The scope of the known universe is as follows:
130,000,000,000 galaxies
400,000,000,000 stars per galaxy
52,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe
6,700,000,000 humans on Earth
7,761,194,029,850 stars per human
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html

Might it just be possible that "God", the creator of the universe, has more important things to do rather than worry about the status of the 6.7 billion humans on the planet Earth? Since there are 7.7 trillion stars for every human, it appears logical that the status of each human is totally unimportant to God, assuming that s/he actually exists.

If I weren't sa humble, I'd think I was so speshul ta tha Lard.

That's where I always find mine.

Let's get procreatin' people--there's trillions of planets that need future LDS gods!!

What baffles me is that no one has found a star that matches the description of Kolob! Why is that? In fact, no star has been found that behaves the way the Morg says it does. Why is that? Of course, it might be out there - way out on the fringes somewhere - but my guess is that it ain't.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Isn't Kolob invisible because it hides behind the sun?

What other description do you have?

Anagrammy

For what it's worth...

My HP stepfather gave us a specific FHE lesson regarding this. According to him, there is a planet/star that apparently matches the specs of kolob. It's infact just a couple solar systems down the block. He cited a BYU source...

So at the very least that's being circulated around some wards... Usually told right after the shellfish fossils found in the grand canyon confirms the flood as obviously true. ITNOJCA ;)

God is a short order fry cook:

Bless that we get home safe.

Bless that those who couldn't come this time come next time.

God wouldn't know.what to do without our deeply meaningful and touching prayers.

Well, if he created it or started the big bang or just stirred the pot, why wouldn't he take of his humans. It's not like he that much too do. Ever powerful, all seeing, all knowing..he could do this. Wonder who else he's watching over? No doubt the atheists too.

stormy

I just finished reading a book about Bacteria. About 10% of your weight is bacteria, about 90% of the number of cells in your body is bacteria. I honestly after reading the book got the feeling that bacteria was the reason for the planet. Not the humans. We are the aberration.

The purpose of humanity was to create plastic. Mother Earth wanted plastic and figured that the best way to get it was to create humans. Now that Mother Earth has all the plastic she needs, humanity is being phased out.

I'm not sure whether this revelation from Brother Carlin will go down well with the local congregation, but as Neal A. Maxwell used to say: You can't run away from things as they really are. (Of course the problem with Maxwell's maxim is that he wanted people to accept the Mormon leadership's view of the "way things really are," no matter how often they've got it wrong in the past.

At the end of the day, after you boil it all down and all is said and done and the fat lady has sung, I don't know if Brother Carlin was right. I'm pretty sure that the anthromorphic God believed in by Mormons is a figment of their imaginations. On the other hand, there's no need to think that a much higher level of consciousness--maybe even a universally aware consciousness--if it exists would necessarily have a limited attention span that could be thrown off by the total number of objects existing at one time in the universe. The idea that a putative God would be too busy and distracted with the tasks of managing (cue Carl Sagan) "billions and billions and billions" of galaxies, etc., is really just an extrapolation from the notion of an anthropomorphic God whose mind basically functions like that of a physical human brain on celestial steriods...or something like that. ;o)

What book is that? I'd like to take a look....

It was a CD course 'Modern Scholar' Course I checked out from the library where 'teachers teach you' I listen to a lot of books on tape/cd I think it was called 'Unseen Diversity' The World of Bacteria

Doh....I was all excited. Right now I'm reading ,"The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements"

It's really good...if you're into chemistry at all.

Thanks for the response though!

An all powerful God could take a personal interest in every aspect of existence, it wouldn't be beyond the scope of their all-powerful resume.
How can we presume to comprehend the mind of such a creature, if one exists? Maybe there is a creature who is aware of all and cares about all according to its own measures.

1. Can it create a square circle?

2. Can it create beings that have free will AND don't sin?

3. Can it destroy itself?

4. Can it know its future and then do something different?

(All-powerful god concepts are bronze-age nonsense)

Worst case of over-engineering ever.

...a stretch Hummer being custom-built to transport a flea.

...the belief that the universe was created just for us humans -- just like a child thinks everything is about himself. All that twinkly stuff in the sky is just for my amusement.

...but I think he believed that it is usually outgrown.

Among some religious groups, however, "Be ye as little children" is the attitude.

Strange that immaturity and naivete should become the ideal, but it explains a lot.

