Alan McDougall

Nice list I would put Sir Isaac Newton above Muhammed, second to Jesus! They were not overlooked I did not want to make the list too long as this can lead to confusion, usually the list tries to include the first hundred most influencial people.We can extend our list to do the same. Please add your list as we are all interested in different views points?

Hi Aeththelwulf You said According what you said we might each exist in a perpetual "Now' with the past flowing passed us and the future coming towards us in an absolute even flow? Sort of we objects are effected by time, relative to the time flow to our repective perpetual "Nows" Or have I completely misuderstood what you mean?

This puzzle is only for those who have not come across it before. You can get the solution from the internet but this would defeat the purpose of this post which having a little fun!! The Problem 12 Odd Pool Balls Puzzle The Problem: You have 12 balls identical in size and appearance but 1 is an odd weight (could be either light or heavy). You have a set scales (balance) which will give 3 possible readings: Left = Right, Left > Right or Left < Right (i.e. Left and Right have equal weight, Left is Heavier, or Left is Lighter). You have only 3 chances to weigh the balls in any combination using the scales. Determine which ball is the odd one and if it's heavier or lighter than the rest. How do you do it?

Some great posts guys, What about a "Moment in Time" do we ever reach one?, my point being once you think you have reached a point in time it is already gone. A sort of a paradox if you like.

How would history have diffred if Hitler had never existed? I put in a few of my own The Cold war would never have happened The Second World War would never have happened There would never have been a space race ? ? ?

A possible model for infinity is that in an infinite multi-universe model, infinity stretches both up and down ,large and smaller lly from the viewpoint of our universe. Thus, the absolutely smallest indivisible particle in our universe’s quantum world, might make up separate tiny infinitesimal finite universes, that are the bricks or building blocks of our much larger universe There could be an infinite number of these infinitesimal universes, going ever downwards creating smaller and smaller universes, to infinity. Our universe could be likewise a tiny quantum building brick or block of a much larger universe ours. Never consolidating into one single final mega- universe because there is always a next level up. Therefore, it goes thus, our universe a smallest component to a next larger universe, that universe is likewise universe a component to a next larger universe and so on infinitely. Alternately, the same model moves infinitely down to next smaller and next smaller universal building blocks. Of course, this is only speculation and conjecture by my restless mind. Who knows it just might be true? By Alan McDougall 8/5/2012

Supernova are "Standard Candles" so they all blaze with the same brightness, so the brighter they are the closer they are, the dimmer they are the further they. Work out the distance of the nearest one using redshift and then use the brightness of this one to get a very close esitimate of the distances of other supernova using both Red Shift and bringtness as the tool

