Hans Küng has for long been my favourite theologian, and I have read quite a few of them including some who were clearly religiously insane. Upon discovering during the prison protest era that he did not buy into the papal bull of papal infallibility, I was enamoured towards his healthy disrespect for authoritative nonsense. It was what drew me to his book Infallible? in 1982.

By that point the authoritarian minds of the Vatican were eager to suppress his ideas and had prohibited him from teaching theology. It did not stultify his thinking and in recent years it was heartening to see this prolific thinker and author take Joseph Ratzinger to task over Vatican complicity in the process of clerical abuse of children.

Küng’s is a formidable intellectual mind which is brought to bear on science in a way that we are not familiar with from reading or listening to most theologians. He paints the history of disputes between science and Christian theology with necessarily broad but nevertheless deft strokes. As someone whose familiarity with science is very much that of the lay person, I concede an inability to often comprehend the points being made. That in itself proves no insurmountable barrier to reading Küng who writes for the inquisitive mind rather than the trained one alone. Besides a lack of scientific acumen has not prevented me from resting certain that Richard Dawkins is right in his claim that planes fly and witches don’t.

In The Beginning of All Things the author seeks to make the argument that theology and science should not be mutually exclusive fields of knowledge. He sees no compelling reason for an irreconcilable tension to exist between science and religion and he pushes back against the materialist view of theology as something that creates pseudo problems. Because he values reason so much he feels it should be used to interrogate faith in science every bit as much as it used to tackle the claims of religion.

He mounts his case from a position that readily acknowledges the bunkum that much Catholic Church teaching has amounted to. While the world was coming to grips with the findings of science the pope in 1950 was pronouncing ‘the infallible dogma of the bodily assumption of Mary into Heaven.’

However, such nonsense promoted by religion should not amount to a free pass for science with which it can expect to escape critical scrutiny. Küng asserts, much in the manner of Jacques Derrida’s critique of modernism, that scientific progress is often far from humane progress. He cites as an example, the mass production of murderous machines of war. Derrida on occasion referred to the 'Holocaust of Hiroshima' to make the same point.

Throughout the book Küng uncompromisingly sides with those thinkers like Gallileo, Copernicus and de Chardin, persecuted by the Catholic hierarchy for their independent thought. The ethos of the Church was akin to something that caught my eye on Facebook this morning from New Caanan Baptist Church: ‘A Free Thinker is Satan’s Slave.’ Yet for all its anti-intellectualism ‘ecclesiastical repression could not prevail against the evidence of the natural sciences.’

Referring to the work of Copernicus the point is made that this 16th Century astronomer and mathematician was confronted by a Catholic Church that ‘instead of being concerned for intellectual understanding, effort and acceptance, called for censorship, Index and inquisition.’

Elsewhere there is unboundling sympathy for the perspective of Teilhard de Chardin, the first page of whose book The Phenomenon of Man I failed to get past in my opening attempt in 1976. de Chardin, Jesuit priest and renowned palaeontologist, was an evolutionist who ‘saw his life’s work as harmonising the insights of science with theological ideas.’ While he does not acknowledge Peter Medawar’s now legendary review savaging The Phenomenon of Man, his concern is stirred by a need to defend de Chardin, a kindred spirit, from the total isolation the Vatican had cruelly subjected him to. None of his major works made it to publication during his lifetime. After his death the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inflicted damnatio memoriae on de Chardin – a complete ban on his works in any form. He was to be airbrushed out of Catholic discourse in a fashion a la Stalinist obliteration.

Küng is much too creative a thinker to dispute the finding of science that the universe is more than 13 billion years old, a conclusion certain to annoy the risible types of the Caleb Institute who invariably sneer at such findings, knowing as the Institute does that the earth is around 6,000 years old.

Subscribing to the view that we do not really know the origins of matter, he asks ‘where did the minimal structure that already existed at the Big Bang come from?’ This is a more refined way of asking what my eight year old son has so often put to me when he reads something from Lucy and Stephen Hawking’s George’s Secret Key to the Universe: ‘but what was there before the Big Bang?’ I simply tell him that I don’t know but that ultimately science rather than something else will provide the answer.

Küng has no time for the anti-evolutionists with their insistence on special creation, stating firmly that there is no going back behind Darwin. He agrees that Darwin was the “Copernicus of biology”. His discovery of natural selection was met with the same theological growls that had greeted Copernicus when he revealed a heliocentric model of the universe. What Küng seeks to do is what so many other Christian thinkers and theistic evolutionists have also insisted upon: to place God at the heart of the evolutionary process, rather than ascribe to it the status of mindless.

But when Küng phrases it as follows ...

If we speeded up time so that the 13.7 billion year history of the cosmos was a singly year then more complex life (algae) – developed only at the beginning of the tenth month and human beings only in the last hours of the last day of the year. So is the whole development of the cosmos in 13.7 billion years focussed on us.

... it does become rather difficult to think of a good reason why it should be. What teleological purpose is served by ‘a meaningless play before empty seats’ for billions of years? So when he asks science to at least consider god as a hypothesis, I fail to see why it should.

He also addresses the issue of miracles which are an obstacle to the faith of people who want some rational basis for their belief yet cannot see the breaking of fundamental laws of nature as something they can be reconciled to. Biblical tales of miracles ‘do not serve to communicate knowledge but to bring about wonder.’ It can be no other way if we are to accept Kung’s assertion of God as one ‘fully respecting the laws of nature whose origin it is.’ While anathema to biblical literalists this is consistent with Küng s’s own perspective which seeks to take the bible seriously but not literally. Yet once this position is assumed the bible as a source of morality has to be abandoned and a powerful instrument of clerical control surrendered. Not something the men of god will readily assent to.

While Küng rejects the suggestion, I think a God of the Gaps is essentially what religious belief for him is ultimately about. His strongest argument for the existence of God seems to take the form of god being pushed back to some unreachable point before the Big Bang which arguably underscores the inability of religion to cope with scientific critique.

Yet reading Küng remains what it has been since I first encountered him more than three decades ago: a joy; a veritable intellectual pleasure in which he delights with a simplicity of style that conveys a complexity of understanding.

Hans Küng, 2007, The Beginning of all Things: Science and Religion. ISBN 978-0-8026-0763-2. William B. Eerdmans: Cambridge.


The Beginning of All Things

Hans Küng has for long been my favourite theologian, and I have read quite a few of them including some who were clearly religiously insane. Upon discovering during the prison protest era that he did not buy into the papal bull of papal infallibility, I was enamoured towards his healthy disrespect for authoritative nonsense. It was what drew me to his book Infallible? in 1982.

By that point the authoritarian minds of the Vatican were eager to suppress his ideas and had prohibited him from teaching theology. It did not stultify his thinking and in recent years it was heartening to see this prolific thinker and author take Joseph Ratzinger to task over Vatican complicity in the process of clerical abuse of children.

Küng’s is a formidable intellectual mind which is brought to bear on science in a way that we are not familiar with from reading or listening to most theologians. He paints the history of disputes between science and Christian theology with necessarily broad but nevertheless deft strokes. As someone whose familiarity with science is very much that of the lay person, I concede an inability to often comprehend the points being made. That in itself proves no insurmountable barrier to reading Küng who writes for the inquisitive mind rather than the trained one alone. Besides a lack of scientific acumen has not prevented me from resting certain that Richard Dawkins is right in his claim that planes fly and witches don’t.

In The Beginning of All Things the author seeks to make the argument that theology and science should not be mutually exclusive fields of knowledge. He sees no compelling reason for an irreconcilable tension to exist between science and religion and he pushes back against the materialist view of theology as something that creates pseudo problems. Because he values reason so much he feels it should be used to interrogate faith in science every bit as much as it used to tackle the claims of religion.

He mounts his case from a position that readily acknowledges the bunkum that much Catholic Church teaching has amounted to. While the world was coming to grips with the findings of science the pope in 1950 was pronouncing ‘the infallible dogma of the bodily assumption of Mary into Heaven.’

However, such nonsense promoted by religion should not amount to a free pass for science with which it can expect to escape critical scrutiny. Küng asserts, much in the manner of Jacques Derrida’s critique of modernism, that scientific progress is often far from humane progress. He cites as an example, the mass production of murderous machines of war. Derrida on occasion referred to the 'Holocaust of Hiroshima' to make the same point.

Throughout the book Küng uncompromisingly sides with those thinkers like Gallileo, Copernicus and de Chardin, persecuted by the Catholic hierarchy for their independent thought. The ethos of the Church was akin to something that caught my eye on Facebook this morning from New Caanan Baptist Church: ‘A Free Thinker is Satan’s Slave.’ Yet for all its anti-intellectualism ‘ecclesiastical repression could not prevail against the evidence of the natural sciences.’

