First, let me say, Abraham, I love your posts. They do bring about a lot of questions that not only do I like to ask myself, but that a lot of folks ask and that many need answering before they can make any decisions on what they want to believe in. But, we must also understand that there are many mysteries that we will never be able to understand until we go on to our further life or death. I also want to say that what I am about to state, is my own view, and not written to offend anyone, but what I have found to be true in my studies and in my own heart. I don't feel as if I walk blindly in by beliefs, as many others feel the same way their beliefs.
My beliefs on Hinduism is that it can't exist because it believes that God is the universe and the universe is God, and that there is no separate creator and that the universe has always been how it is now. So, then we have to ask ourselves "How long has the universe been in existence?". According to Hindism, it would be forever. But, this does not add up to what astronomers, scientists, and Bible teachings tell. So if Hinduism does exist, then we would have the break down of science, of which, I know that you would disagree with, Abraham, as this would also make the theory of thermodynamics null and void. If Hinduism would be correct, we would also not see the formation of new stars and galaxies, as it is based on the "closed system" concept of forever in existence. But, then they also believe in Brahman, in which we are an amoral people - not having morality. As human beings we are inbred with moral beliefs, called a conscience. It is in the growing and maturing of individuals whether the conscience is developed or killed. Hinduism also teaches that individualism is an illusion and that you have to renounce it to enter into oneness with the universe and that one day you will be reabsorbed into Brahman and lose your individuality. So, then we must ask "If personality is an illusion, why are people all so individual?".
If we take a look at Buddhism in its basic world view, we understand that a person has to enter the abstract void called nirvana. You enter this by traveling an Eightfold Path and stamping out all attachment or desires in yourself. And once you do this, all your suffering ends. Now, I know that we all have our individual passions, and we can also look at all the millions of nerve cells that have been created in us to achieve pleasure of differents sorts to support our uniqueness: ie some folks like chocolate, some like salts, some like the ocean, some like the mountains, and so on - these nerve endings are inclussive of all passions. Then we must ask "If we were meant to be an impersonal universe then why have we been created with such an abundance of desires and abilities to feel great pleasures or diverse tastes?". I sometimes wonder if the sufferings in India were so great that Gautama wanted to come up with an explanation for it, and to give this as a solution - as you can really never achieve nirvana you would then understand that you will always suffer. Whereas, as Christians, we understand that suffering is part of the sinful world that we are born into and just a part of life, and that thru our faith in Christ we are given a comforter.
As to your question of the creation of light in Genesis, I love this question. There are many ways to perceive these creation statements, and I think it is so cool that God has allowed us to make our own views on what He meant. And I'm sure that you will agreee that I have kind of a strange concept on this.
My thought is that when God created the light, as spoken of in verse 3, He created a light separate from what we know as the light of the sun - of which lighted the whole universe for the short period of His work on earth and the enclosing galaxy. I also believe that God thru Moses could have been speaking of the creative act of radiation as a light source - of which we see the smaller amounts in the sun. After all, the earth was protected by a very thick firmament, which eventually became the waters of the earth during the time of the great flood. And it can be acceptable, as we know that in Revelations it speaks of when we lose 1/3 of the sun, moon and earth - then we would wonder if centrifical force is what we think it to be, and what really holds the stars in their place. To me, the concept of a separate light source from what we know it to be would be so cool, as we would have a whole new scientifc study of the universe and what light really is.
So, I guess Abraham, I would ask you, let's throw out all the man-made answers of science and pretend that it doesn't exist, how would you answer this part of the Bible? I don't want quotes, but what you, personally, would think these words mean in your heart.

Hi Dawn!! How's it going? I'm fine, and glad to hear from you!! Happy New Year! I'm having a blast with Abraham on this line of thought.

I'm sorry Abraham, I meant to add in that as Christians we do know that the earth was here and it was created as part of the heavenly body and throne of God and that it existed before and during the downfall of Satan. It was destroyed during this period of time, and then God created it for human existence, this is what the book of Genesis tells us of, God wanted to make sure to tell us that there was no question of evolution in His creation. The book of Isaiah tells us of the earth being destroyed during the downfall of Satan.

Marty,

I've yet to see anything anywhere that says the universe didn't always exist... There are Big Bang theories, etc. but even those believe the universe exploded from very dense matter (something like one heck of a black hole).

A founding principle in most science is you can't get something from nothing. For example, you can't produce more power than you put in (with friction this is why no perpetual motion machine works) and you make more of something without putting something else in... Basically from any chemical equation you will have an equal amount of matter go in as what comes out.

