In a pretty tech-savvy move to reach the flock, Pope Benedict XVI now has his own YouTube Channel. It's even in HD!
From their YouTube Profile:
This channel offers news coverage of the main activities of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI and of relevant Vatican events. It is updated daily. Video images are produced by Centro Televisio Vaticano (CTV), texts by Vatican Radio (RV) and CTV.
This video-news presents the Catholic Churchs position regarding the principal issues of the world today.
Links give access to the full and official texts of cited documents. Holy See (Vatican City State)
Watch the Pope on YouTube here, but be careful about leaving flame comments on his videos. God is watching you.
Right now, everyone is focusing on the crisis in banking as the cause of our economic problems, but I wonder if this is an effect and not a cause.
The financial sector certainly made some really stupid mistakes, but they actually were doing fairly well until something set them off.
When that happened, they realized they had, over the years, removed a lot of the safeguards we installed to protect them. That was the stupid part.
For thirty years, maybe more, maybe twice as long, our economy has been a shallow river. The water moved very fast, but it wasn't very deep.
Two years ago, we found ourselves in a situation where growth in the the world's economy was outstripping the resources we built to fuel it. The problem was fuel itself. We were too reliant on fossil fuels and when demand outpaced supply, we saw fuel prices more than double.
Energy costs are a fundamental building block of any economy, and you can't double the cost of energy without having serious repercussions throughout the rest of the system. Fuel prices doubled and the economy stalled. When the economy stalled, it created a major back flow in the banking system so the banking system broke.
As painful as this recession is, it may have come not a moment too soon. Without a slow down in the world's economy we were facing the serious problem of literally running out of energy. This recession may give us just enough time to correct the problem before it's too late.
The river of our economy overflowed its banks and threatened the villages in the valley below.
Alternative forms of energy have been a part of our economy for more than seventy years, but they were only a small part. Instead we supplied our demand for energy with fossil fuels as a commodity. It was more profitable in the short-run, but lead to two major problems: global warming and dwindling supply.
Renewable forms of energy are part of the infrastructure, not a commodity. Wind, solar, tidal, thermal, hydroelectric, even nuclear energies cost more to build on the front end, but then they are free from the fluctuations of the commodity market as they are self-supplying to a large extent.
Our energy has always come from a mix of infrastructure sources like hydroelectric and commodity sources like natural gas and oil, but in the past the ratio of that mix was something like 10% infrastructure and 90% commodity, leaving us incredibly vulnerable to the fluctuations of commodity markets.
Suppose we change that ratio, to say 60% renewable infrastructure sources and 40% non-renewable commodity sources. We need to retain that 40% from commodity sources because they're more flexible and can respond to fluctuations in demand, but it's unlikely demand will ever fall below the 60% provided by infrastructure sources.
To do this will require a genuine increase in both leadership and responsibility in the public and corporate sector. Some will say we can never expect that kind of performance in people, people are too greedy and too stupid, but I say we can. We can accomplish anything we want to.
Hell, we went to the moon strapped to the tip of an over-glorified bottle rocket. We can do anything.
By changing the mix of where we get our energy, by investing in our energy infrastructure, we deepen the river of our economy. The water won't move as fast, but more will flow past us and our future will be more secure.
A flea hears from other fleas that there such things as mountains. Being a rational and inquisitive flea, it decides to set out and see for himself if it is so.
A fleas segmented eyes are made so that it can only focus on things a few inches away. Everything beyond that is a blur, so it cannot see any mountains. Fleas have acute senses of smell and taste, but since mountains have no smell or taste the flea can't detect any mountains that way either.
Fleas have moderate, but limited intellectual properties, so our flea is unable to create a tool to detect mountains or devise a system to deduce the presence of them either. The way fleas are made, he can start at sea level and walk straight up the side of a mountain and never know it.
Because he can neither detect, nor deduce the presence of mountains, the flea decides that there is no such thing, and the fleas who say there are mountains must be either deluded or fibbing.