Referring to the work of Copernicus the point is made that this 16th Century astronomer and mathematician was confronted by a Catholic Church that ‘instead of being concerned for intellectual understanding, effort and acceptance, called for censorship, Index and inquisition.’

Elsewhere there is unboundling sympathy for the perspective of Teilhard de Chardin, the first page of whose book The Phenomenon of Man I failed to get past in my opening attempt in 1976. de Chardin, Jesuit priest and renowned palaeontologist, was an evolutionist who ‘saw his life’s work as harmonising the insights of science with theological ideas.’ While he does not acknowledge Peter Medawar’s now legendary review savaging The Phenomenon of Man, his concern is stirred by a need to defend de Chardin, a kindred spirit, from the total isolation the Vatican had cruelly subjected him to. None of his major works made it to publication during his lifetime. After his death the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inflicted damnatio memoriae on de Chardin – a complete ban on his works in any form. He was to be airbrushed out of Catholic discourse in a fashion a la Stalinist obliteration.

Küng is much too creative a thinker to dispute the finding of science that the universe is more than 13 billion years old, a conclusion certain to annoy the risible types of the Caleb Institute who invariably sneer at such findings, knowing as the Institute does that the earth is around 6,000 years old.

Subscribing to the view that we do not really know the origins of matter, he asks ‘where did the minimal structure that already existed at the Big Bang come from?’ This is a more refined way of asking what my eight year old son has so often put to me when he reads something from Lucy and Stephen Hawking’s George’s Secret Key to the Universe: ‘but what was there before the Big Bang?’ I simply tell him that I don’t know but that ultimately science rather than something else will provide the answer.

Küng has no time for the anti-evolutionists with their insistence on special creation, stating firmly that there is no going back behind Darwin. He agrees that Darwin was the “Copernicus of biology”. His discovery of natural selection was met with the same theological growls that had greeted Copernicus when he revealed a heliocentric model of the universe. What Küng seeks to do is what so many other Christian thinkers and theistic evolutionists have also insisted upon: to place God at the heart of the evolutionary process, rather than ascribe to it the status of mindless.

But when Küng phrases it as follows ...

If we speeded up time so that the 13.7 billion year history of the cosmos was a singly year then more complex life (algae) – developed only at the beginning of the tenth month and human beings only in the last hours of the last day of the year. So is the whole development of the cosmos in 13.7 billion years focussed on us.

... it does become rather difficult to think of a good reason why it should be. What teleological purpose is served by ‘a meaningless play before empty seats’ for billions of years? So when he asks science to at least consider god as a hypothesis, I fail to see why it should.

He also addresses the issue of miracles which are an obstacle to the faith of people who want some rational basis for their belief yet cannot see the breaking of fundamental laws of nature as something they can be reconciled to. Biblical tales of miracles ‘do not serve to communicate knowledge but to bring about wonder.’ It can be no other way if we are to accept Kung’s assertion of God as one ‘fully respecting the laws of nature whose origin it is.’ While anathema to biblical literalists this is consistent with Küng s’s own perspective which seeks to take the bible seriously but not literally. Yet once this position is assumed the bible as a source of morality has to be abandoned and a powerful instrument of clerical control surrendered. Not something the men of god will readily assent to.

While Küng rejects the suggestion, I think a God of the Gaps is essentially what religious belief for him is ultimately about. His strongest argument for the existence of God seems to take the form of god being pushed back to some unreachable point before the Big Bang which arguably underscores the inability of religion to cope with scientific critique.

Yet reading Küng remains what it has been since I first encountered him more than three decades ago: a joy; a veritable intellectual pleasure in which he delights with a simplicity of style that conveys a complexity of understanding.

Hans Küng, 2007, The Beginning of all Things: Science and Religion. ISBN 978-0-8026-0763-2. William B. Eerdmans: Cambridge.


91 comments:

  1. 'Küng has no time for the anti-evolutionists with their insistence on special creation, stating firmly that there is no going back behind Darwin. He agrees that Darwin was the “Copernicus of biology”.'

    Anthony
    with all due respect kung is in the dark ages as regards darwinian evolution. his theory was jumped on by the elites who promoted it as justification for their 'superiority'. he is up there with marx as having one of the most malign influences on the human family. darwinism is propaganda for the elites and is not scientific, in fact it has been scientifically disproved since he first came out with it from Mendel( a monk who was also a scientist who reserached peas) right the way until now by paleontologists who can find ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE for darwinian evolution from the fossil record. here is a quote from a book called 'rethinking darwin' i got a few years ago from the same hare krishna i mentioned to larry in another blog yesterday:

    at the dawn of the last century, leading scientists and politicians giddily predicted that modern science - especially Darwinian biology - would supply solutions to all the intractable problems of American society, from crime and poverty to sexual maladjustment. Instead , politics and culture were dehumanized as a new generation of 'scientific' experts began treating human beings as little more than animals or machines:

    - in criminal justice, these experts denied the existence of free will and proposed replacing punishment with invasive 'cures' such as the lobotomy.

    - in the welfare department they proposed eliminating the poor by sterilizing those deemed biologically unfit

    - in business, they urged the selection of workers based on racist theories of human evolution and the development of advertising methods to more effectively manipulate consumer behaviour

    - in sex education , they advocated creating a new sexual morality based on 'normal mammalian behaviour' without regard to long-standing ethical or religious imperatives.

    Darwinism thus permeated society with far reaching consequences, and as it did, the theory left the realm of hypothesis and moved into the realm of 'established fact' something not to be doubted. It was no longer a question of whether evolution had taken place but of how.
    (end of quote from book: Rethinking Darwin)

    Anthony, i urge you a cara to look into a contemporary of Darwins called Russell and see how the differing politics and belief systems of both men affected whose theory of evolution gained dominance. i know you would find it fascinating. Darwin was an elitist interbreeding pig. And he was wrong.

    Im not a scientist either Anthony but it doesnt make me unqualified to challenge a big fatskinny lie.

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  2. Grouch,

    thanks for taking the time to make such a lengthy comment.

    But I have been through all this countelss times.

    Rethinking Darwin is the work of the Intelligent Design lobby in the US. If ever there was a fraud it was Intelligent Design. Thrown out of court during the 2005 Dover trial after its advcates were caught lying.

    I don't particularly care how we got here. It is just that the case for evolution either by the hand of God or natural selection is so irrefutable that I never consider some magical trick that saw us just arrive instantaneously from dust.

    But again, thanks so much for rowing in here with your perspective.

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  3. Dr. McIntyre,

    I haven't read "Beginning" yet but I'm a big fan of Hans Kung (and of yours). I'm afraid I must respectfully disagree with your assertion that science will someday learn what it was that went Bang in the first place. I think most physicists would tell you that there are simply things we will never know. My faith lives in such places. There is a reason the celebration of the Mass is referred to as a mystery.

    Organized religion has given us Osama bin Laden and Torquemada. It has also given us Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Teresa. Science has given us penicillin, but also Zyclon B and nuclear weapons. It seems clear (at least to me) that faith must be tempered with reason and reason enlightened with faith. It is also my opinion that people who insist on an irreconcilable conflict between science and religion have closed their minds to both.

    Love is a mystery. Hope is a mystery. There is no equation that explains why human beings will sometimes sacrifice their lives for total strangers, and other times murder them wholesale. I suspect that "God" is often a convenient excuse to justify actions upon which some Men have already decided. Undoubtably, you have experienced this to a greater degree than I ever will.

    The mystery of life is what makes it worth living. Ireland is rich with that mystery, for better or worse. However you relate to that mystery, I hope it brings you and your family peace.

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  4. the book i mentioned whose full title i should hav mentioned earlier is Rethinking Darwin edited by leif a jensen. its a collection of essays from scientists, vedic philosophers, intelligent design proponents (as you mentioned) and paleontologists. intelligent design is only one part of the bigger picture in this debate.

    the Dover trial is about what is taught in schools in america and is not relevant to what i wrote and also is a very controversial court case to this day.

    It came as a shock to me, (regardless of whether you do or dont believe in Darwinian evolution)that there is no scientific proof for his theory, in fact there is the opposite and if you want to know what a lie is in this evolution debate look into - haeckels faked embryo drawings, piltdown man and kettlewells peppered moths.

    i will say it one more time - there is no evidence in the fossil records for this elitist royalist's theories. In fact the opposite but that does not get promoted in our corporate controlled education shitstem.

