The Big Questions

Blog post # 4:

First of all, thank you to all who read my .. asymmetric thoughts .. here.

(Note: There seems to be a bug with blogspot's comment-posting. If you get the message that your comment was not published, try again in a little bit. I seem to be able to post comments successfully about 50% of the time.)

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First, an anagram:
What is this an anagram of?

Ah, man strains a GI.

(Clue, it is not about a constipated drill-instructor. But you can tell that I STRAINED to come up with a semi-coherent sentence that anagrams with the secret phrase.)

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Maybe I saw this before, but I realized just the other day that:

A mustache is a.... mouth brow....

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(And I may have heard the following before too. It sounds like a George Carlin observation.)

Why is the top of the inside of your mouth called the ROOF of your mouth?

Since the "roof" of the mouth is really the underside of the inside of the mouth,
shouldn't it instead be called the CEILING of the mouth!???...

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Ah, all this talk about constipated drill-instructors and mustaches and mouths makes me turn to thoughts about the nature of reality.


Or more specifically, I am wondering about the nature of God. For those who know me and my lack of beliefs, and who are religious, don't worry. I am NOT here today to attack God or God's existence.

(Or should that be the existence of "God", or maybe the existence of " ' God ' ", nested inside any number of quotation marks.)

I am here instead to seriously wonder, hey, what if God DOES exist.



I saw Allah in Valhalla....

Well, first let me tell you all where I am.
I have no beliefs of any certainty. I am an agnostic.
But if I believed in anything regarding the topic, I would be an atheist.
But if I was religious, I would probably be a Buddhist.
But if I believed in the theistic God, then I would probably be a Deist.
But if I were a Christian instead, then I would probably be a Unitarian.

Maybe I would. I don't know. I don't even know if WE exist at all, let alone if God exists!

But let assume that God exists. I would say then that God is PROBABLY the 'zero-point energy of the false-vacuum' (maybe), to borrow terminology from physics.
This energy is the lowest possible energy of empty space, which is a positive amount of energy, since -- because of quantum physic's uncertainty principle -- there can be no energy lower than this. (For, if there was zero energy in parts of space, then this energy level would be absolutely certain, which is forbidden.)

So, maybe God's existence is defined by uncertainty itself!

Or maybe God both exists and doesn't exist. (God's existence is in a "superposition of states", to borrow more physics terminology.)

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And as long as we are merging science and religion, I would say that the singing of the angels (maybe there are no angels, but their singing does exist) is the cosmic background radiation white-noise.

And maybe God is all about being omniscient, but does not have any super-powers and perhaps did not create this universe.
Or maybe....

So much to consider, so little time.

Ha! Life after death. What about that, Great Leroy, the knowing one???

Well, hmmmm.

I heard on the news one time that SOME people who are close to death, but recover, remember seeing Heaven and all that. Muslims see Mohammed, Christians see Jesus, and (get this) atheists see a Heaven without any god. Some people have even reportedly seen Hell. (I heard about the visions of Hell from an unreliable source, though.)


But maybe the after-life experience is all an illusion caused by the dying brain. Maybe. Maybe not.

Going back to the zero-point energy theory of God, maybe the afterlife is the merging of the soul with the energy of the universe,... man.

And yes, the soul!

The soul is basically what, outside of our physical selves, makes us each an individual, or that is what it has been defined as.

So, is it our memories? Is it our consciousness? As far as consciousness is concerned, some scientists have theorized that little carbon structures in all our cells called "micro-tubules" (I am going by a distant memory of mine here) interact with the physical world via quantum mechanics, basically because the structures are so small. Some have theorized that these micro-tubules are where consciousness arises in us.
If these are indeed the center of our being, of our awareness that we are aware that we are aware that we are aware that..., then that would mean that our ENTIRE body is the seat of the soul.
There is some small evidence that this is indeed fact. When some people receive donated organs, they report having vague memories once belonging to the donors.

I once had a dream that every individual's soul had a unique shape. This shape related to our personalities. (And so I guess it could change throughout one's life.)

But maybe the soul is indeed shaped, just like in the movies, like our bodies. (Although, we all may be sans robes or any other clothing in Heaven....)

Anyway, all in all, I am skeptical of the theories favoring the existence of a Heaven and a God (or gods). But nobody really knows.

Still, the point of this essay, if there is any point at all, is that The Answer to the Big Questions may be found in science. I don't think anyone should be afraid to look, anyway. But I think we are.

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One last thing before I go today, a simple word puzzle.
(I think I got the idea for this kind of puzzle from Will Shortz's segment on NPR.)

*Start with the English name of a certain color.
*Change one letter to get a relatively uncommon spelling of a common girl's name in America.
(2 syllables)
*Change this to the most common spelling of the same name.
*Change the last syllable of this latter spelling to get another color's name.
(There are actually two colors that will work for the last step.)

I will answer this (and the anagram puzzle above) later in a couple of days in the comments to this post, unless someone else answers these earlier (in the comments).

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Thank you,
Leroy Quet