This is interesting...(very much so)

New Earth-like solar system

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Bruce Duensing's Intangible Materiality

Intangible Materiality is a brilliant blog maintained by the mind of Bruce Duensing.



It is dense and daunting, but chock full of insights to what we call The Game of God.

Mr. Duensing doesn’t suggest, overtly, that God (or reality) is playing a game with humankind, but his highly intellectual ruminations tend in that direction.

But it would be remiss of us to try and present an accurate summation of what Mr. Duensing offers.

His material transcends ratiocination, and illuminates in ways that will elude all but the most intelligent among blog readers.

Here is the link…

Intangible Materiality

Wagner footnotes the death of (the) God(s)

Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” confirms the death of the gods (God), as Nietzsche metaphorically stated also.



God Himself confronted man for the last time during the Hebrew period [circa] 8000 BC.

God’s messengers appeared off and on after that time, but God? He disappeared.

Jesus’ last appearance (and even that “visitation” is iffy) took place when Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) had his encounter with a disembodied manifestation of Jesus/Christ.



Jesus, after his alleged ascension, made that one contact with mortal man, and that was it. (We think Paul had a psychotic episode, as noted here earlier, but for the sake of argument we’ll concede that Paul was touched by Jesus, even if that “touching” was only immaterial in essence.)

Mary, the mother of Jesus, appeared sporadically over the years after her “death” but the last bona fide appearance she made was at Fatima, Portugal in 1917.



There are those who discount the Fatima visitation, and all the subsequent visions of Mary, such as those in Belgium (Beauraing 1932; Banneux 1933) and Spain (Garabandal 1961-65).

But we accept the Fatima appearance as real, based upon the reactions and eventual religious dedication of the children (Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco) who had the visions. Also there were many eyewitness accounts that didn’t actually confirm a Mary sighting, but did authenticate something strange occurring during the alleged Mary episodes.

God didn’t appear to Muhammed [610 AD], but His messengers did, just as they did to Joseph Smith [1820 ff.] who founded the Mormon religion.



Again. God didn’t appear to anyone after about 800 BC. And Jesus only to Paul (maybe) around 35 or 36 AD.

Mary had appeared sporadically up to 1917, perhaps later but not recently in any way that is dynamic in nature.

What does this mean, and how does Wagner’s magnum opus confirm the death of the gods?

Wagner was, among others, a genius with insight to things and truths that come forth into the Unconscious Mind as an epiphany, even though those insights are never formally recognized by the persons (usually creative artists) who have them.



Wagner didn’t take the Norse “theology” and use it for his music drama; he reworked the theology to show that the gods didn’t just hide themselves from mankind, but died, once and for all time.

The remnants of God remain, and so do His messengers. Even the soul of God lives on – as the Holy Spirit, but God Himself, and His Second Nature, Jesus, are dead.

And Holy Mary, the Mother of Jesus (God)? She may still be alive in some sense, but not in substance as she once was.



The gods have subsided, in relevance, and reality.

Otherwise we humans would be experiencing them, in some overt if intangible way.

How does this affect us when we die? That for another time…..

God's Sustenance

God may be dead or dying, and the reason lies in the dearth of souls that feeds Him.

Since the appearance of the Deity on Earth, as Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible and Allah in the Koran, along with His various permutations in the Vedic, Egyptian, and Norse texts (and others), it seems clear that God (or the gods, if you will) needs sustenance of some kind, often confusingly said to be, by believers, a response, moral in nature, to Him, in the form of worship and obeisance.



But the sustenance that God needs isn’t just spiritual but material also, and it consists of human lives, and the souls that are intertwined with those lives, or bodies.

God is vampiric in a sense. He (or It) feeds off humankind, draining away lives and ultimately the souls that animate those lives.



But it’s not just all humankind, but particularly those human lives that pay heed to the godhead; that is, humans who pay attention to God are preferred, and taken en masse by God to keep Him alive.

Evil-doers are not feasted upon by God but thrown in the scrap heap that theologians call Hell or Sheol (or Nirvana).



Those who are called the Faithful or Believers are gobbled up, often before their Earthly time is up and they are grist for God’s appetite, which is tangible, not immaterial.

The Jews, God’s Chosen, have always been grist for His appetite, and He brought many, over the millennia and especially during the Holocaust, to His table to feast upon.

Even now, Allah’s menu is filled with Muslim faithful, and He is devouring them as fast as He can.

This is not just a sadistic enterprise, although it surely seems so.

