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ANDREW'S
RANTS ARCHIVE #5 THE ANDREW' RANTS ARCHIVE OF PAST COLUMNS ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #1 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #2 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #3 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #4 CURRENT ANDREW'S RANTS ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #6 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #7 ANDREW'S RANTS ARCHIVE #8 |
DECEMBER
19th, 2005 |
PROOF
OF GOD This past week I sat around and read a new book. It was titled "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. I had to reread many sections over and over to even grasp the meaning of what Mr. Hawking was trying to dumb down for the common layman. I am sure some of my friends like George Smith or Johnny 'Rocket Man' Baker would think it was an easy read and skim right through it. But as I struggled through the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal and the effects of Dark Matter upon the universe I came to realize that the entire universe as we know it operates upon a set of Laws and Principals that are set in stone so to speak. Even if we can not get the Theory of Relativity to work hand in hand with Quantum Mechanics and each says the other is wrong but both seem to work within our limited scope it doesn’t mean that either is wrong. It’s just so much more complicated that we can’t see the whole picture of what’s going on. As Hawking talked about Singularities that would contain the entire Universe at the beginning of existence before time and space or the universe I came to a realization that the only thing that could contain such unimaginable forces in such a state where even size is nonexistent is GOD. There is no other way it could happen. The Universe around us is so complicated and massive that we as humans with our limited frame of reference cannot even begin to grasp a small portion of the factors involved. Make fun of Sagan with all his Billions if you want but he is on the money with the size thing even if he missed the mark on who put it all together. You see the Universe operates on a complex set of physics so particular and precise that it would not all hold together if even one type of particle did not do exactly as it is supposed to. What I mean is it is no accident that we are here. It was designed and thought out. It was worked and reworked and reworked again and again repeatedly until God got it right. Example the 3 Mass Extinctions here on earth until God came up with us. He would create an eco system and let it run and see how things went then if he didn’t like it or got bored or thought he could do better he would have a massive 'Do Over' and wipe out a lot of stuff and start over. Remember the PRECAMBRIAND PERIOD or the later try with all the dinosaurs. But I digress. What I am trying to get at and not really communicating well is that a lot of people need to have proof of God to believe. The proof is you. Your very existence is proof. Lets break it down. Hold up your hand. It is the most versatile instrument on Earth and can do anything from wiping your ass to sending a Man to the Moon. It is a thing of flesh and blood comprised of over 148,000 different amino acids in a specific combination. Remember that DNA stuff? Each of those has to be exactly the way they are or they wouldn’t work at all and you would just have a claw or beak or slimy pseudofoot. The laws of so-called evolution do allow for change but to have a spontaneous evolutionary occurrence that is beneficial and not detrimental to a species is about a billion to 1. Factor that by the number of different amino acids and you get impossible. It didn’t happen by mistake it was designed along those previous laws of physics I talked about. Each of those amino acids is composed of molecules and atoms and muons, gluons, electrons, neutrons, quarks, leptons, neutrinos, 1,2,3,4, and ½ spin virtual particles that are so small they work only on a gravimetric scale. If even one of these particles didn’t do exactly as it should every time then You Wouldn’t Exist. The Universe Wouldn’t Exist. And you thought a Rubix Cube was complicated? The more I read this book the more I came to realize that God was a very orderly and organized being and that even the chaos in our Universe was designed to do just as it does to fulfill a specific role that might not be all that chaotic when fully understood. Many people think we can only find information about God by reading the Bible and I say, 'that aint so'. You can find out a lot just by observing the world around you. This book proved that to me and it certainly was not written with a religious message in mind. It just brought to light information that wouldn’t exist without a guiding hand. You want proof scratch your head with that hand of yours and look up at the Night Sky. |
DECEMBER
5th, 2005 |
HAPPY
