RRRGroup

Religion, UFOs, and Bunk

2008-07-14T10:39:00.001-04:00

Michael Heiser engages in some very interesting debates at his UFO Religions site:

http://michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions/

The thrusts are many but his usual and current nemesis is Monsignor Corrado Balducci.

Balducci, the Vatican’s premiere demonologist, thinks that UFO creatures, even those that allegedly abduct humans, are, perhaps, of a higher nature than us, and more spiritually evolved, thus denigrating the idea in some UFO quarters that abductors and UFO aliens are maligant and/or evil as one blog commentator has it:

Balducci the Individualist

There’s a problem with infusing, continually, religious elements in the UFO debate, and that problem is the mixture of theological myth with ufological myth: UFOs are a phenomenon (or phenomena as we contend) and not a tureen into which every cockeyed hypothesis should be poured.

Religion is itself an amalgam of hopeful theories about God, human life and morality, and an afterlife perhaps.

Ufology is a potpourri of screwed-up and, sometimes, unique conjecture, which doesn’t need one more set of variables based upon the idea that there’s a God (and demons) who have something to do with UFOs.

The only link between UFOs and God, or between ufology and theology, is that God is an unknown and UFOs are an unknown.

That’s it.

Michael Heiser is brilliant and his views follow suit.

He keeps the UFO/religion debate intellectual.

But let a few UFO fanatics or evangelical Christian/Islamic hooples get into the fray and all hell will break loose, and not the Hell of theologians, where the Devil can be accomodated.

Opening the UFO discussion to Christian fundamentalists is akin to Pandora opening her chest of evils, which have afflicted mankind for millennia.

But if you can’t help yourself, go to Michael Heiser’s blog and sites.

You will not be engulfed in nonsense, as is the case elsewhere in the UFO universe when religion gets added to the UFO mystery.

Scouring History, Literature, Biography, etc. for UFOs: Nada

2008-07-09T11:51:00.002-04:00

When purported UFO incidents are expunged from the Bible – Ezekiel, Elijah, the God-dove at Jesus’ baptism, et cetera – the vast written material provided by mankind (prior to 1947) is devoid of flying saucer and/or UFO accounts that stand as bona fide sightings of the phenomenon.

The striking dearth of such events or appearances – excluding the scant mariner observations by Columbus et al. and the apocryphal stories about Alexander and Constantine, along with the metaphorical images in Vedic sacred writings – indicates that the general population of human observers and writers didn’t see or experience the things we know today as UFOs.

Thucydides, Herodotus, the Greek philosophers, the Conquistadors, Magellan, Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark, Livingstone, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, Melville, Bierce, Margaret Mead, and all the other explorers and writers we read or read about have nothing in their journals or oeuvre that comes close to what has become the “literature” of flying saucers and UFOs.

And the context of the few early UFO episodes – those often cited by ufology writers as proof of the ubiquitous UFO phenomenon – is mythological or religious, not historical or literary.

This plays into the Vallee hypotheses, not the Friedman theories.

That is, UFOs are either a kind of mythos, not the recent visitors to the Earth as Friedman contends.

Or UFOs are a product of the modern age, generated by, initially, Cold War anxieties and more recently as existential artifacts, produced by man’s intuition that we are alone, with no galactic companions and gods (or God) to assuage the mess we call life.

UFOs are not mystical as some ufologists believe, nor have been intrusions by a concomitant race hidden to man (so far) as Mac Tonnies portrays.

They haven’t been projections of human psyches, as Jung suggested.

(Early human strife would have provided such projections, and the Holocaust in particular, where no UFO sightings were recorded or noted, not even by Victor Frankl.

UFOs could be the bolts-and-nuts craft that Stanton Friedman has established his credentials upon, but the armada needed to fulfill his armload of visitors seems iffy for a number of reasons: intergalactic travel restrictions, support facilities (mechanical and sustaining supplies such as food and water), the unimportance of Earth in the great scheme of the Universe, et cetera.

One would expect that extraterrestrial races would not be that different, if Friedman et al have it right.

And the UFO configurations seem to hint at races not very technically different from us.

But UFOs exhibit behavior that is different. UFOs do not communicate, whereas Earth explorers always went out of their way to communicate with the strange tribes and life-forms they encountered.

UFOs could stem from time-travelers but, again, the number of UFOs seen in modern times would mean that creatures from our future (or past) have an inordinate interest in this time and place.

Even the great explorers of the past were small in number compared to the total human population, representing a scintilla of interest in what was out there while the primary human contingent (the rabble) went about their lives with not an iota of care for what lay beyond their immediate environment.

So UFOs from time seem problematic, unless almost everyone from the future (or distant past) found this time period obsessively intriguing.

Where does this leave us, conjecturally?

UFOs have not been a part of humanity in any significant way, as the lacunae in literature shows.

The few apocryphal sightings say more about the writers of that apocrypha than the reality they bent for various reasons, most self-aggrandizing.

UFOs – some UFOs – may be visitors from space (Friedman) or time (Goldberg) but not all of them.

Some UFOs are psychical projections, and hallucinatory, considering the dementia of many UFO devotees.

A few – quite a few? – UFO are hoaxes. (Dementia again)

Or UFOs are a counter-reality that impacts some Earthlings but not many actually.

And the import of that? None…none whatsoever.

Thus, UFOs are a game, meant for a few, not the (Spock) many.

Therefore they can be dismissed or ignored, and nothing will happen when they are ignored.

So fellow UFO mavens move on to something worthwhile…..

Plato, the Cave, and UFOs

2008-06-23T12:29:00.000-04:00

From Wikipedia:

“The forms that we see, according to Plato, are not real, but literally mimic the real Forms.

