Just in case you missed it, I have no problem with anyone believing or following their own faith in whatever God they choose. For me, it is a non-issue.

In the world I exist, people tend to be fakes. Sometimes their true selves appear but for the most part people are actors. This happens for many individual reasons of which judgement is but one.

In essence, acting is a lie. It is the act of trying to show you are something you are not.
In movies, TV shows, commercials and radio personalities acting can be entertaining.
In life, on a personal level, acting can be hurtful and cruel.
When the acting becomes a personality one must maintain, it is lying to yourself. You can get lost from yourself.

At one time in my life, I wrestled with my conscious.
I sometimes regretted my actions because I did and said things I truly did not mean.
I needed vacations and retreats to try to get back in balance.
When my world came crashing down, I realized I caused my own delusions by believing the acting I adopted.
I believed the lies I was told by my religion.
My entire life was out of balance and it toppled.
When I started being myself, other people saw the change too.
Some liked it, some did not, some were threatened by it.

I've always believed there was some kind of God.
I never really believed it was the God I was told it was by my religion.
I acted the part because I thought that was what I was supposed to do.
When I stopped acting, I was told I would burn in hell and that I should ask for forgiveness for being myself.
That was the last straw.
The delusion was lifted and the lies were no longer being graciously accepted.
After that, I started seeing the actors playing their parts.

Many people think I am weird.
I'm weird because I don't maintain a persona so I can fit into their expectations of who I should be.
I am who I am, take me or leave me.

I was sent to a Catholic school but when I left at age 18 I started to wonder if all that stuff about an all-powerful being could really be true. Would I sit at the right hand of god eternally twanging my harp if I was good? And would I burn for ever in hell if I was bad? I can't imagine anything more boring than twanging a harp for eternity and neither can I imagine how it is possible to burn 'for ever'. Of course asking questions like, "how is that going to work?" would get me a clip round the ear and helpful advice along the lines of don't ask awkward questions, just believe what you're told.

Unfortunately, being a bit of a rebel, I was not happy with those answers. If google had existed in the 1960s, that's where I would have gone for further enlightenment! I could see nothing around me to provide any believable 'evidence' that what I had been told was actually true. Not sure what sort of evidence I was looking for, but nothing seemed 'right' about what I had been taught. As for being told to 'believe' that was the most difficult bit. The things I believe in are things like the world being round and five added to six gives eleven. Always. I don't believe something just because someone else says it's true. That seems naïve to me.

I discovered humanism about five years ago and suddently realised that here is a description of me - and I had not known it for the last 65 years! If I had previously felt any remanining guilt over not believing what I had been told to believe as a schoolboy, all that now floated away and I am very happy.

And here endeth the gospel truth, according to Mike

The way I see it, all belief has some truth in it.
I studied transhumanism.
Even transhumanism has some truth in it.

You say humanist.
I think of myself as a realist.
There is a difference.
The difference is you believe in humans.
A humanist believes that human experience and rational thinking provide the only source of both knowledge and a moral code to live by.
The problem is the source of the origial moral code.

In reality there is no moral code.
There is rationality but any morals one might have are adopted from human morality.

I am not a true realist.
I still value my learned morals.
Being a realist, I do understand where morality and reality differ.
I choose my moral compass.

Humans are savage creatures.
We are predators and kill.
Its our morality that keeps us from killing each other.
Its our morality that keeps us from killing every life we encounter.
Humanity is an unnatural society for such a species.
Yet humanity endures because we have morals.
Morals which originated from a belief other than reality.

All societies attempt to change the nature of the human from savage to civilized.
Religions are societies too.
If you look at the history of the human animal compared with the human animal today, society has been very effective in making us think we are something other than the animals we are.
Societies like religions over the years.

Tarzan, the wolfboy and other stories of a child raised in the wild.
Savage and animalistic.
Morals are a learned trait of humanity.
Religion/society has been the teacher of these morals over time because all societies thrive on unity.
"Savage" is the direct opposite of "Unity".


