h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, according to St. Paul, God is love, and the explanation for creation according to C.S. Lewis is that, since God is love, and of such a pure love that it is unfathomable to humanity, God created all the universe(multiverse?) out of love so he would have something TO love. His love for us brought the Son to the Earth, who, out of his love, saved us all, and brought the Holy Spirit upon the Church. Ergo, love begat all that is, was, and ever shall be. The very fact that it is energy, as alicat said, and was created, is what is the essence of God. He created that which is physically impossible to create via our current knowledge of physics. That is what makes him God.

i once saw a tv show about a couple who had adopted some twenty children. the reporter asked the couple "how do you divide your love amongst so many children?" the woman answered, "you don't divide your love, you multiply it". i found this to be a very profound idea. another great thing about love is, the more you give away, the more you get in return. animals are much quicker to give it away. humans tend to be much more selfish, hording it for themselves.@

First off, CS Lewis was pretty froody, but usually wrong about things. I like his grasp of mythology, but his cosmology stinks.

Please explain why the invisible, gaseous vertebrate alpha-male you term 'God' would lovingly create awful people, condemn them for their awfulness eternally, incarnate himself as an avatar (whom he loves) so that the awful damned people of his creation can murder him, allow people to butcher and maim for 2 millenia in commemoration of that event, and then eventually send everyone who didn't happen to 'believe' any of this to eternal fire? This is a strange accounting of love.

nice point Twophlag.

Applies not only to the god called God of the Jews, Christians etc but also to many other war lords called gods, created in the minds of people with too much time on their hands ...

hence time exists ... Q E D

PERSONAL NOTE TO AUTHUR: I should try jurnalism, next !

To say that we are unique in our acknowledgement of time is perhaps slightly optimistic. What perception of time is there without a picture and what picture would there be without the time to create it, be it in a natural or artificial state.

I would agree with the fiction that said time is subject high's and low's rather like the weather and also that time exists in all minds but what we have trouble getting our heads around is that there are other perceptions and thus other manifestations of time. Like the saying `one persons trash is another persons gold', could be adapted to time thus `one persons embarrassing moment is another persons best second' etc.

To recalibrate our own perception will most likely be the only way we can truly embrace the concept of other times. Or, even to introduce other times and schedules as a way of helping to recalibrate, acquaint and thus understand or live it. The fly has its ten minutes in a few seconds of our actual percieved time (by the clock or watch). Thats why they are usually well out of the way of the swatting newspaper, they do not have quick reflexes at all, and they sure don't think about dying for too long. Its simply because thier perception is far faster because their time `rate' is so much faster.

Or something like that.

I tend to think that time does exits myself. Wanted to get that out in the open at the outset so we could move on to more important things like the following.

Humans are not the only ones who are aware of time, we are simply the only ones who can't take something so basic for granted and leave it be. My dog for instance most definately knows when 5am is as he wakes me up every morning at said time wanting to go outside, he does not however discuss wether it would be effected if he jumped the fence and ran down the street chasing the postman at the speed of light with his doggy friends. My dog has better sense than that and is in my opinion probably living a happier life than I for his lack of questioning. Some things are just wiser to be taken on faith.

God (by whatever name/race/sex/species/etc... you wish to call Him) has to be one of these things so far as my perspective goes. It's fairly easy to show why if you can follow a string of logic for a moment. There are four possibilities if we sum all gods into one and discount religious barriers: God exists and you follow Him, God exists and you do not follow Him, God does not exist and you follow Him, and finally God does not exist and you do not follow Him.

We'll start by examining the second pair of possibilities, in either case it won't make a difference to you once you're dead if you followed Him or not so step in front of a car now and save yourself the bother of having to get up and go to work in the morning. Either way you choose to go through life leaves no point to your existance so why bother with it?

As to the first pair of possibilities these are spelled out in the beliefs of the particular interpretation of God you follow, most of which proscribe something rather nasty if you did not follow Him and something equally good if you had. This fairly well makes the choice a rather obvious one.

There we have the four possibilities: the good happy ending, the um..oops i'm stupid ending, and two cases of the does not matter ending. It's alot like having two doors in front of you with signs on them. One door says "certain death" and the other says "topless member of the opposite sex with beer". Without knowing if either is true what would any sane person choose given this situation?

Given that fairly sound, if I do say so myself, line of reasoning it truly amazes me the number of people who choose to actively disbelieve the existance of any God at all. If nothing else they should believe out of self defence as they have nothing to loose and everything to gain.

I sure do talk alot sometimes.

I am personally a dolphin, and I don't feel time. When ever I roll out of the left side of my kelpy bed in the morning, it doesnt poke me in the side with a ceptor and say "You have 22,783,431,652,890 seconds left to live!" And that is because we dolphins are far more perceptive than you humans. We composed a theory of everything 30 years ago, whilst you still roll about in cosmic string. The Universe is not a single entity travelling through time! Rather, there is a separate "Now" for every instant--a Universe in which nothing changes. Many of them, in fact. Time, as we experience it, is like a film running through a projector. It appears to move, but is actually a series of still images in sequence. And on another note, once the Universe ceases to expand, it will shrink, and time will move backwards. Or will it? No, silly human! The slides will! Submit to my evil showing of subconscious slides which you deam as time! Magma! Magma!