In the Allegory of the cave expressed in Republic they are called the shadows of artificial replicas of real things.”

Are UFOs “forms”?

We think they may be.

And if they are. then what are the real Forms, that which the UFO “forms” are mimicking?

Jacques Vallee, and a few others, have been suggesting all along that UFOs represent another reality, a reality behind the apparent reality.

Even as a chair can be a Plato “form” with the real chair Form residing elsewhere – an “elsewhere” that isn’t exactly defined in philosophy or Jungian psychology (where Plato’s archetypes play an important role) – UFOs can be “forms” but where is the UFO elsewhere, where the real UFO Form may be found?

That is the question that Vallee (or Jung in his book on flying saucers) fails to answer.

Without the source or “elsewhere” of UFOs, it becomes difficult, maybe even impossible, to assess what UFOs really are.

But that’s what ufology needs to do: find the “elsewhere” that houses the UFO phenomenon or phenomena.

This means that philosophical disciplines need to be applied to UFO research and investigation.

While we eshew philosophy at another venue of ours, we think the methodologies of philosophy (and maybe quantum mechanics which is more philosophic than scientific) can be worked to attack the UFO enigma.

It will require effort of a serious kind, which we know ufologists are rarely up to, but that is what it will take to get to the core of the UFO reality.

And we know a few pesons who are up to the task, and prepared to make the mental (maybe physical) pursuit.

We’ll keep you apprised of their progress, if any…

The BIG BANG Insanity

2008-06-10T12:51:00.002-04:00

Common sense tells us (and any non-physicist) that the Universe could not be created ex nihilo.

That is, if the Universe is the totality of existence (reality), it could not have sprung from an infinitely small “atom” as conjectured in the Big Bang Theory.

There would have had to be something into which that Big Bang atom could “explode.”

Mentally we can’t envision the supposed void that physicists propose the Big Bang atom was surrounded by when it generated.

Moreover, from whence did the Big Bang atom derive?

Even if we accept the postulations of the Big Bang physicists, we can’t account for the creation of the primordial “atom” that gave birth to the Universe we inhabit.

Of course, if the Steady State Theory of the Universe remained viable, that is acceptable, as is the theological position that God is internal, infinite, and brought the Universe into existence from nothing – into the existence that is God itself, the “body” of God as conjectured by Teilhard de Chardin (and others).

The expansion of the Universe doesn’t presuppose a burst of cataclysmic energy, especially from a pinpoint source.

Expansion of the Universe that we can perceive could be an exhalation of the Universe for the time-frame we’re part of, and the Universe will contract eventually as the Vedic accounts have it.

Expansion is not necessarily intrinsic to the Universe.

And we’ll be exploring the physicists’ mental aberration about the Big Bang even more, upcoming….

The Failure(s) of Philosophy

2008-06-06T10:43:00.001-04:00

Philosophy has never provided answers to anything.

The conjectures have always been convoluted, obscurant, and even senseless.

For instance, a Professor (D. Moore) at Indiana-Purdue University (IPFW) in Fort Wayne, Indiana had a lecture recently wherein he provided the usual canard that Plato was a realist and Leibniz was an idealist.

The actuality is that Plato was an idealist, as is obvious from his writings, and Leibniz was a realist, as accounts of his life and studies show.

But philosophy instructors and advocates always turn reality on its head.

Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God – that than which nothing is greater – convolutes the simple question “Is there a God?”

Hume and all other philosophers have beat the dead horse of God’s existence, with no denouement.

From the beginning of philosophical thought – Thales, Anaximander, et al. – the ruminations pertaining to the meaning of life have made the examination complex and confusing.

In an effort to appear wise and/or erudite, philosophers encrusted their arguments with questions that perplex but do not answer anything – have not answered anything.

Three thousand years of philosophical queries have produced not one iota of information or thought that has been helpful or beneficial to mankind.

Theologians, such as Aquinas or, more recently, Barth, haven’t helped either, and both (among others) were brilliant.

Philosophical conundrums posed by Aristotle, Boethius, Descartes, Vico, Nietzsche, and everyone else, have fallen flat when it comes to human destiny.

The Existentialists – Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, et al. -- recognize(d) the silliness of the philosophical pursuit but actively engaged in it themselves.

The great literary master, Herman Melville, provided an entertaining look at the nature of God (Moby Dick), good and evil (Billy Budd, Foretopman), and the existential dilemma (Bartleby the Scrivener) that settles (arguably) most of the philosophical questions posited before and after him.

Melville provided, in three works, the whole of philosophical questioning, and offered answers, of a kind, to all of it.

Socrates’ maxim – Know thyself – is pithy and not recondite but it tells us nothing.

Descartes’ offer – I think therefore I am – is also a concise statement of reality but it takes us nowhere.

More recently Gramsci tried to flesh out Marxist thought, but that time has passed.

The meaning of mankind’s purpose is still up for grabs.

Politicians can’t help. Theologians are up against a denial of God’s existence, in light of the absolute absence of God in the lives of humankind.

And philosophers are as defunct as the Roc, which makes us wonder why anyone would take up that educational mantle.

Philosophy is an arcane methodology, no better than alchemy, and more confusing actually.

So, please, let us move on to things more intellectually productive…whatever that might be.

Cancer and Quantum Theory

2008-05-28T14:08:00.000-04:00

Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat and the quantum idea that observation or measurement of an event alters the event can be used to explain why some people die of cancer and others do not.

Everyone, virtually everyone, has cancer in their bodies.

Once a cancer is observed (measured) or found and acknowledged it is altered by the finding (observation) and become active, in a detrimental way, just as Schrödinger’s cat is dead or alive once the box in which it was (figuratively) encased with a vial of radioactive poison is hypothetically broken.