Kerry, That is true, and do you believe that the earth had life on it before the downfall of Satan? ie: as an abode of angels?

That may be true of science, Kerry, but.....
ALL things are possible with and for God! If God wants to creat something out of nothing He can (and has), that's why He is called the CREATOR!

That's right, Aphephilia, and as human and in the flesh, many look for answers that can only be imagined by what other men have said to be so and proven, but what we don't grasp is that we are just on the surface of God's work - we don't give God credit as all knowing, but want to put Him in human perspective and thus give Him human knowledge and understanding, for some reason, scientist feel that they have to prove God wrong, but in fact are coming closer to proving him as the only Creator.
We see this in just the path of science. First it was believed that the world was flat. That was proven wrong. Then scientists believed that we evolved from animals, this can't be because they can't find the missing link. The missing link is that animals don't have the three elements that we share with God. They don't have God consciousness as we have, and while they have soul, don't have the spirit. We even see this true in plant life. Plants can't be from the same single cell that man or animal comes from as they don't have any conscieousness of soul or spirit. They do have God conscienousness because Christ said that if the 9 blind men that he gave sight to wouldn't have shouted to the heavens, the rocks would have.
Even Aristotle lost his reliability when he declared that there was no such thing as meteors, as he believed that the planets were always in their place and that there could be no new creative act. This was proven wrong in the content of the meteors that were found.
God gives us a little knowledge of what His magnificence truly is, and we can just hardly grasp or imagine what it all entailed - as we see just in the study of the human body, or even in the study of the atom.

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Breast Implants!

Not that the Vatical has much authority in anything but here is their latest on the topic:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060119/ts_nm/religion_catholic_evolution_dc

"Intelligent design" not science: Vatican paper By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor
Thu Jan 19, 10:52 AM ET

PARIS (Reuters) - The Roman Catholic Church has restated its support for evolution with an article praising a U.S. court decision that rejects the "intelligent design" theory as non-scientific.

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said that teaching intelligent design -- which argues that life is so complex that it needed a supernatural creator -- alongside Darwin's theory of evolution would only cause confusion.

A court in the state of Pennsylvania last month barred a school from teaching intelligent design (ID), a blow to Christian conservatives who want it to be taught in biology classes along with the Darwinism they oppose.

The ID movement sometimes presents Catholicism, the world's largest Christian denomination, as an ally in its campaign. While the Church is socially conservative, it has a long theological tradition that rejects fundamentalist creationism.

"Intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the demand it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation," said the article in the Tuesday edition of the newspaper.

Evolution represents "the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth" and the debate in the United States was "polluted by political positions," wrote Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at Italy's Bologna University.

"So the decision by the Pennsylvania judge seems correct."

EVOLUTION CONFUSION

Confusion about the Catholic view of evolution arose last year when both the newly elected Pope Benedict and his former student, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, said humans were part of an intelligent project designed by God.

An article by Schoenborn in the New York Times in July seemed to signal a Church shift toward intelligent design because it played down a 1996 statement by Pope John Paul that evolution was "more than a hypothesis."

This triggered a wave of "Vatican rejects Darwin" headlines and attacks from scientists, Catholics among them, who argued that had been proved man evolved from lower beings.

Schoenborn later made it clear the Church accepted evolution as solid science but objected to the way some Darwinists concluded that it proved God did not exist and could "explain everything from the Big Bang to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

The Church, which has never rejected evolution, teaches that God created the world and the natural laws by which life developed. Even its best-known dissident, Swiss theologian Hans Kueng, echoed this in a recent book in Germany.

Schoenborn said he spoke up because he shared Benedict's concern, stated just before his election last April, that a "dictatorship of relativism" was trying to deny God's existence.

TENET OF FAITH

Pennsylvania Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design was a version of creationism, the belief that God made the world in six days as told in the Bible, and thus could not be taught without violating a ban on teaching religion in public schools.

It was not science, despite claims by its backers, he said.

This literal reading of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is a tenet of faith for evangelical Protestants, a group that has become politically influential in the United States.

Many U.S. Catholics may agree with evangelicals politically, but the Church does not share their theology on this point. Intelligent design has few supporters outside the United States.

While not an official document, the article in L'Osservatore Romano had to be vetted in advance to reflect Vatican thinking.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute -- the main think tank of the ID movement -- said on its website that reading the Osservatore article that way amounted to an attempt "to put words in the Vatican's mouth."

