Bible Study: New Earth

This is an excerpt from a book I am currently busy with. More or less it reflects my life in some 365 entries,- where all that I read observed and lived through in some seven decades, are put down as a Daybook-benny)

 

36 Day 5

 

God sent His only begotten Son to the world (John 3:16) in order lead us into his light. His testimony agrees in these three: ‘And there are three that bear witness in earth, the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one (1 John 5:8)’. Under the hand of John he received baptism to indicate his humanity. As a sign the spirit came like a dove descending and sat on him. On the cross his side pierced drew blood. Thus his humanity and deity have been established. He is indeed the firstborn from the dead.

 

36 Day 6

 

The Holy Spirit in keeping with the Father Son relationship, sets this: ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool (Is.66:1).’ When Son finally fulfills His will we have the earth in heavenly places. The vision of four living creatures and the seven Spirits like seven lamps are set about the throne. (Re.4:3-8) indicate a mode of inversion. By death and resurrection of Jesus Christ it is the new earth that is our eternity.

 

36 Day 7

 

The Seven lamps that St John saw in his vision serve as a memorial. He makes spirit his angels (Ps.104:4) and we see several instances where they are sent to minister unto man. The angel waking up Elijah is one such. He strengthened the great prophet to go to Horeb where God had a message for him. Similarly when Jesus was in agony in the garden and a ministering angel attended to him. Between God and man there has been a highway so he has been always surrounded by the angel of his presence.

The Spirit makes the rock from which the Israel drank from as the Spiritual Rock that followed them. In spiritual parlance natural objects are invested with glory of God that is not in themselves but under whose hand it is set there.

Bread from heaven by the same token is not manna but the Son who came from his Father. In short what is the glory of God? It is the Son whose gospel made the earth double in for the heaven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Soundings: 5.0

Size of course matters: wouldn’t a may fly consider the lifespan of humans as interminable as we might look at a galactic year?

Correspondence on the matter of size: Our planet Earth is a living planet giving rise to millions of species of life forms; Because it is a home to every creature big or small, these life forms have learnt to interact in groups forming a food chain, and thriving as far as they could, making the most of their ecosystems.

Benny

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Soundings:4.7

4 Day 7

 

Alexander of Macedon or Julius Caesar fought close combat when personal bravery often forced the outcome. How different it is from waging urban guerrilla warfare in our times? Art of war has lost its stomach for a single man to man confrontation.

We shall see law of entropy working in the manner Napoleon’s Grand Army was decimated in Moscow. A well-knit strategy is an order but when descends into chaos the result is inevitable, In his case an early winter had set in and he and his army had no choice but to retreat. General Winter was one among many imponderables that conspired against him.

Think of the early Christian church with the modern churches around the world. Religions show this dilution of cardinal virtues that prophets emphasized at the founding of their belief-systems. Apostles have given way for charismatic TV preachers advocating prosperity theology to milk the congregation. Order of Truth descending into chaos speaks of moral terms man cannot escape. Spirit of the times is a moral equivalent of the physical law.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Soundings: 2.7

2. Day 6

 

Man and nature. Context of each bears on the other but it does not shape truth of other. Truth the Absolute must remain outside systems that hold their interaction going.

 

2 Day 7

 

A musical note for example middle C on a piano has regular vibrations at a rate of 262 per second. Suppose a humming bird could reproduce the same note would it make a piano is same as a humming bird? The truth of a bird defined by the form defines its integrity to be confused for anything else.

Benny

 

 

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Soundings:2.5

2 Day 4

 

Remember the face-vase drawing? One may conclude the face, as its centre while another would give the vase his focus. It explains how Trotsky and Stalin in Soviet Union clashed over future of Communism as a movement from their ideological position. How each life form lays emphasis is possible but truth one applies is arbitrary. This ought to warn us that understanding itself has an inherent problem.

Human brain is still evolving and is not infallible.

 

2 Day 5

 

Pointillism is an art movement making use of the science of optics by which colours from many small dots placed so close to each other does differently than individual colours do. Psychology of vision explains how mind perceives than reality. This is the same way computer screens work today. The pixels in the computer screen are just like the dots in a Pointillist painting.

Benny

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Soundings:2:3

2. Day 2

 

Considering finite nature of life form the centre of imagination is not as one circumscribes a circle about a point geometrically. Line of development from that point is a matter of understanding and it shall settle everything else secondary to it. Thus St Francis of Assisi would renounce wealth of his father as Alexander of Macedon set out to conquer kingdom to give an expression to greatness that he understood as due.

 

2. Day 3

 

Understanding and how each life form pursues it gives relevance only to the life form. It has to negotiate with other life forms similarly engaged in being relevant. Extinction of the wingless Dodo owed to many circumstances working against it.

Relevance of life form is bound up in context of others. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin spent his lifetime to create a Worker’s Paradise in Russia through the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. But he could not prevent the movement he spearheaded morph into Personality Cult under his successor. Truth of an ideal on which he laid his all is not Truth. It is what life and truth of action ought to mean.

 

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Soundings:1.5

1.4

Death of stars contributes to elements that make up our body. So how truth of living bears relation to Truth must necessarily hold a corresponding relationship with death. There is a limit to our understanding. However Truth must be the basis on which any system life, death, ignorance and knowledge can be held as one; where various facets have several purposes but in their organization would look to Truth as the basis. Consequently how life of a form pursues truth, which is different from what the system itself represents.