Enigma of the existence of evil and the Garden of Eden and God the Benevolent I know the story of the Garden and Eden and the fall of man is most likely a mythical account of a peoples interaction with God, long past in the mists of time I will try in my own humble way to answer this most difficult question. How can we ever reconcile the fact of sin/ evil, suffering and pain, existing side by side with a benevolent holy God of light and love? Let us go back to the story of the Garden of Eden God says to Adam in Gen1, Chap. 2 Verse. 17, “that he may eat of any tree except the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”. Note; There was a tree of knowledge of both Good and evil, so Evil existed before Adam and the Garden of Eden. However, God being all-knowing knows before hand that Adam is going to fail the test so why did he give it to him in the first place? Because he wanted us to have a free will and not be robots!!. I don’t buy this, completely, as God could easily given Adam absolute free raine and said to him “Adam your can do anything you want without any reservations. But then sin/evil as well as good would have had to be approved by God and God is Holy in the absolute and thus could never had permitted sin and evil to exist forever in his domain of paradise and heaven But, nevertheless, God wanted to test, teach and make man worthy so he allowed sin/evil to enter our world. Nevertheless, GOD in his infinite wisdom goes ahead and gives Adam (and Eve) a test he "knows they are going to fail", why? Was this fair seeing the awful consequences for humanity down through the age? Yes! absolutely as I will describe later in this essay Let us go back to the origin of evil, where it came from. Isaiah Chapt. 45 Verse 7 God says "I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil I God do all these things". GOD made everything so he must have made evil but why? Let us go back to Adam and the pampered environment of the Garden of Eden. If Adam and Eve had remained and obeyed God completely. ( remember God knew they would not obey him) they would have existed forever in a paradise setting of beauty warmth, comfort, never ever have to toil work just reach out and eat do any thing they want . No pain no gain! This would be wonderful for say a hundred years or a thousand years, but having never ever experienced cold they could not appreciate warmth, never being hungry never appreciate food never being thirsty they would not appreciate the taste and satisfaction of sparking water , never knowing hate the would not know what love was. They would have existed in a one-sided reality never knowing the opposite. But God knew that they must know evil, pain and sorrow to become fully functional free thinking beings similar to him in consciousness and indeed co- creators of their own domain and reality Think?, after countless years what would at first be a wonderful paradise to Adam and Eve would become a boring non -challenging never changing hell. Therefore, God simply had to banish them into the world or toil sorrow and hardship to give meaning and purpose to their lives. So God being fair and just gave them the test, which they failed and drove them out into the present reality world of thorns, cold, dark, pain, evil etc, etc. This reality is based on a duality we know evil so we know the beauty of goodness; we know truth so we can hate the lie, and we experience the light so that we know dark. Humanity can look back on a paradise lost with a longing to for the eternal wonder and beauty of the original Eden, which they would love and rejoice as paradise regained I do not for one moment believe the nonsense that there is an eternal battle between God and the Satan and that this being is almost Almighty Gods equal. Satan can only do what God permits him to do as we read in the book of Job. However, God permits or allows the below dualities for our own good. Good and evil Light and dark Truth and lie Deception and honesty Love and hate War and Peace Positive and negative Faith and despair Holiness and depravity Warm and cool Life and death And so on and so on God bless Alan

Time and the twin paradox by Alan McDougall I was banned recently from a forum by putting this post under cosmology, maybe they had a point but I see nothing wrong in postion it here! Nothing is really as it seems to us and all things are subjective to the observer. Everything is relative to each person from the viewpoint. Comparative readings, of two almost unimaginably accurate precision atomic clocks located on fast moving spacecraft and airplanes and on earth, have detected this strange skewing of time and proved Einstein’s theory of relativity to be fact. Stop all the clocks in the universe and movement will continue unaffected. Stop all movement and the illusion we call time will stop and nothing ever happen again. As an object approached the speed of light it becomes more and compressed (It occupies less and less space), distorts the fabric of space time and time slows on the speeding object when compared to an object stationary state, it left at its source. Let the Object equate to a spaceship if you like. Time is much like an elastic string which can only be stretched in one direction namely; into the future. The twin paradox describes what happens. Twins; One boards a spacecraft that accelerates to near light speed, on say a voyage to Alpha Centauri, some four light years from earth. The other remains on the home planet. Ten years later the bother who went to Alpha Centauri returns having aged only "one subjective year" because time has moved slower for him, “relative” to his brother who remained on the home planet, where time moved at the "normal rate" Why and how did this ageing difference happen?, why has the spaceman one brother become twenty years younger than his brother who remained at home? or the reverse if you like! There is no absolute time, time moves differently from one object to the next and in one location to the next according to its "gravity mass and density" Condense the matter on a object, into smaller and "smaller volume" and you alter gravity and the flow of time on its surface. This is the reason that time stops in a black hole of infinite density Note; this will really happen if we develop near light speed space vehicles Maybe just year of subjective time has passed for the twin on the spaceship, when compared to twenty year older brother who has somehow aged at a 1/20 ratio. The brother who remained at home is a grey haired old man of say 65 and his returning brother just one year older at 26 years of age An enigmatic paradox but absolutely true and real. One exciting, but far distant use of this effect is the real possibility of reaching nearly any moment in the future. Given enough speed and enormous energy, one could reach the Olympic Games of the year C.E. 3108, in a matter of a few subjective days or even return a million years later only older be maybe a decade or so older. Backward times travel to the past, is a fantasy and if this were possible, a person could do the impossible and go back and murder their younger self. There is no universal now! Events are simply there, hanging in space-time Time cannot exist without space and space cannot exist without time. We only conceive of time by the movement of an object through space, so space and time are different realities of the same thing and can only exist where movement is allowed. For example, stop all movement in the universe and you have stopped time, have you not? Therefore, there is really only one reality all bond up into and combined into what I call "spacetimemovement." There is simply no universal now and each moment is unique to the observer By Alan McDougall 29/8/2007