    Anthony, the reason why this is so important is because of its crushing effects on the human family since its adoption/promotion by the scientific elites who want total control of society. it is not just about evolution vs creationism. it is about total control through scientific fascism.

    you say you dont particularly care how you got here but i hope you care how you get out of here. ie, not some social darwinist telling u uve passed ur sell by date and sending you to the euthanasia ward. i hate darwin more than i hate marx anthony and u know i dont like him. dawkins is an utter bollox too, these people are very nasty elitists and they do not have a healthy vision for the future of the human family, far from it. one final point - i think these elitists like going to courts (usually with funny handshaking judges) against people and groups who are easily ridiculed. so this o'marxist better shut up now! im off to the leaba now anthony, i agree with you on most things and have the height of respect for you but we'll agree to differ on this one i think.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Is there not an element of faith when people who haven’t studied science , reject religion because of it? Im not saying they are wrong (as far as their understanding is concerned), but they exhibit the essentials of blind faith , it amounts to “I believe this is true because he said so”. In my view they explain two different things, the spiritual and the physical, and the discrepancy comes with conflating the two.

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  6. Grouch,

    LOL. Enjoyed that. But you are right we will agree to differ.

    Chap,

    I invariably refrain from tagging my name with Dr and in protest against your use of it I will ignore you!!!

    Seriously, Chap, you could well be right and there are things we might never discover. To be more exact, if it is to be discovered science before anything else is most likely to do that.

    DaithiD,

    that would not be how I see it. Penicillin rather than prayer gets rid of infection. People know very little about the science of penecillin but they can form an intelligent opinion based on experience. It is not the same as blind faith, no more than getting on a plane rather than a broomstick is. If you believe in one god how many thousands do you not believe in? I just believe in one less than you do, presuming you believe.


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  7. Thanks Anthony,yup Im a catholic for my sins. (Also did a theoretical physics degree because i didnt repent them believably!) I think that slightly misses my point, penicillin is a miracle of scientific endevour that we can all appreciate, there is no article of faith involved. But trying to disprove science via theology is bad theology, and similarly science disproving theology is bad science. I think people who are not trained in science, yet will quote it to disprove theology are displaying characteristics of faith, you have chosen to believe a defined outcome because of some higher authority.

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  8. AM,
    "Penicillin rather than prayer gets rid of infection"

    How does that fit in with placebos!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  9. AM,
    Sorry forgot to add, enjoyed your article but also found aspects of Grouch's comments interesting too...

    Grouch,
    I was unaware that there was no scientific evidence to back Darwin albeit from the fossil record that is! Is there any other 'record' that does provide evidence in support of it for if not, then why has society in general swallowed it hook, line and sinker?

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  10. I have no intention of getting into one of those neverending debates about the existence of God. Been there done, that, proved nothing, disproved nothing! But I do appreciate the comments on the review.

    Niall,

    if placebo works, give it a go. I rule out nothing if it works for somebody. If people get pain relief from praying I am all for them praying. Although I think that is a placebo.

    DaithiD,

    each to their own - people must have the freedom to practice their religion on themselves.

    I don't think science disproves the existence of God or the FSM or unicorns and mermaids although you might find some scientists claiming god is a failed hypothesis. I think it simply offers no proof that I am aware of for their existence. I work on the basis of what it is reasonable for me to believe. I just think it unreasonable to believe there is some God thing out there. So I don't.

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  11. Thanks again, i really wasnt trying to proselytize or convince you im right. It was more to get across that there is an element of faith in most paths, no matter what solid logic we tell ourselves we are following. Even within science trained, and the Hawking quote regarding the big bang is illustrative of this, is the fact that space and time spontaneously ‘happened’ that big a leap from immaculate conception?

    ReplyDelete
  12. niall,
    its mad i know, but darwinism and all that is 10% science 90% elitist dogma. society has fallen for it hook line and sinker the way the chinese swallowed that tyrant marx and his offspring mousey dung because the same elites dominate media, science, universities, education, banking. just as there is banking families, so is their scientific families serving the elitist agenda. dont forget our ancestors were portrayed as sub human monkeys and then they were GENOCIDED. food shipped out under armed guard from a country full to the gills with food. they try and tweak it now to neo-darwinism coz the fossils arent there. they will keep tweaking their false theories because they have to. we are not ruled by politicians we are ruled by scientific elites who dominate the mass media and education shitstem. people are deluded into thinking they live in a democracy coz they go into a booth every 4 years and put an x beside some gombeens name. the un is their baby. unesco was ran by the huxleys initially, they are absolute tyrants and they all interbreed - darwin galton russell huxleys. people think bertrand russell was a great philosopher. he was a total bastard, elitist to the max - viewed us as scum to be mind manipilated and bred out of existence. science is the religion of the elites. they believe in their religion. as regards penicillin, the pharmaceutical arm of their corporate industrial complex will seize on any good thing that science can come up with as an excuse to mass medicate society. most diseases now are diseases of 'civilization'. we are sick because we are not living in harmony with nature. nature holds the cure for everything but they look down their nose on our mother (and also her medicine is free). they know better. they are deluded maniacs and they are going down because the control those elites have had over society with the printing press and tv they have always owned is being challenged by shit kickers like me who arent intimidated by the letters after their names and know that this thing we type on now is like a nuclear bomb for them. i am not a hare krishna niall but if you only knew how much they are into putting it up to these scientific elites u wud be impressed. the book i mentioned earlier cud well be in one of their restaurant shops near you - Rethinking darwin, a vedic study of darwinism and intelligent design edited by leif a jensen(collection of essays from different writers). I have the height of respect for the hares now and i used to think they were loopers growing up . They are happy for a reason i believe now.
    and dont forget all these elite royal societys serve the mother of all tyrants - the british(germanic/transylvanian) empire. dawkins, that guy is the most pathetic deviant bucket of vomit ever and i mean that, he is a dangerous deviant pukehead. they are all horrible those scientific elitists and will use science to try and usher in a warped diabolical society. when i say deviant i mean deviant. anyway, hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare. i believe when catholics get to heaven they will be a bit like the hares - happy and singing and dancing.

    ReplyDelete
  13. and i dont like that hawking guy either, apparently he gets loads of women too, and i cant get no-one. he gets the sympathy vote i reckon or else he must have a big bang.

    ReplyDelete
  14. chap is right, its all a mystery, and nicely said daithi, the immaculate conception is part of this divine mysterious universe and vice versa, joyful sorrowful and glorious mysteries.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I belong more to this school of thought..

    "Ancient Aliens -- Chariots, Gods & Beyond "

    ReplyDelete
  16. I have to laugh at all this immaculate conception stuff but realise at the same time those I laugh at just laugh back. Better than killing each other! Religion ... just not for me.

    Oddly enough I got one of those emails today from the Catholic Truth Society advertising their books. They have a good stock of well written stuff and very reasonably priced. And in terms of getting the stuff to me there has never been a hitch. A good reliable service. They have a brilliant booklet out on the sort of thing being discussed here: Darwin and Evolution:
    From a Catholic Perspective
    by
    Joseph Bolin.

    Whether people buy into it or not is another thing but what it does do is show the compatability between a belief in God and a belief in evolution. It is about 2 or 3 years since I read it but it was worth it.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Frankie,

    I really believe in Scandinavian crime fiction! That's about the height of my beliefs these days.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Anthony,

    If Scandinavian crime fiction turns you on and floats your boat...I suppose there is no harm done. All I know about that neck of the woods is a wee Swedish girl I had breakfast with several times in 1994/95...

    But this immaculate conception is based on fact..They basically had trial marriage for three months and Mary got up the duff. But the 'real' marriage happened after..Hence the immaculate conception..

    Where Jewish brides pregnant in ancient times?

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  19. This is one of those issues were this is no right or wrong, but worthwhile nonetheless. Quantum mechanics has opened a can of worms, the measurement problem, where particles behave differently when observed is mind blowing. It has lead physicists to explore all different kind of theories, holographic universe, the role of consciousness in the universe, higher and lower dimensions, it is fascinating and the bottom line is we just don't know.
    Grouch, you're bang on to be weary of these bastards Huxley who you mentioned was Darwins strongest supporter, member of the Flavian society, is a shady character, his son went on to right brave new world and wrote some dangerous literature on transhumanism. Their game plan for us doesn't look rosy, Maxwell Taylor c.f.r member wrote over 2 BILLION should cease to exist if humans are to prosper.
    Daithi, would be interested to hear your view on some new theories in theoretical physics given your studies.