BIRTHDAY Last evening we went out to eat at Texas Roadhouse. Its just full of County and Western atmosphere and a lot of DINKS (Double Income No Kids) that want to show each other how "Down to Earth" they can act as they drive up in their Beamers. We ordered and I got my favorite item on the menu, Green Beans. I love their Green Beans and wish I had a recipe for that style of beans. Anyway as we sat eating, my glass got empty and I looked around for a server and none were to be seen. NONE anywhere in the restaurant. Then suddenly from the kitchen the entire Staff burst forth with a Small Cup Cake-sized Pastry with a sputtering Candle on top screaming at the top of their lungs. You know the drill, the Happy Birthday 'thing' with Cheering, Clapping and so forth while the intended victim acts surprised and spits out the Candle. All the while my glass is empty. This happened again just moments later and then yet again ten minutes later. No sooner would one parade of foolishness end than some 'Goober' would feel left out and declare it his Birthday so he could be the center of attention. Geez! if you want attention go shopping 'nekkid' in Wal Mart or if you want singing, go to Up Chuck Cheeses where the animatronics bears might give a Damn, cause I sure don’t. I still didn’t get my glass refilled and the Waiter didn’t get a tip. Waiters should wait on people. They shouldn’t be off singing Happy Birthday to some Dumbass that isn’t in their area and not going to tip them anyway. They also shouldn’t be overly friendly. For example they will introduce themselves by first name and sit down at the table with you so that things seem more casual, WHO CARES!!!!! Shut up Jean Claude! get off your ass, and bring us a beer, I don’t want to be your friend or adopt you, I just want you to bring me some food so I can eat. I don’t want a server getting friendly unless I am dining at Hooters and she is blond and stacked. I swear the next time I am in a restaurant and they start that Happy Birthday crap that just gathers momentum like a bad taste landslide I will get up, leave and not pay the tab. You just watch. I might even stop on the way out and slap the Birthday Person right across the mouth just for fun. Yep, that’s what the 'snapper heads' need is a good old fashion “Smack Inna Mouf”. |
OCTOBER
17th, 2005 |
REVELATIONS
FROM THE SHOWER As many of you know I recently became an ordained clergy person in the Church of Spiritual Humanism. It was done as a lark on a whim. I paid them 60 dollars and received the title of Reverend Father. As I began to think about this I realized that perhaps even as a joke it might be a bit sacrilegious and decided to actually study the bible a bit more and try to understand my own chosen religion. It seems every morning that while I am in the shower under the scalding water as my brain is jolted awake I do my best thinking. Eyes closed against the sting of soap I ponder the nuances of what I read the evening before as I prepared for sleep. I read late night in bed much to my wife’s annoyance. Anyway I begin to look at what I read from different angles and examine it from not only a spiritual point of view but also a scientific perspective. Now this doesn’t mean that if science cannot explain something it is not real or has no relevance. Science is just a tool of logic and experience to help one understand something by providing a logical frame of reference. When it can’t do that then you need to learn more so that you can understand. That is why science is always expanding, growing, and developing new theories and revealing new information. As I said just because you can't explain something with science doesn’t make it not so. It just means that you can’t explain it yet but its still real. That’s where faith comes into play. Sometimes you just have to believe for the sake of the belief alone. Anyway as I stood there under the water stream the other morning I thought about Noah and his arc. We read in the bible how the entire world was covered with water and it rained for 40 days and nights. We know now that there is not enough water on earth to cover the entire surface even if all the liquid trapped as ice at the Polar Regions was melted. Although it would certainly go a long way towards flooding every low-lying costal region. If you look at most civilizations they grew up around natural water sources like rivers or lakes or oceans. Easy access is necessary for any beginning society not only for drinking but agriculture and transportation. We do know without a doubt that there was a catastrophe in the dim historical past that caused massive flooding. It is recorded around the world in many different civilizations records independent of each other. Many scientist now think it was a case of plate shifting in which the continents will shift across the surface of the molten core of the earth in a sudden gestalt movement that happens every 40 thousand years or so. It seems that the idea of slow plate movement is a fallacy of erroneous thinking and that in a matter of hours the entire earth shifts its magnetic poles as the surface continents swirled around. It sounds to incredible to be true but it is. We can see the evidence in rock formations where magnetic north will change by sometimes as much as 180 degrees in a matter of a week. Einstein theorized that this shifting was caused by ice building up at the poles. As it snows and ice is added each year the ice pack grows larger and larger. Eventually the amount of water trapped as ice at the poles is so out of proportion to the earths balance that something has to give and the planet self corrects. In this instance the very crust shifts on its liquid base. Suddenly what was a tropical jungle is now the North Pole. It explains a lot that plagued scientist for many years. Like why under the Antarctic ice there is a lush tropical jungle 400 feet down frozen solid or why they can dig up frozen mammoths with food still in their mouths but just freeze dried in mid chew. From the current theories the climate would have gone from sub tropical to 180 below freezing in less than 2 hours. This would \cause all the water trapped as ice to melt rapidly over a period of months and the condensate would cause terrible storms that would rearrange weather patterns