Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

American Atheists 2025 National Convention is in Minneapolis this month.

America the secular? What a changing religious landscape means for US politics.

Sen. Josh Hawley wants to free America from its secular “spiritual oppression.”

Ryan Walters announces lawsuit against Freedom from Religion Foundation over school prayer so more children can be afflicted with the same poison he drank.

Georgia governor signs ‘religious freedom’ bill, to allow Christians justify hate crimes.

The ex-Archbishop of Canterbury admits his irrelevance.

World of Woo:  The American Plan to Eliminate Vaccines

Environment:  Is sustainable crop intensification an oxymoron?

Consumers are boycotting US goods around the world. Should Trump be worried?

California man invites BBC to witness his assisted death.

Dissent and the power of two.

Entropy and the Meaning of Life.

Long Reads:

Here in Oklahoma, we seem to be the training ground for Christian nationalism.

As Satan descends on Kansas, Catholics defend themselves by praying the rosary.

Which Identity is more important: Race, Gender, or Religion?

When calls for vengeance go online.

Jonestown: Cult Dynamics and Survivorship.

The Kalam cosmological argument debunked.

The pronatalists who believe Trump’s White House is on their side.

The truth about global poverty.

Sunday Book Club: The Universal History of Us.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Coffee Break Videos:  New research on the Evolution of Intelligent Life.  The Praying and Evolving Mantis. Physicist Brian Cox explains quantum physics in 22 minutes.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Have a great week!

[StregaModerator]

Thanks Reg!

[unapologeticParticipant]

In the article about the boycott of US goods, they show this photo, saying that US products are turned upside-down in protest:

This is standard practice for Hienz. They even print their label upside-down with extra wide caps. Hienz bottles have been upside-down in my local (Pennsylvania) store for years.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Yes, I always store such bottles ‘upside-down’, no matter their origin.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

The Kalam cosmological argument debunked.

Reading that story has given rise to many big questions:

* If The Big Bang took place 13.8 Billion years ago, and the radius of the known Universe is around 46 Billion Light Years, wouldn’t the matter at the edge of that radius had to have travelled from The Big Bang at faster than the speed of light if the matter at the radius came from The Big Bang, an obvious violation of Einsteinian physics?

* Or did that matter predate The Big Bang?

* Could there have been more than one Big Bang in different spaces to get us the Universe we bave now?

* Could endless numbers of Big Bangs have taken place throughout the infinity of time?

Some things that are not a question, however:

* Whatever the answers to the above, it all took longer than Bishop Usser’s 6000 years.

* The Universe does not need a beginning. The Energy/Matter that makes it up has always existed and cannot be destroyed.

* When it comes to God (and the Abrahamic God in particular) Kalam and William Lane Craig are the unmoveable objects colliding with the unstoppable force of the Objective Reality of that Universe.

* And Schrodinger was one sick puppy.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Change "Sith" to "with." So much for Sith being unchangeable
• This reply was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling again. Proving I am no Sith
• This reply was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling again
• This reply was modified 1 week, 4 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: More mispelling from clumsy fingers

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

A bit more fun with Aron Ra;

[UnseenParticipant]

unapologetic wrote:

In the article about the boycott of US goods, they show this photo, saying that US products are turned upside-down in protest: This is standard practice for Hienz. They even print their label upside-down with extra wide caps. Hienz bottles have been upside-down in my local (Pennsylvania) store for years.

Genius of Heinz’s barbecue sauce execs to anticipate the U.S. having a harebrained wannabe dictator as President years ago.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

If The Big Bang took place 13.8 Billion years ago, and the radius of the known Universe is around 46 Billion Light Years, wouldn’t the matter at the edge of that radius had to have travelled from The Big Bang at faster than the speed of light if the matter at the radius came from The Big Bang, an obvious violation of Einsteinian physics?

That is a good question. It is intuitive to think that is what happened. The trick is realizing that the Big Bang isn’t like an explosion in space — it’s the expansion of space itself.

