Join the new world

Interesting.

I was baptised as Catholic, attended Catholic schools and despite protest, was classed as a Catholic by my mother when she filled the latest government census.

My belief in God is a personal one, not one a share with the many hypocritical men who class themselves as Messengers of God.

Religion is not something that is necessary for a person to exercise their beliefs, but acts only as barrier to our progression as a race.... The Human Race 🙂

arent u a jew???

I wish : )

LoL, "As I watched it on television.
I'm self educated. "I'm a dabble," you could call me. That's another story.
I went to several churches; Mother was happy to be rid of the kids, for a while.The preachers were happy to have impressionable minds.
I don't think that there are any true, monotheistic religions. We simplify everything as, the work of God. But, we praise other Idols.

Television.... hmm.
Not much to say about that. I never watch it.

A lot of creativity goes into the more enjoyable science fiction, fantasy and horror shows that have aired, just as a lot creativity has gone into the various religions as they were created, but that is something for a future article.

Religions are the most successful memes.

Good stuff. How rare and refreshing to see an interesting article.

An enjoyable read. Keep it up.

Few people, wanted to control other people, collected some sh*t together, mix it with the word God, thus we've religions. Thought having Faith in something is really different ideology than religion.

Religion/the supernatural in popular culture is an interesting phenomena, its surprising there are so many television shows specifically aimed at adolescents that feature adolescents with ‘superpowers’ in them, which goes back to Buffy, Sabrina the Teenage Witch [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFTR2JJcKUg ] up to stuff like Heroes and Twilight. The superpower elements are usually just some cynical deus ex machina because the writings so bad and without the superpowers the shows just become typical teen angst fare.

Quantum Leap is a great show though, I'd lump in X Files in this category too, especially as its tagline is 'The Truth Is Out There' and Skully's Catholicism is a constant presence.

What’s even more interesting for me is how prolific the supernatural rears its head in popular science works, including works from some of the bestselling authors in the field like Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, all of whom hold PhD’s in the physical sciences and all of whom are theoretical physicists. And yet all of them speak about the “supernatural” in their work, and not just explicitly i.e. by mentioning their own faith in deity, but by advancing “cosmological” theories of destiny for the universe, suggesting their was a “plan” at its inception, and that there is a logical and intended finale, which is the kind of theory you find in occidental religions and which is really just the ideas of ‘Genesis’ supplanted to modern science under the cover of cosmological “speculation”. For anyone who doesn’t know, cosmology is the study of the origin, evolution, structure and ultimate fate of the universe, and as such is loaded with almost as many theories as there are practitioners of this branch of science.

What’s interesting about this is the phenomena of professors who teach the physical sciences in some of the most prestigious universities in the world openly arguing from the standpoint of design, however subtly. I think politics has as much to do with this as their own personally-held belief. These ‘religious physicists’ are ofcourse nominally rightwing, albeit they may hold left of centre sympathies especially in regard of social policy, but this kind of viewpoint is still just an extension of 19th century, anglocentric civil society which still has God at the head of society.

The direct antithesis is people like Eric J. Lerner, plasma physicist and Marxist. Lerner argues vehemently against the Big Bang in his book ‘The Big Bang Never Happene😛 A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe’ and against the notion the universe is finite. What’s interesting about Lerner is his politics, his Marxism precludes any mention of the supernatural in his work, it also means he’s against all forms of cosmological theory that posit some sort of beginning and natural end to the universe, concepts which he ridicules as religious and accuses of being developments of mathematical idealism and cosmological speculation, neither of which has any grounding in the truly physical sciences.

From Lerner’s perspective western science is still riddled with, as he would call it, folkish notions of supernatural agents embroiled in the universe’s creation and ultimate demise, and for a Marxist-athiest like him its understandable he’d have a huge problem with that. I have to agree with some of his points. Although works by Hawking and Greene are only intended as popular sciences books that you can buy from Amazon and hold plenty of the author’s views that are highly unlikely to find their way into serious papers they may write, the fact that either they or their publishers feel it necessary to include this stuff is peculiar. I mean you’re reading about black holes, or space-time relativity, but you’ve already digested some preamble that reads into the universe lots of anthropomorphism and/or some benign causal agent, using as evidence the way the universe is ordered, its beauty etc. Greene’s and Kaku’s books are always loaded with allusions like this.

Lerner advocates an infinite universe, and he has some great evidence to support this theory, chief of which is the fact that there are many structures (mainly super-clusters) that – orthodox physics says – are MUCH older than the universe according to Big Bang theorists. In case you didn’t know, this is something that most “orthodox” physicists and cosmologists like to skip over, even introducing exotic substances like Dark Matter (and LOTS of other purely hypothetical substances and processes) to account for the anomaly.

I see the whole phenomena, especially in the hard sciences, as leftovers from the Cold War, I doubt 'religion' would have penetrated so deeply into the culture of the universities in the US and Britain (although I’m aware both have traditions of belief too) without the spectre of the Marxist-athiest Soviet Bloc practising an exclusively materialist science. The science faculties in universities suffered the same kind of pressure as every other institution in the West, and so spawned speculative pseudo-sciences like ‘cosmology’ as a consequence. Just look at France, which has a strong Marxist presence in its academia, Marxist-inspired structuralism and latterly deconstruction was able to re-write the rules on numerous subjects, specifically in the human sciences, linguistics for instance, or anthropology, both of which got this Marxist-worldview-inspired spin. And the problem with anything that entertains dialectical materialism as a means to ‘prove’ something, is it’s a massively slippery concept to tackle because its rooted in politics not genuine scientific method.

I’m strongly monotheist myself btw, so don’t take my criticism as motivated by atheism or Marxism, I mean to direct it more at the political situation which gives rise to the kind of skewed ‘populist science’ we’re served up that’s loaded with speculation and the supernatural and has nothing really to do with science.

If you search for a rocket, you will find hundreds of people that are willing to show you, how to build one.
But, #1 search result, Steve Hawkins,; Rocket into the future.
That's a figment of his imagination.

The market is flooded, for disguise. It happens, often. Ask Nikola Tesla.

jesus NFM haha