Questions about religion

These are things I'm curious about. I admit some questions may seem or be loaded, but I think they make sense.

First:

Seeing what the world is like today, one has to wonder what the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the people in the time of Noah, did to deserve summary death. Any modern Western city has its share of crime, prostitution, drug addiction, etc, etc. Consider places like North Korea, Cuba, China and others were torture and other forms of cruelty are common, and you wonder, For that matter, since god didn't choose to destroy Germany or Japan throughout WWII (the Allied armies did in retaliation and self-defense), or the Soviet Union afterwards, what the bloody hell did those ancients in the Bible do.

More later.

Nareed, heres how I see it. The Ancients in the Bible needed to have a "foundation" of good will towards others that could only ,in those days, be expressed thru a "spiritualality" .They had to develope their own laws for what was right and what was wrong. As is obvious we have to "take ourselves back in time" and try and imagine what life without science must have been like for them. There were norms and abnorms TO THEM. There were very few people on the planet in those days and limited knowledge. Is it any wonder that religions were formed and passed down by traditions and slowly, very slowly developed into the OLD testament (for the control/laws of the Jews) and later Mohammed for the Laws of Muslims. They seem to be related in that they has the same bloodline I think it was Abraham so it is taught. Then christianity came into existance thru a believed Ressurection from the dead by a --as taught-- a person who never "sinned" we know as Jesus Christ. There is a lot here in between that I'm leaving out....

There is one element of difficulty that many choose to avoid, ignor, or write off as "science hasn't solved it yet" and that is how all Spiecie DNA forms and grows and maintains life and still exists intact after death. What breathed the life into our being as well as all the species that exist or ever existed.

In order to extract the right answers one must ask the right question. Which came first the DNA, any and all present and past life forms (DNA alone =Life?? insome cases I guess but not all).Example there are no more dinosaurs why not? If they were not created then perhaps they should be "popping up" somwhere without a parent or a parents rearing. just think if we were not created how did the first child survive? It's the "chicken and Egg" issue. Did we come out of a 'primortal soup' as some may think. Well know one really knows but obsevation can tell us alot.

Think of this --everything living must of came out of fire and ice? How could DNA have formed and maintained the first life out of fire, ice, and earth?? Well i don't know? And since no one can answer this dilema accurately the debate goes on and always will!

I am 98% certain something happened from something (call it Creator) that no one can explain... not the scholars nor the religions created in the expectation of reward for life after death due to the limited knowledge of the Ancients day for the purpose of keeping the masses controled thru "Law by a spirituality base"
. There is a part of us that is in our conscience existance that tells us right and wrong as passed on to us thru the laws of nature and man. We now have civil law which took thousand of years to develop and that is why as time goes on an ever increasing amount of people will come into the knowledge that religion was a man made device for humankinds own benefit as to help in facilitating PEACE and harmony between men.

But there is a problem with JUST Civil laws. Our nature is to want things that possibly can hurt not just ourselves but others. This is what "the Ancients" saw and passed down and still exist today in a form. They saw that humans can have fear when there is no reason for fear. The fear of death was ,I believe, greater back then thru their unfortunate ignorance in expecting an afterlife. They also feared others who thru ignorance were deemed a threat to them for reasons such as food shortages crop failures and wars and rumors of wars. Thus their religions were fortified and somewhat justified. You see they knew that BACK THEN all races had some type of belief in a spiritualistic "god" of the heavens and also the 'underworld"gods.

need to switch up a bit...

Nationalism is an old enemy of humankind and old "Nationalisms" still exist today. Nationalism is OK and possibly preferable if each National entity can survive and thrive on it's own without any need for another Nation. We know that this is not the case. Nations must do commerce to survive with their huge populations. The UN will one day run the planet.

At this point in time the world is short of many resources and the distribution of those resources causes the differences we all encounter today and tend to blame others WHEN WE SHOULDN'T blame anyone but the human condition of FEAR (and hunger, and housing). religiousity is supposed to alliviate those fears but as we know it falls short especially in todays world. But in the "Ancients" time it had it's effective purposes. Today the US government is a god of a sort ($$). But not forever long I fear.

The Ancients THOUGHT god issued judgement but it was just a meteor shower that hit there in S&G.

Summary, There may or not be a "God" but a creator/creation is most likely (DNA/life form complexity). There is no problem believing or following a godliness just as long as it is yours and don't push it on others. Religion can be dangerous when mixed with Governmental authority/s. Religion should not be argued over. And the Masses to often err thru fear of death and punishment. When you are dead you are dead. Paradise and punisment is a flesh based ideology. I'd love to go on but no one's gonna read this here and they wouldn't contemplate much anyway. Ignorance/hubris abounds & everyone wants to be right always. Even me!

