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Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 9:32 am
by Ron Panunto
This leads to the Big Question: why is all this stuff here?


The problem with this question, is that it presupposes a reason. There is no reason, it's just there. Chances are we will never find out what preceded and caused the big bang.

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 9:57 am
by middleway
The problem with this question, is that it presupposes a reason. There is no reason, it's just there. Chances are we will never find out what preceded and caused the big bang.


Indeed.

Well, time is an inherent part of 'space' they are a continuum. With no universe or space, time may not have even existed until the big bang. A concept entirely alien to a human. Ahhh the fun of mind bending hypothesis.

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 12:56 pm
by Dmitri
(to continue to derail this even further...) I bet it's infinite (in time and space), i.e. Big Bang wasn't "the beginning" of everything. If anything (pun intended :)), it was a beginning of a cyclical expansion of the part of the universe that we happen to be capable of observing. When I was in my teens, a friend and I had visualized this model of infinite collection of "bubbles" (each bubble being what we deem "observable universe"), pulsing between the BB state and the state of having expanded to the point where various forces would start pulling it all back together, until it reached the BB-level super-dense "dot". Back and forth, forever.

Another idea would be that it all will just continue to "expand" (as we're currently interpreting our puny measurements), as it always has been, forever, with "new" matter being continuously "created" from sub-levels so "thin" that we can't possibly register them (the "quantum field" and then continually "zooming in" further and further, again to infinity).

All speculation of course, but just seems to make a hell of a lot more (common) sense than the "nothing existed before the BB, and then at some set point in time everything started". To me anyway. :P Smells too much like the first few verses from Genesis, with some super-orthodox folks still denying validity of methods like carbon dating and believing that the universe is less than 6000 years old. Same idea, just different scale. IMO there is no "time limit" to it.

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 1:07 pm
by Dmitri
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Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Thu Jan 11, 2018 7:37 pm
by Steve James

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 2:55 am
by middleway
Spirit in the sky ... yes

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Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 4:42 am
by Trick
Dmitri wrote:(to continue to derail this even further...) I bet it's infinite (in time and space), i.e. Big Bang wasn't "the beginning" of everything. If anything (pun intended :)), it was a beginning of a cyclical expansion of the part of the universe that we happen to be capable of observing. When I was in my teens, a friend and I had visualized this model of infinite collection of "bubbles" (each bubble being what we deem "observable universe"), pulsing between the BB state and the state of having expanded to the point where various forces would start pulling it all back together, until it reached the BB-level super-dense "dot". Back and forth, forever.

Cool, i used to (still do) muse over something similar, instead of bubbles I visualized kind of an hourglass where the thin middle part of the glass is that dot as a kind of black hole, it big bang's it all out into one of the halves of the glass then pulls it back in just to bang it out to the other half. And the process follows the (almost)exact same pattern each and every time, the two halves of the glass are each other's mirror images kind of. We go on live our lives over and over but we have the ability to make small changes as we get the opportunity to better ourself each time, something as in Bill Murray's Groundhog Day movie :)

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Sat Jan 13, 2018 8:18 am
by Steve James
There's probably no theory that we'll think of that wasn't thought by someone 50K years ago. The only things that change are our (attempted) concrete explanations for the mechanism.

Ya'll were discussing western religions. I'm surprised that no one has brought up the Druids or Celts, or any pre-Roman European beliefs. The Druid idea of the Otherworld could be considered similar to a multiverse. Otoh, it reminds me of stranger things.

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 9:34 pm
by Trick
Know next to nothing about Druids. As I understand there is very little(almost nothing)written down about them and there practice, but I guess they followed the nature and saw deeper into it than the everage man and drew "divine" conclusions from their observations. As we understand ancient man lived more with the nature than we do today and probably therefore put more focus on how the land/nature around them sprung to life flourished, decayed and "died" to just repeat the cycle again and again. Even the great God in the sky where born grew strong got weaker and "died" on a daily and yearly basis. They must have pondered if this could be so with us humans to, being reborn. They saw dead bodies decay till only the bones remained and could that be it? From there they probably came up with the concept of having a soul that went on to live, either for feeling comfort or an actual belief and why wouldn't they believe in a soul since we continue to see and experience things even when we are at sleep, and Druids/Shamans could see even more by performing certain rituals.......So maybe today's "religious" people that fully live in a modern society with all its comfort might be more anxious about death, although they have the same nature just around the corner but they don't observe it as the ancient people did

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2018 6:23 am
by wiesiek
"...I'm surprised that no one has brought up the Druids or Celts, or any pre-Roman European beliefs. ..."

we don`t have any writing or carved documents from this period of our history, Steve, :)
so
all what you can read about it - is just guessing from artifacts, or interpolation from >contemporary< tribes ,
then better let`s do our own,
then,
me thinkin`, that RSF holly pages are as close as possible to the real thing,
`cause are brains distillate of the members diggin` in the ancient art...,
well, - ok,
not all of them :D O:)

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2018 6:25 am
by yeniseri
With Islam, death is used to destroy innocent people while in other religions it takes on views based on time, location and behavioural tendencies of specific populations.

There are elemets of "death" (points of view) where we know of no one who is getting out of this world alive ;D while within some traditions (ancient, modern and syncretic tradition) where, if we see the true value of death, we begin to take life more seriously, ernestly and show more respect for it. That includes nature.

Using death as an antidote
Let death....and all other things which appear terrible be daily before your eyes,... and you win never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.
Epictetus

There is a Tibetan tradition of taking death as a master as above, where, because it is feared, we learn to accept it as part of something as opposed to aversion, which creates mental chaos and naturally affects how we think about life.

Re: Death and Religion

PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2018 1:38 pm
by jimmy

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