THE MILKEY WAY GALAXY

1. If there is no hereafter, why live an orderly and honest life?

The answer is, it makes sense to do the right thing if you prefer your freedom and want to enjoy a well-ordered, comfortable life. It also makes sense to do the wrong thing if you feel the pleasure of the gain outweighs the possible pain of the penalty.

Our Founder grew up in a town of 14,000 citizens. They had a police chief and 16 police officers which allowed four officers to be on duty at all times. His uncle was one of those police officers so he learned about some of the things that went on behind the scenes.

One example was the treatment of “Bums.” Today we call them “homeless people,” but that was not how they were viewed in the 1950s. If a person wandered into town and had no visible means of support, an officer placed him in a police cruiser and took him to the other edge of town. There he would be released and told that if he returned he would be ill-treated and then placed in jail. The word in the “Bum” community was that the town was not the place to go, and we had very few uninvited guests. His uncle told him that if all the towns worked like his did, the state could solve the “Bum” problem.

He retained his uncle’s advice in the back of his mind as he developed, and has never found any reason to question the efficacy of that system. He came to believe that if penalties fit the crime, crime would be reduced. For instance, today, when a person is sentenced to 20 years in prison for second degree murder (a light sentence in any view), he or she is released after ten years if they serve their time with good behavior. Using our founder’s thought process, the person should serve the entire 20 years and if the time is not spent with good behavior, more time should be added to the sentence.

This discussion of good and bad actions is based on the activities of normal human beings. Many humans develop with no conscience, and many others suffer from incomplete development and do not understand right from wrong. We consider these people as “defective units” that must be dealt with in the courts to prevent them from harming themselves or others. It would seem the system we have for normal people would keep civilization progressing with relatively few violations of good order, but of late, things have changed somewhat. 

The system worked for thousands of years in groups spread around the world. The organized religious groups developed different penalties for the actual or presumed violations of the rules. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth worked for one group where a simply shunning (which could lead to death without the support of the community) worked in another group. As we became more and more civilized, populations divided into two major philosophical groups (with variations of philosophical beliefs in subsequent subgroups of the major groups); the Liberal group and the Conservative group. Both groups believe in public order and punishment for crimes against public order, but they differ with regard to the punishment for crimes. 

From a Conservative’s point of view, it makes no sense at all to be a bad person because the penalties for violations of the law include loss of freedom and the where-with-all to earn a living and protect one’s family (a natural instinct for normal humans). The Liberal’s (they now call themselves, Progressives) view is that we are supposed to help the less fortunate and that there can be many extenuating circumstances to consider when determining punishment for wrong doers. Where Liberals hold power, people find it more tempting to circumvent the system of good order because sometimes the possible gain outweighs the risk of minor penalties. Where Conservatives hold power and penalties are severe, crime rates are low.

2. How can you brashly ignore what is written in the Bible?

It is difficult to answer this question without stepping on someone’s toes. We assume the reader would not have gotten this far without an inquisitive and open mind, so a few well known facts will be offered to provide the answer. As for the New Testament, a fundamental question casts doubt on its authenticity as the true teachings of the rebel historically known as Jesus. Not one of the writers of the New Testament ever heard Jesus speak one word, yet throughout the Christian Bible you will find quoted statements from him. Adherents are to believe the writers were divinely inspired and, therefore, could not misquote Jesus. They must also trust through faith that the early priests of their religion that removed many books from the Bible (the apocrypha), were also divinely inspired. These facts, combined with certain archeological discoveries lead Gravitists to believe the New Testament is the continuation of the Old Testament as a manmade document intended to provide people with rules for a civilized world. 

Gravitists, by their nature, believe in a religion other than Judaism, Islam or Christianity, so they have no fear of retribution for publicly stating their position on religion. Gravitists do not believe that a God divinely inspired the writers of the Bible, but instead, the writers depended on existing manuscripts and imagination to produce their documents. Some of the laws put forth in the Old Testament can be traced to The Code of Hammurabi, written around 1732 BC in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq). An example is the often quoted law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This is first found in sections 196 and 200 in Hammurabi's code. It is next found in Exodus 21, 23, 24. It is found in the New Testament in Matthew 5:38 where Matthew says that Jesus said, "You have heard that it used to be said 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I tell you, don't resist the man who wants to harm you.  If a ma hits your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well."