Hi CCWilison Thanks for a great post but people are still confusing empty space or an absolute empty void, with nothing Lerts try and define nothing again, nothing is something that does not exist. Try to describe nothing and you will always get something. Or the total absence of everything/existence itself. Hi CCWilison Thanks for a great post but people are still confusing empty space or an absolute empty void, with nothing Lerts try and define nothing again, nothing is something that does not exist. Try to describe nothing and you will always get something. Or the total absence of everything/existence itself.

Here is what happened to me. Alan McDougall died numeruos times due to heart block/and came back On the 18th August 2011 I died numerous times on the resuscitation table due to third stage heart block. I went through the whole drama of my heart stopping, flat lining over and over again, adrenaline, atropine were injected directly into my heart and the shock paddles first used and then chest depressions, used over and over again in a desperate effort to get my heart to beat again on its own. If I had any doubts about life after death I have none now, each time my heart stopped my soul or consciousness left my body and went into other dimensions of Existence. At first I only remembered a little of what went on in those three hours of life and death struggle but lately I have begun to remember more and more about the strange otherworldly realms I saw over the period of three hours. Each time they got my heart to beat I came back. I saw numerous people all gathered to welcome me into the afterlife, all my beloved were there. It seemed like a welcome home party but as soon as the doctors got my heart to beat I was drawn back to the earthly world. Another time I saw a tree with a lot of books situated around it. Reading what was on one off the covers I saw that they contained all the knowledge of Existence. One very large book seem to consolidate all that what was in the smaller books but when I tried to lift it was too heavy to carry and I decided to return later for it I saw a beautiful pulsating orb of golden light that I took for Jesus as it emanated perfect peace and love. I had no tunnel and meeting of a being of light. I think because I was continually being resuscitated by the medical treeam Each time I flatlined my consciousness I seemed to go way for a lifetime, but on the table only seconds passed. Time over here on earth does not flow like it does in the spiritual realm. It took three hours to install a tremporary pacemaker to maintain the pulse at 80 beats per/minute instead of the 5 to zero it had been beating/not beating on the resuscitation table. I was told by the doctor that I had been “really really dead” I now have a permanent pacemaker in my chest which should last ten years and despite the great shock of the event I am felling very alive and well

If the universe were eternal we could never have reached the present "NOW" moment, because the "Arrow of Time" would be pushed back to the infinite past.

Immortal, You made the above quote as it it were fact, maybe at birth Hitlers soul and Mother Teresa's souls were the same, but after death Hitlers soul due to his earthly actions, was blackened with hate, violence, depravity, darkness, murder, rape, war, genicide and the personal reponsibilty for the death of over 55 million people, who the heck can you equate the pure altruistic soul of Mother Teresa with that of possibily the most depraved evil monster of all human history?. Hitler is in Hell, and that is not wher MT is. Silly man!!

You are kidding right? I agree Jesus was the most influencial person in history although Moslems will disagree they are sure it is Muhammud

I know this and pointed it out in one of my replies, I said reach "equalibrium" or "almost absolute zero" so that remains the question. How long do you guys think it will take?

I understand all of that including the fact that one cannot always use logic to explain or understand time. The light speed constant is just one example. Even Eistein had difficulty accepting quantum theory because he wanted the universe to be ordered. Thus"God does not play dice with the universe" and we know in reality he does.

Of course not it is just a poetic attempt by me to understand the cause of existence. Why should you worry about me equating myself to a nonexisting entity? Dont take everything so seriously , take an asprin for your pain and smile I am quite an interesting old goat once you get to know me!

Rob you are killing me with this logic of yours!

