Out on a limb.

"...there may be a darker side to meditation and this is exposed in the book “America. The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice – The Rise of New Age Shamanism” by D. Hunt and T.A. McMahon, Harvest House Publishers, 1988. This book suggests that Transcendental Meditation may be dangerous and may lead to the practitioner being “possessed” by occult powers."

Some years ago now, I watched a movie called "Out On A Limb". It is the story of much of Shirley McLean's life. Let me tell you - it's weird! It really spun me out, for several days; I felt very disoriented, I became unsure of everything; it was a bit of a Descartes moment - when nothing really exists except your own doubting mind.

This idea of Transcendental Meditation reminded me of this film and its themes, which included meditating in such a way that your mind becomes completely clear of everything and you find yourself flying above yourself further and further away until you return. All the time you attached to your body by a silver cord and supposedly death is when that cord breaks. The rest of the movie also involved aliens, a guy who introduced Shirley to their "religion" having found all these things out from an alien whom he fell in love with.

I know what I believe is true; it's funny, don't you think that most people "know" that what they believe is true otherwise they wouldn't try to get others to believe or continue on the hard path of believing. Even believing in nothing I think is hard. I have been blessed by God in many ways, he gives me joy and sprouting from that recently has been a lot of happiness [there is a difference, I don't know if anyone who isn't a christian knows that and even if you are a christian, you might have thought about it]. My friend who is generally agnostic says that she wishes she was as happy as I am - I know what she is really saying (although she may not realise it) is that she wishes she has what I have, she can't have it without accepting Jesus first - because "true" or not (not that I doubt it is) that is the source of my joy and the source of my happiness is everything that I have in life.

Big tangent but I think I will come back to saying that transcendental meditation, along with things that seem to have similar consequences, scares me and I am very happy and joyful in not looking to "fly" outside my body, not until I die anyway.

But you can never take our FREEDOM!!!

"To be human is to want freedom. Look at what suffering people have willingly endured for the cause of freedom (in East Timor, for example). They desire freedom more than comfort or economic stability. Freedom to make their own mistakes, even to hurt and do evil.

Jean-Paul Sartre once said that we are “condemned to freedom”.

Yet others seem to fear freedom. Freedom brings too much responsibility. There are too many hard decisions to make. Maybe these are the people who choose legalistic religions where all the rules rare set down – these are the words of the prayers you should pray, these are the time to pray each day, these are the actions you need to take when you pray – and so on. It is much easier if a priest, rabbi or Imam tells you what to do and you don’t need to think through the various situations of life for yourself. Galatians 5:1-15 discusses legalism and freedom from a Christian perspective."

Interesting concept - freedom. All through the book of Romans Paul says that if you are not slaves to God and slaves of righteousness we are slaves to sin. It's very much like the Truman Show or the Matrix where people have no idea they are kinds of slaves or that they are being influenced or controlled by anything other than themselves and they are quite happy to continue in what they are doing, in their slavery. In that sense there is no such thing as freedom.

I suppose the concept of freedom is like "degrees of freedom" not those used in statistics to determine the probability of an occurence using "T" or "Chi" statistics. It's more like we want as many degrees of freedom as we can get and we want to make our own chances. People will fight and suffer for those degrees of freedom so that they may have a chance, at a job, or a better life, or world domination - those things that people fight for.

Life is about chances really, people always want a chance at something and the freedom to have that thing fulfil their needs.

"... and is everything meant to be or are some things just chance?"

From lecture 6:

"You never know exactly when a radioactive substance will emit a particle. You never know exactly where an electron is situated within an atom. You just know the probabilities of when and where.

In the biological realm the theory of evolution is underpinned by statistics. All these scientific findings have led some scientists to declare that the Universe is without purpose and is going nowhere."

This may be a reasonable assumption given the evidence, but it kind of makes life very dreary and pointless, which I guess is what they're saying, that life is pointless - but that's just depressing! Perhaps if you take these statistical circumstances and have faith in God it represents how God may know but we may never know everything.

I've never heard this one before, it's really cool, and quite a good analogy (I love when a good analogy comes together!)

