Prologos, your question provoked me enough to do some reading and listening. My concern was about energy conservation in the primordial universe and energy conservation of dark energy over the life of the universe. I have run into a few instances of Sean Carroll or others saying that a flat universe is the only possible universe to require no starting energy, and is therefore the only universe to not need a god and to be explainable by quantum fluctuation theory. In a closed universe you must start with an excess of mass; in an open universe you must start with an excess of potential energy. Due to God's Abundant Energy (TM), He May have made a closed universe or an open universe. But we see something that does not demand a starting excess of either. I believe my second concern is answered in the QA session of the lengthy (epic, imo) talk by Alex Filippenko, Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe. It has a bonus QA where the speaker knocks out of the park a question about Science versus Faith.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPkGEVgOJK0
Posts by rmt1
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111" the universe made itself " but---
by prologos inwatching the fertilization of an ovum and subsequent cell division it appears that the new being is making itself.
parents were involved, unskilled labor, time, energy.
no thing has ever been observed to make itself, to my knowledge.
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rmt1
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WHERE IS THE BEEF - Little Bitty Skinny Magazines
by Bob_NC inthe magazines were left in my door today.
skinny little things with a lot of pictures and bullet-type commentary.
actual articles are almost non-existent.
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rmt1
It takes an iron grip on family member's brains from a soulless hostage-taker to keep many common sense bearing people from walking away. Their senses do not deceive them. They do not possess any pretensions to an excuse. I'll be damned if my biological brothers are as stupid as to swallow all these manifest contractions and back-pedalling without a few cracks in the foundation.
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129
They are Definitely Attacking "Higher Education"
by XBEHERE ina friend of mine recently had his co visit and in the elders meeting the co out-right asked the question: how are the friends doing in your cong.
as regards pursuing higher education?
the co continued...you know in view of all the counsel from the slave regarding the dangers.
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rmt1
Those skills and services are expensive to procure legitimately on the street. This is basically a black market in skills. They want "the worker is worthy of his wages" -valued skill sets for free, if someone is so persuaded as to donate them. Mechanical / electrical / civil start about $40k - $50k national average straight out of the undergrad.
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Stats: Does Money affect the growth? Analyze please...
by ILoveTTATT ini made a graph of the new members from 2012 to 2013 in all countries that had positive growth, and graphed them against the country's gdp per capita.. .
the general trend is, as expected, less growth the more money there is in a country.
but there were some unexpected results.
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rmt1
US has huge immigrant populations, huge assured income programs, declining public education standards, climbing wealth disparity, and is of course ground zero for the cult, so bears a location/heritage bonus.
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106
No more doubts for me! Good-bye JWN! We have THE TRUTH!
by DATA-DOG ini could go on and on about my personal journey over the last 2 years or so, but i don't need to.
everything i needed to hear to finally lay my doubts to rest happened on one meeting night.
it could only be divine providence.
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rmt1
I do have to say that the Watchtower's Message Editing and Preparation Service is sine qua non.
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106
No more doubts for me! Good-bye JWN! We have THE TRUTH!
by DATA-DOG ini could go on and on about my personal journey over the last 2 years or so, but i don't need to.
everything i needed to hear to finally lay my doubts to rest happened on one meeting night.
it could only be divine providence.
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rmt1
Well, it's obviously one of the following or not:
MEPS Medical Expenditure Panel Survey MEPS Minimum Energy Performance Standards (Australia & New Zealand) MEPS Military Entrance Processing Station MEPS Malaysian Electronic Payment System MEPS Military Enlistment Processing Station MEPS Multilanguage Electronic Phototypesetting System MEPS Mechanical Electrical Plumbing Structural (construction) MEPS Modification Engineering Program Status MEPS Microgravity Encapsulation Process System MEPS Message Editing and Preparation Service MEPS Mobile Emergency Psychiatric Services MEPS Mobile Electric Power System MEPS Management Engineering and Production Services (UK Consultancy Steel Company) MEPS Member of the Emergency Planning Society (UK) -
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This weeks LIE in the brochure
by DS211 inthis week in the brochure for the "bible reading" it states on subject 24. that jehovahs witnesses wrote a century ago that jehovahs bacjs us and we do t take donations "and we never have!!!!
".....please someone post the information to prove this as a lie as we all know they used to charge for literature.
this is an outright lie lol ridiculous..
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Scientists Find One Source of PrayerÂ’s Power
by alecholmesthedetective inthis is an interesting article from scientific american about a study on how prayer helps increase one's self-control through social connection.
this adds to previous research on the subject.
it's a short article and a worth read.. .
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rmt1
I would put prayer with methods of intense visualization and with the hypothesis that dreams are drills or rehearsals. The mother-in-law preaches "Law of Attraction" where you can attract good things if you concentrate on good things but bad things if you concentrate on bad things, with "manifestation" being the related idea that if you picture yourself in the desired circumstance, the law of attraction will pull you towards that eventuality. I put this woo through a distillery and came up with what I think is a rational inventory and instruction set of moving parts: If you intensely vizualize a circumstance you are not in but want to be in, or, if you know what you want to be the end product, the degree of 'reality' with which you visualize it can trigger iterative reverse engineering that probes back through parameter space to the available starting conditions. If you want the job in the shiny building, you visualize yourself in it, you make it so real that you can barely believe your fortune, and you are forced to ask yourself, "How did I get here?!", and that tricks your subconscious problem-solving abilities into grappling with it as if it were a real-life / non-hypothetical problem.
I've got zero tips or insights on making yourself a "better person".
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SO you turned your back on God
by maccauk11 inok so you had a bad experience and you stopped going to church which ever one that is.
but did you stop believing or are you that peeved you blame god etc.
i would encourage you to humble yourself before your messiah and seek him, he will let himself be found by you and come dwells within you.
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rmt1
Uh. I devoutly worship with those who seek out whatever lies above, behind, underneath, throughout, or outside of our physical universe and experience, using methods of iteratively and separately reproducable testing.
I'm not going to go crazy and actually look up a bunch of 4000 year old chicken scratch, but I am recently intrigued by what the old yarn says about testing god. E.g.:
http://www.openbible.info/topics/testing_god
Insofar as the -let's call it the observer- is permitted to use his cognition and conduct a test on the premise or promise of the benevolent god black box, I *think* a reasonable interpretation of the data of millenia is that there are far more heinous and horrendous events that receive no god-like remediation than there are heinous and horrendous events that DO receive god-like remediation.
And insofar as observer is Not permitted to test god, well, what does that say about the premise that god values or intends for you to utilize, leverage, capitalize on the cognition he supposedly gave you?
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129
They are Definitely Attacking "Higher Education"
by XBEHERE ina friend of mine recently had his co visit and in the elders meeting the co out-right asked the question: how are the friends doing in your cong.
as regards pursuing higher education?
the co continued...you know in view of all the counsel from the slave regarding the dangers.
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rmt1
Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018.
http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/fullreport.pdf
tl;dr : Just start looking at the graphs and projections starting in Part 4 on page 63.