Some of the events in the Bible (e.g., the great flood and the existence of an individual that is one third human and two thirds God) are found in the epic of Gilgamesh written around 2,150 BC. As the centuries went by, scribes added to, changed and polished the original writings to produce the Old Testament that is a guidebook to civilized living.

3. What is the God Particle?

The term God particle is the invention of an unknown member of the international press corps. Scientists do not use it and are unhappy with its use by anyone. What the press has dubbed the God particle is known in scientific circles as the Higgs Boson (no spin). It is a subatomic particle that Physicists feel will go a long way in understanding space, time and matter. The particle has yet to be isolated. If the particle is ever isolated, it is doubtful that it will have any effect on the basic theory of Gravity as God.

Additional information on the God particle can be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

4. Why are there so many different religions and even subcategories of some religions?

The first part of your question is easy to answer. Because of natural barriers, i.e., oceans, mountain ranges, deserts and jungles, pockets of populations came into existence. In their search for the meaning of life, these people developed separate views of the controlling forces of nature. Eventually, through contacts with other groups, the views were distilled down to the various religious groups we have today.

As to the second part of your questions, it is hard to answer without taking a judgmental position. There is a saying that suggests a group of Jewish Rabbis could spend their entire life discussing just how many angels could dance on the head of pin. The originator seems to say that in matters of religion there is no end to studying even insignificant statements. The existence of sub categories of many religions is an example of this human trait of questioning what we are taught. Methodists, Baptists and Catholics are all Christians and believe in many of the same tenants of Christianity, but they differ on some of the dogma.

Before we had what we call civilization, it made no sense to be a good person. The biggest, strongest person in the group took whatever he chose to take. As humans evolved, those with highest IQs (i.e., those with a higher ability to learn) found ways to get around the bullies (those that controlled with force rather than guile) and assumed power over the groups. To maintain order and control the masses, they invented religions and the religions had rules against activities that threatened good order. Violations of the rules resulted in the administration of punishment, the severity of which was deemed equal to the seriousness of the violation. Members of groups subjugated themselves to the leaders of the religions to obtain safety from the bullies.

Perhaps because so many millennia have passed since the emergence of humans, it is the normal progression of things that so many different views of the Supreme Deity have been conjured. We Gravitists view the Supreme Deity from a simpler view. The God of the Universe(s) existed as a singularity (the Supreme Black Hole) and exploded (the Big Bang theory). The spread of star dust from the explosion included tiny parts of the singularity which eventually developed in to black holes (parts of God) with enough Gravity to form all of the galaxies that exist. If one avoids the temptation to assign human traits to the Supreme Deity, it is easy to accept this premise. 

5. How do Gravitists view religion-based governments? 

To describe the Gravitists’ view of religion-based governments is to walk through a political minefield; it will be difficult not to offend someone. Any of the governments of the world fall into one of four categories: Socialism, Capitalism, Totalitarianism or Theocratic (Monarchies have all but disappeared). The leaders of all four types have different degrees of power. Most of the Socialist states of Europe, while promising cradle-to-grave care of its citizens, a system that is not sustainable, also allow and encourage, Capitalism. On the other hand, some of the Socialist states are not unlike the previous Soviet Union where the central government had all the power over everyone and the means of production. Capitalist governments also vary with regard to the amount of power vested in leaders. Capitalists realize that there are some things that must be controlled by a central government (weights and measures, currency, broadcast bands, roadways, patents, national military, certain standards for production items, etc.) but are loathe to allow a government to control commerce. Capitalism, whether by design or not, follows the theory that many people prosper and live lavishly, many more prosper enough to live comfortable, happy lives, and still others, less equipped to survive in the system, fall by the wayside. Compelling arguments can be made for the benefits of both Socialism and Capitalism. Gravitists, with their penchant for personal responsibility prefer Capitalism. They feel that any power given to the central government diminishes their freedom; whereas, fervent Socialists prefer to surrender more and more power to the central government if the government promises total care and protection, which reduces decision making on their part. Totalitarianism (e.g., Hitler, Tojo, Mao, and Stalin) is indefensible in any way. 

