And thus, it's harder to keep pace with these things...(Especially since I seem to be at odds with EVERYONE, regardless of which side they are on, lol!)
Expect a vulgarly vulgated rebutt soon!
(Poor Doc Gonzo keeps getting pushed to the back of the line in his desired argument for America being founded as a "Christian Nation", poor guy... LOL!
1) WHERE in Psalms does it note the split between Judaism and the rest of the cult of El?
2)The Shekinah shows up in many Jewish households as the "bride of the Sabbath", gracing the family with her presence. As such, I think she is quite removed from Sophia. (Of course, that may be the result of rabinical demotion.)
I do have to take you to task about your discussion of chaos. To quote you:
“Chaos is literally things which follow no pattern. Order is the number 3, a rational number. Chaos is the square root of 3 which follows the initial law of a square root, but then gives a progression of random numbers. Such a number cannot even be counted. We can’t perceive it when it occurs. Yet its obeying the same ‘law’ applied to the square root of 4. Even among numbers, there are far, far more irrational ones than there are rational ones.”
Sorry, but the numerical expansion of the square root of 3 does NOT contain “random numbers”. They follow a strict pattern determined by the algorithm for computing square roots. While it is true that no subsequence of digits repeats itself indefinitely (as in the expansion of a rational number), the digits NEVER are “random”.
You also seem to forget that a probability distribution is a pattern. The sequence of times that customers appear at a checkout counter in a grocery store may appear random, but it is typically described by the laws of the Poisson distribution. The sequence of heads and tails in coin flips is modeled by the Binomial distribution.
You also seem to be overlooking the fact that strictly deterministic systems can exhibit what is apparently random behavior when the parameters governing its behavior have the right values. There IS a pattern to the apparently random behavior, but it is determined recursively, not a priori. The successive digits created by the square root algorithm operating on 3 is another example of this.
More fundamentally, the term “order” is a relational term. A set of elements is ordered if the elements can be placed in sequence by some fixed rule. By definition, a set consisting of one element cannot be said to be either ordered or disordered; it makes no sense to talk about the order in which elements appear if there is no second element to precede or follow the first element. Hence it makes no sense to say that 3 is order and the square root of 3 is chaos --- unless you are implicitly invoking a latter-day version of Pythagorean philosophy.
Finally, the set of real numbers HAS a natural ordering induced by the “less than” operator --- either a less than b, b less than a, or a = b. If one invokes the ZFC axioms (Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms with the axiom of choice), one can show that there is, in fact, a well-ordering on the reals (i.e., every subset under the well-ordering has a least element).
By the way, how can you know when the number (3l5,352,527/642,838,517) occurs? It IS rational, after all. How would you count that number?
Turning to your astrophysics, what on earth is a “fragmented neutrino”?
According to recent estimates, the amount of “light matter” in the universe adds up to about 4%; dark mass accounts for about 22%, and dark energy for about 74%. Little seems to be known about the entities constituting dark matter; some believe that the neutralino is one of the constituent particles, but they have not yet been observed. Even less is known about dark energy. So it is a bit premature to talk about structure and/or pattern (or the lack thereof) in either of these entities --- which account for 96% of the matter and energy in our universe.
Chaos: you misunderstand my drift about "random" numbers. What I meant was: drop yourself anywhere on the number progression of the square root of 3, and you cannot say which number will come next. I almost would have asked you to then try the square root of 3.00001 and watch how even with a small change in initial conditions, it will match the square root of 3 closely, but within 50 digits, it will diverge wildly. You could continue to add quantities to the number you will square. Then sometime, you will come across a rational number. The fact is, there are few of them compared to the irrationals. Few being defined in a very complex way here, and I'd rather not go into that. I'm retracting the example.
Forget that example. I was not at my best that day. In fact, I was at my piss poorest then (and not only because of that example). I'll do better now: Chaos is the arrangement of air molecules in the atmosphere of the earth. You may point out that there is no arrangement-- and that's the point. Occasionally out of that, a storm will "organize" itself, because order is a subset of chaos, but overall, there is no real order.
Chaos is the non-arrangement of stars in a galaxy, or galaxies in the universe. Within the apparent order of the "dance of the planets" in our solar system, there are many asteroids drifting around without apparent order.
Order is a planet orbiting a single body. However, if you add another sun to the equation and try to predict the orbit of the planet, you will fail. Add one other foci to the equation, and it becomes unsolvable.
Chaos is the molecules in a glass of water. Refrigerate the water, and it orders itself into ice. You can find a water molecule in the ice crystal. Come back later, and you could find it again. You cannot do the same in glass of water. There is no order to the molecules.
When you say there is a natural ordering of numbers, of course there is, because the less than operator is part of the definition of a number. If it's not ordered in such a way, it's not a number, and we'd have to find something else to call it. However, I don't want to go in that direction now, because I consider that choice an error. Numbers have no existence in the universe.
They are more like our mental effort to order it.
