Delude this Richard Dawkins

Believer:

"I believe in something that is greater than I am, something that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. I call that something 'God.' God is all-powerful; there is nothing more powerful than God. God knows everything. God is everywhere."

Scientist/Pantheist:

"There are many forces and powers in the universe, such as gravity and electromagnetism, to name just two. The universe is pretty potent. In fact, by definition there is no potency at all outside of the universe, which makes the universe omnipotent."

"Omniscience? Well, by definition nothing is known outside of the universe. There is no knowledge, data, or information outside of the universe. There are no knowers outside of the universe. Everything there is to be known is known by the knowers of the universe. The universe is omniscient."

"Omnipresence? Well, by definition all places are in the universe. There are no places outside of the universe. There is no presence outside of the universe. Everything present in the universe is present in the universe. There is no place for presence to be other than in the universe. The universe is omnipresent."

Believer:

"So we don't really disagree about the facts, do we? We only disagree about which labels to apply."

(With apologies to Richard Dawkins. Actually, I'm a great fan of your work. I'm just being provocative: taking a leaf from your book!)

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eBooks by Cosmic Rapture
(for kindle, tablet, smartphone or e-reader.)

NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS. This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously and grotesquely illustrated.

AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?). We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.

MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS. A disturbing repository of quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.

MASTRESS & OTHER TWISTED TAILS. An unholy corpus of oddities, strangelings, bizarritudes and peculiaritisms, including but not limited to barbaric episodes of herring-flinging and kipper-kissing. A cacklingly bizarre read that may induce fatal hysteria. Not Recommended!

FIENDS & FREAKS and serpents, dragons, devils, lobsters, anguished spirits, hungry ghosts, hell-beings, zombies, organ-grinders, anti-gods, gods and other horse-thieves you wouldn't want to meet in a dark cosmos. Immature Content! Adults Maybe.

HAGS TO HAGGIS. An obnoxious folio featuring a puke of whiskey-soaked war-nags, witches, maniacs, manticores and escapegoats. Not to mention (please don't!) debottlenecking and desilofication, illustrated. Take your brain for a walk on the wild side. Leave your guts behind.

The Sound of One Hand Slapping

The Seeker asks the Mastress: “How may this humble supplicant who kneeleth before thee become enlightened? How doth One enjoin with the All, or is it predestinated forevermore to tread the cyclic wheel of existence, hamster-like, until the wrathful deities take pity on the crusading pilgrim's benighted soul?”

The Mastress — a nut-brown, gnarled and ancient guru of indeterminate gender and reproachable demeanour — respondeth imperturbably saying, “Ask the next six people you meet; perhaps you may find the answers you say you seek.”

“What the fricking flaming biscuit!” exclaimeth the Seeker, on hearing these mysterious words.

Loincloth wafting on a stealthy breeze, the Nut-brown maketh the smile of one lip curling. The visage of the guru wears a veil of inscrutability as profound as the deepest depths of inner space.

Dissatisfied and disgruntled, the Seeker taketh his leave of the Gnarly One and sets his footlings on the path that leadeth to the Inn of the Flowering Beetle, formerly The Queen’s Moustache. On the way he encountereth the first of six respondents — an aged washerwoman squatting phlegmatically in the shade of a cinnabar tree.

“How do you do, O Gentle Crone?” enquireth the Seeker courteously.

“Get lost asshole!” quoth the Crone, waxing wrathful, “or I’ll box thy poxy earhole in the blink of a newt’s eyelid!”

Free Lunch (the Law of the Conservation of Karma)

The three fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, "...who spin, draw out and cut the thread of Life ... as they triumph over the fallen body of Chastity." (Wikipedia 23 April 2014). I don't know what Chastity's got to do with it. Death triumphs over Chastity? Doesn't make sense to me.

The fact that anything exists at all is a very good sign pointing to the basic fairness, rightness and justice of Everything*.

You can get a free lunch, you just gotta know where to look (Everywhere and forever, all at once.)