This particular flea though, lives in the wool on a goat living in the Alps. He has, in fact, lived his entire life on a mountain, even though he has no way of knowing it.
Human beings have set out to discover God in the same way as this flea. Some of them, because neither their senses, nor their tools, nor their reasoning can detect God, have decided that there must be no God, and anyone who believes there is must be either deluded or fibbing.
Fleas cannot detect mountains, but that's not an accurate test of whether there are mountains or not. Likewise, humans cannot detect God, but that's not an accurate test of whether God exists or not.
A flea may be correct if he says he doesn't believe in mountains because he cannot detect them, but he goes beyond his bounds if he says that there is no such thing as mountains.
Likewise, a man may be telling the truth if he says he doesn't believe in God because he cannot detect God, but he goes beyond his bounds if he says there is no God, because he has no way of knowing whether there is or not. Hubris leads us to believe the only things to exist are those our meager senses can detect or our limited intellect can deduce.
Just like the flea who lives on the goat who lives on the mountain, I believe we would be amazed at the remarkable things that do exist but are beyond our ability to detect them.
Image: Mountain Goat Statue Near Corviglia - St. Moritz, Switzerland
One of the major tenets of books like The God Delusion and The God Part of the Brain is that we invented God to make ourselves feel better about death and the various insecurities of life.
I don't subscribe to that theory. People use their faith in that way, but, I believe the impetus for our concept for God comes from a very different place: probably from God himself trying to reveal the truth to us or from our own latent ability to see beyond our senses.
Let's suppose for a moment though that it is true; that we invented all this just to make ourselves feel better, to have some comfort and hope faced with the certainty of death and the uncertainty of life.
What kind of cruel person tells people this without offering anything as an alternative?
It's one thing for some over-read, middle class twit like myself luxuriating in the relative ease and security of the west to speculate that God doesn't exist, we at least have the consolation of knowing that we have it fairly well in this life, but most of the world isn't nearly so fortunate.
Most of the world needs some sort of comfort and assurance that their lives have meaning, that they're not just the fodder of evolution and random chance. Even if it is just a delusion, it gives them hope and with hope, even the most unfortunate life becomes bearable and full of potential.
Even though it's controversial, I highly recommend the film The Last Temptation of Christ. The film is the fictional account of Jesus speculating what might happen if he escaped the cross and lived rather than sacrificing himself.
In it, the Jesus that didn't die encounters Paul, preaching about the Jesus that did die. Jesus comes to Paul and says "I am the man you are preaching about", expecting Paul to embrace his new life as an ordinary man, but Paul gets angry. He says that the people he preaches to need the Jesus who died. Jesus says "You can't save the world by lying" and Paul replies:
I created the truth out of what people needed and what they believed. If I have to crucify you to save the world, then I'll crucify you. And if I have to resurrect you, then I'll do that, too.
...You don't know how much people need God. You don't know how happy he can make them. Happy to do anything. He can make them happy to die and they'll die. All for the sake of Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus of Nazareth. The Son of God. The Messiah. Not you. Not for your sake. You know, I'm glad I met you. Because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more important and much more powerful.
Death is inescapable. We all know that. We have all always known that. If the concept of God gives us hope in the face of this unerasable but horrible truth, then it is worthy of us, even if it is a delusion.
If a man's search for truth should lead him to the conclusion that there is no God, that's fine, but don't evangelize it, don't shout it, not without something to offer in its stead because it's better for men to live with a delusion but have hope then to know the truth and have none.
Where's the mercy in taking away hope? Where's the love? There isn't any.
People who don't believe have a tendency to consider themselves superior to those who do, because they at least know "the truth".
Maybe that's what they use to fill the void left when they abandon faith. Considering oneself superior in life can go a long way toward replacing the hope they abandon, but that too is only a delusion, because none of us are superior to anyone, no matter what we believe or don't believe.
Science offers us information, not "the truth". Certainly information is innately and uniquely valuable, but it's not God.