Fragmented neutrino-- not a technical term. I meant a neutrino fragmented from an atom, which never again will be part of atom as long as the universe lasts. That's what I meant. Something brought out of order.
Where in the psalms? Please read back a few messages on that thread. Psalm 82, where God for some reason, finds himself at the Elohim family gathering. You have a Bible. Translations vary, but I give a link to some notes on the words actually used in the source. The family is the Elohim, and the Most High-- is El. These are Ugaric As the notes will tell you, the term "the assembly of El" is only found in this Psalm.
Also, see my previous post on the topic. You've evidently forgotten the Psalm we were referring to.
http://www.theeroticreview.com/discussion_boards/viewmsg.asp?MessageID=41863&boardID=39&page=
The one thing the notes should tell you, though, is how much of a mess translating any of it is. I would actually like to see a book with all possible permutations of translations, and see all the permutations of meanings we could come up with.
My point about the square root of three is that the successive digits may APPEAR to be random because of incomplete knowledge of the behavior of the system; that only means that you don't have a dynamically sufficient model of the generator of successive digits. The sequence is NOT random, even though you cannot perceive the pattern. And by the way, the rationals are a countable set (cardinality = aleph-naught); the reals are uncountable (cardinality aleph-one).
You also seem to be tacitly assuming that order is static. A glass of water can be considered as an ensemble of molecules with distinct ensemble properties --- e.g., temperature, density, etc. If there is a density gradient of suspended particles in the glass of water, there will be orderly diffusion from areas of higher density to areas of lower density --- an orderly process.
By the way, orderings are NOT unique to numbers --- the relation "A is a subset of B" creates a partial order on the set of all subsets of the containing universal set (say, U).
The fact that we cannot solve the general multibody problem for orbiting bodies does NOT make it a random process. Again, you need to distinguish between truly random processes and deterministic processes for which we do not have a dynamically sufficient model. However ignorant WE may be, the astronomical bodies muddle through the situation somehow.
No matter how many detectors you have, you can't make measurements sufficient to make accurate predictions. Also, when you say that it's a law we just can't comprehend: not in every chaotic system, or even most. In a system called a "riddled basin" you can't even say anything qualitatively about it, according to mathematicians. When you say the progression of digits appear random-- it agrees with my thesis here. Order is a special form of chaos. As they say, if you have an infinite amount of monkeys in a room typing, ultimately, you will come up with Hamlet. Order exists because it's a form of chaos. A sufficiently large chaotic system has to ultimately produce order-- because randomly, it has to be produced sometime. That includes even randomness of forces and principles that ultimately produce the laws of order. But those evolved laws are never sufficient to remove all chaos. Counting numbers are just the thin veneer of order over a very chaotic system.
This universe is not only larger than humankind imagined in its scriptures, it is also much smaller. The scale of size that effect us include the sun which is much larger, to quarks and leptons, which are the smallest we could detect. Apparently there is something beneath that in terms of scale, and our universe is part of things much larger.
Now, no matter how unlikely, I don't discount the possibility of a creator here. It is a viable hypothesis. However, what is beyond argument is that the entity that "created" this universe would possess nothing at all like a human mind or personality. We thought of it as a human mind, because then we could reason with it or appeal to it (or them). But why would it be like us? Or even think. All our minds can do, really, is find things within the universe and alter them using the materials and physical laws we can perceive. This is definitely not something any creator of this universe had to do. It cannot even metaphorically be humanized. The most creative thing we really do is dream-- which I believe is really the brain testing itself before dealing with the universe for another day, but that is way beside the point.
Another implication: humankind has never encountered this creator. It has never encountered anything like it. In the the entire lifespan of our species or anything that evolves from it, we will likely never find it.
So, it's better with this information to progress with your life on the assumption that there is no God-- if it's possible for you to function within that belief.
...all is chaos. (Why is it that this sounds like a physicist's version of Sartre?) This seems to be a reductio ad absurdum insofar as you cannot say what chaos is NOT. Saying that a chaotic system can produce an ordered result is NOT the same thing as saying that an ordered system can produce chaotic results. A stopped clock is right two times a day.
I did NOT say there are no truly chaotic systems. I was trying to distinguish betweem truly random processes and deterministic (non-random) systems producing results that APPEAR random. Do you adopt the Eastern mystical point of view that all is illusion --- specifically, order?
You go on to argue against the existence of any God resembling the Gods we worship. It is ironic that, while the Bible asserts that man was created in God's image, the truth is that man has made God in HIS own image. Nikos Kazantzakis stated something like this in the Prologue of his "Report to Greco", where he states "We must give God solidity lest He perish, so that He may give us solidity lest we perish."
The Pagan author Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits in his book "Real Magic" devotes Chapter 6 to a discussion of his theory of the (psychic) switchboard, wherein all human thoughts are captured and circuits made that couple beliefs. These circuits are capable of storing energy and being tapped by people in many ways. In this sense, he argues, every demon, god, etc. worshipped by people become real in a psychic sense. (I can only crudely approximate his discussion; you might find it interesting to read that chapter, if not the whole book.)