With Socialism, Totalitarianism and Capitalism out of the way, let us look at Theocracies, the thrust of the original question. Theocracies are a bane to freedom, freethinking, civilized living and the enhancement of life for human beings in general. If there is anything Socialists and Capitalists can agree upon, it is that the Theocratic system of government is always wrong. For the leader of a sect, a church or a religion to require the people under his or her control to be blindly obedient to the point of giving their blood and treasure to support their leader, is unacceptable.

Because Gravitists do not accept the teachings of any of the other churches in the world as the Word of God, we cannot even consider the authenticity of any government leader that claims to represent a God and demands subjugation of its citizens. We accept that others do not believe in Gravitism and we respect the religions of others, but we cannot tolerate God-like power being conferred on mere mortals as is the case with Theocracies.

6. Do mass extinctions have anything to do with gravity?

Depending upon whom you consider as an authority in the field of mass extinction events, which are labeled ELE (Extinction Level Events) by scientists, there have been as many as five ELEs in the last 434 million years or one every 87 million years. Even distinguished scientists can not predict a repeating pattern  for when they will occur. An ELE,  is identified when anywhere from 60% to 95% of terrestrial and marine life become extinct. 

Gravity certainly has an effect on those ELEs that can be traced to the eruption of super volcanoes. The eruptions brought about decades of extremely high levels of dust and carbon dioxide, which caused inhospitable climates, which extinguished much of life on Earth. Without Gravity to hold the erupted material in our atmosphere, it would dissipate into space and cause little or no harm.

The second cause of ELEs is the collision of Earth with large extraterrestrial bodies. The results of such collisions include worldwide conflagrations and pollution of the atmosphere to a degree that sunlight is blocked for decades. The collision that occurred 65 million years ago that is thought to be the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs is the most widely known example. The proponents of the 87 million year cycle of ELEs have proffered a questionable reason for their theory. They believe our Sun has an extinguished twin star, called Nemesis (about 50 to 65 percent of stars are part of binary systems) that has yet to be discovered which causes collisions with objects from the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is a cloud of comets in orbit around our solar system approximately one light year from our Sun. Some believe that the orbit of the sister star to our Sun takes it through the Oort cloud and disrupts the orbits of comets, some of which are drawn by Gravity into our solar system, and those that escape the very strong Gravity of Jupiter collide with or pass closely by the Earth. 

With either scenario, Gravity plays a role in the ELEs regardless if they are random or periodic. For those adherents of other faiths that believe a watchful God, for some strange reason, has caused the ELEs, we can only say that we Gravitists believe that ELEs are part of the organized chaos of the universe. 

7. Energy cannot be destroyed, so should energy be called God instead of Gravity?

Research supports the theory that energy cannot be destroyed and that it continuously changes form. An example is the energy from the Sun that caused the growth of the plants and animals that decayed into the fossil fuels we use today to power our generation stations to provide electricity to charge the batteries in our hybrid automobiles that move us from one place to another as we live our lives. If one thinks about any form of energy, even the energy that is produced by Gravity (any falling object),  its transformation from one form to another becomes obvious. To substitute energy for Gravity as God is taking energy a step too far.

Energy depends upon Gravity for existence. Without the Gravity of the Sun, there would be no Sun and therefore no photosynthesis, which provides us with much of our energy. Gravity controls everything we do on Earth and allows the universe to exist. To put it succinctly, Gravity came before energy, even the Dark Energy postulated to be in the universe.

Astronomers suggest the possibility that Dark Energy is stretching space itself and thereby overcoming the propensity of galaxies to approach each other through the force of their Gravity. They demonstrate this theory by imagining a wide rubber band and cutting it so it will lay flat on a surface. They then make several marks on the band and pull from each end. The marks become further apart from each other because the surface is stretching, not because the marks are moving. Scientists tell us that the combination of outward movement of the galaxies from the Big Bang combined with the stretching of space is the reason that the universe will not collapse in upon itself as originally believed. If space is stretching, and if Dark Energy causes the stretching, there may be a case made that energy is on a par with Gravity with regard to God-like power, but currently, Gravitists believe there is only one God, and it is Gravity.

Sir Isaac Newton, like many of the scientists and free thinkers in the world today, was somewhat conflicted in his belief or understanding of religion and Christianity. The following presents one man's view of Newton's position:

Excerpted from:

A Brief Survey of Sir Isaac Newton’s Views on Religion by Steven E. Jones. (Steven E. Jones is a professor emeritus of physics, Brigham Young University.)

