Hi,
I am impressed and surprised at the quantity of discussion being given to "whither god". I am heartened by the grappling with the concept and yearning of many for some form/expression/rationale for spirituality. Please be entertained by the following...
Ecclesiastes 3:10 I have seen the task which God has given to the sons of
men, to be humbled by it.
11 ¶ He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, He has set eternity
in their heart, without which man cannot find out the work that God makes
from the beginning and to the end.
I believe we are intelligent black holes...each of us has an interior universe that is topologically vastly larger than the size of our crania. The more we fill the hole the stronger its pull (curiosity), and the more which fills it (knowledge). Sometimes the hole becomes pathological, and surrounding holes become orbital and subservient or subsumed, and combinatoric (master/slave). On this list, there is enough economic and social separation for converse to occur among rather dense (non-pejorative) holes without being conclusively sucked in, or being forced to orbit one "universe meme".
Our metaphors tell us more than we know...to keep an "open mind" leads to potentiation of hyperdensity and achievement of qualitative inflection points providing novel insights unavailable below X densities...novel insights can combine to create "vision" which I will now call "outsight". An emmissive black hole, producing powerful Meme as its projecta.
with the above in mind, consider the following
Genesis 11
1 ¶ And the whole earth was of one lip and of one speech.
2 And it happened, as they pulled up stakes from the east, they found a
level valley in the land of Shinar. And they lived there.
3 And each one said to his neighbor, Come, let us make brick, and burning
burn them. And they had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar.
4 And they said, Come, let us build a city and a tower with its head in the
heavens, and make a name for ourselves, that we not be scattered on the face
of all the earth.
5 ¶ And Jehovah came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of
Adam had built.
6 And Jehovah said, Behold, the people is one, and the lip one to all of
them, and this they are beginning to do, and now all which they have
purposed to do will not be restrained from them.
7 Come, let Us go down and confuse their language so that they cannot
understand one another's speech.
Note 6: due to a single language...all they (we) purpose is available to become reality
There is a gravitational attraction which results in what we call society.
Society's gravitation is geometrically increased by language. Society's time
to singularity is contracted as language is concentrated. Multiple languages
result in competing societies, thus temporarily dilating the time to
singularity. Writing creates a one dimensional parallel universe creating
more gravity (fixity) within the memetic/linguistic event horizon. Printing
made many languages die...thus reconcentrating language to populations
sufficiently large to result in pathological black holes in competition
(imperialism followed by nationalism)
Multivariant orbital Competition among pathological holes results usually in
convergeance to a single remaining hole (world power) along with more
gravity "created" by increased information density from the competition
along the lines of focused power utilation (military invention). As writing
and printing created extreme forms of information concentration
(science...money) the rate of information conflation increased
geometrically...leading to the creation of god (lower case), nuclear weapons
which the holes (ass) obeyed unreservedly. This led to a short term
semi-stable massive hole orbit during which massive quantities of
information emerged. The emergence AC power, and -importantly- of dc power
(5 volts) became a common language resulting in personal computers. TCP/IP
internetworks complete the path for return to one language. The rate of
information creation / adduction is now going off chart. The event horizon
presenting surface area to ingestion of information quanta has gone multi
nodal, multidimensional.
Gen 1:22 ¶ And Jehovah God said, Behold! The man has become as one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand and also take from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever...
We live in interesting times.
By the way, it so happens that I founded the company that may have created the worlds first parallel universe - worlds inc... see www.activeworlds.com
cheers,
dave
As Nixon might have said "I am NOT a kook"