It takes an observation of the cat in the box to determine if the cat is alive or dead after the radioactive vial is broken. Before the observation, one doesn’t know if the cat is alive or dead, and the cat is, according to quantum theory, neither alive nor dead until it is looked at – observed, measured.

Once a cancer is found – and, again, everyone has a cancer in their body – the observation of it will activate the cancer in a deleterious way.

Just as Schrödinger’s cat will surely be found to be dead, once it is observed, one’s cancer will surely become deadly once it is observed.

The idea that early detection stems cancer’s advance is a canard. Early detection merely shortens the life of those who have the detection.

There is, however, a quantum possibility that one can, just as Schrödinger’s cat could (hypothetically), collapse the observation – in quantum physics, it’s a “wave” that is collapsed – and not have a killer cancer.

Consciousness of a positive kind might deter further growth of a cancer or put it in remission.

Some people do this, and prayer, as a deliberate conscious act, might also be a positive element in keeping cancer contained.

But it is the detection of cancer and it’s measurement that brings on the deadly aspect of the cancer; that is, the cancerous growth is accelerated by its observation.

Those who don’t have a medical examination, but who have a cancer within, will not be affected by the cancer in an abnormal way. They will die naturally, late in life, with the ordinary malfunction of human organs and the vicissitudes of old age.

So if you think you should have an MRI, think again. Quantum theory is your out.

UFOs: A failure to communicate

2008-05-19T13:49:00.000-04:00

If UFOs are depicted in primitive petroglyphs and the stories in the Hebrew Bible are authentic [The Ezekiel vision and the Elias episode for instance], the message inherent to those early sightings remains cryptic.

AmerIndian myths and accounts of UFOs (or things similar to them) are still without clarity. The message, if there was one, was obscure and is still obscure.

The alleged Alexander [The Great] sighting(s) and Constantine’s “cross in the sky” epiphany, despite the accrued Christian context, were devoid of a clear message.

And the Middle Ages battles of UFOs seen in the skies left nothing to explain what that was all about.

In the modern era (of UFOs), starting with the airship occurrences of the 1890s up through the 1947 raft of flying saucer sightings and into the year 2008, UFOs (and their progenitors, if any) have provided no message to humankind, no decipherable message anyway.

The absence of any message – and UFOs have had ample opportunity to leave a message if the things wanted to – is significant.

Like God, after the Torah, and Jesus, in the New Testament, who spoke in parables, UFOs have been obscurant. Why?

If alien beings pilot UFOs (or some of them), they’ve had enough time to understand the human mind-structure, and ability to communicate or receive communication.

The hypotheses by some “ufologists” that UFOs have left messages, via symbols or symbolic behavior, is just flaky, unless UFOs, like God, are playing a game of some kind with humanity.

But because so many years have gone by, eons actually, the game of UFOs (and God) has worn thin, to the point that human beings don’t or shouldn’t care.

If there is a message being proffered by UFOs, we humans are either too stupid to get it or the message is a garbled mess, by insane creatures, a message that can’t be deciphered because it is totally irrational (like the message of the Creator).

Or there has been no message to be gleaned. UFOs just can’t communicate, or are as confounded by us we are of them, and choose to remain mute.

Either way, it’s a sum-zero situation, with no winners…..

UFOs: A Reason to Party?

2008-05-16T09:18:00.001-04:00

A Canadian film-maker who likes UFOs takes umbrage with our idea that he and his cronies diminish the seriousness of UFOs by using them as a front for beer-drinking and womanizing.

Most ufologists think some UFO phenomena are serious matters, even going so far in some quarters to say they represent an apocalyptic omen.

Other UFO blokes (us included) think that UFOs are a benign (thus far), unknown intrusion of several phenomena, one of which may be serious (an alien presence of some kind).

Science eschews UFOs because the field has been, since day one, infected by crazies who have tried to use UFOs (sometimes successfully, as in the case of George Adamski) to augment their ego-needs.

Serious “ufologists” have distanced themselves form the crazies but there is a renewed effort, by the Canadian film-maker and his pals, to re-invigorate the nonsense element within the UFO community.

The recent release of some British government UFO files has created an environment that might generate a sensible interest by the public and media in the UFO phenomena.

But that sensible interest will be undercut by those who use UFOs as a pretext to act silly and be cavalier, all the time pretending to be investigating UFOs seriously.

The 1950s created an atmosphere of looniness about flying saucers, but with the alleged abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, UFOs took on a sinister aspect.

UFOs have a patina of eeriness about them that is more than subliminal, even though nothing untoward about UFOs has been proven, in the scientific or military sense.

But UFOs may contain a serious threat to humanity, or not. We just don’t know.

Yet, UFO aficionados who use the phenomena as an excuse to get wasted and traverse the world as playboys and playwomen do an injustice to those who want science and media, even the public, to give UFOs a bit more concern than has happened since the contactee days.

The party-people diminish UFO study as their ballyhooed shenanigans give continued credence to others that UFOs are the bailiwick of the fringe, and not anything that should be taken seriously.

So our plaint that the film-maker is subverting ufology, and the investigators he has shilled into his fun-loving approach to UFOs, is only that: a plaint.

The film-maker can have all the fun he wants, but let’s not use his tomfoolery as a template for ufology or UFO research.

Life is short, and partying is okay, if one is a hedonist or epicurean.

But for those who think there’s something serious going on, within the human condition, and that UFOs may be a part of that, then the UFO happy-crowd should be ignored or avoided.

UFO wackos

2008-05-08T23:05:00.001-04:00

Here are representatives of the current UFO community:

Does anyone wonder why science and media don’t take the phenomenon seriously?