It is a need, a need of God that keeps Him alive.

But with a dwindling supply of believers, God is and has been malnourished, even dead perhaps, as we (and Nietzsche) believe.



While Communion is the rite of humans eating the body and blood of Christ, a reciprocal activity is taking place at the same time: God eating the body and blood of humans.

And it’s those faithful who get cancers, heart disease, or have accidents that take them to God well before nature intends.

Death is God’s mechanism for feeding Himself, and if He is dead, His process lives on, in perpetuo, with no way to stop it.

This is the meaning of life: Humans were created as a food source – intangibly and materially for God.



We have been and are being farmed.

Nota Bene:

There is an exception to God’s modus, and it’s this….

God adores creativity, even while being jealous of it.

Artists, composers, writers who favor and extol God get long-lives, while those who are agnostic or atheistic are given short shrift, even Earthly pain and suffering.

Michelangelo, DaVinci, Liszt, Tolstoy, Messiaen got long-lives.

Marlowe, Shelley, Schubert, Chopin, Seurat, were cut short.

(There are many more examples, of course.)

Artists, in the broad sense, are treated differently from the rest of humankind, and we’ll deal with that upcoming.

The Methodology of God

Delay (or foot-dragging) is the essential ingredient, ab initio, in God’s evolutionary plan for creation on Earth.

The wonder of life can’t be viewed in the Biblical time-frame – creation in six days – because that doesn’t agree with geological fact, but it does appeal to religious zealots since it makes sense if one posits a God who is able to bring about instantaneous creation by His will.

The problem is that God (using the mechanism of evolution) proceeded at a snail’s pace and created a plethora of life-forms, which existed for millennia before man appeared.

Those life-forms – most (dinosaurs for example) had nothing to do with the advent of man or the eventual purposes of humankind.



Flora and fauna came and went, without impacting the arrival of man or the continuation of mankind, as a species.

Why the delay – billions of years – before man appeared on Earth.

If God is able to create life instantly, as some think, why did it take so long to raise up a sentient being who had the ability to ruminate on his own creation?

Evolution allows for the advent of man, but even evolution has its fits and starts, and only produces mankind by Darwinian quirks that are either coincidental or brought about by an intervention of some kind that one might attribute to God.



If evolution is a God-process, then why the protracted process? What was the divine point in making evolution such a laborious procedure?

The problem lies in how one imagines the mind of God.

If God is interactive with creation (mankind, the universe, anything), why does that interaction drag on and on – and to what end?

The methodology of God or Nature – with its spurts and failures (the Neanderthals, for instance) – may have a rationale to it, but that rationale has illogical, even insane, elements in it.

Existence is obvious, but the meaning of it is not.

And after billions of years, one would think the meaning of life would be as obvious as the reality of life is.

But that’s not the case, and so man’s existence is muddled, without coherence or sense.

God or evolution (which is a process with rhyme and reason but no cognizance) doesn’t provide answers as to why man is here, on Earth.



Man just is. And theological ramblings about a divine plan that is obscure but must be in place are as insane as the rise and fall of the great lizards, the dinosaurs.

God’s methodology is and has been painstakingly slow. It bespeaks a divine laziness or divine incomprehension of some kind.

Evolution can’t salvage God’s methodology, as evolution is just as batty.

God is either an imbecile, or a sadistic presence that has fun with creation, at the expense of the things created.



And that, dear reader, may be why you suffer existential anxiety, if you really think about it….

Religion, UFOs, and Bunk

Michael Heiser engages in some very interesting debates at his UFO Religions site:

http://michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions/

The thrusts are many but his usual and current nemesis is Monsignor Corrado Balducci.

Balducci, the Vatican’s premiere demonologist, thinks that UFO creatures, even those that allegedly abduct humans, are, perhaps, of a higher nature than us, and more spiritually evolved, thus denigrating the idea in some UFO quarters that abductors and UFO aliens are maligant and/or evil as one blog commentator has it:

Balducci the Individualist

There’s a problem with infusing, continually, religious elements in the UFO debate, and that problem is the mixture of theological myth with ufological myth: UFOs are a phenomenon (or phenomena as we contend) and not a tureen into which every cockeyed hypothesis should be poured.

Religion is itself an amalgam of hopeful theories about God, human life and morality, and an afterlife perhaps.

Ufology is a potpourri of screwed-up and, sometimes, unique conjecture, which doesn’t need one more set of variables based upon the idea that there’s a God (and demons) who have something to do with UFOs.

