Just to play Devil's Advocate here could'nt that result (in theory) in a person who enjoys pain (i.e. a masochist) giving pain to another who does'nt enjoy it, he's doing unto others...

Would'nt an even more basic injunction be don't impose one's will on another....

D

Pratekya, Thank you for you clarifying your view point. I am happy to see that you have an open mind about beliefs. To me that's extremely important. I also keep my mind open, although recent events all over the world have caused me to no longer believe in the good of many involved in organised religions. There are big problems, unlikely to go away any time soon, if ever. That said, these same problems have brought me closer to my God. If I read to much into your previous post, that you didn't mean, I apologise.
I beleave it important to keep beliefs fluid. Hopefully avoiding any personal entrapment in a BST once my time comes to be over there. I am a strong believer in my God. I am also a strong believer in your right to beleave in what you perceive to be God as well. They may well be the same God. I think part of my point is that even if we do look upon God from different view points, both our beliefs are as good as gold. Both correct.   It goes right to the top. I will go back to your post and reread it.   

Reading "Voyages into the Afterlife" last night I came across a passage as communicated to Bruce by a non physical friend he had earlier met at TMI. Many here probably remember reading about Ed Carter. (Ed was alive when Bruce originally met him at TMI and helped Bruce get his books published through Hampton Books.) One thing that he mentioned to Bruce while Bruce was attending his second X27 excursion at TMI was, (page 266) and talking about the coming shift in awareness (and lowering of the population levels on earth), "Between my fingers is the vast majority of human beings who will have difficulty with the coming shift of awareness. the biggest percentage of those people will have difficulty making the shift because of their religious beliefs. It's difficult to shift out of such a strong belief system, as you know."
That statement confirms others that also feel as I do about the need for fluidity in beliefs. I beleave it nessassary for my well being to believe in my God but not in organised religions. Once the change comes, our biggest recovery chore may well be helping get those entrapped within religions free of their perceived beliefs so as to enable them to find themselves and God/The Creator.

Two hundred years ago, the biologist William Paley published a huge book called Natural Theology. It contains detailed descriptions of hundreds of animals, birds, fish and plants — the carefully collated results of a lifetime spent studying and cataloguing nature.

Its detail is staggering, and Dr Paley’s book remains a landmark in historical biology.

But he didn’t intend it as a work of science. In fact, Paley was setting out to demonstrate something quite different: his idea was to prove beyond any doubt that God exists.
The book starts with a simple parable. Imagine you’ve just found a watch in the middle of a field — one of those old-fashioned clockwork pocket watches, presumably.

Now, what is it about the watch that makes it different from the stones and pebbles lying around?
The answer is design.

It’s obvious that the watch has been carefully constructed by a human watchmaker. The wheels, pinions, coils and chains inside the watch’s metal casing are shaped and assembled with a specific purpose in mind: telling the time. If the parts had been different, or fitted together in different ways, it wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

The chances of a watch being constructed by blind chance are astronomically small. Where we have something that’s clearly been designed for a specific purpose, we can safely say that a Designer gave it that purpose. Where there’s a watch, Paley points out, there must be a watchmaker.
Now Paley invites us to draw the comparison between the watch and the world of nature.

A fish’s eye is much larger and rounder than a mammal’s eye, with a crystalline lens that’s good at concentrating rays of light passed through water. As Paley wrote, “what plainer manifestation of design can there be than this difference?” Surely, if someone designed the watch, then by the same logic someone designed the fish? And the same goes for every other creature whose design is painstakingly described in Paley’s book.

Of course, Paley was hardly the first to come up with this idea. People throughout history have looked around them at the wonders of nature and intuitively asked themselves, “How else can we explain all this except by God?”

But these days there’s a problem. In the mid-19 century, Charles Darwin came along with an idea that changed the face of biology forever. His theory of evolution by natural selection did very nicely what Paley thought was impossible: it described how apparent design in nature can arise without any hint of a Designer. (Nature, to quote a modern-day Darwinian, is ‘the blind watchmaker’.)

Darwinism is no real threat to our faith. After all, the Genesis story can be illuminating and meaningful, even if it’s not literally true. But it is a problem for Paley, although he can’t be blamed — he was writing 50 years earlier than

Darwin. So was he barking up the wrong tree?
Well, surely there’s more in the universe to be explained than the design of a fish’s eye? If we agree that we don’t need God to explain the design of life on Earth, even then there are some puzzles. For instance, scientists tell us that the universe itself looks ‘designed’, and Darwinism can’t explain that.

The universe contains life. But not just any old universe would allow life to develop in the first place. To get life, you first need spatial dimensions, matter, energy, chemistry, atoms, stars, planets, gravity (and. antigravity, as it happens).

Luckily, our universe has all these things, and in precisely the right amounts to make it possible for life to develop. But without each of these key values being exactly as they are, there would be no atoms, no stars… no life. Can we really attribute the nature of the universe to coincidence? The odds against life are astronomical — a conservative estimate reckons the chance of generating a universe with just the right setup is about one in a billion. And yet — gasp — here we are!


So we’re forced to believe both that God exists, and He designed the universe in order to create human life, or that we owe our existence to an astronomically huge coincidence.

For a hardened atheist, the second option might look tempting. But think about it. Imagine that your next-door neighbor wins the lottery jackpot every single week for a year. Do you go on your merry way, thinking nothing of it? Maybe? (“Ah well, it’s an astronomically huge coincidence, but never mind!”)

Well, what if, one day, you find out that your neighbor’s brother works in the Lottery office and is in charge of handing out prizes? Do you still go on your merry way, without suspecting a thing? Of course not. A much better explanation for your neighbor’s ‘winning streak’ presents itself — that the whole thing is a fix.


The situation with the universe is similar. I suppose it’s remotely possible that the universe is special ‘just by chance’, in the same way that it’s remotely possible that my neighbor could have won the lottery every week for a year just by being very, very, very lucky.

But, as good scientists, we should prefer any alternative that doesn’t depend on such ridiculous coincidences. Dr Paley was a good scientist, so maybe he wasn’t so far wrong after all?

I'm just finishing up Hawking's A Short History of Time and I have to say it is stupendous. It's a short read and well worth that bit of time. It's not too heady but he explains why god could be possible and how the universe could be growing infinitely without a creator that intervenes with us day to day from a physics stand point and a few other possibilities.

I haven't quite finished the book but Hawking allows for the possibility that there was a creator, but so far he doesn't appear to entertain the idea that that creator interferes in anyway with the day to day function of the universe ...well ours anyway. I wish I had read this before reading Campbell's My Big TOE, because Tom discusses some of this theory and parts of his presentation were a little over my head, but Hawkings work surprisingly is a bit easier to understand even though he makes no argument for the afterlife. And really we know that experience of the afterlife is subjective at best and anyone who doesn't or refuses to make the effort for that subjective experience will never find their "personal" empirical evidence. It's a good quick easy read, A Brief History of Time. I dreaded cracking it open but it has been a true pleasure to read it.

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Hi Rondele,

Stephen Hawking has always been a committed absolute atheist, so much so the his first wife, a firm believer in God, divorced him

Alan