Think of space (or SpaceTime) to be like the surface of a balloon with dots drawn on it. As you inflate it, the dots get farther apart, not because they’re moving, but because the surface itself is stretching. When we say the universe is 46 billion light-years in radius, we’re not saying galaxies moved through space that far — we’re saying space itself stretched out while the light was traveling through it. The light that takes 13.8 billion years to get here was moving on a ‘cosmic travelator’ of stretching Space (sorry the best metaphor I could come up with at the moment).

Consider the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. They are not moving away from each other because local gravity always overpowers the expansion of space when objects are close enough. They are ‘only’ 2.5 million light years apart. (When you see Andromeda in the night sky, that light hitting your eyes left Andromeda before Homo sapiens had evolved!) On very large scales (millions of light-years and beyond), the expansion of space dominates. Galaxies move apart because the space between them stretches. On smaller scales — like galaxy clusters or galaxy pairs — gravity wins.

As for the Big Bang, it did not happen in one “spot”. It happened ‘everywhere’ at the same ‘time’. That is because when it happened “everywhere’ was a tiny speck and ‘time’ was at the initial instance of its beginning (or Planck Time). Everywhere we see now was once condensed into that tiny, primordial state. This means every point in today’s universe was once adjacent to every other point. After Planck Time the Universe began expanding and cooling. As space expanded, these points moved apart. That’s why every location in the universe can be considered the center of the Big Bang—not because the universe has a center, but because the expansion happened uniformly from every point outward. The Big Bang wasn’t a “bang” in time and space, but the rapid emergence and expansion of spacetime itself as there was no “outside” to explode into.

The speed of light limit applies to motion through space, not to the expansion of space.

Einstein’s theory, especially Special Relativity, says that: Nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light (c) in a vacuum. The universe can expand such that distant galaxies recede from us faster than light, and that’s totally fine under General Relativity.

One more analogy: You’re sitting on a couch made of rubber (space), and the couch is stretching. You’re not running across the couch — it’s the couch that’s expanding. You and a friend on the other end see each other move apart faster than you could run — but neither of you broke any speed limit.

I don’t use similes as I don’t know what they are like.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by  Reg the Fronkey Farmer.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg:

I don’t use similes as I don’t know what they are like.

I see what you did there…like John Prine singing about Kentucky Similies in A Big Ol’ Goofy World:

I also see that a perfect analogy would be a tautology, so I don’t fault you as I struggle to understand theories of Cosmology.

However, I still have many questions: If we assume a single Natural Universe with nothing before it or beyond it, with all energy, all matter, all space, all time, wouldn’t this mean there can be no “balloon,” no “surface,” no “outside,” no force to expand space “inside” the “balloon?”

And if Relativity doesn’t apply to the expansion of space, wouldn’t it still apply to the objects moved by space? And just how can space–literally nothing–move anything?

• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Correcting video link
• This reply was modified 1 week, 3 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling

[PopeBeanieModerator]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

However, I still have many questions: If we assume a single Natural Universe with nothing before it or beyond it, with all energy, all matter, all space, all time, wouldn’t this mean there can be no “balloon,” no “surface,” no “outside,” no force to expand space “inside” the “balloon?”

And if Relativity doesn’t apply to the expansion of space, wouldn’t it still apply to the objects moved by space? And just how can space–literally nothing–move anything?

Reg might still answer in a better way than me, but I’m practicing how to paraphrase some answers I got from ChatGPT.

You’re correct, in that there is no “surface” and no “outside” wrt our universe. Unless, say, our universe is a giant black hole, or exists separately within a multiverse. Just guessing here! But that’s another set of questions.

I don’t know about “no force” existing to expand space, but I think that the purported Dark Energy somehow explains this, at least mathematically.

I say “mathematically”, because our intuition has trouble imagining what cosmologists say is actually happening, which is (at least according to my understanding of ChatGPT’s response) that cosmological distances between galaxies are increasing due to expansion of the universe; but that is not the same as saying that those galaxies are actually moving away from each other.