The only link between UFOs and God, or between ufology and theology, is that God is an unknown and UFOs are an unknown.

That’s it.

Michael Heiser is brilliant and his views follow suit.

He keeps the UFO/religion debate intellectual.

But let a few UFO fanatics or evangelical Christian/Islamic hooples get into the fray and all hell will break loose, and not the Hell of theologians, where the Devil can be accomodated.

Opening the UFO discussion to Christian fundamentalists is akin to Pandora opening her chest of evils, which have afflicted mankind for millennia.

But if you can’t help yourself, go to Michael Heiser’s blog and sites.

You will not be engulfed in nonsense, as is the case elsewhere in the UFO universe when religion gets added to the UFO mystery.

Scouring History, Literature, Biography, etc. for UFOs: Nada

When purported UFO incidents are expunged from the Bible – Ezekiel, Elijah, the God-dove at Jesus’ baptism, et cetera – the vast written material provided by mankind (prior to 1947) is devoid of flying saucer and/or UFO accounts that stand as bona fide sightings of the phenomenon.

The striking dearth of such events or appearances – excluding the scant mariner observations by Columbus et al. and the apocryphal stories about Alexander and Constantine, along with the metaphorical images in Vedic sacred writings – indicates that the general population of human observers and writers didn’t see or experience the things we know today as UFOs.

Thucydides, Herodotus, the Greek philosophers, the Conquistadors, Magellan, Captain Cook, Lewis and Clark, Livingstone, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, Melville, Bierce, Margaret Mead, and all the other explorers and writers we read or read about have nothing in their journals or oeuvre that comes close to what has become the “literature” of flying saucers and UFOs.



And the context of the few early UFO episodes – those often cited by ufology writers as proof of the ubiquitous UFO phenomenon – is mythological or religious, not historical or literary.

This plays into the Vallee hypotheses, not the Friedman theories.

That is, UFOs are either a kind of mythos, not the recent visitors to the Earth as Friedman contends.

Or UFOs are a product of the modern age, generated by, initially, Cold War anxieties and more recently as existential artifacts, produced by man’s intuition that we are alone, with no galactic companions and gods (or God) to assuage the mess we call life.



UFOs are not mystical as some ufologists believe, nor have been intrusions by a concomitant race hidden to man (so far) as Mac Tonnies portrays.

They haven’t been projections of human psyches, as Jung suggested.

(Early human strife would have provided such projections, and the Holocaust in particular, where no UFO sightings were recorded or noted, not even by Victor Frankl.

UFOs could be the bolts-and-nuts craft that Stanton Friedman has established his credentials upon, but the armada needed to fulfill his armload of visitors seems iffy for a number of reasons: intergalactic travel restrictions, support facilities (mechanical and sustaining supplies such as food and water), the unimportance of Earth in the great scheme of the Universe, et cetera.



One would expect that extraterrestrial races would not be that different, if Friedman et al have it right.

And the UFO configurations seem to hint at races not very technically different from us.

But UFOs exhibit behavior that is different. UFOs do not communicate, whereas Earth explorers always went out of their way to communicate with the strange tribes and life-forms they encountered.



UFOs could stem from time-travelers but, again, the number of UFOs seen in modern times would mean that creatures from our future (or past) have an inordinate interest in this time and place.

Even the great explorers of the past were small in number compared to the total human population, representing a scintilla of interest in what was out there while the primary human contingent (the rabble) went about their lives with not an iota of care for what lay beyond their immediate environment.



So UFOs from time seem problematic, unless almost everyone from the future (or distant past) found this time period obsessively intriguing.

Where does this leave us, conjecturally?

UFOs have not been a part of humanity in any significant way, as the lacunae in literature shows.

The few apocryphal sightings say more about the writers of that apocrypha than the reality they bent for various reasons, most self-aggrandizing.

UFOs – some UFOs – may be visitors from space (Friedman) or time (Goldberg) but not all of them.



Some UFOs are psychical projections, and hallucinatory, considering the dementia of many UFO devotees.

A few – quite a few? – UFO are hoaxes. (Dementia again)



Or UFOs are a counter-reality that impacts some Earthlings but not many actually.

And the import of that? None…none whatsoever.

Thus, UFOs are a game, meant for a few, not the (Spock) many.

Therefore they can be dismissed or ignored, and nothing will happen when they are ignored.

So fellow UFO mavens move on to something worthwhile…..