Mike Heiser's Blog

2008-05-08T08:14:00.001-04:00

Mike Heiser is PhD who deals with Semitic religions usually, but he also has an interest, surprisingly, in UFOs.

Check out his new blog:

http://www.michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions

God’s not quite immortal remains

2008-04-30T14:24:00.000-04:00

As the writer using Shakespeare’s name has it in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” there is, indeed, more things, and here’s one of them:

Following Teilhard de Chardin’s thesis that reality (the Universe) is the mystical but physical body of Christ (and therefore God), we conclude that Dark Energy is the remnant of God’s demise, the decaying elements of God’s “body” and Dark Matter the remnants of Jesus/Christ’s “body.”

The total corruption of God’s and Christ’s remains will take millennia as physicists conjecture when they theorize about the end of the Universe.

But Dark Energy and Dark Matter “prove” for pantheistic agnostics the death of God (and Christ thereby too).

When the demi-urge (demiurgos), acting as creative agent for the Ineffable, produced the Earth and the creatures on it, there wasn’t an evolutionary plan that incorporated human beings. (The demi-urge may be equated with the Evil face of God as enumerated in Jung’s concept of the Quaternity.)

The great lizard/birds, dinosaurs, ruled the Earth for millions of years until a natural or purposeful catastrophe occurred and mammalia arose, culminating in apes and then man.

The short period of man’s (accidental?) transcendence was beset by the early demise of the demi-urge (as noted in our previous post) and is now threatened by the death of the Ineffable God (and Christ), evidenced by the discovery of God’s (and Christ’s) remains:
Dark Energy (and Dark Matter).

If there was (or is) a purpose for life, that purpose is meaningless now, and theologians and physicists move into an abstract forensic that is academic, and nothing more.

Atheists may find this satisfying in some way, while believers shall scoff, but we accept our “God is really dead” hypothesis as actual and nihilistically complete…

God is dead, Jesus too…

2008-04-28T09:57:00.001-04:00

…and the Holy Spirit may be in a coma.

When did God die, and we don’t mean in the Nietzschean metaphorical sense?

God’s demise seems to have occurred shortly after Jesus/Christ’s crucifixion.

If God sacrificed himself, in the form of Jesus, to expiate His sins against mankind, as Carl Jung postulates in his "Answer to Job,” He did not recover from the experience on the Cross, even though it appears that the second nature of God, Jesus, did survive the ordeal, for a time anyway.

But Jesus seems not to have lasted much beyond the crucifixion Himself.

(We discount Saul of Tarsus’ “epiphany” where he thought Christ spoke to him when he was on the road to Damascus; that was an hysterical, psychotic reaction that Saul – St. Paul – suffered because he was actively persecuting Jews who were Christians.)

The third “person” of the Trinity, The Holy Spirit, manifested itself, overtly, for the last time in 312 A.D. when Roman Emperor Constantine had a vision of the Cross before a battle.

After 312 no element of the Godhead has been evidenced objectively. Subjective awareness of God, and Jesus, as persons’ personal savior, have been rife throughout the time period following the Roman persecutions of Christians, and continue to this day.

But nothing concrete related to the Divinity has been palpable since 312 of the Common Era.

(The appearances of Mary, the mother of Jesus, throughout history, even into our modern era – although such visitations have been rare of late – might be attributable to another phenomenon. But even if they represent or represented real Marian appearances, that doesn’t remove the perception(s) that God and Jesus are not longer “alive.”)

What is the evidence for God’s death?

The Holocaust comes to mind. And previously the Black Plague, and other natural calamities, but mostly man’s inhumanity to man, with no intervention by God, Jesus, of The Holy Spirit, not even symbolically or subliminally.

Richard Elliott Friedman suggests in his book “The Hidden Face of God” that God has merely removed Himself from interaction with mankind.

No, God is dead. It’s as simple as that.

Creation, put in motion by God, moves along under its original momentum, and can continue for some time period, but existence is winding down, and there is no ineffable being to halt the eventual terminus.

God is dead.

And we’ll take this forward, upcoming, as to how that death affects all the aspects of humanity…

Unanswered Everything

2008-04-27T11:00:00.001-04:00

Noted here, at this blog, are all the quirks of nature and reality that go unanswered; that is, they remain unexplained.

Who really produced the Shakespeare oeuvre?

Is there a God?

What is consciousness?

Was there a Big Bang?

What are UFOs?

What is Dark Matter? Dark Energy?

What happened to Amelia Earhart?

Why did Neanderthal “man” disappear?

What is death?

Is quantum reality the real reality?

Does pi have an end?

What is the purpose of life?

And so on…

Do we have a point? Not necessarily.

Life doesn’t seem to have a point, so why should we?

To pursue the questions above is an idle pursuit of course. Socrates suggested that such pursuits are the philosophical point of human existence. But is that so?

As we go forward, we’ll be more nihilistic probably, just a bit short of Schopenhauer’s wonderfully depressive outlook, but with an epicurean stance somewhat.

And that’s all we have, right? That is if Sartre and the existentialists are correct…..

The Shakespeare Group

2008-03-26T10:49:00.004-04:00

In determining who made up the raft of writers using the sobriquet “Shakespeare” we only have to find the following:

What contemporary/writer/colleague of William Shakespeare (who formed the Shakespeare consortium) was a devout Roman Catholic?

What writer was an insider to the Court of Elizabeth the Queen?

What writer was enamored of phantasmagoria?

Who was a master of the language?

What writer was primarily a poet?

What writer preferred Histories of his time?

What writer looked to ancient histories for his muse?

