Link
Watch the video for a look at how God is viewed by most of mankind
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Hellenistic Culture
I was able to start a very interesting article about individualism in the ancient world . The author of the link says that it began with Alexander the Great. This article is well worth finishing.
Tags: Alexander the Great, Hellenism
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Mithraic Mysteries
Here in the end we may sense a profound kinship between Mithraism and Christianity. For early Christianity also contained at its core an ideology of cosmic transcendence. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the opening of the earliest gospel, Mark. There, at the beginning of the foundation story of Christianity, we find Jesus, at the moment of his baptism, having a vision of "the heavens torn open." Just as Mithras is revealed as a being from beyond the universe capable of altering the cosmic spheres, so here we find Jesus linked with a rupture of the heavens, an opening into the numinous realms beyond the furthest cosmic boundaries. Perhaps, then, the figures of Jesus and Mithras are to some extent both manifestations of a single deep longing in the human spirit for a sense of contact with the ultimate mystery.
Link
The article goes to great lengths to explain the relationship of Mithra to Christianity. The Author has a book that can be ordered from the site.
Tags: Mithras, Christianity, Cosmos, Phaedrus, Hipparchus, Age of Aquarius
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Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Friday, July 6, 2007
Genesis 2.0, the creation of synthetic life
Synthetic life approaches creation from the bottom up. It starts with the dust and works toward life. It is probably true that if life is not found on Mars or some near space object in the next few years, it will be found in the laboratories here on Earth.
Imagine what a new creation would mean to theology. From that moment on in creation we would not be alone. Granted that a very basic life form is not the equal of a man, but does anyone doubt that creating that life form is a long way toward something with an intelligence.
I believe that the creation of synthetic life is one of the great milestones of all our history.
Tags: synthetic life, creation, creation 2.0, theology
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SYNTHETIC life and Creation
SYNTHETIC life could be just around the corner - depending on what you mean by "synthetic".
Last week, genomics pioneer Craig Venter announced that his team has passed an important milestone in its efforts to create a bacterial cell whose genome is entirely synthetic - constructed chemically from the building blocks of DNA. Venter claims this goal could be achieved within months.
But while Venter's synthetic genome will be housed within an existing bacterial cell, other scientists are aiming for the even more ambitious target of building an entire living cell from the basic chemical ingredients. Giovanni Murtas of the Enrico Fermi Centre at the University of Rome 3, Italy, reported last week at the Synthetic Biology 3.0 meeting in Zurich, Switzerland, that his team had taken a step toward this goal by successfully synthesising proteins in cell-like compartments.
According to George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has devised a complete blueprint for a synthetic cell, an investment of around $10 million would be enough to turn the "bottom-up" dream into reality. "Our approach doesn't require any super new technology," he says.
Whichever definition of synthetic life you adopt, it seems now to be a question of when rather than if. "We are at the doorstep of being able to create life," says Steen Rasmussen, a physicist trying to create artificial living systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The creation of synthetic life should lead to many questions about traditional views of creation. With forty percent of America's population having literal, fundamentalist views, this will be another question for to answer.
Tags: Creation, synthetic life, George Church, Craig Venter, Steen Rasmussen
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