Try to imagine in this reality of billions of trillions of planets one might develop a species similar to humans.
However, on that planet, there is no societies.
There are no morals taught for unity.

As a realist, I must realize the importance of religions and societies and their impact on the reality I experience.
Trying to separate religion from society makes no sense.
In certain ways, religion is vital to the society in which we live.

A different example;
Let's say you do not believe there are atoms.
You can't see them.
Yet you use a cellphone, floor, car and other things created from the reality of atoms.

Now;
Let's say you do not believe there is a God.
You can't see how religion makes any sense.
Yet you enjoy the societies that are created from those religions.
You adopt the morality inspired by belief.

The end result does not prove there are atoms, does not prove there is a God.
Even if you look thru an electron-microscope and see an atom on the display, it 'requires' belief that what you are seeing is reality.
How many times have you measured a photon's speed?
Can you do it right now?
Is the speed of light nothing more than belief?
Is an atom, nothing more than a belief?

Belief is a powerful thing.
However, no matter how powerful a belief can be is is still not a reality.
Reality doesn't care.
Reality just is.
Reality requires no belief for it to exist.

Religion is full of issues but it is effective in establishing and maintaining unity which is needed for any society to exist.

The God I belive exists, exists in reality outside the scope of religion, society and morality.
God doesn't care.
God just is.
God requires no belief for it to exist.
Religion requires God but God does not require religion.

I don't subscribe to religion and I don't subscribe to god either.

I believe in atoms and the speed of light because sufficient numbers of very clever scientists agree about such things. There are of course many things about which we are not certain and I duly keep an open mind on them. My beliefs start with, "as far as I know..." which is so different from the fundamentalist faith believer who just 'knows' what he/she believes for certain, without needing any proof. These are presumably people who like some of my school colleagues were taught what they must believe and accepted it as 'obvious fact' without any questioning. In Christian terms I would be called a 'doubting Thomas' (!) - one who needs to pur his fingers in the hole to prove that the hands had nails in them.

Travelling faster than light is an example of my beliefs. As far as I know, the fastest speed at which anything can travel is the speed of light. Speed is relative to something else. The difficult bit for me, is the answer to the question about what heppens when a torch beam is pointed at another torch beam. Relative to the earth each beam is moving at the speed of light, but relative to each beam, the speed of the other beam is twice the speed of light!

Clearly there is much science we have yet to learn, which is why my belief system is different from that of the religious fanatic.

Interesting, how, this 'acting ' or, ' expected behaviour ' , takes us away, from who we are, and to some degree, destroys any unity.
I feel, we are more controlled by fear, than unity
I would not agree, that Savage, is the opposite of unity
Take a jail for example, it can be a savage place, yet, it can still have unity, or solidarity
If we are not who we are, because we fear the consequences, of what will happen, should we fail to display the expected behavior, then, who are we?
Fear, can produce, a vicious cycle
People, fear, admitting, they are, in fear
Things happen, in life
Banks for example
Most people, don't like them, see them, as crooked. Yet, they use then. The, you'll never change it attitude. Go with the flow, all of that jazz
It's weird, how a relatively small group of people, destroy unity, and keep us in fear, so they can rule us
Is that moral? Is that unity? Or is that savage? So, in 1 respect, I would agree, with your assessment of them being opposites
It reminds me of the 'American Dream' in fear and loathing in las Vegas
And to some extent, how I think, some native americans may have viewed dreams
It seems, our dreams have been, hijacked, stolen
Replaced, with, a Cadillac , with, the jackpot, with, winning the lottery
Our dreams are a window
But, our window, can be fogged

Food for thought me thinks

I myself, am a dadaist

Everything comes down to fear, ultimately.
I agree, fear is the motivator.
The greatest fear is the fear of dying.
If you can master that, you make real progress towards actually being in control of yourself.