What writer was homosexual? (It wasn’t Will Shakespeare himself.)

What writer preferred male/female complications?

What writer looked to political machinations for his inspiration?

And what writer had a tendency to science, magic, or alchemy?

(The task at hand isn’t as difficult as it seems.)

The Shakespeare Mystery

2007-12-20T11:45:00.000-05:00

Yes, Shakespeare, like the RRRGroup, was a writing consortium, consisting of major playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, Edward DeVere, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson, and others.

The point of the consortium will be examined here, in ways that haven’t been tried before.

We’ll do, upcoming, a forensic examination of the writing, the lives, and the interaction of the writers who formed the group known as Shakespeare, including Shakespeare himself.

Admittedly, the idea of a Shakespeare writer who wasn’t Shakespeare himself is not new, but that several persons joined with Shakespeare to produce plays and sonnets is.

More to come….

The Insanity Gene

2007-10-18T12:57:00.000-04:00

Lecomte du Nouy in his book “Human Destiny” hypothesizes that humans who will move evolution forward are mutants; that is, the mass of humanity is primitive (in many ways) and only those who are endowed with special sensitivities (talents, as it were) are capable of evolving the human species and civilization in a beneficial way, toward an Omega Point as Lecomte du Nouy has it.

(The Omega Point is also a feature of Teilhard de Chardin’s writings.)

The problem for humanity or the problem of humanity is that it is palpably obvious that the bulk of the human population is insane; that is, humanity, in general, is non compos mentis.

One doesn’t need detailed footnotes to show just how crazy humanity is and has been, since the Garden of Eden.

A cursory examination of history and media accounts of today provides ample incidents of insane behavior by man.

The pockets of humane actions by the du Nouy mutants do show up on occasion, but their existence does not offset the preponderance of mad activity that permeates human culture, and has always permeated human culture, even “civilization” itself.

The insanity is ingrained in humankind; it is, perhaps, the essence of humankind.

Since madness is an ephemeral thing, it can’t be found or investigated as genetic structures are able to be studied.

But it does leave tangible footprints, as Freud and others have outlined.

The insanity may be the “image of God” that was mankind’s creative template, and we’ll be presenting views about this probability...

Homosexual gods?

2007-09-18T11:05:00.000-04:00

We opine in The Biblical Paradigm for Homosexuality (online at http://wildesociety.homestead.com) that God (Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament) was homosexual and/or sexist; or at least His writers were.

The examples cited in our pamphlet can be supplemented by other occasions that show the inordinate “affection” that God showed toward Abraham and Moses (among others).

For instance, the homosexual jealousy of Yahweh is delineated specifically in Exodus 4:26 where Yahweh threatens to kill Moses (for reasons a bit obscure) but is thwarted by Moses’ wife, Sepphora who cut off a piece of her son’s foreskin and touched the feet of the Lord (an entity suffused with or obsessed by male genitalia as outlined in The Biblical Paradigm…).

Morton Smith discovered an unexpurgated version of the Gospel of Mark, wherein Jesus has a homosexual relationship of a significant kind with a young man as part of a secret initiation of some kind.

In his book, The Secret Gospel [of Mark], Smith presents the passages that were culled from the canonical Mark, but some have suggested that Smith, an eminent scholar, created the passages.

Whether or not that is true (and we very seriously doubt it), a passage still intact in the canonical Mark seem to confirm the idea that Jesus was enamored of a young man (Lazarus or the beloved John) who had amorous inclinations toward Jesus:

“…a certain youth followed Him, wearing a linen cloth on his bare body and when they seized him, he left the linen cloth behind and fled from them, naked. [Mark 14:51]

Why was the young man naked? Morton Smith’s “secret” Gospel of Mark presents the hypothesis of secret rites and arcane mysticism that the Gnostics attributed to Jesus and His followers, and those secret rites included a sexual initiation it seems.

The underlying homosexuality of all mythologies and religions is palpable, going back to primitive religious rites where the Phallus was prominent.

That Jesus may have been homosexual, and God (Yahweh) was also, indicates that something was and is amiss in the theological morality espoused by the Church and entrenched by Luther and those who followed in his rebellious wake.

Thus homosexuality became anathema at the public, overt level of theological consciousness because of Protestant pronouncements, but its subliminal acceptance and ritualistic display over the millennia, while perverting the natural law (sexual intercourse for the procreation of the human species), seems to be inculcated in the genetic make-up of human kind and appears to be important to the cultural advancement of civilization, which we’ll deal with in the ensuing posts here…..

There was no Big Bang

2007-09-05T11:21:00.000-04:00

That the Universe was begot by an infinitely small singularity is absurd on the face of it.

And physicists pursuing that notion are bordering on the insane.

But this doesn’t mean that the Steady State theory is bona fide; that notion was wiped away by evidence of an expanding Universe.

But there was no Big Bang. Such an event is and was an impossibility.

Yet there is another possibility – if Einstein’s idea of space-time is correct (and it seems to be) – which is that our Universe was created by the intrusion of a parallel universe into a fissure within the fabric of space.

That is, an expanding universe, from a dimension of the Eternal Infinity breached a crack or hole in the fabric of space and brought part of the parallel universe into our area of the Eternal Infinity, which only consisted of Dark Matter and Dark Energy before the insertion of the expanding matter that we now know as our Universe.

Was the fissure a Black Hole? Or a rending that has yet to be determined or discovered?

That is where the physical sciences need to assert theory and research.

The Big Bang never happened, and the continuing hypothesizing about it is a futile waste of (Space) Time and (Dark) Energy.

Casting pearls before....

2007-08-28T10:42:00.001-04:00

We deal with and have dealt with some obtuse professional communities and oblique efforts over the years, including media, ufology, physics science, and theology.

