The Physical Nature Of Time by Paul N Butler

John,

That is ok. I haven't even had the chance to read all of the papers let alone keep track of all of the comments attached to them. It would be good if all of this contest information was put into a book or an internet archive, so that we and others could later go over it at our leisure then contact any one who had given information that was of interest to us to inquire deeper into it. This would mean that we would have to be willing to give our e-mail address out, but that could be made optional.

The concept that fluctuations of space generate energy and matter entities comes from quantum theory and when you get to the level below quantum effects that generates those effects you find that the world has more of an analog construction than a quantum construction. It appears that the total of all the motions of all motion entities (energy and matter particles, etc.) has not changed from the beginning of the world until now. The only thing that has changed is how that overall motion total has been dispersed into the individual motion entities that exist at a given time (point in the motion progression). Although motion entities can transfer from other fifth vector structural levels to our level or visa versa and appear as though they just came into being, they already existed previously in the level that they were transferred from and so they are not actually newly created entities or motions, but are just another example of motion transfers. It is true, however, that the dimensional system that the motions exist in did preexist the motion that was later added to the system.

At this point whether you chose religion or science as your guide to the world, you are left with the concept that the world had a beginning or creation and has progressed from that beginning to its present condition through a single path or narrative. The problem is not that such a narrative does not exist; it is just that man has not been able to fully grasp it in its entirety. It is true that such a narrative both defines reality and at the same time restricts or constricts it to the definition thus obtained, but that is really what the pursuit of knowledge is all about. We are continually striving to conform our narrative of the way we see and understand the world and how it works to the ultimate true narrative of how it actually is and how it actually works by continually testing our narrative in light of our observations of the world around us and changing it as necessary so that in the end it will hopefully attain as closely as possible to the world's true narrative. God's grace will go in the path that he has prepared for it according to how he has defined it, so that it will be given to those who meet the requirements that he has established for those who will receive it regardless of what we do. He has also given us to be able to choose either the path that will allow us to receive his grace or to reject that path and take another that will cause us to not receive his grace. Because the path that is chosen by us makes the difference between life and death and because I have compassion on others and desire life for as many as possible, I try to take and encourage as many others as I can to take the path that God has set out for us that leads to life. It is true that after we leave this world our bodies will return to the dust of the earth from which they were formed, but that is not the important part, as God's intent is that we live in a new and better body (his body). It is also true that there is the wheat that will be saved and the chaff that will be burned up at the end, but my job here is to help gather the wheat to God. The chaff will decide to take a different path. For those who chose the path that will lead to their being saved, both the spirit and that part of the soul that is not of the flesh will be saved. It is likely that they will, therefore, have access to all their stored records of their past as well as their future intents and will continue to live in the present. They will just interface through a new body. It is evident that life can exist without death because the first living being (whether you believe in God as that being or some one celled creature as that being) lived in the world before any death existed. The opposite is true, however, that without life there can be no death. My study of sacrifice indicates that it was usually introduced by those that feared death (and understood that they deserved death because of their actions) as an attempt to persuade God to accept the death of another in their place. The replacement usually had to be as pure as possible to be a worthy sacrifice in order to redeem the other from the penalty of death by the payment of the willing death of the pure sacrifice. Of course, when the sacrifice was an animal, it was not usually given the opportunity to make that choice for itself. This is a precursor or prediction that God built into us of his chosen method to allow us to be restored to him and be saved after we disobeyed him (sinned against him) and were worthy of death (as the penalty for that sin), by his son's willful offering up of his pure life for payment to redeem us from our sins for the restoration of us back to God. It is true that most people still fear death today and try to avoid any thought of it if possible. Having been on both the unbeliever and the believer sides of the existence of God argument at different times in my life, I found that I much more desired to avoid thinking about death on the unbeliever side because on that side death meant the end of existence and even when things in life were bad, it was more preferable to continue to live because as long as I was alive things could change and get better (and they did), but one could not hope for an escape from death to something better later. On the believer side, the fear of nonexistence is done away with. It is just the unknown process of getting to the better place through death that remains. We always tend to fear the unknown. I suspect that after the fact at least for the ones that are saved, we will wonder why we thought of death as such a big fearful thing. It will probably be much like birth into this world. You leave this small existence that you have grown comfortable with and accustom to and enter into a new greater existence with much greater potential for fulfillment.