In some ways, acting does destroy unity but in more ways it provides unity.
Its a sticky wicket.


Lets look at what you wrote.
Consider that others may found their belief on the same criteria as you.
Only, instead of very clever scientists they use very clever clergymen.

It seems to me, because I believe a God does exist, I am disagreeing with you.
I do agree with you.

On the torch beam example it is important to realize a photon is both a particle and a wave.

The quanta in a light wave are not spatially localized.
The main point of Einstein's light quantum theory is that light's energy is related to its oscillation frequency.
Quantum theory estimates that a particle such as a photon can be in different places at the same time, or it can even be in infinitely many places at the same time, exactly as a wave is.

What this means is in quantum reality, the light is not close to anything, plus being also a wave, the light passes thru the other opposite light.
However, one must also remember the speed of light is light in a vacuum.
In other substrates it is slower.

One must also realize for there to be relativity it is required someone be there to make a comparison. The space between the torches will just show up as light, perhaps a super-computer could set up a detector to determine the directionality of the photons but it would require a super AI to appreciate the relativity of the speed differences.

Radio is a wave.
If you have a radio transmitting in one city and a radio transmitting in another city the signal is not changed for either.
Radio waves are a kind of electromagnetic radiation, and thus they move at the speed of light.
A test of speed could be devised with a simultaneous ping with exact same strength. However, there is no way one could get relativity of one ping's speed to the other ping.

One laser beam passes thru an opposite laser beam with no interaction.
Because light is a wave and is quantum.


A thing is matter.
There are forces that are faster than light.
Gravity is one such force.
Consider the light event horizon around a black hole (white singularity).
Consider time as well. Time must be faster than light because light speed is a measurement using time.

I always thought that gravitational waves move at the same speed as light in a vacuum. I just looked that up on Wikipedia and it confirms what I thought.

I know that light is both a wave and particle, but I believe it is, "not as we know it, Jim" as Spock once famousely said. I can understand that the way to avoid the idea of two particles colliding at a combined velocity of greater than 'c', when 'c' cannot be exceeded, is to go into the realm of waves. My problem is still back at the level of trying to understand how it can be both at the same time, or put more cynically, a wave or a particle, according to what you are trying to prove, and at the same time never exceeding the maximum possible speed!

Sometimes that cynical train of thought can lead me to speculate that maybe the 'speed of light' is not in fact a fixed constant. Perhaps it is only fixed for the range of experiments we have so far conducted. Who knows what future scientists will be able to achieve? I wish I could take a pill that would enable me to live for several hundred years in order to be able to find the answers to this and many other questions!

As far as I know we use only half of our brain. What is the other half for? What does it do? Can we train ourselves to have double the brain power by using all of it? Or am I talking my usual gibberish

Gravity doesn't change, or begin, or expire, (except maybe in cataclysmic events like black holes and supernovae where new materials can be created), it moves position according to the mass from which it surrounds, and as atoms and molecules clump, the same amount of gravity is concentrated but not increased any more than the individual atom's collective mass / gravity.

Waves move faster than the fastest matter, because if matter reached light speed, it would revert to pure energy, and not be matter anymore. It would be energy, and separate massless gravity. I don't think slowing it down would re-constitute the matter, like you can't un-scramble or un-cook an egg.
How do you re-attach a gravity to a particle ?
But light particles are not matter, and are energy anyway. Have no gravity.
I think calling them particles is misleading, because they are something else again. A bunch of light particles will not make a lasting splat on a surface.
Even laser light doesn't leave a splat on a surface, but it will heat it.

If you used all your brain to conduct deep thought and experiment, a bear or teradactyl will eat you. I need parts of my brain for living, sex, gathering and hunting, making a nest, looking for a mate, avoiding dangers, and artistic cultural pursuits. Big questions are not top priority, unless its 'fight or flight', or impressing a mate. (Personal note, women are not attracted to brains.)

