CLEARING UP SOME METAPHYSICAL CONFUSION

Some of you may ask me, “Do you really believe in things like The Big Bang and in Predestination?” The answer, if you’re asking what I really believe- - is No. No to both. That may surprise some of you. I really don’t like the idea of predestination. I think it’s mentally unhealthy to live by such a belief- - even if it turns out to be True, it’s unhealthy. You may remember a quote I had on Escape from Egypt. Suppose there was an alien who landed here in a super-dooper space ship and he announced that he came from the Future. Further he announced that he knew my fate but he wasn’t going to tell me what he knew it was- -just to taunt me (or probably because he didn’t really know) the question is how would I respond. It should be, “I don’t give a damn about your Future, I live here in the present and it’s here, today, that I have a decision to make. (assuming I have one) In a four dimensional construct, time travel is inherently impossible. Think about it. Either the time machine or space craft is there in our world or it isn’t. It can’t be both there and Not There at the same time. Also in a Larry Elder letter I express hostility twords the doctrine of predestination. This may have puzzled some of you. A way to “reconcile” the two views is to say that the Universe predestines; God doesn’t. If, as I intoned in the letter, the Devil is in control of “this world” then it’s actually my duty to fight his will, and make up my own mind. The only reason why I mentioned predestination so much is because it fits in with the Big Bang theory. There are times where I decide that I must accept what Scientists and others who know more than I do say, because I don’t have the mathematical where-with-all to mount a counter argument. Of course it’s easy to know why Christians believe in predestination. One of their reasons is that they worship a God they really consider (when push comes to shove) as a part of their own Ego, and such a God to be the greatest of any god that could be, is to say he’s “omniscient” or all-knowing. To be all knowing would logically mean one knew the future, too. In terms of the Big Bang theory I don’t believe in that, either. I didn’t as a young kid in elementary school. To me the idea of counting stars or counting galaxies or “measuring” how big the Universe was seemed absurd, because obviously it went on forever. Some may mount a complaint to this saying “If enough time passed eventually all the celestial bodies in the Universe would be pulled together in one mass by gravity, no matter how weak”. My answer to this is to emphasize Not If There Was Also Infinite Space. People have some primal opposition to either time or space going on forever. People seem to want to have a beginning, a middle and an end, like a two hour movie, where all is resolved and all of your questions get answered. I don’t know where this desire to know everything came from. Knowledge is out there and we’ll find it out eventually. As for Einstein and his equations, I say that those same equations could be put to better use- and would probably serve just as well, if they were done under simpler Newtonian physical laws. A lot of the logic of Einstein doubles back on itself. Take the Doppler effect. This is the phenominum where you hear a train whistle lowering in pitch as the train passes. The whole doppler theory rests on the idea that there was be some wave medium like ether, where pitch and color can be translated into approaching and receeding distances. But to me when I see everything in the distance receeding or appearing to, the logical thing to suppose is ther there must be something in the medium (ether) itself that slows down the light waves as they travel through space. I call it ether drag. It’s a good thing to have a theory that actually answers questions rather than to raise more questions than it answers. If space and time go on forever then there is no problem with the Theory of Evolution. All of Chuck Smith’s arguments rest on the premise that there is a finite amount of both space and time, and frankly, I just find no reason to accept this.

For those of you who are curious my friends at the Orion Federation say they believe in predestination but have absolutely no problem with the “Steady State” theory, which is what I have described. Some of their history I know of goes back five thousand years and all intents and purposes, those people were just as advanced as today.

I’d like to address the matter of dying for one’s faith. They say only good people will die for their faiths and not bad people. They also say that lies eventually get found out because Guilt gets the best of people and they confess them on their own. I think both of these assumptions are false. The Russians were willing to, and have, died for their Faith, which is communism. Moslems die for their faith all the time awaiting those seventy-two virgins. Dad used to always say how cruel it would be if General Patton had turned his tanks on the Russians after defeating the Nazis because “The Russian people were so wiped out”. Yeah, but just think of how many lives would have been saved. In fact Stewart Sutcliffe (next posting) has stated that the Nazis when they invaded the Ukrane region should have been treated as liberators because Stalin had rigged the collective farming system to insure a slow and laborious mass starvation of the population. The other thing about dying for a lie is an area I’d like to use soap opera character Lexi Carver to illustrate. Just today a sexual affair of hers was found out. Since the person blackmailing her threatened to reveal this secret if she didn’t tell certain lies to certain people- - one might think now that “the worst” had happened she could go to people like Austin and Carrie and tell them she had lied to and deceived them and caused them much harm. Well, you don’t know soap operas very well. The more a lie is threatened the more tenatiously people hang on to them and defend them against exposure, sometimes at all costs. Lexi doesn’t want to admit what she did because her trust in the community, not to mention medical mal practice suits and disbarment (or whatever) licence revocation would be the next step. She has to hold onto her lie more than ever. If all a Christian has left to live for is some imagined bliss in heaven- - they are literally going to hold onto that belief forever- - because to give it up would be a sort of psychic death for them.

Tomorrow or Wednesday is the first day of summer. I would now like to reprint the following letter written quite a number of months ago- even though my opinion on the Iraq War has changed a bit. I am more sympathetic to reasons for our being there now than I was when I wrote the letter. But here’s what I thought in late January.

You wanted feedback about 1150 talk radio. Yes it does come in on my radio. In fact, it comes in better than some other stations. It isn't in my push button rotation because it used to be Sports and simocast with XTRA 690. I dropped it from the pre-set selection and so untill yesterday hadn't checked it for a long time. I was pleasently surprised with the station. Not to sound like a slogan but I guess you could say from now on I will go to KTLK to meet my talk show needs. I notice they have good publicity agents and all the right slogans. That's good; they'll get more people. It shows they're going for a main stream audience. I listened to the host who is on from nine to twelve and then the host from twelve to three. I guess there is some woman on at three and she didn't interest me. One thing I kept hearing on the station is that we have HAD a lot of elections in the Mideast but they haven't gone our way. There was an election in Iran that put a fundamentalist fanatic into power, and the Shiites won a majority in Iraq, and in Palestine the Hammas party got in just after the former PLO party had purged itself of its war like elements. That's what you call really bad timing. Of course there's that tape of Bin Laden. Every time one of those tapes surfaces in this country the effect is to strengthen President Bush's power. Indeed John Kerry said that the tape that arrived a few days before the US election in 2004 may be the incident that got Bush re-elected. I didn't see the connection at the time but I do now. There seem to be new demonstrations carried out in mideast countries with people shouting "Death to America". I guess you have heard that the stroke of Ariel Sherone in Isrial was blamed on God because God didn't want Isrial to give up land. That's what Pat Robertson said. It would seem Pat Robertson is slowly slipping out of the "main stream" of Politics. Combined with all this are increasingly frequent statements from people saying that the US Army is stretched thin and we won't be able to sustain present troop levels much longer. Where I disagree with the democrats (and possibly you) is the notion that we didn't have a good cause to go into Iraq to begin with. I believe we DID have a good cause for war at the beginning. We had a "reasonable belief" there was a mad man in power who was becomming increasingly dangerous. My personal second grounds for going to war was that Bush 41 made a promise of the people of Iraq that if they fought for their freedom in 1991, we would back them up. What we have now is a horse of an entirely different color. We're out to promote some region wide "Cultural and religious revolution" to Western ideas in the mideast. In this war of words we are failing badly. For this reason it's time to try another tack. I think we should start withdrawing troops, doing everything we reasonably can to prevent chaos from ensuing in Iraq when we leave.