are too close the parents to be fooled. The reaction of fundamentalist christians against science is a tragedy. And it is a reflection of the tendency of Western society (espcially the U.S.) to seek simple-minded solutions to everything. The result is that our society swings to one extreme and then another, when these simple-minded solutions fail. However, the current dangerous and frightening swing to the right that we are currently suffering (in the US) is the natural consequence of the simple-minded solution of liberals to trash and dismiss every tradition of our past without any attempt at compromise with a large portion of our population. If we do not learn again to compromise as we once were able in the past then the US will fall as these swings to extremes eventually tear the democracy (which is far more fragile than most imagine) apart. No one thought that a maniac like Hitler could gain power in Germany, but he did in just the kind of right wing swing that the US is now experiencing.

It is simple enough. The were verifying E=mc^2 in the absorption of a neutron by an atomic nucleus which creates an atom of a different atomic element.The mass of the new atom is less than the mass of the old atom plus the mass of the neutron, so the difference in mass must be released by the atom in the form of high energy light (gamma ray radiation). By measuring the energy of this light they can veryfy that it is exactly equal to the difference in mass times the speed of light squared.

My vision of life after death is based on three fundamental principles in which I believe. The first is the rule of natural law. Just like there are natural laws in the physical world, I think there are natural laws in the spiritual world. I just don't think the whole idea of the judgement of God holds up very well. The second is that I do not think that our responsibilites in life can be escaped so easily. I do not think truth will be revealed at death, I think it will be even harder to find. I do not think the barriers between people built or accepted in life will vanish after death but that they will be even harder to overcome. The third is that I think that life is a preparation for our life after death. I think that death is a bit like birth. Where we suddenly find ourselves in a much bigger world, where many things which we have taken for granted are no longer automatically supplied, but require abilities which we are supposed to have developed in this world. I mean for example, the common reality and connections with other people that are automatically supplied by the physical laws of space and time. I think these automatic connection will not exist and that we may easily find ourselves completely alone, even though it may take some time to realize it, if we ever do.So what are these abilities that we are deviloping in this world? Well I think that life is all about the choices we make and that these choices are the essence of our spiritual existence or soul. So I think it is the ability to make choices -- effective choices, that will determine whether we can make it in spiritual world. Do we make choices for greater life (enriching the life of others) or do we choose death (destroying and devastating the lives of others). Choosing life is not always completely obvious. There are subtleties which require a deeper understanding of the nature of life. For example, responsibility is an important aspect of the nature of life. Do we choose to be alone or with other people? Again we may think it is an obvious choice, but do we accept people for who they are and try to fit ourself into their lives, or do we try to fit them into our life? I am afraid, that the second is really choosing to be alone.I think life after death is our dreams come true. Sound nice? I don't think so. The question is, what are our dreams. Do we really think that we know what will bring us happiness, any more than child does? We may think so. But in my experience, people are so deluded, so full of self-deceptions, that the truth is they haven't a clue. I think that just given three wishes in life we are most likely to mess up our lives completely. Often the more freedom and control we have over our lives, just provides more rope with which we can hang ourselves.I think the real difference between heaven and hell is a very simple one. It is all a matter of whether we manage to get help. Help from the one source, directly or indirectly, whose help will do us any good in the long run. We need help from the one source that knows us better than we know ourselves, who knows what choices will bring us happiness. Oh! I bet you are thinking, "just great, all I need is someone making choices for me." But, .... We are used to choosing favorite colors and ice cream flavors.... We are used to choices in small doses which we can manage. We are use to making choices which have insignificant consequences. I think we have no idea of the enormity and scope of critical choices that face us after death and that when we do, it will make our life experience of choosing nearly insignificant. Also, I don't think it will be like a quiz we have to take. Everything we do will be choices without even realizing it. In life we are used to making choices all the time that have so little consequence, that I fear we are not really prepared to be faced with a situation where every choice we make every few seconds is a matter of our eternal life and death?Without help I am afraid we will all be like many different stones on different parabolic paths under a relentless downward acceleration. Those who have made better choices in life will just start out looking good with an upward velocity. But ultimately we are all our own worst enemy and our choices will eventually lead us to dark places, just as all the stones end up in the same place.