One thing that's very clear from the history of science, is that no matter how much information we uncover, there's still more left to be uncovered. Science brings us no closer to complete knowledge now than we were ten thousand years ago.
I'm capable of abandoning my faith. I've done it before. But after very careful consideration, I choose to embrace it now
Maybe I am deluded for believing in God or believing that our lives extend beyond these physical bodies. Maybe I am. But, you know what? I'm satisfied with that.
I'm satisfied with it because I know my limits, and one of my limits is that I need God. I need to know there is more to me and the people I love than just what I perceive.
If you're brave enough to take a completely human and objective look at the bible and all the people who wrote it and all the people who compiled it and embrace the considerable amount of truth that journey leads you to, but still come away a believer, then you're in for life and there's nothing anyone can ever do to change that.
There's not even very much that can upset you. If you already know all the criticisms, but still believe then there's nothing humanists, atheists, agnostics, Satanists, Pagans or Scientologists can say to upset you.
You might even agree with them on some points, but since you already know these things, but still remain faithful, then it's no challenge to you.
It's the people who wont take that journey, who won't look at the bible objectively whose faith is in jeopardy, because it's built on the sand of superstition and not stone of reason.
For example: the objective christian knows that there is a vast collection of evidence in support of Darwin's theory of evolution, so that means the creation story in genesis must mean something other than what we thought it meant and they go on with their life.
They may or may not try and find out what that "something other" is, but it doesn't matter because their faith isn't threatened if every single word of the bible isn't historically and scientifically accurate. They know that's not the case and they don't care.
On the other hand: the theory of evolution has the superstitious christian under siege. For them, if genesis goes down then the whole bible is bullshit and they've been fools all their lives, so they fight like hell to keep that from happening, even if it means isolating themselves from the rest of the world.
Now, who serves God better, the woman who walks freely in a changing world but still believes, or the man who digs himself a bomb shelter to live in because he might have descended from apes?
Suppose you read a history book that said "John Kennedy said we should go to the moon, so we went to the moon."
Now, that would be a fairly accurate reporting of what happened, but it also omits a heck of a lot of important information, like "who", "why", and most importantly, "how".
The bible tells us that God created the universe and God created us, but like the example above it omits pretty much all of the details, especially "how".
Many people believe there's this conflict between science and religion because science has come up with a different narrative for the creation of life than the one found in Genesis. I don't see a conflict at all, but rather two different ways of telling the same story.
The Genesis writers were primarily concerned with telling the story of God's relationship to us. They tell us that God created us and God created the universe, but they make no attempt to get into the details of "how". Neither do they give us any indication of "who" or "what" God is.
Science, on the other hand, is completely concerned with the details of "how" man and the universe were created, but make no attempt to give the details of "why".
If you're reading the bible hoping to make it a book of science or history then you're going to be disappointed, it simply doesn't deal with those questions.
The bible is a collection of many different stories, written by many different people over an extraordinarily long period of time, trying to illuminate the relationship between God and man. They weren't even trying to account for the types of information one finds in books about history or science. It simply wasn't their purpose.
People who find a conflict between the bible and science or history are trying to make the bible something it's not, which means they're completely missing the point of the bible for what it is.
There's an incredible amount of valuable information in the bible, but if you're looking for the answer to where dinosaurs came from, or why the earth orbits around the sun, then you'll simply have to look elsewhere.
It's an obvious enough question. It happens to each of us and to everyone we know, yet nobody really seems to know for sure.
So far nobody who crossed that boundary for more than a few moments has reported back. They say Jesus was dead for two days before he came back, but that was almost two thousand years ago and the only testimony we have was passed around a good bit before anyone wrote it down so basically what we have from Jesus just wouldn't stand up in court.
There are several schools of thought on this issue. The first and nominally the most logical is that nothing happens when we die. We wink out of existence like a cheap light bulb and our bodies are disposed of.
This philosophy depends on the idea that our consciousness is nothing more than the biological and electrical processes of the brain and once those processes break down, we cease to exist.