Of these, only the theological community remains intact as a serious intellectual enterprise.

Media (national and local), which for us consists of news media mostly, is rife with hubris, self-aggrandizement, and narcissism of a manifest kind.

But then so does the community of physical science, where theoretical physicists have co-opted the realm of Newtonian and quantum physics, replacing rumination in those arenas with self-serving, self-promoting agendas.

As for UFOs and ufology, the conundrum and its cohorts fill the valley of thought with vile, despicable actions, confused by inebriated hoaxers and ignorance so profound that the gods certainly must be flummoxed by what they wrought when they created man.

In news media, television personalities exist, not to pursue journalistic truths, but rather to enhance one’s image, salary, and self-glorification.

But even newspaper journalists are not exempt from feathering their own personal nests, even working harder to do so since newspaper staffers have been and are considered much lower on the professional scale than their TV counterparts.

Newspaper personnel have always thought they had a handle on truths and information which no one else had access to.

TV upset that applecart long ago, and blogs are putting the final nails in the print medium coffin.

Our contact with news media for many years now has determined, for us, that those in the profession of journalism are, generally, short on intellectual acumen and
aesthetic nuance of any kind. (News people haven’t a clue about the glories within liberal arts, and this includes those who write or report on the arts for their papers.)

In critiquing media, we (and others) have had to dumb down our broadsides so that those receiving them could understand the volleys for what they are and were: attacks on the superficial and banal reportage that passes for journalism nowadays.

News media, like politics (which media worships like no other human activity), is fetid, which even the rabble that media serves (and exploits) smells.

That’s why newspaper circulation is in a steep decline and television newscasts are slugging it out to maintain viewers for their devolving influence.

While ambling around the so-called UFO community the past few years, we notice that the mystery has accumulated a raft of reprobates and scoundrels like no other arcane enterprise we’re familiar with.

(Politics is scummier but that all-consuming human endeavor is hardly arcane.)

Unidentified flying objects present an interesting, even intriguing, phenomenon.

But those involved with the phenomenon – and we cite virtually everyone involved – are clinically demented, as anyone can see for themselves by visiting web-sites, blogs, and interactive forums about the elusive things once ubiquitously known as flying saucers.

There is a meanness and psychotic etiology that should be pursued by psychiatry and/or sociologists if they want to discover the collective insanity of a large segment of human society.

The value of “ufology” and its minions, is not the evanescent “objects” and mysterious lights that persons are hallucinating about, but the malevolent thought processes of those who’ve entered the UFO realm for purposes other than a denouement of the evasive phenomenon.

Sixty concentrated years of flying disks and unidentified flying somethings-or-other have produced nothing but a surfeit of ignoramuses who feed off each other and a very limited, dull-witted segment of society.

But in science, the matter of intelligence is no better than that in ufology.

Theoretical physicists deign to pronounce on the reality, or lack thereof, of God or the gods, which is not the province if science, but of faith, and faith alone.

God can’t be addressed by science.

Even science can’t be addressed by science.

Science, ever since the actualization of quantum reality, has to step aside for the panoply of existence(s) which lie outside man’s ability to fathom.

Science can’t crack the riddle of life, or the mystery that is the Universe.

To try is to evoke the hubris of the doomed Greek heroes who meddled in “divine” machinations to their magnificent detriment.

Mankind can’t decipher the ultimate reality, whether it’s a God or a supreme natural law.

The vastness of the ultimate reality is overwhelmingly beyond man’s capacity to understand it, and those in science who think they can unravel that reality are more insane than the ufologists they demean.

Media, ufology, and science are follies engaged in by madmen, some with egotistical purposes, others with a serious chink in their mental capacities.

And for us (and others) to comment on such follies is almost as psychologically unsound as the bizarre enterprises themselves.

So, perhaps, its time to move on to more productive ventures…..such as theology or stamp collecting.

Miracles? We got no stinkin’ miracles!

2007-07-25T10:11:00.000-04:00

A big nail in God’s coffin are all those miracles attributed to Him and His Son: the plagues of Egypt, the parting of the Red (or Reed) Sea, the destruction of Jericho’s walls, the talking donkey, the water into wine, the Resurrection, et cetera, et cetera.

All the miracles of the Bible (and legend) can be explained in physical terms, strange physical terms perhaps, but explainable.

A miracle - -a real miracle - -would be something like a pyramid hovering a hundred feet in the air, or the total evaporation of the Mediterranean Sea, or the reversal of Jesus’ time-line (whereupon He avoids crucifixion).

Today, a miracle wouldn’t consist of a laying of hands and the fainting of the person upon whom those hands laid; the miracle would take the person back in time to where their frailty wasn’t a problem.

Another miracle – a real miracle – would be for a fully stocked and ready to go McDonald’s to appear, ex nihilo, in the midst of Darfur’s refugee camps.

And a visible, rational symbol or marking, displayed suddenly on the moon, for all Earthians to see, would be miraculous.

Raising a Lazarus from the dead was interesting, if he was truly dead, but Christ showing up now, as he was during His ministry (two thousand years ago), would be amazing – rather miraculous.

God needing men to write down His words doesn’t bode well for an omnipotent Being. A true God would provide His Book fully transcribed, and without grammatical or spelling errors.

(The Bible, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon apparently were not contrived by a true God, if any god at all.)

Changes in physical laws are not possible, and tweaks that seem to alter those laws are quantum artifacts, which are far from miraculous; strange perhaps but not miraculous.

No, we, and no one else, has experienced a true miracle, and that alone should indicate that if a God exists, He’s adept at sleight-of-hand and that’s about it.