God exists in your brain if you want it to.
Even if god exists in almost everyone's brain, unless the existence of god can be ascertained by a non-believer, it doesn't exist outside of brains.

We use all our brain.
The average adult human brain has the ability to store the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes digital memory.
While we do use all our brain, individually, we do not use it effectively.
Brain efficiency can be improved on purpose.
It involves pathways and memory.
Intellect is mostly memory.
Improving one's memory, improves intellect.

notbeold, I liked reading what you said on gravity.
Gravity is locked to mass.
Waves and forces are massless, thus are not locked to gravity's influence (as far as I know).
Heat should be influenced by gravity.
This is because temperature is movement of mass/particles.
Mass/particles have gravity.
The wave or force does not have heat but it can cause movement in the particles it contacts, causing those particles to heat.
If the entire Universe were at true absolute zero, waves/forces do not exist.
Hence, my belief in God.

It is possible, before the so-called big bang, the Universe existed in a state of true absolute zero. No movement/no heat/no waves/no forces. A static state.
Something caused a change of state that broke the true absolute zero condition. Since nobody knows what that was, I call it God. It may persist or it may have mutated or split apart. I do believe its influence dictates our natural universal laws whether in whole or in part. I do not believe it has intelligence like we have intelligence, perhaps the Universe itself is aware on a whole different scale of intelligence we can't fathom. Perhaps, since we are part of that whole, we contribute to the awareness of the Universe.

There are a few different scenarios I can think of involving an absolute zero static state change that creates Universes.

One is the perpetual cycle Universe.

The perpetual cycle Universe involves a Universe which expands and cools to absolute zero. When the last particle in that Universe slows to a certain point, it erupts. When it erupts, it consumes all the frozen mass of its Universe and explodes much like we see in the big bang theories. That Universe evolves, cools and the cycle starts again.

Another is the perpetual multiverse cycle.

In the perpetual multiverse cycle a similar cooling occurs. This time, instead on one particle changing state, multiple particles change state causing multiple big bangs and evolution of multiple Universes which slow and repeat. In this scenario there may be billions of Universes (imagine every star is a Universe) but we can't detect them because we are locked within this Universe.

Another is the Dr. Seuss Universe.

In the Dr. Seuss Universe or multiverse, Universes occur below quantum and expand below quantum in a larger Universe that may (Horton Hears a Who) or may not detect it/them.
In this scenario, every particle may hold one or more Universes. You might have one or more Universes in your own body. The parent Universe may be but one Universe in yet a larger Universe. And so on...

The way I see it, whatever causes the change of state which causes the big bang may or may not be God. God could be something in a different dimension?
Could be a force we haven't figured out yet? I doubt it is a God particle but it might be a force or wave related to a God particle, perhaps it only occurs when all matter reaches a certain level of absolute zero?
Thing is, how could we know?

Life and the Universe is after-the-fact.
It certainly isn't what religions think.
That makes no sense.
Not with what we do understand about reality.
No, God must be something else.
Probably not God but God is just as good of a name to give it as any.
It is defined by "Unknown Factor"
Thing is, try having a discussion where you explain you believe in "Unknown Factor". At least when you insert "God" people realize it is something beyond understanding.

The scientist Laura Mersini-Haughton has suggested a cyclic universe. Currently we are in an expanding phase. The universe might one day reach a maximum size after which it starts to shrink until one day it gets to the smallest size possible at which point there is another Big Bang and it all starts again. That idea solves the concept of time itself starting at the Big Bang, which is hard to grasp. Instead, the universe has existed 'for ever' and will continue to do so. If this is proved one day, the religious people will probably say that god created the universe many cycles ago and there were 'people' in all the previous cycles and after ours has gone there will again be 'people' the next time around.

Current thinking by most other scientists does not agree. they say that this universe will just get bigger and bigger with its constituent parts getting further and further away for ever. Maybe one of those theories is right or maybe the truth is completely different.