for years. Remember Ethiopia used to be the Garden of Eden, now look at it. It has also been theorized that this event which occurred last about 25000 years ago was responsible for the overflow of the ocean at the Gibraltar straights which caused the small land bridge to give way and flood the entire area now known as the Mesopotamian sea. It is widely proven that under this sea are hundreds of villages and some massive cities that were deluged with water and covered literally overnight. They are our best source of archeological treasures from that time period. Cities like Troy that were thought to have been a myth entirely have been unearthed along with Rhodes Helike and major portions of Alexandria. Some are so old they do not even have names or historical references. If you were living in this low lying area and suddenly it began to rain and the world filled with water from horizon to horizon then certainly to your frame of reference the world was flooded. What I find truly amazing is the stories that come from other great cultures. In many ways, so similar, yet also unique. Take Hawaii, for instance. Before Christian influence, they seem to have had a story about the great flood -- the Kai-a-ka-hina-li’i -- which left two people stranded on top of the peak of Mauna Kea. Then there is the story from the Peruvian Incas. When two shepherd brothers were warned by their llamas that a great flood was coming, they hid away in a great cave. As it rained and the floodwaters rose, the mountain in which they were hiding kept growing higher and kept them above the flood. After the flood, the shepherds and their families repopulated the Earth, but the llamas always preferred to stay in the highlands because they remembered the flood. Smart llamas! The Aztec, who had a myth about the great flood before the Europeans arrived with their version, believed that Tata and Nena were saved because they were instructed to hollow out a great log for a boat. In Greece, the son of Prometheus -- Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, were placed in a large wooden chest. They landed on Mount Parnassus after the flood, which was caused when it rained for nine days and nine nights. Many people think the bible is the oldest record of the flood but you must remember that writing was around thousands of years before the first book of the bible was ever penned. Others erroneously think that the story of Gilgamesh is the earliest written tale but once again they are wrong. Gilgamesh even refers in its latter chapters to a man known as Utnaphistim. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the story of King Gilgamesh of Uruk who oppresses his people. As punishment, the gods send him a companion, Enkidu, who is his mirror image and becomes his good friend. Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu defy the gods by killing the giant Humbaba, cutting down the sacred cedar forest which he guards, and killing the Bull of Heaven. Enkidu has ominous dreams of the destiny of tyrants who become slaves in the House of Death. Enkidu finally dies of an illness sent by the gods. Horrified by Enkidu's death and the prospect of his own demise, Gilgamesh undertakes a quest for immortality, which brings him to the abode of Utnapishtim, a virtuous man who obeys the gods and was saved by them from the Great Flood. Utnapishtim puts Gilgamesh to various tests, which he fails and eventually sends him away, assuring him that he cannot escape death. A humbled Gilgamesh returns to Uruk and orders his story to be inscribed in stone. To Gilgamesh Utnapishtim was an ancient tale already from their dim past. It was most likely passed down by word of mouth until it was finally written down the first time most likely in cuneiform characters on clay tablets some of which were found at Nippúr in Mesopotamia and dating back to around 4,000 BC; The most common copy is based on the 12-tablet Akkadian version of the poem found in the 25,000-tablet library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC) at Niniveh. I guess my point to all this flood business is that just because it’s in the bible doesn’t mean it’s the unquestioned absolute only story. I’m not saying its wrong but that it has to be viewed from the perspective of the writer. In the era in which the bible was written they had different views on many things than we do now days. An excellent example of this is the council of Trent of 1545 in which several books of the bible were edited out simply because they did not agree with the formal view point of the church at the time. They eliminated any reference to females of power or any situation that questioned the total authority of the church over daily life and finances. It has been shown that the version we most commonly use as our standard version the King James is a far cry from the original copies found on the Dead Sea scrolls. Political Power struggles and basic human greed, along with normal mistakes and errors have changed the content of our holiest book away from what it originally was intended to be. In fact you can buy a copy of the bible with the edited books restored. They are called the books of the Apocrypha. The Catholic Church recognizes them but will not canonize them. So back to the flood I know this is all disjointed but you gotta remember its happening in the shower. Thoughts sorta washing down the drain so to speak. Sure a flood happened. No I don’t think it covered the world. Noah most likely built a big barge and put all his livestock on it. No he didn’t put two of every animal on it. First of all for viable breeding stock you need