Paul,

I generally concur with your view of physics, but I do feel your religious construct tends more toward indoctrination than insight. We are all narrative threads drawn from the web of connections in which we exist, as are our religious, political and economic institutions. There has to be some balance between the coherence which makes these narrative structures whole and the connectivity which makes them a viable part of the larger environment, so they are neither so isolated as to be irrelevant, or overbearing as to be destructive and or parasitic.

While the basis of Christianity is Judaic, it was the Greeks who really formalized it. This seems to be because it served to connect their primordial religious customs with their emerging rationality. It provided the metaphor for the cycle of life through the unknown of death. The Greeks had long and complex formulations to deal with this relationship, which Christianity served to crystalize in a way that allowed them to shed some excess cultural baggage. Yet many of those traditions of variety and synthesis emerged in the Christian monotheism, from the Holy Trinity to the incorporation of polytheistic deities as saints, angels, cherubs, the Holy Mother, etc, though the deeper connections have been lost. Like a rope woven together from many different threads and then having the many loose ends trimmed off.

I can understand your desire to define this rope as a whole and with a clear purpose, yet for me, those many threads, where they came from, how they fit together, creating both the strengths and weakness of this rope, are of far greater interest than simply presenting a neat package, all wrapped up and signed, sealed and ready for delivery. This is because it is those loose ends which connect me to my larger reality and trimming them is the real sacrilege.

John,

It is good that we have some agreement in physics concepts. As far as religious constructs are concerned, you are right in the sense that they tend toward indoctrination (i.e. instructing, teaching), but I believe that is partly what we are both here for. Another part at least for me is to study and learn of others in this world. Insight is a difficult thing to comprehend in many cases. Some have been thought to possess great insight at a given time by others around them only to be proven wrong at a later time by better understandings of reality. Others were thought to be fools in their time only to be proven to have had insight so great that it was just too much for others of their time to accept their understandings. Ultimately reality steps in and reveals the true insights. I am content to let reality have its way in the long run because my desire is to know and understand the truth more than to always be proven right. To me the narrative structures are not really whole until they connect to the larger environment at all relevant points, so the whole picture is understood. When it comes to the balance point of the emphasis that is appropriate to give a part of the overall narrative of the universe, the best balance is obtained when the part of the overall narrative that is being examined is given the same importance that it possesses in comparison to the true whole narrative. As an example, if someone spent their life in the study of the relative importance of the contributions of Gelatin as compared to pudding in the overall progression of the universe and believed that everyone should consider his study to be the most important endeavor ever to be undertaken and should put all resources into finding the complete answer to that question, that would be destructive and or parasitic because there are many other more important things to study. The existence or nonexistence of God, however, is the most important part of the whole narrative because it goes to the beginning foundations of that narrative and its overall meaning. If God exists, the whole universe is his work and questions such as: (What is the purpose of the universe? and what is our purpose?) make sense to ask. In that case all aspects of the way the universe is made can give us insight into the nature of God who made it. If God does not exist and the world just came about by chance, there would be no true purpose or underlying meaning to the universe or the living beings in it. It is so important to the overall narrative because it is the difference between an intelligent narrative written by an intelligent author and just the chance output of an innumerable number of monkeys pounding on an innumerable number of keyboards for a very long time. The way that a person answers the question of the existence of God will greatly determine how he looks at the universe as a whole and how he looks at the place and importance that he and all other living creatures have in it. Although he may not always consciously think about it, his thoughts and actions in the world will greatly be affected and determined by this most basic belief. I have done some study in this area and it would take much more space than would be reasonable to give all the results here, but it was to a great degree the incomplete and misleading one sided information given by many on both sides of this controversy that caused me to take so long and invest so much of my time in study to search out which belief is more credible than the other because I found that I could not depend on sources on either side to give me intelligent and truthful answers to my questions in this area.

