Jesus may have traveled to India, Nepal, Ladakh and Tibet. Gruber and Kersten (1995) claim that Buddhism had a substantial influence on the life and teachings of Jesus. They claim that Jesus was influenced by the teachings and practices of Therapeutae, described by the authors as teachers of the Buddhist Theravada school then living in Judaea. They assert that Jesus lived the life of a Buddhist and taught Buddhist ideals to his disciples; their work follows in the footsteps of the Oxford New Testament scholar' Barnett Hillman Streeter, who established as early as the 1930s that the moral teaching of the Buddha has four remarkable resemblances to the Sermon on the Mount." Some scholars believe that Jesus may have been inspired by the Buddhist religion and that the Gospel of Thomas and many Nag Hammadi texts reflect this possible influence. [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_years_of_Jesus]Lost years of Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
Cool, now Oceana and the Americas? Don't worry about available means of transport for the times, we are talking the son of god here. I can only guess they weren't worth the effort.
I have to admit that it would be wonderful to believe that I am going to live forever in a land without suffering after I die. I'm not asserting that you believe this. But some folks do, and it would be wonderfully comforting. I just can't get past the fact that such a belief does not fit the available evidence.
Without getting to philosophical, we were all made with the power of conscious choice, reguardless of how you believe we came into existance. If one wants to believe in a living God and that the Bible is indeed that Gods supernaturally inspired words, there is ample evidence to have faith that it is true. But any Christian should admit that their God will not force you to believe by proving that he exist. On the other hand, in my opinion, by not proving His existance, God has also allowed for ample evedince for those who choose not to believe. For me personally, the prophecies of Daniel, chapters 2, 7, and 8 that fortold of the world kingoms of Babylon, Media Persian, Greese, Rome and Rome deviding into current Europe is proof enough.
Could you cite a reference for your statement that QM tells us that the future is unreal. I would be interested in reading that.
I don't care what invisible friends people choose to have or not have. It's when they insist that I have the same invisible friend that gets me all in a snit.
There is no evidence for god or the Bible. The prophesies you refer to are so vague they could be applied to almost anything. I find these comments of yours especially interesting: "God will not force you to believe" and "[There is] ample evidence [...] not to believe." But most fundamentalist Christians insist that if you do not believe god will torture you forever. Torture is not the act of one who loves. As for my assertion that QM says that the future does not yet exist, this comes from the fundamental principle that an unperformed experiment has no result. You can measure the position of a particle or its momentum, but not both. You can measure a particle's spin along one axis, but not two or three. To ask "What would be the spin if I did measure it?" IS A MEANINGLESS QUESTION. This is because an unperformed experiment has no result. The future is an unperformed experiment. It has no result. It does not exist until it arrives. You can set your alarm clock for tomorrow morning, but until it rings, the ringing does not exist. We can make certain predictions about the future (planetary movements tend to be very stable) but never exactly, due to quantum uncertainty and chaos effects. Even god (if he exists) cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle to an accuracy greater than Plank's constant, because it does not exist, nor can he know the spin of a particle in all three axes simultaneously. Again, Christianity was invented by people who did not understand QM or chaos theory or the nature of time itself, so they ascribed to god things that are not possible, and then made the preposterous (and in fact meaningless) statement that "god knows everything," in which they included things that do not even exist. You can believe what you like in this free country. God, the tooth fairy, kamikaze stealth Edsels on the planet Uranus, or that the moon is made of cheese. All are pretty much the same.
Belief is very consequential. If you believe that infidels are invading your homeland, that might make you strap on a bomb. If you believe that the bible is telling your that abortions equals genocide, that might make you shoot an abortion doctor. If you think that end times are coming, it might make you dress up in purple with a bunch of like minded people and drink poison. The best results occur when beliefs, decisions, and actions are based on reality.
I definitely agree. If you try to force other people to not understand evolution because of your religious beliefs, or interfere with other people's access to abortion because you interpret the Bible to say a fetus has a soul (despite the Bible equating life/spirit with breath, and a baby doesn't breath until birth), then your belief system is taking freedom away from others, and that directly conflicts with the principles of our founding fathers who separated church and state.
People believe some pretty bizarre things outside of religion. Think of superstitions that baseball players will do before or during the game (well, organized sports is essentially the same as organized religion except you can't deduct your offering, uh, I mean arena tickets). A lucky rabbit's foot, 4-leaf clovers, crystals, those "balance bracelets" and holograms you wear next to your skin, spraying WD-40 on arthritic joints. Even the fear of flying, or of shark attacks, compared to the real risk of driving is largely irrational. It would be irrational to expect people to be completely rational.
"According to quantum mechanics, an unperformed experiment has no results. The future is an unperformed experiment, therefore it does does not yet exist and has no results." If the future is an unperformed experiment who or what performs the experiment? Experiment- A test under controlled conditions that is made to demonstrate a known truth, to examine the validity of a hypothesis, or to determine the efficacy of something previously untried.
I've never had a baseball player try to force their rabbit foot superstition on me or require me to recite the Lords Prayer each morning at the start of school (Spokane Washington around 1950). or give me extra duty and restrict me to base in the military (USAF more than once ion the early 1960s) because I wouldn't lie and say I was a member of one of the preferred organized religions. Organized religion is a threat to freedom that needs to be kept under control, baseball players are entertainers.
An "experiment" in the context of QM is anything that happens. The future has not happened yet. Therefore it is an unperformed experiment. A popular misconception is that an "observation" requires a human observer. Actually, an "observation" is anything that is changed by an event. If an event has any effect upon anything else, then it has been "observed" even if there is no human present to make a note of it. Similarly, in QM an "experiment" need not be something done by scientists for a definite purpose. It can be. But it does not have to be. Your dictionary definition is a more narrow and more common usage. But it is not the definition in QM. Note that many terms have different definitions in specific fields than they have in common usage. In common usage a "bug" is any little creepy crawly, but in biology, "bug" refers to a much narrower category of insect. In common usage, a "theory" is a notion without evidence to back it up, but in science it is a well-demonstrated and complex construct that has been amply verified. Language is chock-a-block full of similar examples. In classical physics we often speak of a "thought experiment." This is a useful concept. But in QM a "thought experiment" has no result because it has only been imagined, not performed.