a set of at least 7 non-related chromosomes strands to avoid the Hapsburg effect and run into reciprocity of DNA and stacking of genetic defects. Second to hold two of every animal and their feed and accessories would require a ship the size of an aircraft carrier. It just didn’t happen. I think Noah took the barnyard animals when the yard began to flood and they made a safe get away. To him those were all the animals in the world anyway. Do you think he had ever seen a koala bear or hippo? Try putting a mad rhino in a wooden stall for a month. Trust me you wouldn’t have much of a ship left after that. Yes I think God told Noah to prepare for a flood and that is based purely on faith. I also think God warned many other people in many other countries around the world and helped them survive. If he didn’t we would all look middle eastern and that is just not the case. Thank God for that because I don’t think I could handle not bathing and wearing goat sweat as an aftershave. Perhaps the Christians just had better PR than a lot of the other religions. Perhaps they are all valid to some extent. But that is a shower for another time. |
AUGUST
1st, 2005 |
| STOPPING
FOR THE DEAD Why is it people stop for funerals? I know what most people say, "It’s to show respect for the dead". They’re dead, they don’t care. They needed respect when they were alive. If you're that concerned with showing respect then the next time you are honking your horn in frustration at a stupid driver or flipping someone, who you don’t know, the finger because they cut you off, remember that so called "need to show respect". The next time you see a Homeless Person pushing a cart or sleeping on a Park Bench show some of that 'respect' by helping them get back on their feet. What you don’t need to do is bow up in front of me at 50 miles an hour and come to a screeching halt because some dead guy is passing you in a hearse on the opposite side of a 4 lane restricted access highway. This causes wrecks and deaths. This is the situation. I spend half of my life waiting at Red Lights and trying to get around some of the 'Room Temperature IQ Morons' out there who have managed to pass the DMV’s Drivers License Test, or trying to avoid being hit by 'aging geriatrics' peering myopically over their steering wheel while driving a 20 ton Land Yacht. These people make my life miserable and they are the very ones who will slow you down on the way to work when you are 10 minutes late. They are also the very same morons who will slam on their brakes at the first sight of a funeral procession. It’s not the law that you have to do this. I’m not saying blast past at 80 miles per hour and play loud music but just keep going the same speed and go around them. For God's sake, don’t slam on the brakes, someone might be behind you and let me give you a real big hint: The guy is dead ... he has all the time in the world to get there. I, on the other hand, don’t have that luxury. It’s the same with School Busses and Ambulances. If they are on the other side of the road going in the opposite direction don’t freaking stop. Just keep going you stupid Snapper Heads. Sure if the School Bus is stopped with its sign out unloading kids you need to stop as well or if the Ambulance is coming up behind you then get out of the way but not if they are coming from the opposite direction. Just the other day I went around a funeral procession that was going 3 miles an hour and my wife gave me hell about it and several other motorist honked at me. It was two lanes going in the same direction and they were only using one so why shouldn’t those of us with life still in us, and a schedule to meet, use that other lane. But of course, I had to stop at the next light and here comes the hearse with its 3 block-long tail. They just drive right on through the intersection and ignore the Red Light and sure enough a Water Delivery Truck has to slam on its breaks to avoid smashing into one of the cars in the procession as it sails leisurely through the intersection ignoring the Red Light. A car then slams into the back of the Water Truck and the hood crumples up like an accordion. Aren’t they supposed to have police escorts when they run lights? And if they are in such a hurry to get there that they have to run a light, then why the hell don’t they drive any faster that the snail crawl they barely manage? 'Show respect for the living', I say and follow the normal traffic safety laws just like the rest of us have to. You don’t see me getting a group of friends together and parading around town causing traffic problems. Oh No, we would get a ticket so fast it would make your head spin. No, I think it’s a plot by the Funeral Directors to generate more business. They are hoping that people will get killed so that they will have more dead bodies piling up from all the car crashes they are causing. So in conclusion, just remember the stiff in the lead is dead. More than likely you didn’t even know him and wouldn’t have said 'Hi' to them if you passed on the street. Why on earth do you feel the need now, when they are dead, to show some amount of false respect for someone? Just keep on going cause I might be behind you and from now on ... I’m not stopping. That’s right, from this point on all you Snapper Heads out there in love with your break pedal and a false sense of propriety just remember that big F150 in the rear view mirror with the rail road tie for a bumper is not stopping. So either get busy driving or get busy being dead ... your choice. Who knows perhaps I might even slow down a little for your funeral ... but I doubt it. |
