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

I've been slinking around the internet today as the weather systems going through LA have been sending my joints all achy and I've discovered I'm allergic to something in the air besides Chinese Elm. I found this interesting tidbit:

Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.
-St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim"

I don't know why is never ceases to surprise me that people have been saying the same things about knowledge and religion since time immemorial.

Oooh, topical: eh?

I think that this is effectively what Jesus meant when challenged as to whether Caesar's head on a coin meant it was not God's property: 'Give to worldly authorities the things that belong to them, and to God what belongs to God.' In other words, the one should not presume to speak on matters concerning the other.

My father was both a scientist & a christian and, as it seems to me, could not communicate between the parts of his mind that held the two. I think each part said of the other '(sigh - no use talking)' and left it at that. What I enjoyed about the scientist is that I could question him freely and he never tried to convert me to chemistry. What I found annoying about the christian was the opposite. Well, they're both gone now - who knows which one recieved the greater surprise?

Hello Pailaway, and welcome to my journal.



If both sides of your father encountered something that is buddhist, animist, or otherwise reincarnation-minded, they may *both* have had an interesting surprise.

Science aims to disseminate information about the reproducible, no matter how ineffable it may seem to makers of the initial hypotheses. Reincarnation can allow an experimentation along those lines. I find it fun to speculate that if he'd been a reincarnation of a previously spiritual-and-analytical being, perhaps he made a mistake by choosing male this time around as men have a smaller corpus callossum connecting up their brain-halves and this may have prevented any integration that he was 'looking for' (if he was looking for it).



Shall we keep our eyes peeled?

Curiously, we did not speak of reincarnation much (I have been told that references to this were removed from the bible, I don't actually know - but if it wasn't in the bible, for whatever reason, it wasn't within his framework). As for me, I choose to believe in choice and am somewhat skeptical that mistakes occur. So I speculate that he would have known what he was doing before he was a he and chose to have a smaller corpus callossum (I did not know this fact, btw - it would probably explain a lot, if I only had a brain) and therefore two distinct and disjoint experiences in one. A real shocker would have been to encounter himself. ()

I guess if the afterlife were a Heisenberg state, he could very well meet himself, until some other soul observed him.

The earliest Christians were expecting that there'd really be a literal re-incarnation at the Second Coming, and that it'd be sometime soon. This is why they spent so much time with their ossuaries and endeavored to keep their bodies' parts whole after death.

Ok, so let me see if I get this - we die, having made some callossum mistake, become probabilities, until observed, at which time we board quantas, fasten our seatbelts so that we may know precisely where we are, but not where we are going, and takeoff for an afterlife of uncertainty among the boneyards?