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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
God the Finite
Monday. 1.30.12 3:50 pm
I have been thinking about infinity again a lot lately. Infinity... it just goes on and on and on forever! I usually think about it as a series of white numbers on a black background which come very close to the viewer and then as we pull away, fade into the vast reaches of empty blackness. Mathematically you can suggest infinity by putting an ellipsis [1, 2, 3...]. Everyone has their own way of dealing with infinity, I guess.

But infinity is a tricky beast, even for mathematicians. Stray infinities can bungle large model calculations. You can stay up half your nights chasing after wandering infinities. You can spend enormous amounts of time crossing out large sections of equations after you find that they go to zero, or trying to flip them over if they go to infinity. And there are the infinity over infinity cases. The infinity over zero. We call these "indeterminant", or "undefined". It seems silly that things in math can be "undefined". We made up math, didn't we? Can't we just "define" them? No, we can't, because math is really just a language that we use to describe the universe, and some things in the universe cannot be defined. These are the universe's way of telling you that you are operating out of your appropriate domain. ;)

Naturally thinking about infinity got me thinking about God, and how God is infinite. God isn't even a normal, hometown, countable infinity like aleph zero. God is like taking all of the infinite cardinals and adding them up to make a crazy super infinite cardinal that not only encompasses infinity many times over, but encompasses all possible infinities.

Human beings are by definition finite beings. We are finite in space, we are tragically finite in time, and the way in which we are able to perceive the world around is cripplingly finite. Just think about the Universe and how little of it we are actually able to see! Just think about our five senses and our lowly instrumentation and imagine all the other kinds of things that could be out there that we can't even imagine how to detect??

It seems logical then, that God would find us rather frustrating, if God had human emotions. God knows everything at all times and in all places. God understands everything and is everything. We are in one place at a time. We understand very little beyond what we have seen with our own eyes. We know what happens in our time and place, and then when we pass away our memories pass away with us. God has to constantly forgive us for doing things which are, to the all-seeing, blatently stupid and unwise. Every way in which we think about God is merely a projection of a vast infinity into something that we can understand better. We imagine that God looks like a man with robes and a white flowing beard. It is laughable to think that infinity could fit into a man with a white flowing beard. But how are we supposed to imagine God? Is this better ∞? Does God fit into a sideways 8? We each have a frame of reference, and we do our best to project God into it. One can hardly blame we finite beings for doing that.

Since God is everything and encompasses all experience, I sometimes wonder if the one thing that God hadn't ever experienced was being finite. After all, it is always very confusing to constrain the differences between Jesus and God (and the Holy Spirit, of course). How can three entities be one God? How can Jesus be the son of God, and also God himself? I think of Jesus as the finite manifestation of God. Since God is all things, he can't exactly make himself completely finite, or the universe would cease to exist. He would have to manifest himself in a finite being. You can't fit all of existence into the body of a man!

But how bizarre would it be to go from being Infinity to being a newborn baby? I suppose it would be good that you'd start out that way, because you would have so little awareness that you wouldn't even be aware of what you were missing. You'd have quite a few years to get used the Finite-game before you realized what was going on. I'm sure once Jesus got to an age where he was cognizant that he was the Son of the Lord, it was very weird to go around finitely, interacting with other finite creatures, eating food, seeing only out of two eyes, walking from city to city in a linear fashion instead of simultaneously being all places at once. That must have been very strange. Then, being alone able to grasp the power and knowledge of the Infinite, you would try to pass this information on the people around you. To you it would seem obvious and compelling, but to them it would seem at best cryptic, and at worst false. How frustrating would those finite creatures be! How narrow their minds! How short their sight! Death means nothing to the infinite! A body does not confine the infinite! But of course you could be nothing besides understanding, because you are Understanding itself, and you could be nothing but forgiving, since it was you who created these finite creatures to begin with.

I kind of think of dying as becoming one with God, and suddenly becoming aware of everything, in a way that is impossible while we are shackled by our bodies. It wouldn't be like we would "become" a God, or gods, only that we would suddenly be aware of the totality of existence, which would be totally mind-blowing if our ordinary human brain wasn't already dead.

Anyway, it's getting late, and my pathetically limited animated corpse requires 9 hours of unconsciousness per day for adequate function.

[ ... ]





Recommended by 4 Members
middaymoon dannixfresh The-Muffin-Man undisputed
8 Comments.


heeeheeeheeheeeeee love it.

Speaking of mind-crippling, have you read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
» middaymoon on 2012-01-30 06:59:18

nice. i have never thought of infinity before. i only dream if only my money account is infinite.
» renaye on 2012-01-30 07:06:13

-nods fervently-
» middaymoon on 2012-01-31 01:16:47

Well.

Now calculus seems less complicated in comparison, at least.
» Unicornasaurus on 2012-01-31 09:47:09

Laughed when I read the description.

"But sometimes they always died."
» randomjunk on 2012-02-01 12:50:03

I love this. Really.
» The-Muffin-Man on 2012-02-01 03:32:18

:)
4321
» dannixfresh on 2012-02-06 04:25:41

I kind of doubt it. He's got work and class, so it's unlikely we could get anything together. Might not even see him that day, since it's a Tuesday, and he usually reserves the weekdays for his other responsibilities.
» randomjunk on 2012-02-10 01:38:36

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