    ReplyDelete
  20. il watch that later frankie and get back to you. all i'll say is if there is aliens they could all be catholics. or maybe protestants. but are more than likely hare krishnas.

    ReplyDelete
  21. they cud be as mad as us frankie

    ReplyDelete
  22. frankie, i used to get that one wrong too, its actually marys conception they are on about (immaculate conception), not her conception of jesus. and i wil watch that later.
    david, yes thanks for back up, its like the fuc*in matrix is it not when u consider it all, but i really believe they are going down. darwin marx freud - the three false prophets of this dark age, but they will be dumped, i do believe that.

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  23. David you are half right, but the interesting behaviour is when they are not observed, they take on wave form and can be at each end of the universe, and only when observed does the wave become a particle collapse into form we would register in front of us. To be honest, the higher echelons of study deal in really really esoteric things you are talking about, I guess I’ve just got a grounding in the basics of all it. My dissertation was on Phase Transitions at complex temperatures, like imaginary numbers if you are familiar. That’s pretty weird, im trying to apply it to stock market data in my spare time.

    ReplyDelete
  24. they cud be as mad as us frankie

    Grouch,

    As a man once said I've always been crazy, It helps me from going insane

    I can't say I’m proud of all of the things that I’ve done
    But I can say I’ve never intentionally hurt anyone

    I've always been different with one foot over the line
    Winding up somewhere one step ahead or behind

    ReplyDelete
  25. I know I shouldn't, but...

    Right. As an astrophysicist, theologian and father of a palaeontologist, I just *have* to weigh in...

    Grouch: '...paleontologists who can find ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE for darwinian evolution...' BZZZT. Wrong. That is stating the problem not only in a pejorative way, but couched in language to make it look sane. This margin is too small etcetc

    Then we have The Big Bang. Well, people take that as read, but I am not so sure, it has more issues than the plot of those thrillers AM likes...(caveat: I love Hoyle, the cyclical universe stuff makes more sense to me, and inflation is a massive hack. How that won the Nobel is beyond me. There *are* some good applications of string theory, but this margin etcetc)

    And anyone who thinks science is...for wont of a better word...agnostic is fooling themselves. Only certain avenues of science are explored, mostly where the grant money is.

    While I have (some) time for Kung, it is still a very much anglospheric Western-European post-Reformation theology.

    Oh, I should stop, but Russell? Sure what is wrong with being elitist? Ye gads, if our cavemen ancestors were good socialists, we'd still be in those caves.

    (That has been edited five or six times, removing the vitriol, _elitist_ rants, cosmology and Origen.)

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  26. Daithi,
    Thanks for the response I've always been interested in metaphysics and theoretical physics although the practicalities of it go right over my head. It is good to hear from somebody who understands the fundamentals, a few physics books I've read would as well been in another language. On another point a cara I think you've an unhealthy obsession with the stock market. it's rigged that's all you need to know!

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  27. anglospheric Western-European post-Reformation theology.

    Can you put that word in laymans terms (kinda like less than three syllables)

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  28. stray taoist - bzzzzt urself, if i was the father of a caveman it wouldnt necessarily make me an expert on caves so i couldnt be arsed if u were the father of bertrand russell let alone a paleontologist. ask your paleontologist offspring if he has a problem with the following quotation -
    ... the fossil record has posed and continues to pose a challenge to the theory of evolution. Rather than documenting smooth, gradual transitions from one species to another or from one or a few simple species to a plethora of complex sciences, the fossil record consistently shows a pattern in which species appear suddenly and fully formed, then exist virtually unchanged until they disappear altogether from the fossil layers....

    paleontologist niles eldrege wrote in 1995:
    No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. it never seems to have happened. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations and the very occasional slight accumulation of change - over millions of years, at a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occured in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.
    (page 48-49 from book mentioned above.)

    and heres two quotes from the lovely bertie
    "Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so."
    -Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society p50, 1953

    "Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers
    and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt
    of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of
    sheep against the practice of eating mutton."
    *- Bertrand Russell, "The Impact of Science on Society", 1953, pg 49-50*

    get back in your cave stray taoist and suck bertrands nipples. and a question for you on astrophsics - how did the vedics know 5-8 thousand years ago that the sun was 108 suns away from the earth and the moon was 108 moons away form the earth.

    finally you mentioned u are an astrophysicist and theolgian, well good for you, im an unemployed taxi driver so nya nya ne nya nya.

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  29. frankie a cara, some people love talking in polysyllabics or as james joyce might have put it pollysillybollix, he probably removed Origen thinking it was over our heads but little does he know taxi drivers have to study Origens commentary on the fourth gospel before they are allowed near a taxi.

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  30. As this is a spiritual type thread. Do born again Christians have two birthdays every year?

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  31. *sigh* Throw a few more quotes around, sure that is how to change peoples' minds.

    I don't care if you are a taxi driver, Brahman, Dirac or what, you are blithely rehashing old non-arguments. You are doing what the creationists do, pull a quote here, a paper there, and here, have a whole worldview. I am not here to change your mind. I don't care what you _believe_. The mind believes what it wants to believe. (There are some interesting psychology papers on this, dating back to the 70s. Well worth a read.)

    Why isn't there a continuous fossil record? Oh man. Seriously? Not rising to it. That belies so much misunderstanding...no, still not rising to it.

    Finally, wind yer neck in. I mentioned my training by way of introduction, nothing more. You read into it whatever way you want, but pull that chip off your shoulder first. No high horses were fallen off in the making of this statement.

    Frankie: All I meant was, peoples' outlook is always with in their own context, a cultural viewpoint. We humans can't help it. That is the way our minds interpret the world.

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  32. David, I completely understand how confusing Physics text books can be, its best to have ones that a lot of practice questions, and you should have brushed up on the relevant Maths too, its all about simplifying problems so Maths is absolutely crucial to building your logic foundations. Undoubtedly there are some unsavoury practices around the edges of the market, like pumping the price prior to floatation (look at how facebook dumped almost instantly after its IPO) but in general the price discovery mechanism, buying and selling, is too big to rig though. Most of the serious crashes are to do with government interference with it too.

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  33. *sigh* away to your hearts content stray taoist. hold on a minute til i look up what dirac is...okay. I'll ask a paleontologist about it so (i live between two colleges and will go digging for a fossil finder tomorrow). and i certainly will throw as many quotes around which expose the mindset of the elites, especially now as that goon's wet dream of an injected race of dumbed down diddys seems to be upon us.Do you get this upset when people wrting about Origen quote him? as regards your comment 'blithely re-hashing old non arguments' i think its my turn to sigh. And sorry your intro was a bit high horse if you dont mind me saying, i dont think id be the only one to think that and the last thing i have is a chip on my shoulder - its just elitist egoids like yourself do piss me off. You are just a bit peeved sounding to me stray taoist. also u didnt attempt to answer my question which is nearer your field of expertise as opposed to paleontology. the 108 question.

    nite stray taoist
    nite mary ellen

    frankie, in answer to your birthday question Yes. unless they were born again on their birthday. and if they were born again on the 29 th feb that wud complicate things too. unless they were actually born on the 29th feb. so every four years blahblahblah. i am going to watch that alien thing now in the leaba and it better not give me nightmares.

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  34. nite...and morning Mr G.

    Peeved? Oh my no, hardly ever that.

    I'd also say if we threw out every thinker who had a bad thought, we'd have no thoughts left at all.

    Oh, the 108 question? Sorry I missed that. But yeah, I love that kinda thing. (Did you know the speed of light is given in the Koran? And almost in the Bible? etcetc.)

    I don't see why that is a problem, their astronomy (and mathematics) was rather good. The way I see it is that people _today_ see themselves as some pinnacle of achievement, and we know it all. How *did* they know? They worked it out. They didn't meditate on it, or guess, or get it from divine intervention. Nothing mysterious about that, other than it was an awesome thing to do.

    Take Greek Fire as another example. Can we make that today? No we can't. We can guess, but the formula is lost, and modern man can't replicate it.

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  35. Grouch,

    lowering the tone of the discussion will benefit no one. Best kept at your normal pitch infused more with wit than bile. More people will take heed of what you are saying that way. It is after all only a book review!

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  36. Grouch,
    Sorry for the late response as I hadn't the time. I seem to have hit a nerve there with my question as you have expressed very ardent anti-scientific feelings in a very robust manner…that some may even go as far as to describe as a rant…..I really have no opinion on the whether there is or isn’t a global ‘scientific conspiracy’ but to be honest in my eyes you have somewhat devalued your argument with choppy non-fluent statements and that little Hare Krishna sing-along at the end…..I fully understand your very strong feelings towards science but I only asked what evidence was there to support Darwin….I certainly wasn’t expecting your response!

