Religion, Science and God

I believe in one God, who is eternal, immortal and indestructible. He (I will stick to the conventional male pronoun, at least for now) is omnipotent, in that he can do anything that is not logically impossible - he cannot create square circles, but can do anything allowed by logic - and is the creator and sustainer of the Universe we live in, and any others that might exist. By 'eternal' I mean that God exists forever - he existed before the 'Big Bang', and will go on existing after the Universe has reached thermodynamic equilibrium, or 'Heat Death', which it must do at some future point, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when all motion ceases. I concur with the First of the Church of England's XXXIX Articles of Religion that God is 'without body, parts and passions.' The attribute of 'impassibility' may be a late Greek addition, and nothing much to do with the Jewish God we see in the Tanakh , or Jewish Bible (Christian 'O...

The theory of cyclic time - the idea that the time dimension can be described as a circle (what, in terms of the General Theory of Relativity, is termed a 'closed time-like curve' , or CTC), and should not be depicted as a straight line - was advocated in the West in the Modern Era by  Giambattista Vico (Giovanni Battista Vico, 1668-1744), whose philosophy of time inspired the structure of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake  ( sic ; 1939), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose 'Superman' ( Übermensch )  is marked, inter alia , by his ability to cope with the idea of eternal recurrence . This idea found its first advocates in the West in the Stoics , and their founder Zeno of Citium ( c. 336-265 BCE), although it should be noted that Nietzsche employed an argument he derived from the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander of Miletus ( c .610-546 BCE) in his  Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen ( Philosophy in the Tragic [Ancient] Age of the...

Father Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016) was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1954, and served as an Exorcist of the Diocese of Rome from June 1986, at first under the supervision of  Candido Amantini , and subsequently as Chief Exorcist of the Diocese (the 'Pope's Exorcist'). He has been portrayed by the actor Russell Crowe in the film, The Pope's Exorcist  (2023). Amorth, with five other Catholic priests, co-founded the  Associazione internazionale degli esorcisti , the  International Association of Exorcists, in 1990, and it was formally recognised by the Roman Catholic Church in 2014. Besides claiming, inter alia , that yoga and the Harry Potter books are the work of the Devil, and that participating in the former and reading the latter will result in eternal damnation for those doing so, the late Father Amorth claimed to have performed no fewer than 160,000 exorcisms during the course of his career. This claim was made in May 2013, according to the Huffington Post...

It was the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Protagoras ( c. 490- c. 420 BCE), numbered among the 'Sophists' by Plato, who coined the phrase 'Man is the measure of all things', taken up enthusiastically by the Renaissance humanists. Plato believed him to be denying the existence of objective truth, and this is borne out when one examines the Protagoras quotation in full: 'Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.' The Greek version of this reads: ' pant ōn chr ēmat ōn metron estin anthrōpos, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de ouk ontōn hōs ouk estin. '   A rather less sexist English translation would read: 'Humans are the measure of all things: of the things that exist, and of the things that don't.' This is the idea that reality is purely subjective, and that whatever appears to be the case for any given individual is true for that person. So, if the weather is cold fo...

I only mentioned this fact in passing in my last blog post, about Satan (the Adversary, in Hebrew), aka Lucifer in Latin, or Phōsphoros in Greek, both names meaning 'Light-Bringer', also being Venus, or Aphroditē, the Roman and Greek goddesses of love, and Astartē, their Phoenician equivalent, which I didn't mention. Lucifer, the Morning Star, as male, is the brother of Vesper, the Evening Star, and the son of Aurora, the Dawn, and Cephalus, meaning 'Head'. That's the Roman version of the story. The Greek version is that E ōsphoros, the 'Dawn-Bringer', Ph ōsphoros' other name, is the son of  Ē ōs, 'Dawn', and Kephalos, 'Head', an Aeolian prince she had kidnapped because she'd taken a fancy to him, forcing him to be her lover. Hesperos (Latinised as Hesperus), the Evening Star, is his brother. Astronomically, of course, the Morning and Evening Stars are identical, and neither of them are 'stars' at all, but the planet Venus...

In the Christian mythology, Satan (Hebrew, 'Adversary') is an Archangel, originally Lucifer (Latin), Phōsphoros (Greek), Helēl (Hebrew), meaning 'Light-bringer'. Because of his pride - his hubris - he and his followers, a third of all the angels in Heaven, fell, and are now condemned to suffer the torments of Hell forever. He, and they, are determined to ensure that as many humans as possible share their miserable fate, in order to spite their Creator. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, or Jewish Bible (the Tanakh ), the Septuagint (LXX), renders part of Isaiah 14:12 referring to Satan as ' ho he ōsphoros ho pr ōi ', the Morning Star, also identified with the Evening Star and the planet Venus, which to the Romans was, of course, a goddess, that of love, equated with Greek Aphrodit ē. Let us now unpack this: we are to suppose that an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator God, endowed with absolutely infallible foreknowledge, created Satan an...