The universe was created BY us humans. There is no way to prove that it has any existence outside of our own minds--everything we
"know" about it is known by our minds, within our minds, and all the apparently objective tools and technology through which we know it are also within our minds. Like a dream, if you will: EVERYTHING, no matter how apparently objective, is a creation of your mind.

Of course it is a joint-creation of all human minds, but your particular perception is a product of your own mind. Everything is just a blip of electrical stimulation that your brain registers and formulates into a picture. The universe as we "know" it is just such a picture, a product of the human brain.

The concepts of Time and Space are also the mind's creation. Why? In a childish attempt to 'hide from God.' Time and Space do not exist for God, nor do these exist in our own Ground-of-Being consciousness, reached by some in meditation. Just the "Eternal Present."

But the phantasmagoria created in, and by, Time and Space allows us to 1) hide God, and 2) hide from God (in the childish, ostrich-like way that children cover their heads and think that they're invisible to others). Responses on this thread show that this kind of thinking is alive and well.

If God created the universe, then he most certain wanted us to use imperical reasoning to learn about it. Why else would he place the earth in such a unique position as to make the universe observable? And why else would he place us in such a unique environment as to be capable of fashioning tools that can observe and quantify the universe?

I'm not saying I believe in God, but our situation is pretty damn amazing. Go humanity!

The anomaly would be the relatively few places from which it would be impossible or difficult to observe the universe. The surface of Venus would be one. SLC in February is another (inversion joke).

It appears that planetary systems are pretty common. It could be that earth-like planets are common as dirt. We don't know, because they are too small relative to the size of stars to be observable with current techniques, but we don't know of anything that precludes the existence of earth-like planets either. We really don't know if our planetary situation is unusual or not.

The location of our solar system between two spiral arms of the galaxy is quite unique, although it will probably only last for a few more hundred million years. It gives us the ability to see the galaxy, and see outwards from it, without the clutter of all the gasses and stars around. Most solar systems are either in a cluttered spiral arm or close to the inside (the galaxy is a very bright place on the inside, and would be near impossible to see out of.

Though I suppose using high-frequency radiation detection, such as X-rays, it would be possible to see out, but very very difficult.

And the nature of our atmosphere makes it convenient for seeing the universe. The only other solid planet in our solar system with a dense enough atmosphere for life is Venus, and I bet you'd have a hard time seeing the stars from Venus.

Our position is extraordinarily unique.

We are located on on one of its spiral arms, out towards the edge.
THAT IS FROM Dr. Pamela Gore
Georgia Perimeter College
THIS IS FROM wIKI:
The Solar System is located in the Milky Way galaxy halfway out from the center, on the inner edge of the Orion–Cygnus Arm
AND THIS FROM DEEP FLY.ORG:
The Milky Way Galaxy exhibits a barred spiral structure, with two major spiral arms and several minor, irregular arms extending from the central bar (Benjamin 2008). The Solar System is located along a branch or "spur" of one of the lesser arms, traditionally known as the Orion Arm and located about 28,000 light years (8.5 kiloparsecs) from the Galactic Center in Sagittarius (Levine et al. 2006).

THAT MEANS WE ARE NOT "between two spiral arms of the galaxy"!!
AND ALSO "we" see the observable universe and there are Many types of telescopes that also "see" the Universe in other ways...and actually the light spectrum we see in is not the best to observe the Universe!! still magnificent any way you "scope" it though!!!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2011 12:56PM by bignevermo.

Alright, I'll concede that we're on a spiral arm. But it's a pretty minor one, and is not one of the two major spiral arms of the Milky Way. Here is a chart that roughly shows our location, and you can see that we're in a pretty dim spot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_Way_Arms_ssc2008-10.svg

You decide.

But I believe I did mention that higher-frequency spectrums are better for penetrating the stuff out there that obscures our vision. It'd be harder to get to that point, though, without visually seeing the universe first.

If a god did exist, why would it have to place us in a dim section of a spiral arm in an environment in which we were capable of fashioning tools?

Why wouldn't it give us the same knowledge & power it supposedly already has?

What kind of games is this god-machine playing anyhow?

If I believed in a God then I might care about answering your questions. But that still wouldn't change the fact that our position is pretty cool.

The immensity of the universe and our insignificance is one of the things that led me away from a belief in God. A god concerned about humans on this planet would be like worrying about the bacteria that live on one speck of sand on a beach that stretches across the entire planet earth.

that expresses the idea that I tried to present in my OP.

I hope there's no god. If he's real then he's a sadistic sociopath.