Try to falsify it if you think God does not exist? Below is my own idea of how existence might have come to be! It moved down the road of forever and sat down on the throne of infinity. I am the light being and my everlasting purpose is to create and cause existence, I am both nothing and everything I am light and dark. Aware of infinite potential in vast unploughed fields of nothing, I strode with great beams of Radiant Light toward the infinite horizon of eternity, sowing seeds of existence, before the timeless moment of creation. On the panorama of bleak blackness," I AM" "The Absolute", sowing universal radiant energy. Reality is my aim and the beauty of my achievement I who live, forever and forever, “Illuminated" the darkness with beams of dazzling light so radiant and translucent sparkling with my eternal glory. The act of creation was the first event of reason. I formulated everything in the first thoughts of my Mind and knew the first numbers and called them "Zero" and "One", I am the boundless Mind, Original Self-Awareness the cause of everything, relative to nothing I am "This" I am "That" I "Was" and I "Am" and I always will "Be" I am "Eternal Awareness" I am "Every-Where" I know "Everything" I am "Every-When" I am the "Ever Existing One The great Infinite Ocean that contains all things. There is no cause to my existence I simply "was", "were" and "AM" always forever, no beginning and no end, existing forever in the glory of my light... Having no Cause I therefore am the Effect and Affect and shape of everything. Back before anything was conceived , I was "infinite pure "mind" and "thought" these was no dark only light within my infinite domain , so I moved upon the great void of dark and said "let there be" light' With the simplicities and realities of the fundamental numbers, "I made everything". I am the Prime Mover and there was no other proponent to my "First Cause". I am the "Immovable Rock" and the" Alpha point". I took these first numbers and weave them into the fabric of the reality, creating all the limitless universes on the infinite timeless foam of nothing, which now makes all up existence. Indeed, I am the Almighty One. If you are wise, do just one thing wise respect me for I AM your lord and reason for your existence? I am the creator of the totality of all existence known by many names and titles but you should just all refer to me by the title that can never be confused by anyone. Call me “God” By Alan McDougall Continued my reply1 I think there is a better case for the existence of god than its nonexistence.But I insist I am not talking about any religious god, maybe the god of the Dutch Philosopher Spinoza, a god who creates and then lets its creation run on its own. Most definitely not a god of love because reality seems to indicate otherwise. Here is a view that I like! This suggests a more precise definition of nothing. Nothing is a state that is the simplest of all conceivable states. It has no mass, no energy, no space, no time, no spin, no bosons, and no fermions-nothing. Sophisticated arguments of chance creation have been formulated which dazzle our mathematical comprehension… What are the real chances of the existence created by chance? Not a chance. Chance is incapable of creating a single molecule, let alone an entire existence. Why not? Chance is no thing. It is not an entity. It has no being, no power, and no force. It can affect nothing because it has no causal power within it. …It is a word which describes mathematical possibilities which, by the curious flip of the fallacy of ambiguity, slips into the discussion as if it were a real entity with real power, indeed, supreme power, the power of creativity.” (R.C. Sproul, Not a Chance. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999.) http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2011/03/why-is-there-something-rather-than-nothing-the-only-six-options/ The existence is created by nothing Someone has once rightly said that this is the most basic philosophical question that there is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” As far as I can tell, there are only six options: 1. The existence is eternal and everything has always existed. Everything has existed for eternity. As far back as one can go into the past, there is still an infinite amount of time which preceded it. The sum total of the existence is inclusive of an infinite succession of events and moments going backward. Why this is wrong? An infinite number of temporal events going into the past are a formal absurdity. Going backward, no matter how far you travel in time, you would always have infinity to go. Going forward, we would never get to the present moment because we would have an infinite amount of time and causes and effects to traverse to get here. It would be like asking of a man who is jumping out of an infinitely deep hole, when would he get out? The answer is never. There is no starting point from which to jump. Or, better, it would be like someone walking down the street and you heard him counting down… “negative 5, negative 4, negative 3, negative 2, negative 1, zero!” And you said, “What are you doing?” And he responds, “I just got done counting to zero from negative infinity!” That would be a logical absurdity. Even most atheists, since the early 20th century, now believe that there was a singular moment when all things came into existence called the big bang. Some have even proposed a multi-verse theory where our existence came out of another existence. But this only pushes it back one level. Where did that existence come from unless it is transcendent? 