The UFO Arena (minus the phenomenon itself)

2007-07-20T13:16:00.000-04:00

Science won’t intrude on the UFO community, and science won’t surely take a gander at the UFO phenomenon, not since the tainted Condon Committee, for the United States Air Force, seemed to eschew UFOs and flying saucers in its final report of 1968.

(Wikipedia has a thorough encapsulation of the Condon Committee’s efforts here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condon_Report )

But science is wrong by avoiding a study of UFOs, since the phenomenon offers grist for several scientific disciplines, including psychology, sociology, mythology, and even quantum physics (as we detail elsewhere).

The problem for science is that they’d have to deal with the quacks, cranks, and UFO vagrants who’ve captured the phenomenon beginning in 1947, distorting its relevance by self-aggrandizement and totally inept (amateurish) investigations – and that includes astronomer J. Allen Hynek’s foray into the UFO world (first for the Air Force’s Project Blue Book and later for his own Center for UFO Studies).

The UFO phenomenon is intriguing, and curious scientists – curiosity being the general demeanor of scientists – would normally be inclined to check out such a sporadic and circumstantial presence in the upper air.

The militaries of the world have taken notice, as have news media; the former seriously, the latter much less so.

But science, in this instance, just as it has with anything in the paranormal world, chooses to ignore or anathematize UFOs, and this because of the fanatic buffoons who’ve commandeered the phenomenon.

One can’t blame science, or scientists, from avoiding the UFO arena. What have they to gain by immersing themselves in a scrutiny of UFOs which will bring them opprobrium (as it has already for some) and ridicule?

The phenomenon doesn’t have the academic cachet that science feeds upon, and exploits for it own ends: career advancement, grant monies, recognition by peer groups, and university or corporate tenure. (The seeking of truth, nowadays, is at the bottom of many scientific goals.)

Yet, it’s the foolish ambiance that UFO arena purveys which has kept the phenomenon from a niche in the scientific pantheon.

If one looks at the investigation methods of “ufologists” (the mantle the hobbyists of the phenomenon has assumed) or the grammatical presentations of their hypotheses, one will be stunned by the lack of professionalism or even an understanding of logic and a decent methodology.

The UFO community is diverse, but doesn’t include, at any level, spokespersons who give the impression that they are learned in any discipline that might lead them to a considered approach for unraveling the UFO mystery.

(One noted “ufologist” was heard to say, during a recent UFO documentary, that some UFO circumstances collaborated [sic] each other.)

There is a pretense in “ufology” that the phenomenon has been studied or investigated seriously and professionally but any perusal of the UFO material and UFO groups extant will show otherwise, and dramatically so.

Science would have to start from scratch to avoid the miscreant accretions that have accumulated around UFO episodes, many of which are, in their original form, scientifically interesting, to say the least.

Can science retake the phenomenon, and give it credibility? Perhaps. But science would have to work around the ufological vultures who won’t give up their hobby easily. UFO mavens are dogged about their avocation; fanatic, as we’ve said.

Is a workaround worthwhile? Maybe. Since UFOs are rife with attributes that may not pay off in material dividends, but could pay off in ways that are much more beneficial, to the human mythos and civilization, even if they (UFOs) end up being nothing more than a projection of mentally deficient persons, which is what the UFO arena consists of pretty much right now.

N.B. Log on to a web-site, UFO UpDates at http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/latest/ for examples of the oppugnations mentioned above.

The Great Maw of Blogging

2007-07-19T16:10:00.000-04:00

The seeming infinite panoply of blogs are easily comprehended, and dealt with, by visitors only seeking those that are of interest to them. That’s easily done.

But what about the comments that many blogs receive from their visitors?

Those comments are archetypally evanescent, in every way.

The time wasted in commenting by normally intelligent persons, or somewhat sensate persons – we discount the anonymous commentators who represent mental scum – is monumental; the material generated evaporates faster than ice in the Mojave.

But for some oblique reason, persons will spend valuable minutes of their lives, spewing forth opinion, rant, and sometimes valuable asides, but it is all in vain. And that the comment-makers don’t understand this is baffling, in a psycho-social sense.

This blogging syndrome is even rife at Seed magazine’s Science Blogs venue, which we’ve touted here. (The blogs are fine; it’s the comments which are transitory and often useless, in a very real sense.)

Science Blogs is an arena where highly intelligent and intellectual persons ruminate about issues in science and peripherally related matters.

If comments there are virtually useless, you can imagine how vacuous comments are at other blogs.

(Media has taken to incorporating comments and opinions of the great unwashed and have, by so doing, destroyed what little credibility media once had.)

Blogs will, ultimately, enter the abyss of nothingness that Sartre indicated would overtake humanity at some future time. (That abyss is almost upon us, if one scrutinizes the lacunae of intelligence that permeates the blogosphere and media, news media, as it exists today.)

The fad of blogging, like that of e-mail (which is being replaced by social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, for teens and other cognoscenti), will terminate in a few years surely, and all the crud and dissolute ramblings, along with the few erudite posterings, will enter the limbo sate of the internet; the postings won’t become extinct, but they will be fossilized for all intents and purposes.

So why do we continue to blog, casting pearls before swine generally? And why do some continue to comment, even when they are overwhelmingly ignored or have their comments relegated to the internet dustbin?

Everyone needs existential validation. That’s why the mob congregates around the networks’ morning news shows (Today and GMA). Being seen on television confirms one’s existence, and now blogs and responses to them do the same thing, only more easily.

Acting thoughtful, by responding to blog posts, makes one appear to comprehend life and the vicissitudes of the blogosphere.

But it’s all folly, and human beings are nothing if not foolish, as Shakespeare, and others, have prominently noted.