Plato, the Cave, and UFOs

From Wikipedia:

“The forms that we see, according to Plato, are not real, but literally mimic the real Forms.

In the Allegory of the cave expressed in Republic they are called the shadows of artificial replicas of real things.”

Are UFOs “forms”?

We think they may be.

And if they are. then what are the real Forms, that which the UFO “forms” are mimicking?

Jacques Vallee, and a few others, have been suggesting all along that UFOs represent another reality, a reality behind the apparent reality.

Even as a chair can be a Plato “form” with the real chair Form residing elsewhere – an “elsewhere” that isn’t exactly defined in philosophy or Jungian psychology (where Plato’s archetypes play an important role) – UFOs can be “forms” but where is the UFO elsewhere, where the real UFO Form may be found?

That is the question that Vallee (or Jung in his book on flying saucers) fails to answer.

Without the source or “elsewhere” of UFOs, it becomes difficult, maybe even impossible, to assess what UFOs really are.

But that’s what ufology needs to do: find the “elsewhere” that houses the UFO phenomenon or phenomena.

This means that philosophical disciplines need to be applied to UFO research and investigation.

While we eshew philosophy at another venue of ours, we think the methodologies of philosophy (and maybe quantum mechanics which is more philosophic than scientific) can be worked to attack the UFO enigma.

It will require effort of a serious kind, which we know ufologists are rarely up to, but that is what it will take to get to the core of the UFO reality.

And we know a few pesons who are up to the task, and prepared to make the mental (maybe physical) pursuit.

We’ll keep you apprised of their progress, if any…

The BIG BANG Insanity

Common sense tells us (and any non-physicist) that the Universe could not be created ex nihilo.

That is, if the Universe is the totality of existence (reality), it could not have sprung from an infinitely small “atom” as conjectured in the Big Bang Theory.

There would have had to be something into which that Big Bang atom could “explode.”

Mentally we can’t envision the supposed void that physicists propose the Big Bang atom was surrounded by when it generated.

Moreover, from whence did the Big Bang atom derive?

Even if we accept the postulations of the Big Bang physicists, we can’t account for the creation of the primordial “atom” that gave birth to the Universe we inhabit.

Of course, if the Steady State Theory of the Universe remained viable, that is acceptable, as is the theological position that God is internal, infinite, and brought the Universe into existence from nothing – into the existence that is God itself, the “body” of God as conjectured by Teilhard de Chardin (and others).

The expansion of the Universe doesn’t presuppose a burst of cataclysmic energy, especially from a pinpoint source.

Expansion of the Universe that we can perceive could be an exhalation of the Universe for the time-frame we’re part of, and the Universe will contract eventually as the Vedic accounts have it.

Expansion is not necessarily intrinsic to the Universe.

And we’ll be exploring the physicists’ mental aberration about the Big Bang even more, upcoming….

The Failure(s) of Philosophy

Philosophy has never provided answers to anything.

The conjectures have always been convoluted, obscurant, and even senseless.

For instance, a Professor (D. Moore) at Indiana-Purdue University (IPFW) in Fort Wayne, Indiana had a lecture recently wherein he provided the usual canard that Plato was a realist and Leibniz was an idealist.



The actuality is that Plato was an idealist, as is obvious from his writings, and Leibniz was a realist, as accounts of his life and studies show.

But philosophy instructors and advocates always turn reality on its head.

Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God – that than which nothing is greater – convolutes the simple question “Is there a God?”

Hume and all other philosophers have beat the dead horse of God’s existence, with no denouement.



From the beginning of philosophical thought – Thales, Anaximander, et al. – the ruminations pertaining to the meaning of life have made the examination complex and confusing.

In an effort to appear wise and/or erudite, philosophers encrusted their arguments with questions that perplex but do not answer anything – have not answered anything.

Three thousand years of philosophical queries have produced not one iota of information or thought that has been helpful or beneficial to mankind.

Theologians, such as Aquinas or, more recently, Barth, haven’t helped either, and both (among others) were brilliant.



Philosophical conundrums posed by Aristotle, Boethius, Descartes, Vico, Nietzsche, and everyone else, have fallen flat when it comes to human destiny.


The Existentialists – Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, et al. -- recognize(d) the silliness of the philosophical pursuit but actively engaged in it themselves.




The great literary master, Herman Melville, provided an entertaining look at the nature of God (Moby Dick), good and evil (Billy Budd, Foretopman), and the existential dilemma (Bartleby the Scrivener) that settles (arguably) most of the philosophical questions posited before and after him.