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If all the atheists left the United States it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population.

Even with all the wisdom that Abraham can muster there is infinitely more that we don't understand than that which we do. Sit still, shut up, close your eyes and try to get your mind around a concept like infinity and you will see what I mean. The bad news is that our minds will never be able to grasp what is really going on. The good news is...well I am not sure what tat is really. If we teach anything it ought to be that there are limitations on the mind's ability to understand and that, as science fiction writers have been pointing out since Jules Verne, anything is possible.

Except violating the laws of nature and physics, which pretty much refutes the concept of miracles as well.

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If all the atheists left the United States it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population.

Sorry for my extended absence (yea-yea, no one noticed).

First, Nell, on the tee-shirt, I don't think the Bush image is life-like enough but it can be found at:
http://ffrf.org/shop/products/details.php?cat=tshirts&ID=TS10

Second, Marty has asked several questions and asked that I answer them in a certain fashion:

My personal position is not any different than my "professional" position.

It is not my business or perhaps that of anyone else to reconcile the eastern religions with science. Curiously it is mainly christianity that has an issue in that regard. Hinduism even by the standards of many theological professors may not meet all the criteria for a religion but it is the third biggest in the world. So you see Hinduism does exist. Your comments would be akin to saying Christianity does not exist because its beliefs are wrong and/or indefensible (living after dying, invisible beings, three-in-one god, etc.) I personally believe that the universe has been in existence forever depending on how you define "forever". How would you measure the beginning of "forever" without the structure of the universe and what Kant calls the apriori intuitions of time and space? It looks like humans cannot. Astronomers only measure time (because time as defined) from the last "big bang" or energy/matter transformation.

The bible is pretty fuzzy on time. It posits the god as hanging around for an infinity and then the god gets lonely or "loves man" (that doe not exist yet) so then creates man and time. So by the biblical standards, when does time start. Theologians argue that god exist outside of time. So did time for christians start only when god created humans or can you measure or define time before that.

Hinduism exists and it has no conflict with science.

The second law of thermodynamics argument that is spun out by a variety of evangelical christians in an attempt to refute this or that is useless. When they use it to attack evolution they seem to forget that the earth is not a closed system. Hinduism does not preclude change nor is Hinduism one monolithic belief system. Your question on the Hindu belief in the face of western beliefs in individuality is easily answered by those Hindus that actually belief thusly. Individuality is an illusion Like a wave on the ocean. Is it an individual? Where does it goe when it dies?

In Buddhism your suffering ends when you triumph over desire. Depending on what type of Buddhism you refer to this may be by the Eightfold path or other wise. A Buddhist might quibble with your use of the word "abstract."

On the nerve ending issue you are asking your question from the viewpoint of a creation believer and assume some creator has make humans thusly. In Buddhism that personal creator is not there. You should ask this of christianity. If these are the very things your god insists you overcome, then why did it create them? Why did the christian god create sex if you are to spend your life stifling this biological aspect to be in accord with your religion? In the christian world it is god that created evil and allows it? You accept a "comforter" instead of answers.

As to your comments on the creation of light issue, I was being a bit facetious. In the theological discussions of this it is generally accepted that two versions of the creation story got stuck in while the process of oral traditions, translations, etc. played out and in the end they remained practically side by side and you must be complimented on your imagination in attempting to iron out the conflicts.

By the way, about 25 years ago or so a book came out called the "Tao of Physics" that draws parallels between the eastern religions and science and answers most of your questions in detail.

Unless you assume the existence of gods or unseen beings, etc., then what you have is man-made or human-observed answers. Not all Man-made answers are science. The gods, religion, etc. are also man-made and provide explanations and answers. Are they true? Well that's another story.

Well I must rest from all my work which I have done but you don't have to hallow this day on account of it.

<small>[ January 25, 2006, 01:10 AM: Message edited by: Abraham ]</small>

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"Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other." -Baha'u'llah

I think the image looks like Prince Charles. Bush's ears do not stick out that much.

Welcome back, I do miss your postings.

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Nell

More women die of lung cancer than breast cancer. If you smoke, quit. If you don't, don't start.

Friends never lets friends drive drunk.

.

Welcome back Abraham. I did miss you.

You are correct Nell, the likeness on the shirt is more of Prince Charles than our Prez. Anyone with any designs on intelligence could pick that out!!

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Life is too short for drama & petty things!
So, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly!

Kind of like a Prince Charles Jimmy Carter blend.