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  37. anthony, genocidists like russell do get on my goat to put it mildly and i will get pissed off about it. when i talk about deboning people u can accuse me of lowering the tone.

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  38. Grouch,

    the bible was full of genocidists. I see your God as a murerous old tyrant but I am not going off on one because you like one genocidist and not another. I don't think your arguments make a lot of sense but you probably feel the same way about mine and a lot of others. Point is, your response to Stray Taoist could have been better handled. Like Niall I was surprised at your response.

    In my view Darwinism is a science and social Darwinism a crime.

    Why I even came back to this thread, I have no idea. The moth and the flame perhaps!

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  39. lads, when ur kids or young people u guard come back from school one day and say - i got a load of vaccines today, i hope u go ape. i am going to go ape on another site anthony because i dont want to lower the tone here anymore. hope some of ye look into what i quoted on russell and what obama's science czar holdren has to say on mass sterilization, forced abortion and loads of other lovely things. the lunatics have taken over and i am sane compared to them. i have a loved one who's mental health has been destroyed by a vaccine 40 years ago, she knew something was wrong the day it was given to her (7yrs of age).evolution is these freaks religion. also obama is a marxist. hare krishna.

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  40. Grouch,

    you are free to come, free to go. You bowed out on a funny note as usual and I wish you well. Yeah, we will miss you but freedom to write is also freedom not to write. So, your call.

    It would be insensitive to let the case of your loved one pass without comment. I think it is traumatic for her and all close to her. My wife scrutinises the background to every porposed vaccination before we let the children get them. Yet, I still feel we improve our chances with medicine.

    Anyway, good luck to you.

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  41. I have never u/stood why u Anthony an intelligent man would bother reading Egghead Kung’s prolific ramblings and musings. These renowned theologians are a joke and know jackshit really. It is hardly like he has ever come up with anything dynamic or mindblowing that an average person couldn’t come up with as well.

    I think it is time you read the ‘footwarmer’ Bible cover to cover. Irrespective of what you currently think how can you be sure if you aint read it? It would be interesting to read your review from Old Testament through to New Testament. Kung is just another pawn in the game of new world order in the guise of peace and unity through one ‘religion’ Yawn…. I say roll on Armageddon and that ‘men’s knowledge is fools wisdom’ (Bible)

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  42. Mary,

    if you consider all the good material I wish to read and will not get a chance to before I pop my clogs, I am not going to give up precious time reading the bible.

    I wouldn't read it on the jail protest when there was nothing else to read so with so much choice I am not going to start now. Jussi Adler Olsen has nine more books lined up and you expect me to read the bible!

    Hope all is well with you Mary.

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  43. @ grouch I got lost somewhere in your words... All I can think of is what a Vietnamese b/friend said to me one day long post the VN war He was from the north & had suffered profoundly Fought lived in the tunnels etc He said "We live We die and life is shit" Initially i laughed my guts out but then I realised I was beginning to cry. His statement blows Hans Kung ramblings outta the water & exposes them for the pithy shite they are. I hope God brings some happiness to us all before we die Life is war in every sense.

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  44. LOL Anthony Yes I do wt u to read the bible. I would like to pipe audio recordings of it round your head 24/7 lmbo! All is good with me as good as it gets. Drowning in old irish text translation My patriotic fevour for Irish culture has diminished significantly.

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  45. Grouch,

    I can understand why people follow religion and have no problem with people who believe in a god. I am just not one of them nor plan on becoming one.

    I had a good friend from Dublin who would always crack up when I mentioned we are related to apes.

    I can never figure out how it came to be that god created man in his image and then makes women from a rib.
    Sounds like god is a wee bit biased when it comes to women.
    The other weird fact I am supposed to believe is that from Adam and Eve we now have almost 7 billion people and this population was accomplished in the 6000 year old earth.
    That would mean over a billion people every thousand years somehow the math does not add up.

    Why is it that people believe in an all powerful god who has a special plan for them become faithless when people who don’t believe in a god express their opinion? I assume belief in a god would have little purpose without sinners why argue when at the end god is supposed to sort it all out.
    Surely the faithful would have to concede the god clause of “free will?” Or, is that only a connivance to explain away the so called faithless.

    The bible has been used for genocide mass murder in the name of one god or another. The crusades and the inquisitions certainly shine a heavenly light on the nature of belief along with papal corruption even covering up the mass abuse conducted by priests and those on high look the other way.

    Religion and those that believe don’t seem to mind the criminal elements that insist on controlling people with a promise of eternal life.
    It is all just washed away as gods will though I don’t see why religious people feel they are right under the premise they believe in a god.

    As for boning people lowering the standard I never said people nor even a person so if you have a beef with me on that issue ask me and don’t use it in some arse backward excuse in your defense of religion.

    I thought religious people were into forgiving transgressions but from your deboning remark I see it is okay to lie as long as it is in the defense of your belief in a god.
    No harm to the faithful but I prefer walking on the road to perdition where everlasting punishment is oh so scary.

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  46. and good luck to you too anthony, slightly funny moment as i read ur farewell( i was only going to another site for a rant, i wasnt saying goodbye forever, however) rte radio keelan shanley and some elitist scientist were doing their best to discredit a man warning us on the dangers of fluoride. it was almost like the sinn fein treatment before they climbed aboard the 'peace' train. another of russell and his ilks (and stalins) favourite things to put in water to zombify us.

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  47. mary i heard a dub say, life is a load a bollix, death is load a bollix, and if theres an afterlife its probly load a bollix as well.

    i am stuck into the old gaelic poetry lately too, its a great escape from ireland if u know what i mean

    life has conquered, the wind has blown away
    alexander, caesar, all their power and sway
    tara and troy have made no longer stay
    and the english too will have their day.

    that was written aons ago but theyre still here. as the vietnam man said life is shit

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  48. I can never figure out how it came to be that god created man in his image

    Tain, God made man like US in OUR image. According to the versions of the bible I've read it's always in plural not singular..

    Gotta be more than 1...

    Genesis 1:26

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  49. why is everyone on my case, am i not entitled to the odd rant.

    tain bo,

    2 Peter 3:8
    New International Version (NIV)

    8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

    my team of solicitors have just informed me i never said you deboned or mentioned deboning anyone. i just said 'when i talk about deboning people u can accuse me of lowering the tone'.

    all this deboning talk is making me hungry.

    i try not to defend religion - i wud put people off god, i tackle the scientific elite. incidentally - not believing in evolution dusnt automatically make someone a believer in God. just like there are gay people who dont believe in gay marriage dusnt make them homophobes.

    if i do go on a rant about people who actually believe genocide is good for humankind, then that is understandable to be fair. cromwell and all that stuff. and if God is a genocidalist too, its time he got his finger out.

    anthony, thanks letting me stay in the classroom. i will try to behave better now. and i will try to love and forgive more tain bo, and im not being facetious there. i actually love all the tpqers, u are my family even if i was adopted. tain u must admit when u said if i had a 'beef' with u over 'deboning' was a bit funny.

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  50. Tain Bo-

    " That would mean over a Billion people every Thousand years "-

    Aye that's right- we are never of each other-

    That's not counting the use of condoms and the use of Abortions-every one is saved from the waist up-and thank God for it-



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  51. Grouch,

    you above anyone are entitled to rant as you have a way with words that it would be difficult to have a beef with you.
    Whether you are intentionally witty or unintentionally your comments usually have at the least a few funny lines and funny words I am glad your solicitors squared that away.
    I am definitely not picking on you, you bring a certain levity to the quill no easy task given much of the subject matter is grim.

    It was intentional on my part and I am glad that you got a laugh at the having a “beef” bit.

    There is nothing wrong with people defending religion I can accept they believe in god. Having a go at science is fair game as like anything else it is subjective and has its good and evil.
    Without it we wouldn’t be yarning on computers.

    You can drink of the holy water I will stick with the primordial soup anyway I shouldn’t go swimming in the deep end of religion I run the risk of finding redemption and being converted.

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  52. Frankie,

    the plural still wouldn’t explain why Eve was made from a rib of Adam and not the dust.
    I am not arguing against religion I just don’t subscribe. There are those who go into overkill in the religious camp and those that do the same in the non religious camp.
    Neither side can definitively claim they are right as neither side can prove or disprove the existence of a god.

    The bible is mainly a history of the Jewish people adapted and retranslated to suit Christianity certain historical books made it into what we know as the bible and other books were left out.