The proof of this comes from observation. If you cut off the head then death is almost immediate. So far nobody has been able to keep a head alive without a body or a body alive without a head.
I think a lot of people refuse to even consider this possibility because it's very discomforting. It's not themselves they're worriying about primarily, when it's your turn to go, there's pretty much no turning back, but we all have friends and loved ones who died and most of us would like to think they continue somehow, even in a way that's utterly beyond us.
You can't posit this as the final word on the matter yet though. We understand so little of how the brain really works. We know some tricks, for instance if you add certian chemicals it produces certian effects, but when it comes to the real basics of how ideas are formed and stored we just don't understand how it's done.
It may be that the brain isn't the repository for our conciousness, but rather a conduit between our real selves and this physical world.
Marcus Aurelius talks about the futility of life because there's such a huge spance of time before we're born and after we die and such a brief moment in-between when we're alive, but, what if the issue here really is time itself.
We exist in four dimensions: three of space and one of time. The demensions of space we move about pretty freely in. We can go forward and back or up and down at any speed we wish whenever we wish. Not so with time, we are a slave in time. In time we can only move from the past to the future and only at one speed.
But, it's only in time that we die. Six months ago, my mother was alive, sixteen years ago, my dad was alive, and sixty years ago, my great-grandfather was alive. It's only in the present that they are not alive.
If we were somehow freed of time, then everyone who ever lived would still be alive because all we have to do is move through time to the peroid where they were alive or they could move from the time when they were alive to times when they weren't. If we could move into the past or the future of our own will then we would effectivly live forever.
Perhaps that's what happens we die. Perhaps that moment of breaking between life and death is the moment where we become free of time and maybe the reason nobody ever reports back after death is because our perspective is so different once we are free of time that there is no way to communicate with those who are still its slave.
I'm convinced that we are still in just the earliest stages of our full development. In time, we will overcome these ideas of life and death.
There was a time when light and dark were absolute forces to us. During the day, we had light, but at night or in the shadows we had none and there was nothing we could do about it. Then we discovered fire, then mirrors, then electricity and more and now light and dark are a matter of choice to us. We can bring light to the darkest room or the longest night.
Perhaps it will be that way with life and death too. At the present we have no control over it, but perhaps, in time, we will come to a place where we can illuminate death as easily as turning on a lamp.
I'm willing to concede that what we call religion is probably little more than a combination of folklore, wishful thinking and outright fraud. But, it doesn't matter, I'm still a christian.
How can that be? Am I stupid? Deluded?
Thought creates reality. Jesus becomes real because I believe in Jesus.
Let's look at some other ideas that are completely imaginary, yet even atheists believe in them so they become real.
Ideas like: Justice, Equality and Freedom.
Equality? You can't show me two human beings that are equal, let alone a whole nation or a whole species. Equality is just something we made up...and yet, how many of us have died fighting for it?
The same goes for Justice. Are you kidding me? There is no justice! In the "real world", justice just isn't possible, and yet we fight for it every day and we make it a reality.
Freedom? Freedom is bullshit. We are bound every second of every day by gravity, economics, age, physics, prejudice, ignorance, lack of energy, lack of knowledge, lack of motivation, greed, lust, envy, bureaucracy, hypocrisy, genetics and stupidity, and yet there is nothing more important to us Americans than Freedom.
You simply cannot posit these things as a reality using logic and science. These things only exist if we believe they exist and work to make them exist.
Space travel wasn't a reality in 1950. Reasonable people just didn't believe in such things: yet by believing in the impossible, man walked on the moon before 1970.
If we accepted only what we could prove was real and solid and tangible then the world would never grow and improve. It's by reaching beyond reality that we create reality, otherwise we might as well just go back to making tools from stone, living in caves and killing each other over a bite of antelope flesh.
I don't know if there was actually a guy walking around first century Palestine named Jesus doing all sorts of magic and stuff. It doesn't matter, because I am not in first century Palestine.