Melville provided, in three works, the whole of philosophical questioning, and offered answers, of a kind, to all of it.

Socrates’ maxim – Know thyself – is pithy and not recondite but it tells us nothing.

Descartes’ offer – I think therefore I am – is also a concise statement of reality but it takes us nowhere.

More recently Gramsci tried to flesh out Marxist thought, but that time has passed.



The meaning of mankind’s purpose is still up for grabs.

Politicians can’t help. Theologians are up against a denial of God’s existence, in light of the absolute absence of God in the lives of humankind.



And philosophers are as defunct as the Roc, which makes us wonder why anyone would take up that educational mantle.



Philosophy is an arcane methodology, no better than alchemy, and more confusing actually.

So, please, let us move on to things more intellectually productive…whatever that might be.

Cancer and Quantum Theory

Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat and the quantum idea that observation or measurement of an event alters the event can be used to explain why some people die of cancer and others do not.

Everyone, virtually everyone, has cancer in their bodies.

Once a cancer is observed (measured) or found and acknowledged it is altered by the finding (observation) and become active, in a detrimental way, just as Schrödinger’s cat is dead or alive once the box in which it was (figuratively) encased with a vial of radioactive poison is hypothetically broken.



It takes an observation of the cat in the box to determine if the cat is alive or dead after the radioactive vial is broken. Before the observation, one doesn’t know if the cat is alive or dead, and the cat is, according to quantum theory, neither alive nor dead until it is looked at – observed, measured.

Once a cancer is found – and, again, everyone has a cancer in their body – the observation of it will activate the cancer in a deleterious way.

Just as Schrödinger’s cat will surely be found to be dead, once it is observed, one’s cancer will surely become deadly once it is observed.

The idea that early detection stems cancer’s advance is a canard. Early detection merely shortens the life of those who have the detection.

There is, however, a quantum possibility that one can, just as Schrödinger’s cat could (hypothetically), collapse the observation – in quantum physics, it’s a “wave” that is collapsed – and not have a killer cancer.

Consciousness of a positive kind might deter further growth of a cancer or put it in remission.

Some people do this, and prayer, as a deliberate conscious act, might also be a positive element in keeping cancer contained.

But it is the detection of cancer and it’s measurement that brings on the deadly aspect of the cancer; that is, the cancerous growth is accelerated by its observation.

Those who don’t have a medical examination, but who have a cancer within, will not be affected by the cancer in an abnormal way. They will die naturally, late in life, with the ordinary malfunction of human organs and the vicissitudes of old age.

So if you think you should have an MRI, think again. Quantum theory is your out.

UFOs: A failure to communicate

If UFOs are depicted in primitive petroglyphs and the stories in the Hebrew Bible are authentic [The Ezekiel vision and the Elias episode for instance], the message inherent to those early sightings remains cryptic.



AmerIndian myths and accounts of UFOs (or things similar to them) are still without clarity. The message, if there was one, was obscure and is still obscure.



The alleged Alexander [The Great] sighting(s) and Constantine’s “cross in the sky” epiphany, despite the accrued Christian context, were devoid of a clear message.



And the Middle Ages battles of UFOs seen in the skies left nothing to explain what that was all about.



In the modern era (of UFOs), starting with the airship occurrences of the 1890s up through the 1947 raft of flying saucer sightings and into the year 2008, UFOs (and their progenitors, if any) have provided no message to humankind, no decipherable message anyway.



The absence of any message – and UFOs have had ample opportunity to leave a message if the things wanted to – is significant.

Like God, after the Torah, and Jesus, in the New Testament, who spoke in parables, UFOs have been obscurant. Why?



If alien beings pilot UFOs (or some of them), they’ve had enough time to understand the human mind-structure, and ability to communicate or receive communication.

The hypotheses by some “ufologists” that UFOs have left messages, via symbols or symbolic behavior, is just flaky, unless UFOs, like God, are playing a game of some kind with humanity.



But because so many years have gone by, eons actually, the game of UFOs (and God) has worn thin, to the point that human beings don’t or shouldn’t care.

If there is a message being proffered by UFOs, we humans are either too stupid to get it or the message is a garbled mess, by insane creatures, a message that can’t be deciphered because it is totally irrational (like the message of the Creator).



Or there has been no message to be gleaned. UFOs just can’t communicate, or are as confounded by us we are of them, and choose to remain mute.

Either way, it’s a sum-zero situation, with no winners…..