    I am not anti religion though religion seems to be its own worst enemy as it never seems at peace with what is the correct version of belief.
    Different religions with different ways to believe in god it hardly suggests peace and love in harmony with spirituality.

    The good thing is people find genuine comfort in their faith and that would be impossible to argue against.

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  53. Mickey,

    thanks for the laugh though prophylactics have only been around for 90 plus years so that might account for a partial slowdown in birthrates.
    Now you might have me converting as god did say go forth and multiply and with 7 billion people that is a growing multiplication.

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  54. Tain,

    The plural bit, Eve the verse or three in the Bible. God said let 'us' etc....Who's to say there wasn't or isn't female Gods aswell...? The Greeks had female gods.. Why do people assume God has to be a man?

    Now going along with my line of thought that ET's paid this rock a visit many moons ago, who is to say that we aren't a genetic experiment (that whet wrong a few times, hence homo habilis, homo ergaster, neanderthal's..) and the ET's kept tweaking the DNA until they settled on modern man...

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  55. nice one tain, there is good science and bad science but my fear is the bad scientists have unwarranted power now (science czar holdren). he and his marxist boss obama who has lied about who is father is gives me nightmares (that is some lie really). i love the american constitution which is part inspired from the lakota and other native tribes. us irish republicans have to get wide to those forces seeking to undermine something which gave great hope to our long battered people in '98. and try and snap our irish american bros and sis out of their paddys day trance. those early american republicans knew exactly who they were up against - not just the crown but the bankers also and they warned us about them over 200 years ago. another thing - there is only one way to find out the effect of fluoride - avoid it and feel the change.

    Fluoride and controlled mass media is part of the reason u were not supported/minded/protected in the early days of the struggle. you had the ruc, udr brit army uvf uda red hand and those lovely people mi5-6 on ur backs and what did u get from down here??? oh those ira terrorists are such baddies, section 31, the heavy gang, etcetcetc. u shud have heard that little tyrant shanley and the elitist scientist on radio today doing their best to diss this brave man who was highlighting the dangers of fluoride. It was like she had been deep trained by the kgb broadcasting wing. they make me puke those rte people they are from the dark side. no two ways about it. its worth listening to and i will look for it now as i missed the beginning.

    i am going to go to the republic of saordonia (fluoride free zone) for a few days now. i am a bit wired lately to be honest, and i blame hans kung for everything, beir bua.

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  56. Frankie,

    personally I am not against the thought of many gods monotheisms became the standard one world, one universe, one god even though we find pagan observances throughout Christianity.
    I am just going by what is the accepted belief that god is male and it is taught that woman should be obedient to man.

    That is the line of thought in the Catholic Church as women cannot be priests going by that then god must be male?

    I prefer the thought of us being the product of space rather than the magic man in the clouds who happens to live in a kingdom that sounds more of the imagination of men than of a god.
    I am not so sure about ET but in the realm of possibility who knows. If we follow the big bang theory and life formed in a primordial soup then we are all a bit of ET.
    I wonder if we were just pure chance an accident of all the right materials forming together at the right time under the right circumstances.
    Though if you just look at our own galaxy and how vast it is never mind the unfathomable dimension of the universe it would be difficult to say we are the sole inhabitants or intelligent life form out there.

    Man has been to the moon and there is the international space station floating around with ambitions of making a colony on Mars using the moon as a launch pad. I suppose as we evolve it is not out of the question that ET might bump into us somewhere along the line.

    Then again we might just go the way of the dinosaur which has an interesting theory behind it as the earth was forming a large rock got knocked of its trajectory and all those years later it made its way back and smacked into the earth.
    A happy accident of space marbles after all if it hadn’t hit we might not be around.
    Who knows about ET the Mayans supposedly carved images of what some think are aliens the Egyptians as well and even in the Bible with chariots of fire. There is a lot of world mythology involving aliens.
    I suppose since Jesus went up to heaven that would make him a reverse ET?

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  57. Grouch,

    if fluoride doesn’t get you something else will. Science has improved the quality of life but along with that comes the side effects.
    Undoubtedly the large pharmaceutical manufactures will flog us a tablet or an elixir for anything that ails us or not.
    In line with all large corporations it is profit before people and unless you are fortunate enough to live in a bunker in the republic of Sardonia then we have to take our chances.

    I do my best to avoid sterile media I heard it somewhere that television shows are just the filler for adverts and advertising companies push only one ethos consumerist greed and nowadays you have to have the latest gadgets and everything or you are just a caveman.

    Unfortunately the bankers make the world go round and most of us skint. Strange name for the free market society when there is nothing free about it the public get what the corporations want them to get and the big wheel of finance keeps on spinning.

    I don’t think the folk of 98 would be pleased their vision of Ireland is even further away now than it was before if we ever reach unification it will be a shell of a country.

    Enjoy your stately visit to Sardonia give my best regards to the non president.

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  58. sound tain
    frankie i conked out last nite but wil catch that again and will get bak to you on it.

    also

    daithd and david,
    im not trying to be funny, but is it possible the market is rigged and not rigged at the same time or am i losing it altogether now. max keiser says its rigged and he seems pretty savvy. i havent a clue about economics and finance and all that stuff.

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  59. Daithi,
    Thanks for the reply and the advice. Regarding the stock market I think we've had this debate before and i haven't the energy to go into it again. If memory serves me right we agreed to differ or maybe i just copped out because i was getting beat!
    Tain bo,
    Although i don't believe in a omniscient supreme being, i do believe in a matrix behind the matter. I believe the realms of consciousness are boundless and what we call reality is just consciousness experiencing itself from an individualistic perspective before returning to its true nature, kind of like information being downloaded to disk only to return to the mainframe when the disk is useless. I first heard Bill hicks talking about this idea and then researched the idea through some physicist scholars, i don't know it just sounded right.
    The reason i tell you this is you spoke about life being a cosmological accident, that makes as less sense to me as a big man making us out of dust. There are to many anomalies for our existence, Gravity being weaker than it should be, nuclear force being just the right composition to form structural matter, all this and more suggest to me that the answers to the universe lie within our own consciousness. Maybe one day through science or spiritualism we'll get there.

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  60. Tain,
    People talk a lot about the Mayans and all I know is they plotted the known solar system long before Galileo.

    I am just going by what is the accepted belief that god is male and it is taught that woman should be obedient to man That is the line of thought in the Catholic Church as women cannot be priests going by that then god must be male?

    Christians are meant to believe in the Bible etc.. It says there are Gods. If we are made in their image then it stands to reason some of them had to be female hence Eve. The 2nd Council of Nicaea threw a spanner in the works by voting in Jesus (IMO).

    Man has been to the moon and there is the international space station floating around with ambitions of making a colony on Mars using the moon as a launch pad.

    Some say we got kicked off the moon and thats why we haven't been back. I believe that the military are already using 3D printers today in some far off location making a space Lego set to build bases and ship them out via the ISS. Thats another joke the USA, China, Russia, Europe throw billions at the ISS here on this rock the USA, Russia, China etc are at each other throats over oil, gas..green backs. Then a plane goes AWOL and we all pool together...

    I wonder if we were just pure chance an accident of all the right materials forming together at the right time under the right circumstances.

    I've actually said the same thing here and else where. But then that would make me a Darwinist.

    I'll stick with genetic experiment/ancient alien school of thought...

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  61. those early American republicans knew exactly who they were up against

    Grouch,

    When you retreat to the Republic of Saordonia and dwell..What about the native Irish who conquered the wild west and slaughtered the bison, scalped the Blackfoot, Crow, Apache..turned them into alcoholics....

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  62. Just seen this.."but is it possible the market is rigged and not rigged at the same time or am i losing it ".

    Course is it rigged.

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  63. David, haha yes Im not planning to get into this again either.

    grouch & frankie, of course there are people who try to manipulate the market, they may even succeed for a short while in one small section of it. This does not mean the whole thing is rigged. But very little evidence is needed for people who are already decided on matters such as this.

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  64. frankie, catholic traders and farmers speculated on price of food and made profit during famine - workhouses bought oatmeal at 2 pound a ton oct '45 and by end 1846 was 20 pound, just came across that last nite. there were always bastards on this island and always will be. we killed a lot of australian aborigines too, but has to be said in brit uniform. the san patricio blog from yesterday is worth reading. i will look into what u wrote, i dont know enuf.