Your second paragraph is a good example. You explain Christianity as though it is just some social movement started by the Jews and formalized by the Greeks. As though the people created Christ and God and are in control of how the movement progresses and what meanings apply to it. This is, of course, what those who do not believe in God often believe and transmit to others. I am not saying that studying how Christianity has affected different groups of people is of no value. It can show how God can work with and in all people to accomplish his purpose. I am just saying that the viewpoint that you presented is one sided. The other side is that God created Christianity in the same way that he created all other things and is in complete control of it to use it to accomplish his purpose and has defined its meaning and how it works. You can look at different groups of people and see how it has affected both those who believe and those who do not believe in each group, but when you look close you find that in all of the groups there are some who give up the customs that are contrary and change so that they believe according to the scriptures (God's Word) and those are the ones that fulfill God's purpose for it all. He only needs a few at a time (in comparison to all the people that are alive at a given time) over a long period of time to get what he desires in the end. The others are just the noise and not the signal as you might put it. As you can see from the two sides that were given, one views Christianity from man's perspective, giving man the control over it and either denying God's existence at all or making him less powerful to control the outcome than man, while the other side places God in complete control and eliminates any changes in the world by man. In reality, there is a delicate interplay between God and man because God has given man the ability to accept his offer to be a part of his purpose for making man or to reject it, so that what you see is a combination of the changes that are made in both those who believe and receive Christ as God's son and the way for their salvation and those who reject his offer. When you look at those who receive Christ, you don't see a monotone of immediate change from former beliefs and action, but a gradual change over a period of time called sanctification, so you will see a range of behavior from those who are still much like the unbelievers to those who are completely changed. To complicate matters, the unbelievers see that many of the changes they see in the believers are desirable, so they adopt many of them and even put them into their laws, so you see a range of changes in the unbelievers also. I could go on and correct every error in your comment, but I will only do a couple. First, the information that God is composed of more than one part is clearly seen in the old testament of the Jews and is not something that was added by the Greeks later. In Genesis God said to himself, Let us make man in our image. Man is composed of a body, a soul, and a spirit, so this signifies that God is also composed of three parts, since man is made in his image. Second, the saints, angels, cherubs, and the Holy Mother (Mary) are never considered deities by God in the scriptures. As an example, the angels are called ministering spirits that minister to (or serve) God.

I don't believe in cutting any of the threads at all. My point is that you get the whole rope when you look at the complete history of how the people in the different groups respond to each other in respect to Christianity both within a single group and between groups and both with believers and unbelievers and also look at God's work in generating and controlling Christianity while also giving man the choice to participate in his work or not and then also looking at the interplay between God and man in how Christianity plays out in the world (due to God's working and each individual's choice) to give us the total range of what we see it to be and all of its effects. If you concentrate on only the limited viewpoint of how unbelievers view Christianity you are just cutting off and looking at a small piece of the rope.

Paul,

I respect how you define your life, but I can't fit myself into that mold. As I've probably pointed out before, the absolute is basis, not apex, so the spiritual absolute is the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.

