John Stewart - I Worship You

I will be short on time/energy for these next two posts, so both are going to be incredibly simple.
Hooray for me.

I have been a fan of John Stewart for quite some time.  He may be on comedy central but he criticizes important parts of American society and shares his views (in a comical manor).  John Stewart is usually brilliant and I wish more people would take watch/listen to him instead of the awful real news they feed off of.

Watch this brilliant clip where John addresses the 'Mosque at ground zero' and elsewhere in America for that matter.
Let me know what you think.

www.thedailyshow.com

The Soul Problem

Do you believe humans have souls?
Have you ever seriously considered the ramifications of such a belief?

For starters I would assume:

• Everyone has one unique soul
• Your soul can and does interact with your body
• Your soul is within you from the time you are a zygote

I assume the first point is the most readily accepted by the religious community.  The second point is vital because otherwise your soul does nothing; it just is.  A soul that simply exists and never interacts is a useless entity containing no information about your personal self that many people attribute to souls: personality, morality, emotional response.  The third point is important to what I will be saying, here it is interesting to note that religious people are unclear on when the soul enters the human body.  Since many people oppose abortion because it is taking a life and the fetus 'has a soul' I decided that the zygote stage was a good time to obtain your soul.

Soul Arithmetic
1 + 1 = 1     -------     The case of the chimera and the vanishing twin: 
  Sometimes two zygotes merge and become one, a chimera, or one fetus is absorbed by the other or by the mother, the vanishing twin.  In both of these situations it seems two souls are moving into one body.  Can one person obtain two souls?  Or does one soul disappear to go to limbo or heaven or hell?  That soul didn't get to experience anything and clearly should have never been created; unless it fuses with the other zygote/fetus' soul.  Perhaps the fetuses do not yet have souls, maybe a soul is endowed at birth - this is the only easy remedy to this crazy soul addition.
 
1 + 0 = 2     -------     The case of the monozygotic twin:
  Monozygotic, identical, twins emerge from one single zygote.  The zygote splits in two - does one soul become two, are they each one half? Maybe a new soul is suddenly conjured up, but one of them received a soul first.  Why wouldn't god simply avoid the whole awkward situation and avoid creating identical twins?  Maybe souls are not placed into zygotes, but fetuses can be re-absorbed.  Man, soul addition just makes no sense!

If souls are not obtained until the fetal stage, then they follow a funny rule of waiting until a stage arbitrarily defined by man and abortion is fine until the fetal stage.  If souls are absent until birth, then abortion at any stage should be acceptable, I mean the developing human has no soul!

Soul Meets Body
 How does your soul interact with your body?
Typically we assume the interaction point is within the brain - I mean a soul might interact with your hand, but to what end?  (It would certainly be amusing to coin the term 'soul-job',  Are you looking at porn?  Nah, just getting a little soul-job!).
Back to the issue at hand (no pun intended) - the soul must change something in the body to interact or there is no interaction.  For you soul to guide you, either in action or in thought, then it must cause some neural movement.  No conscious/subconscious action takes place without brain activity.  For the soul to interact, something material must be influenced by something spiritual.  The spirit must supply energy to move a material part (even if it is only some neurons).  In doing so the soul is adding energy to the physical universe.  The most basic principal of physics, conservation of energy, has just been violated.  Over time and over the entirety of the human race this soul/body interaction would lead to a lot of additionally supplied energy.  I side with physics on this one - sorry.

Maybe the soul doesn't do anything?  Well congratulations, you have a useless soul.  It's ok though, you probably don't have a soul.  If the soul was the center of personality, morality, emotional response, of all that makes you - you, then we would expect that brain damage would not significantly alter all of those areas.  However, brain damage can significantly alter all of them, it can make you think you are an entirely different person with a different background who will sincerely have completely different emotional responses.  It would seem that such a person's soul has even become drastically confused/damaged.

I'm sorry (not really) but there is just no solid foundation for the naive belief in a soul.  Besides, when you talk about your soul - you sound dumb.