"Newton was certainly one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. He laid out the three laws of motion in his extraordinary Principia Mathematica. He discovered the law of universal gravitation, the famous inverse-distance-squared law. He wrote much about light and optics after performing his own original experiments on light. He invented calculus. He rejected the authority of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and promoted experiment-based science.

But it is not commonly known that Newton was also a devout Christian who wrote extensively about Christianity. We learn from his writings that he deeply studied the Bible along with writings of early Christian leaders. Notably, Newton concluded that the dogma of a Triune god was false doctrine and therefore refused ordination in the Anglican Church, a most unpopular decision that almost cost him his position at Cambridge University. Newton also believed that a general apostasy from Christ’s doctrines occurred early on in the history of the Christian church, and he wrote that a restoration of the Lord’s church would come at some future time.

Although none of Newton’s religious writings were published during his lifetime, after his death in 1727, John Conduitt, executor of Newton’s will, published some of his theological manuscripts. Eventually the remainder came forth when the manuscripts were auctioned off in 1936. 

Newton was both a scientist and a believer in God. He wrote Optics, a study of light. In this scientific treatise, he paused to ask: “Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain? And whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? . . . Was the eye contrived without skill in optics? And the ear without knowledge of sounds?” Then, in case the reader is not getting his point, he states plainly: “Does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space . . . sees the things themselves intimately and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly.” 

In his famous Principia, Newton wrote: “This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all. . . . The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect . . . and from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being. . . . He is not eternity and infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present.”

Newton also wrote, “When I wrote my treatise about our system I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.” In other words, Newton hoped his scientific writings would lead people to think about and believe in God."

8. What happened before the Big Bang?

With our average IQ minds, we considered questions without answers that only affected our lives in the present. The question has merit and is quite interesting. The best answer we can give is the one given by Stephen Hawking when he was asked a similar one. His reply is below:

“The boundary condition of the universe ... is that it has no boundary,” Hawking tells the National Geographic’s Star Talk show on 3/3/2018.  In other words, there is no time before time began as time was always there. It was just different.

He tells physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that amid the almost infinitely small quantum form of the singularity before the Big Bang, time existed in a ‘bent’ state. It was distorted along another dimension — always getting fractionally closer to, but never becoming, nothing.

So there never was a Big Bang that created something from nothing. It just looks that way from our perspective.  All the evidence seems to indicate that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago,” Hawking says in one of his lectures.

“There must have been a beginning. Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of complete disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature. In an infinite and everlasting universe, every line of sight would end on the surface of a star. This would mean that the night sky would have been as bright as the surface of the Sun. The only way of avoiding this problem would be if, for some reason, the stars did not shine before a certain time.”

But things were different at the Big Bang. 'The density would have been infinite,' Hawking says. 'It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang.'

This has long posed a serious problem for physics, he says. 'Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could measure what happened at them.' But there are ways to figure what came before, he says.

'Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound like science fiction, and it has been brought into Doctor Who. But nevertheless, it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real as what we call real time.'

This has enormous implications when it comes to the Big Bang. 'James Hartle, of the University of California Santa Barbara, and I have proposed that space and imaginary time together, are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have any boundaries or edges. I have been around the world, and I didn’t fall off.'

There exists no raw physics that supports his idea yet, but Hawking’s insight has proven right before. What we do know is that when it comes to the Big Bang — and black holes — our understanding of physics breaks down. The only certainty about the infinitesimally small quantum building blocks of our universe is that they are uncertain. Simply observing them can cause them to change. They can be in two places — or two states — at once. They seem to be a physical embodiment of probability and potential: elements of reality that haven’t quite yet decided what they’re going to do. 

While it dictates our lives, we still don’t know what time is. Or exactly where it comes from. We know how it works. We know its effects. It’s like Gravity. It doesn’t entirely seem to fit in the ‘big’ world of the physics we experience, nor the ‘weird’ world of the subatomic. But, like the strange behavior of quantum physics, perhaps time has a lot more left to tell.

This article originally appeared in news.com.au. 

Comments on these and any other position of the Universal Church of Gravity are always welcome.