It doesn't matter because in the here and now, I have these really astounding writings attributed to Jesus and the even more amazing concept of Jesus that I can hold and use and build a better world.
Believing in Jesus helps me make really imaginary things like love, compassion, forgiveness and grace real and tangible in a way not possible if I didn't have a Jesus to guide me--and that's why I'm a christian.
In 1969, Edwin Eugene (Buzz) Aldrin was the second human being to ever walk on the moon. His responsibility was to actually pilot the Eagle Lunar Module from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. Buzz Aldrin is not only an American hero, but a world hero as well.
Ever since that day, fringe people have put forth the theory that the whole thing was a hoax. There's a million reasons why they're wrong that I don't have time to go into here. Suffice to say, we really did go to the moon no matter what people say.
The reason Bart Sibrel is an asshole instead of just being a guy who thinks we faked the moon landings, is that he has a habit of stalking ex-astronauts. Besides the yelling and screaming and accusations of lying, Sibrel is known to ask moon-walkers to to swear on the bible that they actually went to the moon, carrying his own bible to aid the task.
In 2002, Sibrel laid in wait to ambush Aldrin at a California hotel. When the astronaut showed, Sibrel accused him of being "a coward, a liar, and a thief" to which, the seventy-five year old Aldrin decked Sibrel in the teeth, nearly knocking him off his feet.
Sibrel made noises about charging Aldrin with assault, but the police and court would have nothing to do with it. Watch the punch on the video below.
The earth is dying and we're killing it. Any reasonable person knows this.
Never mind that scientists can't make an accurate 24-hour weather forecast.
Never mind that anyone who saw the 2000 presidential debates knows that Al Gore is bat-shit crazy.
The logical path is laid out for us, and if we don't follow that path, then we're all gonna die!
At the most recent skeptics convention hosted by The Amazing Randi, Penn Jillette was asked about global warming--to which he replied: "I don't know". It took him about a thousand words to say "I don't know". If you've ever seen his act then you know a thousand words is conservative for Jillette. His normally silent partner's response was maybe five hundred words.
Penn & Teller are among America's greatest thinkers. I say this because I agree with them about half the time. They have a great program on television called "Bullshit" where they expand on just how insane and illogical most of us are.
After the skeptics conference, Newsweek's Sharon Begley wrote an article dismissing Jillette's comments on climate change (in her best Post hoc ergo propter hoc manner) because he dislikes Al Gore. You can read her article here.
In his reply to Begley, Jillette was again terse (only about a thousand words).
The deal is: we don't know as much as we think we know about climate change. We suspect many things, and a lot of them may be accurate, but a lot of it we just can't posit as a scientific fact yet.
Jillette's response was reasonable. He doesn't know. I don't know either. Begley is pretty sure she knows but she doesn't. As a race, we will do our best to rectify the climate change problem, but that doesn't mean we should be sanctimonious about it all, because quite frankly, we don't know.
Scientists in England or somewhere have made the astonishing discovery that eating watermelon has basically the same effect as Viagra. You can read more about it here.
I gotta call bull-crap on this one. I've eaten more than my fair share of watermelon since early childhood and if it had an effect like Viagra, I would have noticed by now. Maybe you have to eat the whole melon, seeds and all for it to take effect.
Of course, this does give a whole new meaning to the phrase "melon balls". . .
The The Blue Whale (balaenoptera musculus) is generally considered the largest animal that ever lived. It can reach lengths of over 110 feet long and weights of over 200 tons.
It's hard to imagine what that is in real terms. 110 feet is over 1/3 the length of a football field. To give an even better conception of how big that is, I've included a photograph of the life-size blue whale model from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The Blue Whale is a carnivore. He hunts large shoals of tiny shrimp called krill. The whale will swim through the krill with his cavernous mouth open taking in as much water and krill as he can, then he closes his mouth and uses his tongue to push the water back out letting his feather-like teeth called baleen strain out the shrimp which he then swallows.