Everything Begins with Banging

Animals, plants, the universe - in a way they all start with banging.
I am only going to talk about the universe for the time being. The universe is thought to have begun with the big bang. I for one believe that most aspects of the inflationary big bang model are correct. However, our public school system does a piss poor job of explaining it and I feel the need to explicate the subject.

The Inflationary Big Bang Model:

About 15 Billion years ago the Universe was extremely condensed with all mass and energy compressed to some type of singularity. The Big Bang is thought to have been an expanding singularity or it could have been a planer event like an expanding horizon. We cannot possibly observe the state of the universe before the big bang. We can view light far enough away to see about 13.5 Billion years into the past.

We know the universe is expanding, this can easily be tested. Extrapolating backwards from an expanding universe gives us the infinitely condensed start of the universe. The big bang started - possibly due to an instability in the Higgs Field (See Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos"). When the big bang started, the universe was homogeneous. It was a collection of high energy and high temperature exotic particles. The universe rapidly cooled and hydrogen could form. Hydrogen was the only element until the universe cooled further and nuclei could form (this took about 3 minutes). There were small local inhomogeneities which had a slight gravitational pull and started developing the clumpy universe that slowly evolved toward the universe we have today.

There was no space for the universe to expand into, the expanding universe is the space. The inflationary model says that the universe expanded rapidly, all distances increased by a factor of over ten to the ten million! The rapid inflation helped spread energy differences and make the universe more homogeneous overall. It also lowered the energy density of space so high energy particles like gravitons could no longer form. Inflation also gives an explanation for the small inhomogeneities that lead the the first clumping of the universe. Quantum uncertainty principles dictate that there will be small fluctuations in say energy or position. The incredibly rapid inflation essentially stretched the quantum fluctuations to create small inblances in the uniform universe where gas begun to clump.

The clumping gases eventually lead to stars and galaxies etc etc.

Inflation is perhaps the most important part of the big bang and it is not mentioned in school. If you absolutely need a reason for everything and ascribe god to anything science has not yet explained, then all god or gods are needed for is perhaps setting off the big bang and maybe (doubtful) starting life. A god that has only done that is very hands off and does not fit the description of any god(s) praised by humans.

People ask, "what was here before the big bang?" This question is nonsensical as the big bang created our time. Before the big bang there was not time; time's arrow started pointing forward from the big bang. Sorry.

Nature: The Goddess

Sometimes you witness something so profound you stop and gaze in awe.

Nature constantly astounds me - I revel in her beauty.

What is even more incredible is that such beauty arose without a creator. Such beauty is inherently natural, it is a property of matter to form beauty.

Or maybe as a creature constructed from matter and part of nature I am bound to be drawn to her. Anyway, here is some porn for your natural self:

 

Fun Fact: Contradictions

     According to the Skeptics Annotated Bible website [See Links Page] the Bible contains 456 contradictions within its text.  These are not counting any contradictions that the bible may have with historical texts or reality in general (for example the value of pi).  Many contradictions are little things, such as the number of sons Abraham had:

Hebrews 11:17

By faith Abraham when he was tried, offered up Isaac, ... his only begotten son.

Genesis 22:2

Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, ... and offer him there for a burnt offering.

Genesis 16:15

And Hagar bare Abraham a son: and Abram called his son's name, which Hagar bare, Ishmael.

Genesis 21:2-3

For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son is his old age .... And Abraham called him Isaac.

Genesis 25:1-2

Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah. And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah.

Galatians 4:22

Abraham had two sons; the one by a bond-woman, and the other by a free woman.

 
     The Koran on the other hand contains 31 contradictions.

     The book of Mormon contains 3 contradictions.  However the book of Mormon is shorter and is also fairly new to the website.  It may not be done racking up contradictions.

     Seems as though the writers of the Bible didn't care to closely read the rest of the Bible.  Funny, I thought the writing of the Bible was guided by god?  Maybe he enjoys contradictions, like reasonable faith.  Did I just type that?