2. Nothing exists and all is an illusion Everything you hear, see, do, or think does not really exist. There is no reality. There is not something. There is only nothing. Why this is wrong? This proposition, it should be obvious, is completely self-defeating. In order to even make such a proposition, the subject has to exist in some sense. If all is an illusion, where did the illusion come from? If another illusion produced the illusion, then where did that illusion come from? In other words, there is something, namely the illusion. Even the solipsist, who does not believe in the existence of other minds, has to explain the genesis of his own mind. 3. The existence created itself This is the idea that the existence and all that is in it did not have its origin in something outside itself, but from within. The existence did come into being, but it came from itself. It is self-created. Here, we may suppose that while we don’t understand how this could happen, advancements in scientific theory will eventually produce an answer. Why this is wrong? Like with the previous two, we have created a logical absurdity. It would be like creating a square triangle. It’s impossible. A triangle by definition cannot be square. So creation cannot create itself as it would have to pre-date itself to create. The pre-dated form would then need a sufficient explanatory cause, ad infinitum. 4. Chance created the existence “That existence was created by chance.” Have you ever heard that? While the odds of winning the lottery are not very good, given enough time, everyone will win. While the odds of the existence coming into existence are not very good, given enough time, it had to happen. Why this is wrong? This option is a slight of hand option that amounts to nothing. The fact is that chance has no being. This option implies that “chance” itself has quantitative causal power. The word “chance” is used to describe possibilities. It does not have the power to cause those possibilities. It is nonsense to speak of chance being the agent of creation of anything since chance is not an agent. “Sophisticated arguments of chance creation have been formulated which dazzle our mathematical comprehension… What are the real chances of the existence created by chance? Not a chance. Chance is incapable of creating a single molecule, let alone an entire existence. Why not? Chance is no thing. It is not an entity. It has no being, no power, and no force. It can affect nothing because it has no causal power within it. …It is a word which describes mathematical possibilities which, by the curious flip of the fallacy of ambiguity, slips into the discussion as if it were a real entity with real power, indeed, supreme power, the power of creativity.” (R.C. Sproul, Not a Chance. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1999.) 5. The existence is created by nothing Simply put, nothing created the existence. Why this is wrong? The problem here is that it is either a restating of option #1 (the existence is eternal) or fails due to the irrationality of #4. In our current existence, the law of cause and effect cannot be denied with any sanity. While we often don’t know what the cause of some effect is, this does not mean that it is causeless. When we go to the doctor looking for an explanation for the cause of our neck pain, we don’t accept the answer “There is no cause. It came from nothing.” When there is a fire, the fire investigator does not come to a point where he says, “Well, we searched and we searched for a cause to this fire. Our conclusion is definite: the fire came from nothing.” In both cases, we would assume that the person who gave such answer is better fit for a straight-jacket than a respected professional of his field. There is an old saying; ex nihilo nihil fit which means “Out of nothing, nothing comes.” Even Maria in the Sound of Music got this one right, “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.” To say that the existence was created by or came from nothing is an absurdity. Like with the idea of chance, “nothing” is a non being with no causal power. If there is something, there must be a sufficient explanation for it. 6. A transcendent being (God) created all that there is out of nothing. This is the last option that I know of. Here we recognize the impossibility of the first five. Realizing that the existence must have come into existence a finite time ago, we know that there must be a sufficient cause. Here is how it might look: • Whatever comes into existence has a cause. • The existence came into existence. • Therefore the existence has a cause. The question now is what is that cause? It can’t be “chance” or “nothing” as we have shown that they don’t have causal power. As well, it cannot have relation to time, space, or matter in its actual being as that would make it subject to the laws of cause and effect (i.e. then we would be infinitely stuck in the trap of “If God created everything, who or what created God?). Therefore, this being is transcendent (above, beyond, without ontological relation to…) to the existence. This causal agency must be “all”-powerful or else the grandeur of the effect would eclipse the grandeur of the cause (then we are back to absurdities). This causal agent must have a will (i.e. be personal) or else there would not have ever been a time when the existence was not created (i.e. it would always be being created—again, an absurdity) since it would not be a willful decision to create, but simply a natural aspect of the transcendent cause. This creator had to have created all things ex nihilo (“out of nothing”). In other words, all of matter could not be eternal since material itself is, by definition, not transcendent and subject to the law of cause and effect. This creator, being transcendent to the laws of our existence in which the saying “out of nothing, nothing comes” applies, must create time, space, and matter out of either himself or preexisting material. He creates it all out of nothing. He brings all of existence into being by his power. While it is beyond our understanding how transcendence can create immanence, it does not form a logical absurdity. In fact, existence itself demands that it is a logical necessity.