In line with my observations about time, the only reality is the present and that is what this spirit manifests. Frankly my God is just as happy with monkeys typing at typewriters, as with God in human form being nailed to a cross, though monkeys wouldn't waste their time on something without purpose. That is what matters; purpose. Without purpose there is no existence. Be it stone, or cement, wheat or chaff, everything has its place in the puzzle. It is when we look for meaning that problems arise, because meaning is reductionistic. It's what's left when you distill away all that's meaningless. Yet there is no wheat without chaff. What might be just noise from your perspective, is signal from some other perspective and there are myriad feedback loops which can make that other perspective essential to your own. You hold your version of monotheistic religion up as the one true path, yet there are people throughout this world with equally strong views and different religions. It is what gives their life meaning. It is what's left when all that is meaningless is distilled away. Currently the other two monotheistic religions are killing each other over a small piece of land because it has different meaning to each and the other's meaning is just noise. How much of this search for meaning isn't just a function of our instinctive searching for food and shelter? To a hunter gatherer, it is the berries on the bush which have meaning, not the bush itself. How much of our belief structures are really just an advanced form of that? We want what we want and just do not have the capacity to see the larger context? We are always trying to distill out the most fundamental laws, the hardest materials, the strongest energies, the most powerful Gods. I'm certainly guilty of it myself, or I wouldn't be in this contest. Yet I find that when I reach a goal, its real value is giving me perspective on all that has gone into reaching that goal, not simply aiming for the next goal. Oftentimes what becomes the next goal lays in something I previously discarded. It is my identity to see all the pieces fit together, not to throw most of them away.

John,

I have looked into the concept of rising from a low basis and have found it lacking if God does not exist. Without God the only other alternative is that the world and all things in it including us came about by some chance event with no purpose. What we see as our rise can only be logically viewed as a series of chance events in such a world. It would be the result of a long lucky streak that could end at any time and would surely do so given enough time according to the laws of probability. You could point to the idea that once natural selection came about by chance it became the source of a rise from the basis, but that would not be true. Natural selection only allows an organism to adapt to its environment. It does not necessarily cause an organism to rise to some higher level of intelligence or to gain a new ability or gain an increase in any other specific abilities. The dinosaurs thrived by gaining size and strength to overcome and displace there enemies, but when a change in environment occurred so that the world could not produce the large amount of food that they needed to support their large size and strength they were displaced by the smaller creatures that they once had displaced. Intelligence and the physical ability to use it also require a relatively large creature to support it (although not as large as the dinosaurs). If the climate were to change so that nothing larger than a cockroach could survive, we would also pass away and small size would be chosen by natural selection rather than intelligence. Our existence and the selection of intelligence could only be realistically looked at as an anomaly that is likely to be of a short term nature due to all of the possible chance events that could occur to destroy it. To natural selection we and our intelligence are inherently no more important or advanced than the cockroach and its size. What is favored and therefore promoted is just dependent on chance mechanical changes in the environment. You are left then with a world of no real importance or purpose as a living creature of no real importance or purpose for your life that could end at any time, except the primal desire to survive and be as comfortable as possible. The only reasonable outlook in such a world is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, as is written in the scriptures of those who do not know God. Of course you could rationalize some made up purpose or that there is some natural mechanism that favors your existence, but you would only be living a lie. True chance favors no one and cannot care about anyone.

To worship any such world or any part of it as a god let alone as the God would indeed be foolish. In such a world your God could not be happy about anything because happiness is a property of living beings and the world would not be living in any real sense. I agree with you that purpose matters, but your world would not have any true purpose so life in it would be an empty experience for anyone intelligent enough to understand that. There would be no real puzzle to solve. Everything would just be a jumble of chance happenings or events with no overall real purpose or answer to solve for. In such a world after you distilled away all that was meaningless there would be nothing left at all. Any attempt to draw some true meaning from the meaningless jumble of events would be futile and any supposed meanings that one might draw out of that jumble would just be wishful thinking and a lie. In a world based on chance any conclusion that one might draw about anything would be based on a lie. The lie would be that anything no matter how permanent that it may have been up until now will continue to be permanent. Statements such as there can be no wheat without chaff or that what might be just noise to one perspective is signal from some other perspective, would be meaningless because in a chance world you could just as likely wake up tomorrow to find that by chance wheat now grows without chaff or that the plant only produces chaff and no wheat. In truth everything would just be noise and there would be no true valid signal that could tell you anything lasting about the world. If the world came about by chance, it could just as easily blink out of existence also at any time with no warning by chance. In the chance world there would be no larger context. What is in existence is there by chance and could just as easily cease to exist at any time by chance. Any laws of behavior in the world would just be chance occurrences that could just as easily change at any time, so why bother to spend all the time necessary to find them out when they could change tomorrow. You should just forget science and eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die and it would just have been a waste of your time and pleasure to try to understand an unsure changing world. All that has gone into reaching your goal would just be meaningless chance occurrences with no true valid perspective and there would be no real value there to get. In such a world there would be no deeper meaning behind the way all the pieces fit together. It would all come down to chance. Of course, the world was either created by God or it was not created by God, which means that according to probability there is a fifty/fifty chance that either possibility is true. So if you throw away either possibility you are throwing away one half of the pieces.