I think that in healthy development we come to love our "self", then the idea that this "self" might just disappear becomes frightening. I remember this experience from childhood. It was almost like a falling sensation, almost as if the ground upon which we stand had disappeared. I also think as we grow we slowly learn to look into the future and to prepare ourselves. But when we understand death this becomes a stumbling block. How can we prepare for what cannot see. In this second idea we see a great similarity between the fear of death and the fear of the dark. I think we overcome the fear of the dark when our sense of reality becomes stronger. We have faith that the familiar things are still there around us and we even learn to see them with our minds "eye". Many people deal with the fear of death in the same way, adopting a faith in and seeing a vision of existence beyond death for which they can prepare. But others accept the idea of no existence after death and realize therefore that no preparation is needed. But then how do we deal with this idea of the disappearance of self? Well, I really think this happens for many people when the love of self is superceded by a love for something else. Often the infatuation and attachment to the "self" diminishes with time, and the "self" just doesn't seem so all important any more. Perhaps, however, the most important thing which reduces our fear of death is simply acceptance. When we accept that death really is inevitable and there really is nothing we can do to change that fact, then we can profitably turn our attention to things where what we do can make a differnence. When we truly accept that death is unavoidable then we realize that worrying about the possiblity of non-existence is pointless; what will come, will come. Sometimes we even come to realize that the possiblity of nonexistence is not so bad, but actually comforting. In this case, the realization that non-exsitence may not be counted on (for we really do not know what will happen after death) may become an abstract sort of fear. In this case the blank and unknowable wall of death makes a respectful fear of what may come after death a bit difficult, for at that point it has become hard to fear something which we cannot see.

Well good, I am glad to here this. Wanting to die or not accepting the fact that you have to die would both be good reasons for us to suggest counseling. The question here is what are your expectations or hopes for after death? Do you expect non-existence? Do you expect or prefer some type of existence after death? Do you fear non-existence after death or do you fear something worse? How would you handle such a question from your children? Have you seen the movie "What dreams may come", and what do you think of it? What do you think of Shakespear's Hamlet? Do have questions about the science discussed? Do you think you are your brain or do believe in something like a spirit? Do you think about death and what comes after or do you avoid the question as much as possible? Scott Peck says he has a "love afair" with death and suggests that a certain amount of thinking about death promotes psychological health. He has dealt with cases of people who avoid and supress the questions about death until the neuroses created by this destroys their lives. Of course I don't doubt that excessive obsession (like every waking moment) with death is not healthy either, after all too much of anything good (with a few exceptions) is likely to be bad.