I've not heard that people use only a tenth of their possible brain power, only that half of the brain is not used. I seem to remember that right-handed people use their left brain half and left-handed people use their right brain half. I can't rmember if any research has been done as to why this is. Something else to google on a wet day when I want to stay at home!

We all use our entire brain.
Scans prove it, even when we sleep.
Left and right has to do with...think wiring.
Left side controls the right side and vice versa.
Not sure of the specifics but activity on one side is art and the other is dexterity and reasoning is primarily in the frontal cortex and involuntary keep you alive stuff is in the center...I think? Been awhile since I read about it.
If I remember correctly, all parts of the brain have memory capacity.

There is a theory, not sure what its called.
Essentially gravity causes all matter to coalesce into super-massive black holes. When all 'free' matter has been consumed the black holes slowly cool and freeze. It supposedly happens after many cosmological decades.
It makes sense to a true absolute zero condition requiring a change of state to spark a new expansion.

The theory you describe sounds like the Big Crunch theory.
I think the one I describe was The Big Freeze Theory.
Both could give way to a Big Bang, eventually.
Both could be perpetual.

Time is duration.
Duration is the speed of change of state.
If the Universe were at absolute zero, there are no changes of state, so time cannot exist.
I don't see the big bang as the start of time.
I see the start of time as the moment duration first begins which is the change of state from absolute zero to movement. At absolute zero all movement stops (freezes). Movement is heat. Make something hotter its particles speed up. Absolute zero means frozen, no movement, no heat, no state change, no duration, no time.

If the entire Universe were at absolute zero, it would take an outside influence to cause a change of state.
That influence is an "Unknown Factor" and will always be an "Unknown Factor" because to know what it was would require one to be outside the absolute zero condition of the Universe and everything we know that exists or can exist is within the Universe. Which would be frozen, including us.

Certainly not the God religions try to convince you of, is it?

I just remembered a website I used to read.
Its called HBP
The Human Brain Project.
http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/
You might find it interesting.

Seeing and doing at the same time is a remarkable experience.

Creation, or the big bang, or whatever name, could be similar to super saturated fluids, where the slightest bump or slight change triggers de-gassing and bubbling from nucleation points inside the container. Or like the opposite of when a bottle of beer is left in the freezer just minutes too long, and when you crack the lid and pressure drops, and it freezes into a slushie. (pressure = heat)

Instead of a frozen static black hole, more of a super massive collection of black holes not quite at zero deg K, like a pressure pack waiting to blow, and a shock wave hits from a long way away, causing a similar nucleation event, or a precipitation event, which runs away causing a big bang reaction, and matter is re-heated and distributed.

An anti-matter particle as a trigger; an E.T. trigger from a neighboring universe imploding / exploding, making a shock wave; interdimensional influence; plenty of potential triggers for an oversaturated or over pressured universal concentrate.

Or imagine some 'force' reducing the atom's electron orbit gap, so that every atom becomes a spring, waiting to resume its usual size and expand when the force is changed, thus almost instantly expanding the universe from a compressed state.

Interesting...collapsed atom spring theory?
That fits with the true AZ state change theory I think about.
The only difference is in the true AZ state change theory the collapse/spring is the quark (In particle physics, preons are point particles, conceived of as subcomponents of quarks and leptons).
The only problem I can see is at the atomic level the collapse would create energy.

Both fission and fusion are nuclear reactions that produce energy, but the applications are not the same. Fission is the splitting of a heavy, unstable nucleus into two lighter nuclei, and fusion is the process where two light nuclei combine together releasing vast amounts of energy.

Here are some known theories (which can be researched)
Big Bang – Prevailing cosmological model for the observable universe
Big Rip – A cosmological model based on an exponentially increasing rate of expansion
Big Crunch – Theoretical scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe
Big Bounce – A hypothetical cosmological model for the origin of the known universe
Big Freeze - a scenario under which continued expansion results in a universe that asymptotically approaches absolute zero temperature.
Big Slurp - theory posits that the universe currently exists in a false vacuum and that it could become a real vacuum at any moment.