Paul,

I just don't equate the essence of conscious awareness with the structure of knowledge. One is a mystery. The other is a feedback loop. I'm a farmer. I don't need some institution to make me whole. I remember thinking church didn't make much sense when I was quite young and it didn't take me long to recognize it as another form of mind control. I spend my life controlling animals. I know how it works. Carrot=hope. Stick=fear. Good=beneficial. Bad=detrimental. Attracted to one. Repelled by the other. Governments, religions, businesses have all been perfecting their methods for millenia, but the underlaying processes are far older than humanity. I know I'm just a little fish out in the big ocean, but I like it that way. I don't need a straitjacket to make sense of it all. The past contracts. The future expands. That's why we go toward the future.

As for dinosaurs, did it ever occur to you that they must have existed in a weaker gravity field? Whether the earth was smaller and the accumulated space debris over ten of millions of years increased it, or it rotated faster, or some combination, it just seems they were built far too delicately for their size and apparent speed. Not to mention that avian experts can't understand how the bigger flying ones could get airborne. Of course a weaker gravity field would also mean a less dense atmosphere, so maybe it just rotated faster.....

John,

You are right that conscious awareness is not the same thing as the structure of knowledge. The two are connected to each other, however. The structure of our knowledge is based on the patterns that we perceive in the world around us. It is based on analysis of both the present motion conditions that we are observing and on the stored records of previous present motion conditions. It is also somewhat based on the predicted present motion conditions that have not yet occurred, but are indicated as likely to occur by the results of the analysis of the present active and past stored motion conditions. Much of our knowledge is based on repetitive cycles that we observe. As an example, we see the sun come up in the morning and later we see it go down again. We see this cycle repeat many times and after awhile, when we see the sun go down we predict that it will come up again later. These observations and the predictions, and connections that we make between them become parts of our knowledge base. Our conscious awareness is greatly based on our observation of and ability to react to and control observed motion conditions. We first separate motions that are beyond our control from those that we can control or generate at least to some degree. We then learn that our body can be controlled directly by our mind, but that we can only control other things indirectly by motions of our body parts. From these observations we become consciously aware that we exist and have at least two parts, a mind that observes motion inputs from our body parts about the body itself and also about the world that exists outside of our body and the body that passes information to our mind and also carries out generating motions that our mind commands it to produce to allow us to interact with the other entities that exist in the world around us. At this point it should be clear that our conscious awareness is informed of many things by our knowledge structure and information about our conscious awareness is stored in our knowledge structure, so the two are joined together in many ways. I also have a dislike for institutions that have been created by men in an attempt to gain power and control over others and to get gain from others in order to fulfil their selfish desires at the expense of others. As I covered somewhat earlier, however, God's institution is different from those of men. First, when we come to him we only have to go through one mediator (his son Jesus Christ) (although many organizations have been created by men that try to lead you to believe otherwise) unlike most organizations of men that have multiple levels of separation between you and the one at the top. On the surface it might seem that it would be better if we did not have to go through any mediator at all, but could interact directly with God the Father. In reality the whole world that we live in requires us to go through mediators in order gain any information about it or to interact with it in any way. As an example, when you look at your car, you are not really interacting directly with the car. You are only interacting with the mediator of light that transfers information to you about the car as the mediator between you and the car. On the one hand you will never really get to obtain information directly from the car itself, but on the other hand you can get information from the mediator (light) about the car even when the car is far enough away that you would not be able to interact with it directly even if that were possible. Whether you choose to go to God or to the world around you for information, you are stuck with going through mediators to get that information and I see it as a good thing that God has placed only the minimum one layer between him and us. The second difference is that men create organizations primarily to take resources (money, power and control) away from those that become parts of the organizations and sometimes also from those that are outside of the organizations to increase their own resources. God on the other hand, used his own resources (a part of his motion) to create us and this whole world for us to live in. In essence he has given us life and all of the resources that we have. On top of that, he offers to us the choice to become members of his eternal body that he is building for himself. Instead of his organization taking resources from us it has given everything to us that we have and offers more to come. All we have to do is to choose to join it. It is true that God does desire to control your mind, so that you will become a member of his body that is beneficial to him and the other members of the body, so that we will all grow together in love and caring for one another eternally. I am sure that you desire the same from the members of your body. If some part of your body decided to do its own thing and not care about the needs of the whole body (cancer) you would not very likely say will I guess it has the right to live its life the way that it wants to even if it results in the death of the whole body. God also does use all of the control methods that you mentioned and you are right that they are older than humanity because he is the inventor of them all. The main difference here is that he uses them for our benefit to lead us to him and to encourage us to accept his offer of salvation rather than the ultimate death and destruction that waits for those that do not accept his offer. Of course, there is no real past or future, but only the present. The past seems to contract because as the records of previous motion conditions get older and older they become less important to us and except for those that store a few important events they tend to fade from use by our conscious mind. This gives the appearance of a past that contracts as its records seem to blend more together and eventually disappear from our direct observation. The future seems to be expanding because as we learn more from analyzing past and present motion conditions, we can make more and better predictions about what those conditions will be in the future. The same motions are occurring in the present and they will propagate into the same later motion conditions in the same way (there is no real expansion). We have just learned about more of the motion conditions that will occur and we interpret that as an expansion. If you look at the top of a bucket of marbles you might count one hundred marbles. If you later learn how to see through the top layer of marbles you might then see one hundred more marbles in the second layer. You might say that there has been an expansion of marbles from one hundred to two hundred, but in reality they were all there in the beginning. It is just that you did not know about the second layer in the beginning.

When it comes to dinosaurs, there has always been much conjecture and speculation about such things as their speed, intelligence, and other characteristics that is usually based on little or no evidence. In most cases there is at most a reasonably well-preserved skeleton and more often much less than that. In some cases whole stories about the appearance and habits of some creature have been created from a find of only a few bones. Over time the story about a given creature changes to suit the changing beliefs and desires of those that tell it. As far as the earth rotating faster in the past is concerned I do not see a great amount of support for that in the scientific community, but the scriptures give information that could be interpreted as leading one in that direction. First they record that man lived up to about a thousand years in the beginning. If our bodies are made to last a given period of time, we would live for more years if the earth rotated faster as more days and years would pass in that time. The lifetime decreased to about one hundred and twenty years abruptly in the time of Peleg. It is also recorded that the earth was divided in his time. The slowing of the rotation of the earth in a very short time certainly could have had the effect of separating the continents or dividing the earth. This is just another case where the scriptures contain information about the world that is mostly ignored. On a lighter side it could be that the reason that those bigger flying ones are extinct is that they all jumped off of cliffs thinking that they could fly only to find out that they couldn't and as hard as they tried, they just could not evolve enough before they hit the ground. Sorry, I just could not resist that one.

Paul,

I don't think that awareness and the feedback loop of knowledge can be separated. Any more than we could understand the vacuum without the fluctuation. Without the subjective totality, the absolute really is just nothing.

I can appreciate your faith in your religion, but you have to understand that I value my beliefs as well. I view ideals as necessary for learning, but they do have their limitations. The obvious example is when opposing ideals are in conflict, there is no room for compromise, as with the current situation in the Middle East.