My 10 year old son came to me last night because he was afraid of death, he thought maybe that after he died he would not exist. I told him that I didn't think non-existence was anything to be afraid of and that many, if not most, actually hope for this. To illustrate, I recited Hamlet's soliloquy. Then we discussed what he thought it would be like to lose an arm or even both. I asked him what part was him and he thought he was his brain. So I launched into a description of what the brain really was, interacting chemicals and elementary particles all following deterministic laws, like a long chain of dominoes connecting cause and effect, and I asked him where he thought he was in all of that. Why I asked do you think there is a you in first place? Could this simply be a figment of your imagination? Then I said that that there was after all a phenomena in science that did not act like a big chain of dominoes. I took out James Gleick's book "Chaos" and turned to page 114 to show him a picture of the strange attractor and to page 71 to see the bifurcation diagram. What makes things go one way and not the other, I asked. These are generated by mathematical equations which are deterministic. I explained how physics was governed by mathematical laws so that if you knew the intial conditions you could predict everything thereafter. Then I explained about significant figures and that what you thought was a cup half full of water could with increasingly better measuring devices determining more significant digits in a number close to a half, be a fraction that you could never know exactly. Then I explained how Ilya Prigogine proved that systems like the strange attractor and bifurcation required knowing the initial conditions to an infinite degree (all the significant digits) of precision in order to predict. So what, its still deterministic isn't it? Well there is just one problem, Quantum physics. In this we find there are events very similar to those in chaos science which are unpredictable refered to as measurements or wave collapse. Scientists objecting to something that contradicted determinism supposed that there were simply hidden variables (like all those significant figures we could not measure) which we did not know but which determined these events anyway. Then a scientist John Stewart Bell found a way that he could prove this. He found that if there were hidden variables then there were experiments that could be performed that should show correlations satisfying a mathematical condition. Only when the experiments were performed the condition (an inequality) was not satisfied, proving once and for all that there are no hidden variables. So the in real physical systems unlike the mathematical equations, the choice of path in nonlinear systems could not ultimately be said to be determined by initial conditions because the initial conditions do not exist to an infinite degree of precision. The precision of intial conditions ends at the quantum level. So either these events are not determined by anything at all or they are determined by things outside of physics, which are not restricted to the premise of local reality or local causality which physics now takes for granted. So maybe this feeling that we have that there is a self that determines our actions which is not simply part of a chain of dominoes -- maybe this feeling has a basis in reality, and maybe this self isn't part of this whole system of chemistry and interacting particles. Perhaps there is a self outside this causal chain of physics that makes choices and it is these choices are what ultimately determine the direction of our actions. So my son asked me wondering what that thing outside of physics could be. So I told him that many people call this the spirit, and if this was indeed what people call the spirit there are two important implications. The first is that all living things without exception (and perhaps even many things not usually thought of as alive) have such spirits because the phenomena we were describing was common to all of them. The second implication is that this spirit consists of the choices we make and that the choice we make are what we really are. I told him that this spirit being outside the laws of physics is most likely not subject to decay, but of course that doesn't mean that it is alive. Continuing existence without life might be hell, and so there might indeed be far worse things to fear that mere non-existence. The choices we make in life is certain to play a role and so the responsibilty we have in living may not be so easily escaped in death. We ended by watching the movie "What dreams may come." Which reflects well my suspicions that life after death is likely to be quite confusing rather than suddenly proving whether we are right or wrong about what happens at death. I think it quite likely that an atheist will simply believe that he lost in delerium or dreaming on his deathbed, and never come to the conclusion that he was wrong at all. Of course, on the other hand, if the atheist is right, then neither atheist nor the religious person will realize his being right or wrong either. I would also like to point out in that movie, "What dreams may come", where I think the real difference between heaven and hell lies, which is more about where your path will eventually lead rather than where you immediately find yourself. The real difference between heaven and hell was at that point of the movie where "Christy" (Robin Williams) is about to go chasing after what he believes to be his wife, but his friend stops him. I think heaven is having such a guide to give such desperately needed advice (which you are only likely to have if you are inclined to heed such advice). I think hell is following the illusion of people but in reality being completely alone. And being alone you will most certainly follow inclinations that will inevitably lead in the end to dark places, some of which are shown quite graphically in the film.

This is of course complete nonsense. The physics that says that relative time passes faster at higher velocities is inextricably connected with the fact that velocity is relative, which means there is no zero velocity. Furthermore the expansion of space is not the same as relative velocity and in fact the apparent relative velocity due to the explansion of space can exeed the speed of light. This results in a horizon which we cannot see beyond and that horizon is shrinking because the expansion is accelerating. This is at least the current understanding of the situation as I have read about it. It seems to imply some contradictions to me so I will do a little research to see if I can clear this up and post again later.

To follow up on this topic, the irrational numbers are not only uncountable but this only represents a higher order of infinity that can also be exceed by and even higher order of infinity. Just as there is a one to one correspondence between the rational numbers and the natural numbers, thus representing the lowest order of infinity C1. But there is a one to one correspondence between the points of an infinite plane and the points in a line segment from zero to one, representing a higher order of infinity C2. An even higher order of infinity is represented by the number of possible functions on a real line segment: C3. These things were first proved by Ludwig Cantor, but they were not well received at the time. The following quote from webite Cantor relates how Cantor, was himself was surprised by some of these results. The website continues to describe how other mathematicians continued to reject his discoveries through most of his life.

I personally find their comercial obnoxious and insulting. I admit that I don't like their operating system and most of what I dont like about windows is due to microsoft's attempt to imitate macintosh. Regardless of whether competetors of intel produce chips which are 100% reliable (and this is debatable) as intel it is certainly no reason for the hype or the outrageous implication of their stupid comercial.