A little closer to heaven

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I dunno... @Cooter once spelled out the odds of existing in a post somewhere and we are either a statical impossibility or not.
 
steingar said:
People view the world through their experiences, and their thoughts are shaped through their interaction with the world. My parents died from horrific cognitive decline. I didn't feel particularly close to them while they were still alive, there just wasn't a lot to feel close to, unless you like things like drool and stool. Again, how is it that they are anymore cognitively sound now that they're deceased?
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Well, if I believed in such a thing, I would think they wouldn't have that frail, failed and feeble body to carry around, and all of their earthly infirmities would cease to exist. Either that or the would be toiling at the furnaces and not have time to listen to you anyway.
 
I don't know about "closer to heaven", but I often think of my Dad when I'm flying. He was my first flying buddy, though it was only R/C models, but he financed my flying lessons later and flew with me every chance he could get.
 
Zeldman said:
I am usually busy flying to think of anything else.

There were a few times in Alaska, usually during winter and before sunrise when the northern lights are so spectacular that I was in a zen place. The temperature would be in the -10 to -20s. The stars would be twinkling, the lights of a far off village would be just shimmering. The temperature inversion would bend the lights making the village look as if it was floating in air.....

At that time I would think that I am the luckiest pilot in the world to be exactly where I am at the time.
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Were ya drinking that night? :confused:;):D
 
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Bill Jennings said:
My grandparents and parents have all passed on, and sometimes when I'm flying I talk with them a little bit as I feel I'm a little closer to heaven. Anyone else have this feeling when they fly?
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Well, my passengers sometimes ask why they seem to be hearing harp music in the headset. I tell them not to worry about it and just hum along....

I don’t talk to the deceased when flying (or any other time), but my prayers while flying are most fervent and quite simple: “Dear God, please don’t let me f*** up!”
 
JOhnH said:
Well, if I believed in such a thing, I would think they wouldn't have that frail, failed and feeble body to carry around, and all of their earthly infirmities would cease to exist. Either that or the would be toiling at the furnaces and not have time to listen to you anyway.
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So their cognition is to be restored to them? At which stage? Would they once again have the fast cognition and mental reflexes of a young person, or would they have the slower august reason of the old? Which version of them winds up in this afterlife? And where are all those memories stored? They certainly lost them for all we could judge. Moreover, if their cognition wasn't somehow magically restored hell would hath no fury, since they hadn't sufficient wherewithal to suffer unduly, or at least realize on a conscious level they were suffering.
 
steingar said:
So their cognition is to be restored to them? At which stage? Would they once again have the fast cognition and mental reflexes of a young person, or would they have the slower august reason of the old? Which version of them winds up in this afterlife? And where are all those memories stored? They certainly lost them for all we could judge. Moreover, if their cognition wasn't somehow magically restored hell would hath no fury, since they hadn't sufficient wherewithal to suffer unduly, or at least realize on a conscious level they were suffering.
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See, that's the good thing about religion. You can make up whatever theory you want and nobody can say you are wrong. So I believe that everyone is restored t their peak of youth.

Don't get me wrong. I am not anti-religion. I think the core values they (mostly) teach are good. But I think the theories people make up to support them are suspect.
 
JOhnH said:
Of course not. But Religious theory is one that is most difficult, if not impossible, to prove.

Just thinking about that makes my head hurt.
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I wonder when Hawking gave the lecture where he said the age of the universe was 15 billion years? According to contemporary sources it is about 13.8 billion years, with an uncertainty of order 20 million years. 15 billion was a popular estimate back around 1980, when Carl Sagan did the original Cosmos series.
 
JOhnH said:
Of course not. But Religious theory is one that is most difficult, if not impossible, to prove.

Just thinking about that makes my head hurt.
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Right, I think you can prove that some type of metaphysical being exists. That’s why many (like Anthony Flew) abandoned atheism for agnosticism or deism. But descriptions of the afterlife or supernatural encounters can’t proven.

I am confident in many of my beliefs, but that is far from saying that I absolutely know them without any doubt. Science and religion err when they assert to know more than they actually do know. I don’t have any problem with science speculating beyond science, like in the linked article. But they need to be honest about what they are doing. Popular scientist like Hawking have increasingly strayed into the metaphysical, which is fine as long as it’s recognized as such.
 
azure said:
I wonder when Hawking gave the lecture where he said the age of the universe was 15 billion years? According to contemporary sources it is about 13.8 billion years, with an uncertainty of order 20 million years. 15 billion was a popular estimate back around 1980, when Carl Sagan did the original Cosmos series.
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I’m asking this in all seriousness, how does it matter? Are certain explanations excluded or included based on that 1.2 billon years? I don’t follow those things closely enough to know the significance.
 
It matters to details of the evolution of the early universe, to the overall composition of matter and energy in the universe, and to models of stellar and galactic evolution. Astrophysicists are forever trying to refine that estimate.

Here's a pretty good, if a bit technical and rather dated discussion (seems to predate the findings from type 1a supernovae that the universe's expansion is accelerating) of the significance as well as some ways that people measure the universe's age.
 
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