Religious absolutists tend to deride anything less as moral relativism, where nothing has real value, but that's a complete misunderstanding of relativity. Absolutists assume there is an absolute standard against which all is judged, while relativism means that every possible aspect must be weighed. The first is subject to whomever makes the judgments in the name of the absolute authority and history shows this is often abused. The latter can be extremely complex, but tends toward more balanced judgments. As an example, it should be noted that democracy was originally developed by polytheists, while the validation for monarchy has historically been monotheism, as in the divine right of kings.

For me, it is a world that has formed from the elemental to the complex and returns to the elemental when the complex becomes unbalanced, not one handed down by higher authority.

John,

Yes awareness and knowledge are joined together in many ways as I mentioned in my last post. Awareness is actually a form or part of knowledge. To gain awareness of the existence of one's self and other things in the world is synonymous with gaining a degree of knowledge of these things.

You definitely have the right to believe what you will. That is what free will is all about. Opposing ideals are a problem if one assumes that all ideals are of equal value. In general, if two ideals are in conflict or mutually exclusive, one or both of them is either being misapplied or is not a true or complete ideal. Although there are some faulty ideals there also, many of the problems in the Middle East come from misapplications of ideals.

Absolutists whether religious or otherwise often don't see that there are exceptions to most laws, rules, or ideals. At first it seemed odd to me when I noticed that in one place in the scriptures God would tell the people to do or not do a certain thing and then in another place he would command people to do the opposite. It took me awhile to see that the problem was not with God, but with man's placing the law (that God gave to them to keep) higher than God as though God should be subject to the laws that he commands men to keep or should not have the right to change them according to his will. To a degree, the exceptions to the laws are God's way of showing people that the law is not the absolute, but that God is the true absolute and is above and rules over the laws. In addition, the exceptions that God has put into his laws are for the most part due to various circumstances (aspects) that must be considered (weighed) to arrive at the full absolute understanding of how the law is to be applied, so it is a combination of absolute laws or ideals that are complex in nature so that every aspect or circumstance must be weighed in order to come to the understanding of the absolute application of the law for all possibilities of circumstances. The problem is that man likes to have everything very simple, so a man will likely read the first place that the law or ideal is mentioned and apply the partial meaning that is given in that one place to all circumstances thus causing many problems due to its misapplication in other different circumstances. In order to make things simple man will usually only look at and then gravitate toward one side of an issue without searching out the whole issue. This can be seen in the psychological test in which a cup with water in it to the center of the range between empty and full is presented to someone and he is then asked to state the amount of water in the cup. The person will usually respond that it is either half empty or half full (the complete answer is that it is both half empty and half full) and the choice that was made will then be interpreted as either a negative or positive outlook on life. The person could have said that it contains water to the mid point of its range, but that would be a more difficult concept, so the average person will give a half answer rather than the complete answer because of his desire to have everything be simple. People tend to apply these half answers in their lives even to the circumstances where the other half of the answer would be more applicable and thereby generate many unnecessary problems. The form of democracy that has so far worked the best in the real world (the government of the United States of America) was produced by those who were predominantly Christian monotheists.