So, we go on blogging, and some will continue to provide vapid, inane responses, and out of all this shall come certitude perhaps, or more evidence of human madness.

Where’s Waldo? (Or how science escapes INTO reality)

2007-07-11T18:27:00.000-04:00

The CERN particle accelerator is poised to allow physicists (and other scientists) to probe the most fundamental building blocks of nature, the absolute infinitesimal reality of quantum particles.

To what purpose however?

When biochemists and medial researchers dig into DNA and genetic structure, they do so with the intent of discovering what malformations cause cancers and other diseases that plague humankind.

Their means goes to a beneficial end.

But particle physicists? What do they get with their inordinate curiosity about the structure of elemental particles?

That is, when all is said and done, how is mankind, civilization, advanced or helped by their potential discernment of the bases for reality?

One science gets beneath gluons and subterranean quarks, what does that do, in practical way, to further evolution?

The monies being spent to get the CERN accelerator/lab up and running represent an obscenity when one considers how many persons in the world are without food, or the basic necessities of life.

Sure, wars are spending much more than what’s being thrown into the CERN basket, but wars are initiated by maniacs, not supposed intellectuals.

The psychiatric mechanism that explains this behavioral quirk is called an escape INTO to reality (not an escape FROM reality).

Persons, and in this instance, scientists of the highest caliber, who shirk the reality in which they find themselves – this Earthly vale – do so because they can’t cope with the horrific human condition that pervades and prevails here on Earth.

(The Mars-probers are equally disturbed.)

The CERN contingent propagandizes, as have scientists of every generation, that they are seeking the origin of the creation. That may be so, but what happen when they discover that origin, as if CERN will be the vehicle by which that happens?

Discovering the ultimate iota or iotae doesn’t do anything for the advancement of life here, or anywhere.

Yes, curiosity, scientific curiosity even, is the promulgator of CERN (and other diffuse explorations). And those involved are not committing moral or ethical crimes, unless one posits that there are sins of omission at work in the CERN objective.

Quantum physics shows us that reality is goofy. Deconstructing quantum particles may or may not make that reality less goofy.

But if CERN does get to the heart of reality, what do we have? A clue to the Creator? A pattern that explains nature once and for all? An abyss that tells us that we’re part of a random insanity from which there is no escape?

Yes, CERN is an obsession for some. For the rest of us, it’s a psychologically induced scientific boondoggle.

And for mankind? CERN is nothing more than a search for Waldo, without the charm of that pursuit.

It doesn't compute....

2007-07-09T15:44:00.000-04:00

Sure, evolution explains the physical advance, even the mental advance of human beings, along side the physical changes and slightly increasing mental abilities of the animal kingdom (the fauna) and, yes, the plant kingdom (the flora).

And the whole evolutionary track, particularly slow and not so deliberate – consider the dinosaurs – throws a chink in the armor of the Intelligent Designer.

The piecemeal pattern of evolution is hardly intelligent, but that’s obvious to Darwinists, and the creationists, and neo-creationists, have to accept, at some point, that the whole of creation was conceived by haphazard natural selection or a procrastinating Creator.

The universe, with its infinite longevity, is also a product of chaotic physical laws – not Newtonian laws, but meta-quantum laws – or the plans of an addled Creator.

But that’s not the point here exactly.

Avatars, such as Moses, Ankhenaton, Lao-Tze, Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith et alia, all brought soppy bromides to their audiences; they brought nothing of a technical or quasi-technical nature – nothing that would advance or help humankind survive materialistically or practically.

The gods who supposedly proffered information to prophets or their alleged progeny were highly deficient in the physical laws of the universe or refused to divulge those laws for some obtuse reason.

And the promises of an impending paradisiacal Eden never materialized, and still haven’t arrived. (See Jesus dictum that his generation wouldn’t pass away before the things he promised would come to pass: Mark 13:30.)

So what is the program? Is procrastination as much a part of nature as it is for the gods? What’s the end-game? Is there one?

Neither evolution nor an Intelligent Designer, or even a Supreme Being, appears to have a conscious, well-thought out plan for humans or the Universe.

It just doesn’t compute….

The Science blogs at Seed magazine’s web-site

2007-07-02T11:20:00.001-04:00

Seed Magazine (online at http://www.seedmagazine.com) is an erudite periodical covering science, in all of its diversity.

The magazine also hosts invited blogs at its web-site (above), and those blogs are, generally, interesting and often volatile, especially by way of comments they accrue.

(Click on the left side of the web-site, where Bloggers is entitled, to find the panoply of blogs Seed endorses.)

What’s intriguing is that many of the blogs have a sexual ambiance about them, subliminal usually, but blatant more often that one might expect from the presumed stuffy academics who make up the large proportion of bloggers that Seed likes.

Some of the blogs have sexual innuendo that is vulgar, some bloggers are desirous of making contact with like souls, and some Seed bloggers are just exhibitionists.

But the blogs posts are always vibrant, and edifying; the comments even more so.

Here are some of our favorite Seed blogs - -we haven’t scoured all of them yet:

Thoughts From Kansas

A Blog Around the Clock

Chaotic Utopia

Developing Intelligence

The Daily Transcript

The Loom

Adventures in Ethics and Science

Afarensis

Commonground

Pharyngula

Page 3.14

Good Math, Bad Math

Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

Respectful Insolence

Stranger Fruit

Dynamics of Cats

Aardvarcheology

So if you’re intellectually inclined, want to broaden your science outlook and/or acumen, or just want to indulge in sly sex (occasionally!), check out the bloggers at seedmagazine.com.

You’ll come away smarter than you are now, and orgasmicly fulfilled perhaps.