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  65. Frankie-

    " what about the native Irish who conquered the Wild West "-

    That's a new one to me-the bison never got a look in and not only did the Irish scalp the Red folk they turned them onto the piss-

    Maybe the Irish started the fire in London and drove the Jews across the Red Sea-the world would be a safer place without us Irish about-

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  66. daithid, that sounds fair enuf, i hope cheltenham is rigged, but i cant rememeber the name of the horse i was told on saturday wud win today and her fone is off. i dont think we'll ever get to the bottom of the nature of universe evolution spirit consciousness and all that. we will learn to go with the flow and love each other and sit back in awe at everything. and hopfuly still back horses.

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  67. assembly is ringing a bell

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  68. Frankie,

    the Mayans have an interesting culture it’s a pity the Spanish arrived and burnt and destroyed much of their text. I remember reading somewhere about one monk who thought it barbaric and stashed away some of their texts.

    Jesus had to be voted in without him there is no Christ I think when they ruled out Mary Magdalene that was a spanner as she was his closest “follower” personally I subscribe to the theory that they were married and possibly had children.

    I don’t think the religious folk would be pleased the idea of life on earth being a genetic experiment although most in are in agreement that and unseen unidentifiable higher life form created earth.
    Even though god would fall under the banner of ET as he/she/they are not of this earth but in the realms of possibilities anything is possible.

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  69. David,

    I am in line with the consciousness with limitless boundaries with it I don’t think we would have advanced and keep on advancing. It is individual even within a collective as there is always a slight difference on what we are seeing, hearing, feeling, and translating.
    The sub-atomic nature of realities being microscopic human vision cannot see something as natural as a dead skin cell falling to the earth and if we could view the microscopic world I think we would have evolved on a different path that is not to say future people will not have the capacity of higher fields of vision as we primarily are a visual species.
    I do believe the body is just the soft shell that contains the one muscle that makes sense of our surroundings the inner space of the brain which I believe scientist think we use about 10 plus% at least actively.

    If we look at the night and imagine it is one giant brain all the stars we could say are the active parts and the darkness is inactive so it is a matter of finding out what the darkness is just the same way of finding what the so called unused parts of the brain is.
    Which leads us to a clash of realities as religion wants to debunk science and science is at odds with religion.

    We are hardwired in the primitive brain department as like us or early ancestors had a need to understand or make an understanding of the mystery of life.
    The fear that the sun would not rise the next morning so naturally it became an object to worship without its powerful light life would cease.

    There is always a chance that life was accidental it is not beyond the realm of possibility after all science is filled with accidental discoveries from X-Rays, Penicillin, Quinine, Small-pox vaccination, Pap-Smear and allergy to name a few.

    I am not saying it is fact just a possibility and who knows for sure if there had been the exact ingredients’ for life or was there something missing so we have life as we know it and could be short a vital ingredient or considering mans nature life might have been overcooked or had too much of one ingredient.

    Sounds like pure madness but consciousness is subjective to the individual but if science is correct and the universe will eventually collapse will all that energy reignite again and a universe is reborn a living universe like the one we live in
    And will the stored intelligence resurface eventually creating higher intelligent life forms.
    At day’s end life is experimental and life adapts and evolves and with the human population growing sooner or later Mother Nature will unleash some new super virus to thin out the herd.

    Who knows maybe religion and science will make peace as they are both in agreement on some mysterious power that created the universe.

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  70. DaithiD

    This does not mean the whole thing is rigged. But very little evidence is needed for people who are already decided on matters such as this.

    Here is some very little evidence that'll take anyone 5mins to read.


    All you have to do is look the Libor Scandal and then extrapolate it. Wiki says this about it..

    Naomi Wolf of The Guardian

    notion that the entire global financial system is riddled with systemic fraud – and that key players in the gatekeeper roles, both in finance and in government, including regulatory bodies, know it and choose to quietly sustain this reality – is one that would have only recently seemed like the frenzied hypothesis of tinhat-wearers

    HSBC launder drug money and get a slap on the wrist Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke

    Eighty five people today have more wealth than 3.6 billion..

    They print as much money as they want, when they want, then decide who gets the lions share and most don't even get crumbs to feed on..And I am meant to believe the whole system isn't rigged..

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  71. DaithiD: I have the start/end/mid-day high position of the equitiy markets for the FTSE500 going back, err, 30 years (in handy csv format) if you want it, for modelling purposes. (I gave a talk at a conference once on using relativistic cosmology as a model, just to show you can do any old nonsense and get predicitons from the markets.)

    Grouch: Nah, the markets aren't rigged, that implies people know what is going on. They don't. Talking to traders back and forth, I'd not trust them to rig a church fete tombola, never mind the financial system.

    Tain Bo: I like Hoyle's 'life was seeded by comets/from space' stuff, but that just moves the problem elsewhere, doesn't solve it. But long-chained molecules exist in space, the whole carbon-grain stuff.

    As for a beginning/end (which implies creator, whether you like it or not), again, best side-stepped. Those are human perceptions. I'll go with there was no beginning, and there will be no end (gawd, now I sound like a pop song). Cyclic universe, using m-brane string theory, with colliding branes causing localised Big Bang, tempered with a C-field quasi-steady state model. Etc.

    That's the good thing about science, always something more to learn. And life is so short, to spend time worrying about other things, like artifical man-made borders. Worry about oppression, discrimination, equality (whatever that means). If people want to get het up about Gods and angels, Marx and Engels (that is a pop song...) then let them. As long as it doesn't impinge on me or mine, I'm happy. I am not generally happy.

    Peace out, people.

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  72. Tain Bo:

    One more thing: that 'we only use 10% of our brain' thing? Urban myth/pseudo-science.

    We use the most of it. I'd give the citation needed link, but in work, trying to cause the next financial crisis...

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  73. lads/lassies, dont mind the brain, its the heart we dont use enuf, love and intuition reside there, knowledge and hate are in the grey matter. red vs grey, red to win in the next generation. victory to the saordonian mental liberation army. and u can put ur house on that horse. the universe is rigged. we were loved before we were born. totally rigged. go with it. victory to the saordonian mentalists.

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  74. Frankie:

    Two things:

    Naomi Wolf? (nnnnn)

    Secondly, that LIBOR scandal? I have to laugh. They got caught as you can't manipulate the rate like that. (I deal with LIBOR during my work as well.)

    People will always be crooks, and try to line their own pockets. Always has been, always will.

    Jail the crooks. Hell yeah. But the markets aren't rigged. And when they are, it can be spotted. (Like we all saw the Cyprus crash coming weeks in advance. How do you stop it? You can't, as there was nothing illegal there. Nor could you make it such.)

    Never see conspiracy where incompetence is the answer, and boy, are lots of those bankers incompetent. But deliberately moving markets to line their own pockets? No.

    Lastly, God forbid we ever ban short selling/add transaction tax/other knee-jerk things. Sometimes I wish that politicians had some sort of clue to how the world works, but maybe it is best they don't.

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  75. Stray Taoist I appreciate the offer, I dont use daily data for my models, tick only im afraid because these models will be traded eventually.I have a bloomberg too and would return your offer if you need anything datawise. I think your cosmology point shows the perils of curve fitting to past events ,and its something im very aware of too, ive given talks on that very point, hence why phase transition stuff is done in my spare time, it could all come to nothing.

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  76. Stray,

    why just pause at most of it most of it sounds close to be on the all of it side.
    A throwback primitive man would you say they used most of it or did the matter grow to meet the new requirements as they acquired more knowledge minor things like harnessing the power of fire a major advancement having light in the darkness of night.
    Using tools primitive of course but highly sophisticated for the time and always improving them.
    If we use most of our brain matter it would be a little on the suspicious side that it took so long for us to harness the power of electrical current and even longer to understand atomic energy.

    I believe if we used most of or brain then our greatest minds would hold an understanding of dark matter and perhaps what happens after spaghettification do black holes have an exit or is all that trapped matter just there when a black hole eventually stuffs itself and shrinks out of existence.

    Back to basics if we used most of our brain that should mean I should not forget names, faces, or where I put something I can’t find.
    To state we use most of our brain leaves a narrow percentage for acquiring new knowledge and storing experience.
    Unlike a hard drive on a computer the brain never says memory full.

    Many severe cases of encephalitis, where massive parts of the cerebrum are dissolved by cerebral spinal fluid- and yet intellect and intelligence may remain within normal bounds (Dandy Walker complex)

    Pseudo myth/science is an opinion the potential of the human brain could be infinite a question for mathematicians how do you calculate the percentage of infinity?
    1%, 5%, 10% even 20 or 50% might suggest that some apes with pencils are extremely generous when it comes to the perfect answer that suits a particular theory.

    Neuroscience is relatively in its teething stage if I used most of my brain then my IQ should be up there with the greatest minds if we all used most of our brain then we should all be equally on par with intellect?