I.e. it’s more like a cosmological distance dimension is increasing.

And as Reg alluded to, galaxies near to each other, as we are near to Andromeda, are not considered to be at very long, “cosmological” distances apart, so the space between us is not considered to be space that is actually expanding. The space that is expanding is space that is much farther away from both our Milky Way and Andromeda.

This is not intuitive, eh?

• This reply was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by  PopeBeanie. Reason: i must have fixed a dozen typos and add a few clarifications before FINALLY finishing my edits

[UnseenParticipant]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

If The Big Bang took place 13.8 Billion years ago, and the radius of the known Universe is around 46 Billion Light Years, wouldn’t the matter at the edge of that radius had to have travelled from The Big Bang at faster than the speed of light if the matter at the radius came from The Big Bang, an obvious violation of Einsteinian physics?

That is a good question. It is intuitive to think that is what happened. The trick is realizing that the Big Bang isn’t like an explosion in space — it’s the expansion of space itself.

Then…space is a substance…like rubber. What is space made of? Space is made of space is just a tautology.

[_Robert_Participant]

PopeBeanie wrote:

TheEncogitationer wrote:

However, I still have many questions: If we assume a single Natural Universe with nothing before it or beyond it, with all energy, all matter, all space, all time, wouldn’t this mean there can be no “balloon,” no “surface,” no “outside,” no force to expand space “inside” the “balloon?”

And if Relativity doesn’t apply to the expansion of space, wouldn’t it still apply to the objects moved by space? And just how can space–literally nothing–move anything?

Reg might still answer in a better way than me, but I’m practicing how to paraphrase some answers I got from ChatGPT. You’re correct, in that there is no “surface” and no “outside” wrt our universe. Unless, say, our universe is a giant black hole, or exists separately within a multiverse. Just guessing here! But that’s another set of questions. I don’t know about “no force” existing to expand space, but I think that the purported Dark Energy somehow explains this, at least mathematically. I say “mathematically”, because our intuition has trouble imagining what cosmologists say is actually happening, which is (at least according to my understanding of ChatGPT’s response) that cosmological distances between galaxies are increasing due to expansion of the universe; but that is not the same as saying that those galaxies are actually moving away from each other. I.e. it’s more like a cosmological distance dimension is increasing. And as Reg alluded to, galaxies near to each other, as we are near to Andromeda, are not considered to be at very long, “cosmological” distances apart, so the space between us is not considered to be space that is actually expanding. The space that is expanding is space that is much farther away from both our Milky Way and Andromeda. This is not intuitive, eh?

That breed of intuition, bred from evolution occurring in a micro-environment is not always the best source of universal understanding. I hear religious people often saying, “something had to create all this” or “something cannot come from nothing” or “the human eye is so complicated it needs a designer”. It just shows me that their reality is limited. As if they know what “nothing” is. However, they are fine with just pulling the most complicated thing possible out of their ass…God. Thus, all the idiotic “logical proofs” of God that make them feel good about being nitwits.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Fellow Unbelievers,

So everybody is clear, by asking my questions, I’m not giving any credence to the Kalam Cosmological Argument or any other argument for the existance of a God. I’m simply trying, as a non-professional non-astrophysicist lay person, to take what is claimed about the Universe to it’s logical conclusion and see if it fits into the context of what is known.

If Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has been revised, expanded, or refuted, and movement of galaxies faster that Light Speed is proven possible, I’m game to hear what has replaced it.

And if Matter and Energy existed separate from The Big Bang, I’m game to hear about that too.

My only limit is rational explanation based on evidence without recourse to a non-existent Supernatural Being or Realm.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by  TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling. Further proof of the need for checking one's self

[_Robert_Participant]

To many it seems the term “supernatural” presupposes a spiritual realm actually exists. It is a meaningless word. The prefix “super” is typical ape-brain bias. I will use the term “subnatural”, because all of these religious fantasies are certainly below reality in terms of worth.

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