And they want to gamble way to much!!

There are many ways of looking at it. Here are some!

1. God evolves. God has learned from his experience with man. He promised never to destroy mankind with water again, etc. His relationship with man is evolving.

2. God has an unfolding plan. His revelation comes in stages. The old testament sets a stage for the new testament. He was announcing his authority.

3. All sin is equally bad. We are all sinners, all deserve to die. We have different experiences and many are horrible, and any saving from horror offered is undeserved. Why do we have pain and suffering at all?

4. The Holocaust and the Great Flood both killed a lot of people. Who is worse? Hitler or God? Does God have the authority to kill anyone he pleases and Hitler does not?

Genesis 19 answers your question, somewhat. Until angel-rape becomes common in crime capitals like Los Angeles, we're safe from God's wrath.

I know that in Jewish folklore, Procrustes was a Sodomite, and Lot had had a third daughter who ran afoul of the fact that giving to the poor was a capital offense there.

Really, though, "they displeased God(s)" was just the conclusion of the superstitious mind that "recognized" that someone must have put that shockwave that in the nigh-forgotten past had decimated the region there, just like someone must have triggered the Big Bang, and in the former case that someone must have been pissed, and they had to figure out why. We can go on killing every man, boy, and non-virgin woman in the neighboring towns and keeping the rest as loveslaves, though.

Quote: scire

There is one element of difficulty that many choose to avoid, ignor, or write off as "science hasn't solved it yet" and that is how all Spiecie DNA forms and grows and maintains life and still exists intact after death. What breathed the life into our being as well as all the species that exist or ever existed.

At least the basic mechanisms are well known: an endless repeated cycle of replication, random mutation and a "merciless" selection process of a large population.
It is - indeed - a miracle the result perceived as "life" are fricking awesome in complexity, variety and efficiency.

I'm leaving out the question whether SHE exists or not. But we can at least play with the above principles and decide if it is enough to explain a model of life..
My favourite example is BoxCar2D, a simplistic mechanical simulation implementing replication, mutation and selection principles. In this simulation there is goal to be followed, all happens as it happens following the mechanical rules of the simulation physics. If you let it run long enough in your browser (a few hours), there seems to be a directed process towards forming an efficient "boxcar" capable of riding a rough street which looks astonishing realistic. However there is no part of the program having any master plan for such a boxcar - the boxcar just happens eventually.

Personally, I see nature in a similar way. It just happens as it happens, because there is nothing that forbid it happening. Maybe SHE "wrote the program" (or chose the physical rules), but that doesn't mean SHE had the intention to form all those life around us the specific way we (currently) see it.

I've always found it strange how it's always people positing a deistic or quasi-deistic god, but skeptical of its existence, who insist on referring to it as female (actual deists nearly always saying "he" or "it"), but among believers only neopagans and others with a specific concept of what this goddess - since believers I've never heard talk of a female "god" - should be. It seems almost misogynistic, in a funny sort of way.

Quote: MangoJ

My favourite example is BoxCar2D, a simplistic mechanical simulation implementing replication, mutation and selection principles. In this simulation there is goal to be followed, all happens as it happens following the mechanical rules of the simulation physics. If you let it run long enough in your browser (a few hours), there seems to be a directed process towards forming an efficient "boxcar" capable of riding a rough street which looks astonishing realistic. However there is no part of the program having any master plan for such a boxcar - the boxcar just happens eventually.

I read your post a couple days ago, and went to the link. It's been running ever since, I just hit my 500th generation (that's 10,000 trials). My longest run time is 1:53 with a score of 995.3. Most tries get a score of between 350 to 800. It's been stuck at the same point in it's evolution since somewhere around the 300th generation. While I will agree that, yes, it has become better, it's no where near completing the course. I let it run with all the default values.

If you are stuck in the simulation (i.e. not seing significant progress) -- well done, you just created a new "dinosaur boxcar".
It will stay much about the same over a very large number of generations, making very little progress (it does make progress, right ?).

If you want variety, you need to dramatically increase the population size (compare your 10 cars with the thousands or millions of real entities), higher mutation rate and have much much patience (compare millions of generations to your few hundrets). Or simply change the type of course with your population.
Eventually a new branch of bocars will appear, being able to master this very obstacle you are always stuck on. And if it is sufficiently faster than the "older dinosaur generation", it is more likely to dominate in the new environment.

Nothing fundamental different than we observed on in the history of this very earth.
(Of course life of earth is not about mastering obstacle courses - this is just a model).