Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

"It seems that the earth had been established in orbit around the sun and was a globe covered with water before the six "days", or periods, of special creative works began. "There was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep." (Genesis 1:2). At that early point, something-perhaps a mixture of water vapor, other gases , and volcanic dust-must have prevented sunlight from reaching the surface of the earth."

FWIW, there was a time when I used to try to reconcile Genesis with the creation as it has apparently happened, and it once occurred to me that the 'water' could actually be a very apt metaphor for the false vacuum and quantum fluctuating spacetime at Planck time (10 ^-43 sec), which incidentally would have been quite dark too, as photons had not decoupled yet (at the "let there be light" juncture later).

Not that the writer could have possibly understood any of this, but if one believed the words were inspired by God then it wouldn't have mattered since clearly God would have understood it in dictation and knew some reader in the far distant future might.

"Nothing can change this declared purpose of the Creator, namely, that the whole earth should be turned into a paradise filled with happy humans living at peace with one another "

Shiny, haaappy people holding hannnnnds

This little interaction touches on something I often wonder about: what will ultimately become of all these opposing faiths? Several of them seem to have mutual conversion (or annihilation) as stated goals. The increasing smallness of the world, and our being forcibly crammed together in communications, economics and international relations is bringing about a degree of cultural homogenization that will inevitably have an impact, eventually on religion. The issue is going to be forcing itself upon us. Really it already has in terms of the way they perceive each other. 100 years ago the average person would have simply called Muslims 'heathens' or 'pagans' or some such thing not even knowing the very simplest aspects of the faith. Now there is an increased degree of understanding, and yet still a desire by some for bringing about the "Jihad". I see these future long-term possibilities for many of the dominant religions:

1) Dilution (sufficient to allow the 'others' to exist) and peaceful co-existence thereafter
2) Dilution as above but resulting in gradual dissolution (a sort of agnosticism by default)
3) Dilution and fusion (unlikely but stranger things have happened)
4) Solidification and Jihad (the future which must be avoided at all costs)
5) Simple cultural conversion over time by one religion that eventually becomes dominant

Anyone have any odds on these?

That's right, isn't this the hinterland to which we were cast out from the Off-Topic Forum (the "Garden of Eden"?)

Don't you believe in coffee breaks? :-)

thanks both you guys. Bill I understand what you're saying and yes I acknowledge I'm not in exactly a "normal" frame of mind. But I feel confident I'll be "myself" in a few days. Nobody was severely injured in this incident either, fortunately, but our tellers did get roughed up a bit and will probably need some counseling.

It hasn't really been a good day.

There is an old buddhist parable about blind men in a room trying to describe an elephant. Each one touches a different part of the elephant, tusk, trunk, tail, leg, etc. and arrives at a very different description. They proceed to argue furiously about what sort of animal this is.

It is a parable of the many-sidedness of things and also the foolishness of judging others' perceptions of something you yourself cannot fully understand.

This attitude may explain the higher tolerance of buddhism and some other eastern religions. In this application the blind men represent the world's religions, the elephant represents God. The parable could even be extended to include atheists (a blind man walks through the room, never bumps into the elephant, and concludes the other men are imagining things).

That was begining to bug me to

OOoooooo good one! Telescopes as religious allegories! May I?

Let's see, you have the die-hard fans of the apochromats. Let's call them "Fundamentalists". They believe in absolute purity of image and a devout following of a system free of any central obstructions or chromatic aberrations, however financially impractical that may be.

Then you have the big dob owners. Let's call them "atheists". They do not believe in the religious dogma regarding unobstructed systems or the inherent superiority of the refractor that is so plain to the believers. They believe in the simple science of brute force aperture above all else. They recite the "Aperture wins" mantra.

Then you have the oddly semi-religious fence-sitters like me, who gravitate toward moderation, and who, seeing the merits of both parties' beliefs, and being of modest means, settle into the land of economic performance by going for f/8 reflectors with modest central obstructions.

At f/15 really you are another such moderate, having not fallen into aprochromatic fundamentalism, but going the more practial route of f/15 achromat. I myself have traveled this road.

Everything is a question of degrees and where we feel 'comfortable'.