According to philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, “god” is the answer to the question about why anything exists. The question arises from the contradiction between a reality in which things exist, and the idea that non-existence is easier than existence. In contrast to non-existence, which requires nothing, “everything that is possible demands to exist,” as Leibniz puts it.

But the fact that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people is a bad sign, pointing in the other direction, to the basic randomness and meaninglessness of Everything.

This post is about how that apparent contradiction is resolved by the Law of the Conservation of Karma.

In physics, the Law of the Conservation of Energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can only be changed from one form to another.

Similarly, the Law of the Conservation of Karma states that justice (karma) cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change from one form to another. In other words, everyone gets their just desserts, maybe not at the time or in the form anticipated, but at one stage or another, at one place or another, in one way or another. Everyone gets what’s coming to them, sooner or later, here or there, once or twice, in one lump or many.

One Wonders Why Oneness

If the sum of the parts is more than the whole
And some of the parts want a starring role

One has a question, it’s really quite small
For any who want to be one with the all

One wonders why oneness is set as a goal
One that one dies for, along with one’s soul

A goal that’s scored long after the game
When the self is forgotten along with the name

In trueness your youness is inside your head
Oneness and twoness is noneness: you’re dead

Minus my myness my self can’t be found
Above in the sky or below in the ground

One and one’s two, and two and one’s three ...

The Dead Live Elsewhen

An example of a light cone, the three-dimensional surface of all possible light rays arriving at and departing from a point in spacetime. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MissMJ.

Many if not most if not all people have secrets, or think they do. But in fact there are no secrets. Even the secrets people take to the grave are not secret. Everything is known, in at least one way or another. Information is never lost, not even from inside a dissipated black hole that has given its all to the All via Hawking radiation.

So don't be like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Being unable to see does not mean being unable to be seen.

In private, people let their hair down; they take the opportunity to "be themselves". When no-one else is around, they pick their noses, masturbate, piss in the shower, eat gluttonously, murder their grandfathers, beat their children -- do all the stuff they don't want anyone to see or know about.

But everything is recorded in cosmic memory -- the Akashic Records if you prefer.

Nor are these the febrile imaginings of an aging hippie fumbling around in the peyote-flavoured smog of the Age of Aquarius. Well they are, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a grain of truth in them somewhere. In fact, no less an authority than old smarty pants himself, Einstein, believed that nothing is ever lost.

The Bindu of a Naked Numbskull

Portrait of Thomas Aquinas painted by Carlo Crivelli, 1476

"How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?" is a question first asked by such truth-seekers as Aquinas in the glorious age of scholasticism, when metaphysical nitpicking, hair-splitting and name-calling were the order of the day.

Counting angels is not easy when they’re standing still, let alone jitterbugging on emptiness. And if the dimensionless point at the end of a pin were as infinitely rich in potential as the bindu of Hindu metaphysics, to count the angels you'd need some really tight air traffic control.

But if the point were a dome, and the angels were very thin, how many could dance on the head of a bald man?

Becoming bald is a process involving a diminishing number of hairs. But let's get specific. At the loss of which hair, precisely, can the label "bald" validly be applied? Or, if you're loading straw onto the back of a camel, what is the number of the straw that breaks the camel’s back?

Most if not all questions about moving from one state to another involve a paradox. According to the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, motion is an illusion, and yet he sat on many stools. Paradoxes are like boogeymen: they seem scary and threatening but when you look closely they lack substance. Most if not all paradoxes emerge from the inherent limitations of human thought and language. Resolving them is simply a matter of accurate definition.

For instance, baldness could be defined as the mean headhairiness density of 0-2 hairs per square centimetre across more than 94.2% of naked numbskull.

Alternatively, we could apply a reductive definition paradigm based on recursion theory. If a full head of hair comprises, say, a million hairs, baldness could be defined as the phase transition marked by the loss of hair #999,678, and absolutely and totally bald, as the end-state marked by the loss of hair #1, i.e. the ultimate hair (hair #2 is the penultimate).