At one time I would have agreed with you about the way the world was formed, but over time as I have delved further into the arguments and observations I have found them lacking in their ability to explain how it could have happened that way in any truly reasonable way. First, the concept that the world came about by some chance event does not truly exclude God from the equation, as many believe, because when we speak of a chance event we are saying that we do not know the cause of the event or its results. If we truly knew the cause we could predict the outcome before the event and it would not be a chance event. You might assume that if you throw a balanced coin into the air and let it come to rest on the ground, it will land with the head side up half of the time and with the tail side up half of the time, but in reality the results will not be distributed that way most of the time. First any odd toss cannot yield an exact fifty to fifty percent ratio because you have an extra toss that cannot be divided between the two possibilities. Even if you restrict your observations to only the even tosses, you will find that you will not likely have an exact fifty to fifty percent ratio of heads to tails vary often compared to the number of results that are not exactly fifty to fifty percent. There is obviously something that is causing the results to vary in a way that we call random, but that cause is not known. In this and all other similar cases of supposed random behavior that we observe in the real world because we do not know the cause of the results of these events we cannot logically rule out that God may be causing them. When we see such things we may be just seeing one of God's interface levels with the universe. He may be varying the result of such things in such a way as to generate the results that he desires in the world. If those who believe that quantum mechanics describes the ultimate limit of the amount of knowledge that we can obtain about the world around us because of the uncertainty principle are right, the quantum level could just be God's ultimate interface level with the universe beyond which he will not let us go to observe his workings in the world (I am not saying that I believe that quantum mechanics truly is such a limit). The point is that saying that the world came about by some chance event could be synonymous with saying that God created it if he is the source of random events and we do not understand random events to the point that we can come close to saying truthfully that he does not cause them. The belief that he does not cause them is as much a leap of faith as the belief that he does cause them. At the current level of technological knowledge, it ultimately just comes down to what a person desires to believe. Science works well only when considering repetitive events that can be tested and observed. One-time events that cannot be repeated or those that cannot be observed in some way (and therefore cannot be tested) the cause of which cannot be determined are outside of the proper application range of science. From my point of view and that of all who truly are of God, the point of telling others about God is not to win an argument over them or to gain money from or power over them, but to do what can be done to aid as many as possible to be saved from the destruction that unbelievers ultimately suffer due to their choice to disbelieve God out because of our caring and compassion for them. That choice, however, is ultimately each person's and no one can truly force anyone to choose against his will. God has given that freedom and that responsibility to each of us and we all ultimately make it one way or the other. God counts a choice to not choose either way as a choice against him because he requires a positive choice to believe in and accept him and his only begotten son Jesus Christ to gain salvation. As long as you are alive, you can make or change that decision, but you are stuck with the last decision that you made before death. You cannot change your decision after death. A person might think that he will put off that decision until just before death and then choose God (I have met some like this), so he can live the way that he desires for most of his life and then still be saved. The problem with that way of thinking is that people sometimes die quickly without warning, so that person might not get the chance to make the decision for God and salvation. Of course, the idea that any of us can be free to live our lives as we please is not true. We are made to serve God and if a person leaves God, he ultimately gives him over to Satin to rule over him and he will serve him although he may not know it at the time. I did not see the similarities of belief and behavior of those that don't believe in God until I crossed over to God, but now I see the similarities within each of the two groups (those that believe in God tend to have similar behaviors to each other and those that don't believe in him have similar behaviors to each other). This is somewhat masked, however by those that are either leaving God, but have not yet completely left him and those who are coming to him, but have not yet come all the way to him. The only true free choice we have is the choice of whom we will serve. Even in our daily lives we find that we are not in control of many things and this causes the desire for pleasure that generally is at the center stage for those that do not believe to often be unfulfilled. In this world it generally takes a lot of hard labor to make the things that give us pleasure. A large part of the life of the average unbeliever tends to be spent in working hard to make such things and is unpleasurable and thus meaningless to him. Only those few who are at the top of the social and wealth structure are in a position to come close to doing all that they desire and they even find that they are limited by lack of ability to do things that they desire to do and by bad things that still happen to them regardless of their position. Those that are successful in giving their lives over to pleasure often after some time find their lives to be empty and void of any real meaning or purpose. These often attempt to escape through the use of drugs or liquor. In general, the more intelligent a person is, the more likely he is to perceive such things in his life and be unhappy. The world seems to be designed to work against a life based on maximum pleasure as a viable concept. I have been on both sides of the conflict at different times and am expressing what I have seen, both in myself and in others. I hope that this helps you to understand that although I do realize that you have the right to believe and to express your beliefs as you will and I believe we all have those rights given to us by God along with the responsibility to choose who to serve, I still am compelled by my compassion for you and others to do what I can (while still respecting your rights) to provide all the information that I can to encourage as many as I can to make the choice to be saved.