COVID-19 ... how we cope :)

[Lucas Davies]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH8DJGoD4Vg

[Pargat Perrer]

This raises an important question. Does God exist outside of time or inside of time? If He exists outside of time, then He is eternally present to everything we experience as past and future and therefore He knows who will win every game because in His mind the games have already been played out. If so, He must make a killing with the bookies. But if God exists inside of time then He can only guess just like the rest of us and will be at the mercy of the odds-makers.

Questions about time are unanswerable for us who are trapped within spacetime... for example, people who have near death experiences say that while they were on the other side, "time didn't exist there". Yet inevitably they are told, "You must go back, it isn't your time."

You are correct that time and change are synonymous... along with temperature, at least in this physical plane. There cannot be one without the other, and if there is no time at all, then it is absolute zero and nothing at all is moving or happening.

Yet perhaps there are infinite threads of time, so that there was OR WILL BE a time where the Toronto Maple Leafs won the 2021 Stanley Cup, as well as all the Stanley Cups before and after that.

Perhaps what God does in order to "not know" who is going to win a sports event is that he randomizes which thread of time he will go into. For that to work, he would need to have a perfect randomizer, so that he would have no way to know or to guess which thread he will go into during a particular couch potato evening.... lol. But if he has a perfect randomizer, then how can he be sure that the thread he goes into actually took place? Because a perfect randomizer could create a thread that never actually happened.... unless there is no such thing.... and all possible, infinitely possible, threads of time have already happened OR ARE SURE TO HAPPEN.

Your honor.... I plead insanity. (><)

[Brad Thomson]

But if God existed outside of time then He could not not know. For all of His eternal and infinite existence would be present to Him always. Change is possible for God, as you suggest, only if He exists inside of time, or perhaps more properly put, only if He IS Time itself. It is important to note that if God exists outside of time, then the universe is completely deterministic and we are neither free nor responsible for our actions. Given the number of chess blunders most of us make, it might be appealing to subscribe to a metaphysic that tells us it is not our fault and that our blunders were eternally destined and therefore absolutely out of our control.

[Pargat Perrer]

But if God existed outside of time then He could not not know. For all of His eternal and infinite existence would be present to Him always. Change is possible for God, as you suggest, only if He exists inside of time, or perhaps more properly put, only if He IS Time itself. It is important to note that if God exists outside of time, then the universe is completely deterministic and we are neither free nor responsible for our actions. Given the number of chess blunders most of us make, it might be appealing to subscribe to a metaphysic that tells us it is not our fault and that our blunders were eternally destined and therefore absolutely out of our control.

I thought maybe you had made a typo... until I read more carefully your opening line and "....He could not not know."

Ok, so I think God must exist inside time, because for God to be infinite in any way, he must be changing. Infinity or "infiniteness" is not a static state. We have a symbol for infinity, and we use it in equations, but there is no infinite number. An interesting question arising from that is the question of how fast is infinity growing. The speed of light? But what would that mean in terms of infinite numbers? I think it is growing infinitely fast. So infinity's growth is getting exponentially faster and faster.

If total information is infinite, which means it is growing at an infinitely faster exponential rate, it follows that we can never catch up, we can never know all things, which does not hold for God, because God embodies all information including every new bit of information, which I think is fine, it is part of the property of God of being infinite. We can never catch up, but God is always caught up, there is no speed of growth of information at which God cannot keep up.

If chess blunders are not our fault, then is ANYTHING our fault? Does sin exist if nothing is our fault? Many people who have had near death experiences and have gotten as far as the life review stage say that God does not judge, we only judge ourselves (although we are made to feel the pain we inflict on others, i.e. we experience the event as the person we inflicted pain upon, so I suppose that could be said to be a form of judgment).

[Brad Thomson]

If God exists outside of time then nothing is our fault and we have no freedom and we are not morally responsible. Some theologians will disagree, but if the entirety of our lives exist permanently in God then we cannot change them, for from God's perspective there is no change. Thus, what "will" happen to us from our limited perspective has always eternally already happened from God's perspective. This is the position of the philosopher Spinoza, and he is deemed to be an atheist. Placing God outside of time defines Him out of existence.

As far as infinity goes, it seems to me that the concept is without meaning. Even God who is One is finite, He is just much bigger than the rest of us.

[Pargat Perrer]

If God exists outside of time then nothing is our fault and we have no freedom and we are not morally responsible. Some theologians will disagree, but if the entirety of our lives exist permanently in God then we cannot change them, for from God's perspective there is no change. Thus, what "will" happen to us from our limited perspective has always eternally already happened from God's perspective. This is the position of the philosopher Spinoza, and he is deemed to be an atheist. Placing God outside of time defines Him out of existence.

As far as infinity goes, it seems to me that the concept is without meaning. Even God who is One is finite, He is just much bigger than the rest of us.