"Sometimes the wave-particle duality is used as a metaphor for religious antinomies – like the belief that Jesus is both God and Man."

I think this is a cool idea because people see how there are different natures to light, light does different things and these natures can be demonstrated at the same time, and sometimes they are not present at the same time. Either way people see this and because they can show it repeatedly they are happy to believe it. Christ is similar in that there were some things that made him man, he could be tempted, he bled, he slept he ate, he drank, he lived on this earth. There were also things that people saw in him that were divine; he knew a lot, he was very very wise, he could heal people, he claimed to be the son of God and the only way to heaven, he rose from the dead! For many reasons people don't believe these things; they can't see it, they can't reproduce it; there is a good reason why they cannot - it's history. John 20:29 says Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." So I suppose I'm saying both that this is an effective analogy for both understanding the nature of the Jesus God-Man argument and also for seeing how people's approach to science and religion or different kinds of belief are very different.

In regards to the way pinball machines are completely random and were not mastered by youth of a certain era because of the way something that is very small effects something in a big way down the line (the speed of the ball may change its trajectory by one degree which is unnoticable at the time but makes a big difference):

"So this is the idea of chaos: differences in initial condition so small as to be unmeasurable may give rise to very large differences later in the motion. The other classic example is that the smallest movement of a butterfly’s wing in the Amazonian jungle may change the initial conditions of the atmosphere to such an extent that a severe cyclone may be generated thousands of miles away on the tropical Australian coast."

I thought this was an interesting line of thought as to how God MIGHT intervene in our lives (I still think that it's fun to speculate but that quite frankly we may never completely or even in a tiny way understand God) but I always thought that the butterfly phrase was something to do with coincidence, or how big the earth is yet how small it is, not actually true - I might be taking it too literally =)

The human brain and intelligence of life.

Reading through the 5th lecture (which I should have done last week but didn't because I was ubersick) I've come across something really interesting, it has to do with with chance, evolution and coincidence. It's funny how my last post I was talking about the complexity of the human brain and in the lecture it was said...

"the chance argument... suffers from a lack of precision. We only have 15 billion years to go from the Big Bang to human intelligence. Is that really long enough for the various statistical processes to work to give rise to us? I would suggest that no one has done this calculation yet in a convincing manner.

Many, like Hugh Ross, argue that some element of design is required, not just pure chance. Ross suggests that the probability we evolved by chance is similar to the probability that a Boeing 747 would appear after a tornado struck a junkyard!

This is not to say that the Big Bang Theory of time and so on is incorrect and Evolution is completely false. It's just not as some have believed that evolution is the "unguided" process by which life has become the way we know it. I read of a definition - possibly the NCSE saying that it was an unguided process. Looking at their website though it seems that in American education, just as many other places, the teaching of evolution has became more accepting of co-existence with religion and God, since the writing of that partiular book.

Finishing the reading of that lecture... I thought it was a bit over the top with it's "evidence" of a guided creation. It gave 25 parameters which if they were remotely different this universe would not exist. Then at the end it said that some may argue that there may be many universes with different values than the ones we have that might work together to form a different universe than ours and that the only problem with this is there's no evidence of any other universes. Duh! There aren't any other's because this one is the one that happened! If this one had not had it's supporting elements to build then maybe a different one would have. Maybe I'm taking what Robert said the wrong way and I need to go read the discussions to better understand the end of this lecture.

Dissension in the ranks.

The first aim of the current module is "To understand the controversy in some religious circles over the age of the universe." I've recently come across something that is somewhat controversial in the science world, not just religion.

Church held a "men's breakfast" a little while ago, which of course I was not invited to, being of the female variety and all. However at church someone gave a quick run down of what a guest speaker who is a brain surgeon said. It was said that this surgeon (who is a Christian) had said that geology claims that the earth is so many years old (15 billion if I remember correctly) and genetic investigation suggests that humans evolved lets say 10 thousand years ago, this surgeon claims that none of these times would have been sufficient for the evolution of the very complex human brain. In my interpretation of what was going on this seemed to be him saying that this was some of his evidence that leans against evolution and towards spontaneous creation. As one with no major objections to the model of evolution at this current moment, I found this a very peculiar and curious claim.