One argument of religion is that God made the Universe from nothing.
"Nothingness" is a philosophical term for the general state of nonexistence, sometimes reified as a domain or dimension into which things pass when they cease to exist or out of which they may come to exist, e.g., God is understood to have created the universe ex nihilo, "out of nothing."
Quantum mechanics tells us that there is no such thing as empty space. Even the most perfect vacuum is actually filled by a roiling cloud of particles and antiparticles, which flare into existence and almost instantaneously fade back into nothingness. Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
Each cubic centimeter of empty space contains about 10^29 grams of invisible matter, or, equivalently, vacuum energy.

According to ancient and medieval science, aether, also spelled æther or ether and also called quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere.

Zero-point energy (ZPE) is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have. Unlike in classical mechanics, quantum systems constantly fluctuate in their lowest energy state as described by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

In physical cosmology, the Planck epoch is the earliest period of time in the history of the universe, from zero to approximately 10^43 seconds. It is believed that, due to the extraordinary small scale of the universe at the time, quantum effects of gravity dominated physical interactions.

The way I see the Universe it did not start with a big bang.
The expansion we call the big bang was a result of something else that happened. Even the quantum fluctuations in empty space are the result of something before it.

Imagine you have the Universe's first duration capture camera.
It has infinite speed with infinite resolution.

You snap a picture of a race car passing by you.
The camera captures everything in its view in a static state.
The race car in that static state and everything else in the picture is captured in the process of moving.
A similar picture a moment before and a moment after will look the same but there will be infinitely small changes from one picture to the next. There must be changes otherwise the race car would never move.

There must be some unknown factor which keeps each duration state in order thru time. Otherwise, time would progress in a jumbled unpredictable fashion.
I have seen science fiction which touches on this but never gets deep into it. The wormhole aliens in Deep Space Nine are a good example. Arrival was another.

Considering our race car camera above, if you were to take one capture and throw away all the others, that is how I think of the Universe in a static state. Some Unknown Factor cause the static state to start moving to the next static state then the next and the next and so on up to this very static state. Some Unknown Factor causes these static states to progress uninterrupted and in perfect order.
We see it as the flow of time because we remember the previous static state and expect the next static state.
I wonder if there is anything between the static states of time?
Perhaps the Universe deconstructs then reconstructs for each change?

Memory is stored within every cell in the body, not just the brain
That's why, sometimes when people have a transplant, say, a heart transplant, they might suddenly start speaking French and playing the piano. Previously they could no neither. Only afterwards do they find out, that the heart previously belonged,to a French Pianist

Cellular memory (CM) is a parallel hypothesis to Body Memory (BM) positing that memories can be stored outside the brain in all cells. The idea that non-brain tissues can have memories is believed by some who have received organ transplants, though this is considered impossible.

Well, I'm open to alternative theories as to what causes these phenomena
Also, while I'm at it, what about chakras, or, are they considered to be baloney too

I don't know about chakras?
However, I do like the idea of cell memory.
Cells have DNA.
DNA is a type of memory passed thru time as we reproduce.
Not a memory as we think of by using our brains but a memory of physical attributes.

I have met two transplant patients.
Neither said anything about doing things differently after the transplants.
Could be because the donor was English speaking and couldn't play a piano either.
I only have a limited exposure to transplant patients.
You must know many.
(you wrote 'they' which indicates more than one)

I hypothesize that a wave is held together by willpower. The wave is a form of energy passing through time. The energy over the duration of time in the past is power. Between moments of time, there is power is so small as to be nonexistent, but the energy is the same. The power for the future is will. A wave is a deliberate alignment of enthalpy (Energy not available to do work).