Brad, I'd like to get away from this topic of God inside or outside of time to get into another philosophical question. Do you think, given all the physical laws we know about in this universe and the inherent entropy, that it is possible for humanity to achieve perfection? And by perfection, I mean the achievement of eternal good health and thus immortal life (even if the latter is done by some kind of digital transfer of one's living state from one entity into another, i.e. a "copy and paste" in which after the paste, the "new" entity has all the memories and self-identification that the original had.)

The words eternal and immortal in this context would mean at the very least life and good health for as long as the universe itself holds together.

I think on this topic a lot. Futurists like to say that we are just a few decades away from a singularity after which we will extend our lives through nanotechnology and other medical breakthroughs, and as long as we don't nuke ourselves out of existence or the Earth doesn't climate change us out of existence, we will go on and on with improvements until we are immortal and eternally youthful (again, for as long as the universe holds together).

If yes we can do this, then does that mean God does not exist? Because if God existed, surely he would not allow his creation to achieve God-like status?

Covid has a place in this philosophical discourse. Because covid happened to come along just when we were on the cusp of what seemee like endless economic growth. At the end of 2019, I read an article (can't remember the source) that basically said 2020 was going to be a banner year for all stock markets and bond markets worldwide, and the growth was going to be virtually unstoppable. There was a heady, euphoric atmosphere of unbridled optimism. And I said to myself, oh-oh, something is about to happen. And boom! covid happened. It really makes me think that the universe is rigged against us, we will always suffer these kind of setbacks to prevent us from achieving any kind of god-like status.

Viruses just appear out of nowhere. We don't even know what they really are or where they come from. If they come to us from bats, where do bats get them from? Are they adrift in the void of outer space and get pulled into Earth's atmosphere? We will likely never know.

[Brad Thomson]

To answer your initial question, yes. All we need to do is love each other and love the world we live in, love being not a state of mind but a mode of continuous action. Physical laws, or the Laws of Nature, are nothing more than observable patterns in God's thoughts, His thinking of the external world in His imagination, in which we reside. Material substance does not exist, only minds exist. The "external world" is nothing more than ideas of sense that God places directly into our minds. As finite spirits we are already immortal unless God extinguishes us, or unless we collectively extinguish God, a process we are well on the way to accomplishing it seems to me. The "new" entity you speak of would only be a duplicate, the original would be dead and gone, for there would be no continuity of a finite spirit throughout. I do not believe that science has any answers, only morality does. To me God exists, but He is a baby, undeveloped, learning about Himself. It is up to humans to teach God, to bring Him along and to allow for His full actualization, His full self-realization. We are not doing a very good job, and existence may disappear as a result, God may die and the entirety of existence may die along with Him if we humans do not smarten up. Covid is God playing tit for tat. If we do not love, nor will He, if we love so will He. This is in His nature, He cannot avoid this reciprocal process.

[Brian Profit]

[Sid Belzberg]

Important letter.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...4prOodxok/edit

[Vlad Drkulec]

Personally, I ONLY play 1.e4, and I do NOT want the government trying to force me to play 1.d4.

You, sir, shall be reported to Facebook, Youtube and Google and de-platformed.

[David Ottosen]

Sid - I have long lived by the philosophy that there's nothing more worthless than an opinion you're unwilling to wager on. Would you consider a wager of the following sort:

I am fully vaccinated. I will add a line to my will saying that in the event I die and the autopsy shows that the death is related to the vaccine, $100,000 will be left to Sid Belzberg.

I'm assuming you are not vaccinated. You will add a line to your will saying that in the event you die, and the cause of death is determined to be Covid-19, $100,000 will be left to me.

[Sid Belzberg]

Sid - I have long lived by the philosophy that there's nothing more worthless than an opinion you're unwilling to wager on. Would you consider a wager of the following sort:

I am fully vaccinated. I will add a line to my will saying that in the event I die and the autopsy shows that the death is related to the vaccine, $100,000 will be left to Sid Belzberg.

I'm assuming you are not vaccinated. You will add a line to your will saying that in the event you die, and the cause of death is determined to be Covid-19, $100,000 will be left to me.

It is a silly bet, both, are highly unlikely events. More concerning and more likely is serious long-term injury by the vaccine. Tissue damage especially to the vascular system as described in the link to the letter in my most recent post is irreparable and very serious. So-called "Long haul COVID" has been found to be simply untreated COVID. WGM Irina Krush has interesting posts about this on Facebook and her experiences with COVID.
I for one certainly do not want to profit from your demise especially if it involves health issues. So far I have supplied the direct link references to the Israeli data that you tried to discredit. The vaccines are useless against variants that they were not originally engineered for. A third booster shot of the same obsolete vaccine will do the sum total of ZERO.
Opinions that are backed up by facts and data are indeed very valuable. The fact and data-based letter posted is spurring US Senators to investigate.
Best Wishes,
Sid

[Brian Profit]

Important letter.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...4prOodxok/edit

More BS. Glad to read that you entrepreneurs stick together.

[Sam Sharpe]

..........

[Sid Belzberg]

More BS. Glad to read that you entrepreneurs stick together.