Move it then please!

It reflects the core beliefs of all these religions, but there are minor differences and I did not want to make the post too long I will come back with the lack of evidence although I did mention a few. Lets waite for the believers first to respond

The God I am looking at is not that of religion some great being sitting on a throne for example, to me this is nonsense.The entity I suggest underpins reality is ever existing an original thought that brought forth reality. We know scientifically in quantum machanics that atomic particles somehow need to be observed to exist! To quote Bohr and Heisenberg , As our knowledge becomes wider, we must always be prepared. . .to expect alterations in the point of view best suited for the ordering of our experience. The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has "not yet been understood is infinite". Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'. Qantum mechanics shows that the materialistic common sense notion of reality is an illusion, i.e., that the objective existence of the world is an illusion. I know about Buddhism and they do believe in a type of God. They call it the cosmic consciousness. They have their god but helives right here on earth in the form of the Dala Lama (spelling?) Buddhists believe that there are beings that inhabit the various celestial realms. These are variously called angels, spirits, gods and devas by various cultures. But do Buddhists believe that a God created everything and manipulate human lives? No, we do not. There are several reasons for this. Modern sociologists and psychologists, believed that religious ideas and especially the Creator-God idea have their origin in fear. They might have a valid pint here?

My difficulties with the concepts of karma and reincarnation REFUTING THE BELIEF IN KARMA Karma is a belief that a person has to live many lives and improve in each until they become an ascended master and finally lose self-awareness into the mindless soup of the cosmic mind. Alternatively, one chooses ones own next life from the spiritual plane in order to learn something in the next. It is claimed by some variants of this illogical belief that one might have to live sometimes millions of lives before becoming perfect to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and find enlightenment. I believe this Karma is nonsense and will list my objections to this belief below: 1. The bible says it is appointed for a person once to live and then the judgment. 2. Karma says that a soul must live many mortal lives to reach perfection. Thus humanity undergoes must undergo many many incarnation from a bad human until one finally becomes an enlightened master. One, nevertheless, must start out as a lowly life form such as a cockroach or garden Lilly and finally, after countless millions of years progress to become human For the life of me how does a bad cockroach or garden Lilly become a "good cockroach or garden Lilly". This belief if it where not so tragic would be very very funny indeed. 3. Karma says that if we have a weakness or fault in this life, we must return reborn, again and again and overcome our failings in the previous in the next life, or horrors upon horrors maybe revert to been a cockroach again. :shocked: 4. Therefore, any suffering we have to endure in this life, be it cancer, aids, all other sicknesses poverty, etc, etc is our own fault due to the evil or bad things we did in our past life. This is a cruel belief as many saintly people suffer and die in the most horrific manner. What soul would choose to be a Jew in the Second World War and see their beloved's torn from them in the holocaust and consumed in the ovens of Hitler's death camps? 5. the above paragraphs shows that Karma is nonsense, how can one so often be punished so terribly for something they do not even remember from a sinful forgotten past life. In my case I have had to endure a lifetime the unimaginable pain, horror, desolation of a sever mental illness. Is this the punishment for something I did in past life, that I have absolutely no recollection. (Manic Depression) 6. Another view favored by spiritualists and modern day channellers is that between lives we sit in some other dimensions and decide exactly what kind of life we choose be it beggar, rich person or what ever. Therefore, our fate is consciousnesly decided by ourselves, what nonsense. 7. What then about souls like Hitler, Stalin, Nero and the numerous depraved people on earth at the moment, did they deliberately choose a life of depraved evil and what they could learn by there wicked actions? They will degenerate further and further through each life as they are totally depraved without any redeeming good qualities what so ever. Surely, this type of person deserves judgment and eternal punishment, not escape into karma. 8. If we look at the out of control world population we see an exponential increase in the total world population, which is already a frightening 6.5 billion and growing faster and faster by the day. Where are all these people coming from? If karma is true, surely people should be reaching perfection and escaping the cycle of life and the worlds population decreasing. Not so? 9. Again, if karma is true we should be observing just the reverse. With more and more people becoming better and better and finally reaching enlightenment and escaping the relentless birth and rebirth with a subsequent decrease in the world population. 10. Although people are no more evil now than they were in the past (middle age horrors as an example), they are also no better, if we read our daily newspaper or listen to the news on the electronic media. We just have to read up on the mechanized world wars of the past century and see the awful weapons humanity has developed and continue to develop to kill one another, with more and more sophisticated tools of death. Where is Karma in all of this? 11. Where are all the enlightened masters? There seems to me so few in these latter days. Please could one name just one living master for me? 12. A person I would call an enlightened master in present times would be mother Teresa and she did definitely not believe in the law of Karma but believed and practiced active love caring and charity nearly all the years of her long life. 13. If the law of karma is true, why are we still having more and more conflicts and wars all over the planet, instead of peace? 14. How then are the memories some claim come from past lives? I believe that locked up in our genes and encoded within the colossal D.N.A. molecule racial memories could be stored. Perhaps these ghosts of memories could perhaps leak into the conscious mind of some people who then believe they are remembering past lives. 15. Another fact that, has been proven, is forgotten childhood memories that are remembered in the case of trauma or under hypnoses. 16. My personal search for an explanation has shown not one indisputable past life memory in anyone. All could be explained rationally. 17. My own personal view on Karma and past life regression is that I hope this awful concept is not true. Who wants to live earthly mortal repeatedly? Anyway, 99.999999999+++ of people just like me have no memories of past lives. In addition, if I lived in the past and have no recollection of that life, the person I was then is truly dead. 18. I believe I exist now because years ago my beloved parents decided (Not me) to make love. I am sure I did not choose this life and am positive it is the only life I have ever had. What comes after, if anything remains an enigma to me and to everyone else on eat? 19. I therefore reject the concept of karma and reincarnation as potentially cruel false beliefs and nonsense to any logically rationally thinking person. Alan