Similar methods can be applied to counting straws and camels.

Now if there’s no bijection, this post can draw to an ignominious close.

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As below, so above

According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the respective values of certain pairs of physical properties---such as position and momentum, or time and energy---cannot both be known simultaneously. The more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other is known. For example, the more certain you are about the position of a sub-atomic particle, the less certain you are about its momentum.

The uncertainty has nothing to do with the inadequacy of measuring instruments, but rather is a fundamental property of Reality: when some things are known, other things can’t be known at the same time.

“So what?” I hear you say, “Who cares about where a sub-atomic particle is at? What’s that got to do with the real world?”

Free Willy in the United States of Personhood

I downloaded this image a number of years ago, can't remember where and can't provide attribution: apologies to the copyright-owner. Actually it's unclear as to whether dolphins were granted legal personhood status, or whether India "merely" banned the use of dolphins in aquatic theme parks. But whatever happened in reality has no bearing on whether cetaceans are or are not persons, or on how they should be treated. This issue is a great example of the relativity of values and the significance of context. The movie, Free Willy, is about the conflict of values and the impact of that conflict on the life of an orca named Willy. Many humans, including myself, believe that cetaceans are as "personable" as humans.

Free will means you are free to choose to do anything that is within your power to do; to think anything that is in your power to think; to experience anything that is within your power to experience. But the most significant freedom of all is the freedom to define your values, relative to the All, relative to Everything and every thing.

That relativity is inescapable, at least for the likes of you and me. You might, for instance, choose diversity as one of your values, except if you were supplying tomatoes to a supermarket, in which case you would want all your tomatoes to be the same size, weight and color. A supplier of tomatoes to a supermarket would prefer conformity to diversity, at least in relation to supplying tomatoes. To echo the "location, location, location" of realtors: context, context, context!

the zillion names of god

There are no disagreements, there is only confusion about labels. There are no arguments about meaning, there is only a failure to understand the difference between the signified and the signifier. This confusion is especially relevant and important in relation to so-called disagreements about god or gods, and the nature and meaning thereof.

Both the pantheistic position and the panentheistic position are unassailable, logically, because they are constructed on the bedrock of axiomatic definition, and the truth of any axiom is as agreed in advance of its application. (Although if Godel is right then all positions are unassailable from within but may be assailable from without).

the illusion of difference

People argue a lot, very often about a thing called "god". We fight and kill for reasons to do with a thing called "god".

There are many different fights about god, including but not limited to fights about the existence of god (whether ze exists), the nature of god (what ze is), how we should interact with god, and whether there is one god or many gods or many aspects of the one god. There are fights between people called “believers” and people called “atheists”. There are fights between those who believe they believe in a different god to the god or gods in which others believe they believe. There are fights between people who believe that god is “X” versus people who believe “Y” is god. There are fights between people who believe the name of god is Poseidon and people who believe the name of god is Neptune.

Of course, god is not the only thing we kill each other about. We kill each other for political reasons (to do with power), economic (wealth, resources), cultural, racial and more: you name it, we’ll kill in the name of it.)

in defense of pantheism

This post responds to the issues raised in the post, "Pantheism: it's like Atheism by James Cameron" at Mitch Sullivan's blog, "the big A Word".

The main monotheistic religions hold that deity is transcendent, stands outside of time and space, separate and distinct from creation and the various parts of creation, material, immaterial and otherwise. How can God be outside the world, and omnipresent in it? Beats me! Please let me know if you find out.

There are many versions of pantheism. Crudely and simplistically it's a belief structure in which deity is believed to be "immanent" in time and space; "indwelling" zir own creation including all parts, so that deity is believed to be present in me, you, that rock over there, the planet, etc. But more than present, more than being inside or within, deity comprises creation, is you, me etc. And vice versa: that you are, I am, the girl next door is deity. So that deity is not merely inside or within, deity identifies as creation. Deity is creation and creation is deity. The two are one.