    For example I can take a computer apart and put it back together that doesn’t mean I should try and perform brain surgery nor does it mean that a brain surgeon should take apart a computer.

    No link is needed as it is just a theory that you subscribe too and granted you sound convinced I think I will stay on the side of urban myth as all myths hold a grain of truth.
    Better to believe that human intelligence is not near tapped out as we continue to progress and acquire new and ever more complex information.

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  77. Frankie, sorry i missed your initial point. Cant you see every court case strengthens my point and weakens yours? Court case implies some rule breaking doesnt it? I can see you care about this, and offer the Naomi Woolf article up, but she does not work in finance, and nobody ive ever met that works in this field would agree with your/her analysis. If i may, focus on the government bailouts of the banks, not the ups and downs of the market, this is where the transfer of wealth occured.

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  78. Stray,

    so we move the problem that does not mean we ignore it is there a better theory on what kicked of life. The problem with humans is we think we are exclusive and don’t exist in space so long chain molecules exist here on space earth.

    Beginning does not necessarily imply creator it implies creation from nothing came the universe which might not be true as science might discover that there could be a beyond what they pin point in time as the big bang.
    Is it possible calculation is only based upon the furthest back in time that has been observed and who knows maybe one day that will be changed with a more powerful telescope for looking back?

    The expansion of the universe should eventually collapse under its own weight which brings me back to black holes are they by design in existence of a thinking universe are they merely to consume as much weight as they can in order to prevent the universe from space obesity?

    I agree beginning and end are manufactured by man but that is a different begging and end as even our own life providing star is burning up its fuel and eventually will put on a show that would be amazing to watch that along with the death dance between our own galaxy and Andromeda calculated to be on a collision course that would be a sight to see.

    It is the nature of the beast it is easier to argue about oppression, discrimination, gods and devils as we all have some knowledge of those things but life becomes a little scary if we think the universe is alive that kind of robs mankind of that which makes us feel unique.

    There is always something to learn and there always will be as thought like the universe is always expanding.

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  79. Stray,

    just a moot point about not using all of my brain or most of it.
    If I did then I wouldn't make minor mistakes like this:

    "I agree beginning and end are manufactured by man but that is a different "begging" and end."

    That should be beginning but that is the at most 10% that keeps me trying to improve and learn.

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  80. Tain Bo:

    There *is* always something to learn, and that is what I love about life.

    We *do* have a unique place in the universe, all other things aside.

    And I for one would love to watch a star die, the jets from a black hole (mostly as stellar astrophysics is my bag, but hey.)

    There are issues with black holes, not least due to infinities in the maths. Nature doesn't work on infinities. Those are man-made to show we need to try harder :)

    The reason I love cosmology is that it tries to deal with these things, but acknowledges there are many things we can't know, but that doesn't stop us trying. Find a theory, make predicitons, refine.

    What I recommend is we all get together in a pub, lock-in for the night, and have a laugh debating wildly, gesticulating inarticulately, and talk it _all_ over.

    Next time I am in the colony, I'll call for a summit...

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  81. tain, jesus said this

    -O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding the truth from those who think themselves so wise and clever, and for revealing it to the childlike. Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way.

    and heres a nice story for u.

    2 old professors were walking across a wooden bridge on a lake in the grounds of their university. they had started their academic careers as friends but fell out over the years as one of them, a geneticist, had views on who had the right to life vastly different to the other. In fact he believed people who had low iqs and had mental handicaps should be aborted. As they were in their old age however they decided to make contact with each other again despite their opposing views. This particular day there was a tremor in the earth and the bridge collapsed. A young man who was taking a short cut through the university saw the two old men in peril and dived into the water and brought one of them ashore. He went back to get the second but he had gone under. The young man dived to the bottom of the lake and managed to find the old geneticist caught up in the reeds and weeds at the bottom of the lake. He managed to untangle him and brought him ashore too. He turned the man away from the lake and began artificial recussitation. Eventually the old geneticist coughed up a load of water and muck and regained consciousness. A small crowd had gathered by this stage. The young man was shouting and whooping and revelled in the attention and praise the gathered students heaped on him. Hero, Hero, they cried. The young man asked the man he had just revived what did he do for a living. He replied he was a professor of genetics. The young man responded by saying he didnt know what genetics was but that if he was a professor he should have learned to swim.
    The young man had Downes Syndrome.
    The old man felt stupid.

    and finally a quote form the founder of the hare krishnas

    "rascals and fools are passing as scholars, scientists and philosophers, and therefore the whole world is being misguided"

    victory to the saordonian mentalists.

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  82. Right. As an astrophysicist, theologian and father of a palaeontologist, I just *have* to weigh in..


    Stray, I'm simply a Belfast Rockabilly. But I understand bits and pieces about the laws of motion etc.. Why do some planets and their moons take orbits that go against the grain?
    Now as for DaithiD/Stray, its what Naomi Wolf she said NOT who she is. The heads of the banking industry got together and fixed interest rates in their favor. The fact they got caught maybe down to incompetence but they fixed (rigged) the system in the first place. You can bet you bottom dollar there are other scams that have yet to be uncovered. I'm not saying the market trader is crooked (although some have been convicted of being dodgy)..by an large then are simply well paid gamblers. But I am convinced the system is rigged solely because no one has control over them and they are the only ones who can print money.


    Jail the crooks. Hell yeah. But the markets aren't rigged. And when they are, it can be spotted. (Like we all saw the Cyprus crash coming weeks in advance. How do you stop it? You can't, as there was nothing illegal there. Nor could you make it such.)


    Stray, I'll try to dig out a video where in 2002 the end of the Tiger was predicted and how things would pan out..Cyprus, Greece..the fiddled their own books, the IMF and everyone else else knew what they done but still let them sign up to the Euro..And I have yet to meet anyone who is happy with the Euro..

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  83. Stray,

    Touché, indeed nature does not operate in infinities but given the complexity of nature it holds infinite possibilities.
    The math was just to point out the infinite mind or at least the possibility of infinite thought which to date has taken us from stone tools to computers.

    Black holes are fascinating it is difficult to imagine the point of no return perhaps it is a good location for earth being on the tail end of the galaxy.

    I agree you should call a summit that would be some craic and not having to type I wouldn’t complain.

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  84. Grouch,

    I can’t argue with believers as I can’t prove god doesn’t exist.

    I did enjoy reading your 2 professors bit. Unfortunately there are those who actually hold the view that the handicapped and the mentally challenged are a lower from of life which is a load of shite but elitists and perfectionists often hold everything to their own personal standard.
    I think I said it before there is good science and evil science but the same applies for religion there is the good and the evil.

    I am seriously considering applying for a non-passport and seek refuge in Sardonia.

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  85. tain bo, saordonia is an awesome spot. thats all i'll say for the moment. truly awesome.

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  86. Best Scene out of Sons of Anarchy. You could watch it a hundred times and still find it wickedly funny.

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  87. from the founder of the hare krishnas


    ...scientists in key academic, industrial and government positions have shown that they are indeed capable of mixing personal beliefs and ambitions with their research, thus altering the results. When this happens we are no longer dealing with a search for truth but with a pseudoscience and its resultant array of distortions, fabrications and false information. Unfortunately, this unscientific method has been applied to the most fundamental field of scientific inquiry - the nature and origin of life...
    almost everyone in the world is under the false impression that life is born from matter....science is based on an incorrect theory; therefore all its calculations and conclusions are wrong, and people are sufferring because of this...so we must challenge the scientists and defeat them....scientists cannot explain biological growth. They simply juggle words like molecule and chromosome, but they cannot actually explain the phenomenon...The modern world is a society of the cheaters and the cheated, unfortunately the cheated are eulogizing the cheaters and the small cheaters are worshipping the great cheaters...The law is cheating, medical science is cheating and the government is cheating...everyone is suffering here in the material world and scientific improvements means that the scientists are creating a situation of further suffering...I say to the scientists - if life originated from chemicals and if your science is so advanced then why cant you create life biochemically in your laboratories?...They have discovered atomic energy. Now they can kill millions at once. They have simply cleared the way for death. And yet they dare to declare that they will make life!

    hare kṛṣṇa hare kṛṣṇa
    kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa hare hare
    hare rāma hare rāma
    rāma rāma hare hare

    hare kṛṣṇa hare kṛṣṇa
    kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa hare hare
    hare rāma hare rāma
    rāma rāma hare hare

    hare kṛṣṇa hare kṛṣṇa
    kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa hare hare
    hare rāma hare rāma
    rāma rāma hare hare

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