Hi, rob, Thanks for a great reply best I have had on this subject, but we dissagree on a few points! You stated the above but it is wrong we know scientifically that matter given sufficient time decays and vanishes from existence, even protons Wik article All nucleons decay 1040 years Given our assumed half-life of the proton, nucleons (protons and bound neutrons) will have undergone roughly 1,000 half-lives by the time the universe is 10 to the power of 40 years old. To put this into perspective, there are an estimated 1080 protons currently in the universe.[25] This means that the number of nucleons will be slashed in half 1,000 times by the time the universe is 10 to the ower of 40 years old. Hence, there will be roughly ½1,000 (approximately 10−301) as many nucleons remaining as there are today; that is, zero nucleons remaining in the universe at the end of the Degenerate Age. Effectively, all baryonic matter will have been changed into photons and leptons. Some models predict the formation of stable positronium atoms with a greater diameter than the observable universe’s current diameter in 1 to the power of 85 years, and that these will in turn decay to gamma radiation in 10 to the power of 141 years

Below is my personal list by rank, please give yours? 1. # Jesus of Nazareth 2. # Mohammed 3. # Tsai Lun (credited with the invention of paper) 4. # Johann Gutenberg 5. # Isaac Newton 6. # Paul of Tarsus 7. # Shih Huang Ti 8. # Louis Pasteur 9. # Albert Einstein 10. # Siddhartha Guatama 11. # Confucius 12. # Abraham (reportedly the founder of Judaism) 13. # Aristotle 14. # Galileo Galilei 15. # Plato 16. # Tim Berners Lee (invented the world wide web (with help)) 17. # Adolph Hitler 18. # James Watt / Matthew Boulton (Watt invented it, but Boulton manufactured it and made it into big business) 19. # Constantine I (the Great) 20. # Genghis Kahn 21. # Thomas Edison 22. # Karl Marx 23. # Alexander the Great 24. # # Nikolai Tesla (invented the radio as found by the Supreme Court & pioneered AC polyphase power distribution system) 25. # Christopher Columbus 26. # Hernan Cortes 27. # Nicolas Copernicus 28. # Socrates (just because of his reputation) 29. # Philo T. Farnsworth (invented electronic television that most closely resembles contemporary ones) 30. # Charles Darwin 31. # Moses 32. # Augustus Caesar