The throat of the Blue whale is pleated so it can expand like an accordion when he takes in water. The image above shows his throat about half expanded. For a long time, scientists thought the whales throat was always partially expanded because they only time anyone go to see the underside of the whale was when one beached itself or was harvested by whalers.
Compare the images below of a free swimming blue whale with his throat deflated and another image of the whale with his throat full of water and krill.
Since all my Lost friends have commented on the season finale, I thought I'd throw in my two cents plus inflation.
Last year's season finale opened several questions and we had to wait until this year's season finale to get any answers. The biggest of these was "who the hell is in the coffin?"
"I've looked into the heart of this island and what I saw was beautiful"
If you watched this years season finale, then you know it was John Locke in the coffin. John, knife-wielding, pig hunting, button pushing, Obi-Wan, faithful believer in the island's mysteries, man of faith not science, Locke.
If you can't tell I'm a big fan of Locke.
Like a lot of people, I was pretty sure it was Ben in the coffin. Now that we know it's Locke, fans all want to know if it means he's off the show.
The thing you have to remember is that on Lost, death doesn't mean what it normally means. Dead people come back all the time. Hurley was playing chess with the beaten to death by the smoke monster Mr. Eko in the nut house and Jack's dead dad appears to people who never met him in life.
In the real world, as in the show, the difference between life and death is just a matter of time, literally.
"I hope you're happy now, Jacob."
Marcus Aurelius spoke of great gulf of time before we're born and after we're dead and the brief moment of time in-between when we're alive. Jesus spoke of an eternal life, unbound by time, constituted only of faith. The Lost island operates independently of time. By turning the frozen donkey wheel, the island hops from spot to spot on the (what is to the rest of us) unbreakable sequential progression of time.
"When I said you had to go back to the island, I meant all of you... Him too."
Clearly, Benjamin Linus intends for drunken, bearded, Jack to steal Locke's dead body and take it back to the island. Why? Because, in a place like the island, where time doesn't matter, then life and death is really only a matter of perspective and dead-in-Los-Angeles Locke will be alive again.
Locke to Jack: Why is so hard for you to believe?
Jack to Locke: Why is it so easy for you?
Wait. Have we seen this scenario before? An innocent man gives his life for his friends, only to have his dead body seemingly stolen from its grave but appears to his friends again, very much alive.
Imagine this: Jin (who also is not dead) is fishing off the now re-located in time island, when a stranger appears on the beach. "Have any luck?" the stranger asks. "No" says Jin, in improving English. "Cast your net on the other side." says the stranger.
The concept of Random chance is one of the cornerstones of atheism. It presumes that our existence comes as the result of random events impacting other random events rather than some sort of conceptual direction. The only problem is, random doesn't exist.
When we say "random" what we mean is that the outcome of an event is unknowable because it results from processes either unknown or so complex that they are virtually unknowable. That's a far cry from saying "stuff just happens". Stuff doesn't just happen, stuff happens as the result of other stuff.
Computers are really good at complex calculations, and among computers there is no such thing as random. For programs where we wish to introduce a random element, computers use a random number simulator because they cannot calculate random numbers on their own. It is just a simulation though, if you know how the random number generator works, then the outcome is completely predictable.
Now, saying there is no such thing as random is a long way from proving an anthropomorphic, paternalistic "God" who punishes sins and runs our lives like some sort of giant puppeteer, but knowing that nothing is truly random and that all things have a rational cause makes the existence of a higher power of some sort logical.
Having fallen hopelessly, passionately, in love in middle age, what do Boyd and Mrs. Boyd talk about during dinner?
Last night it was cavemen with Mexican food. Carla picked my feeble mind about the links from our chimpanzee-like ancestors to modern man.
LiveScience gives a great run-down of the top ten hominids to work with.
From Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) to my personal favorite, the Neanderthals and why some people have big noses, we covered the fabled path from monkey to man.
For the record, we're both deeply christian, but also happen to believe in evolution.