1.5

Three equilateral triangles when connected to erect a tepee the fourth side forming the base reveals the nature of Truth, a model set up by interaction of facets. Synergy makes transactional truth of any organization from one facet as incomplete. Synergy explains how the tepee (result of three equilateral angles) helped produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

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Now You Know- Mathematics

Philosophy of mathematics

One plus one is two. But when you apply it to a man and woman the answer shall be always what you may not guess. A family can never be pigeonholed into simple arithmetic. What is mathematics then? No one has yet settled about the nature of mathematics.

Mathematics of numbers however are pure. The number pi for example.

In everyday life, we speak as Platonists, treating the objects of our study as real things that exist independently of human thought. If challenged on this, however, we retreat to some sort of formalism, arguing that in fact we are just pushing symbols around without making any metaphysical claims. Most of all, however, we want to do mathematics rather than argue about what it actually is. We’re content to leave that to the philosophers.

There was a time, early in the twentieth century, in which mathematicians were passionately interested in the philosophy of mathematics. People were deeply concerned about what mathematics is, what sort of existence mathematical objects have, and their opinions on these questions actually influenced the mathematics they did.

Mathematics is a human endeavour, and in every day lives we create sets of certainties to account for services we render and consumables we buy so we have a value systems to assure us certain truths of our waking lives. (When the Spirit makes use of numbers it is notable that zero is never used.) As a value system it helps man give an account of his wealth.

Thus we create wealth and set this apart for our pension funds. When we are told all that money is gone what would mean? Does it mean the value we agreed upon coinage or bonds is worthless? It would not mean that our means to accumulate the desired value are cancelled along with it? Mathematical truths are uncertain like any other truths when it is tied to human nature.

A higher truth is what I have dealt with in Marginalia, a concise guide to the Bible. Truth of the word of God is ever fixed.

Marginalia in two volumes is available as e book/kindle version.

First volume has 112 pages and priced at $3.99

Second volume has 200 pages and priced at $5.99

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Intuition: a quote

“How can one be unhappy unless had a vague idea what happiness is? How can conscience prick unless one had some notion what Perfect is? Intuition is sum total of what an individual is capable of taking cues from consciousness on any given moment,pared to its *least reducible limit. Flight or fight is one aspect of it; so is knowledge of the Most High

*In its least reducible limit what impinges from without and what responds from within are one”.

benny

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News On the March: voice recognition

Uncertainty of Our Existence

 

Barclays, the UK bank, is to replace the password system on its phone banking service with personal voice recognition. “Unlike a password,” avers Steven Cooper, Barclays’ head of personal banking, “each person’s voice is as unique as a fingerprint.” Yet the reality is we have no idea whether either fingerprints or voices are unique at all.

If you buy a ticket for the lottery, the chances of winning the big prize are about 14m to 1. You might therefore be justified in regarding that as evidence that you are unlikely to win, and not buy a ticket as a result. Yet after the draw is made and Ms X of Glasgow is announced in the newspapers as the winner, the known unlikelihood of winning is obviously not evidence that she did not win. She did win. Unlikely things do happen.

Notorious case of Sally Clark, an English solicitor, for the alleged murder of her two babies illustrates well the problem. The case against her turned on the evidence of an expert witness, Sir Roy Meadow, who argued that it was highly improbable that two of her babies could have been the victim of natural cot deaths. Sally was exonerated by an appeals court after serving three years in prison, but died four years later. Her family said in a statement that she had never recovered from the miscarriage of justice. Expert opinion of Meadow was proved wrong in relying on the statistical improbability. It is like a meteor when it sets going we may, by assessing the available data and past history predict a doomsday scenario. But suppose along the way the larger mass of Jupiter which is at that precise moment throwing up -Aurora flares up on Jupiter is caused by volcanic moon Io*, and its path veers off one millionth of a hair width? Over the wide expanse between the earth and Jupiter the meteor would have strayed so farther off from the earth. In short statistical probabilities are never 100% correct.

The way forward

What do these insights mean in practical terms? People might well argue that even with our limited sampling of human voices, we have good reason to suspect we are very unlikely to come across two different people who have identical voices, even if we could never discount the possibility. Fine. Let us say that.

Human voice patterns or iris recognition need not be assumed to be unique to be useful tools for protecting private access to our bank accounts. In the same way, fingerprints need not be assumed to be unique to be useful in courts.

 

*Starting in January 2014, a telescope aboard the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hisaki satellite focused on Jupiter for two months. At the same time, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope also focused on Jupiter for an hour each day for two weeks. Both observatories recorded random brightenings of the giant planet’s polar auroras.

These flare-ups occurred on days when the sun’s usual flow of charged particles was relatively weak. So the researchers conclude that they must be the result of the complex interactions between Jupiter and Io, and perhaps the other three Galilean moons of Jupiter — Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. (These four satellites were discovered by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610.)

Io, Jupiter’s closest moon, gets “caught in this gravitational tug of war between Jupiter and the two other large moons, Europa and Ganymede,” study co-author Andrew Steffl, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com. “It gets squished and squashed,” which drives internal heat just like if you bend a paper clip back and forth in your hands.

This process, in turn, drives a series of active volcanoes on Io. And when those volcanoes erupt, they blast large amounts of electrons and electrically charged atoms into space.

Jupiter’s magnetic field catches these charged particles as it sweeps past Io and “forms a donut-shaped region of relatively high-density plasma around Jupiter,” said co-author John Clarke from Boston University. This so-called magnetosphere is so large that it encapsulates all of Jupiter’s 60-plus known moons and extends nearly as far as Saturn.

(ack: The Conversation-Is every human voice and fingerprint really unique?/Aug.11- Hugh McLachlan

Professor of Applied Philosophy, Glasgow Caledonian University

benny

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