Pondering Meat and God

Over the summer, my urologist told me to cut my meat intake in half, avoid all salt, and otherwise pretend I'm 20-30 years older than I am or TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES could follow. How he determined that from five minutes with me, I'm not sure.

For not-the-first time I was stuck between multiple doctors giving me conflicting dietary advice.

Addis Ababa: Lucy's home

While in Addis Ababa [three weeks ago now], I visited the national museum. It has some interesting artifacts and paintings, but none of it is the Real Reason to go there. So I'm going to keep those pictures small. You can see more detail by clicking on them.

The brands on the top right were used in place of signet rings to mark who stuff belongs to. I think they look pretty cool. I could go for that. On the left, you see a teeny rendering of Gondar, once the capitol city and also known as the Camelot of Ethiopia. Of course, all I can think about is Gondor, and it's one more proof that life really did begin in this neighborhood.


On the right is a massive throne. The seat itself is about at my waist height and the chair is more than a story tall. They have some interesting ceremonial garb.

There was a group of school children there. That was fun because some of them wanted to see a little model city outline on a pedestal but couldn't reach. Using appropriate international sign language, I picked one of them up and let her see. The grin I got in response was precious.

Upstairs they have some pictures I rather enjoyed. Among the things that makes Ethiopia interesting to me is the history of Judaism and early Christianity there. (Did you know Ethiopia is mentioned in Isaiah?) 

 




A painting commemorating the 1984 famine.








The real reason to go to the museum is to meet Lucy. She's buried in the basement. But she isn't conveniently located at the beginning of the downstairs where the other 2-4 million year old skulls are. She's down a lot of corridors and turns to force you to see the rest of the saber toothed bunny rabbits and gorgons and whatnot you didn't come here to see are before you finally find....

Nibley on the Infinite Atonement, the Existence of Life, Temples, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

This post has maintained a steady stream of visitors on our old family blog and I'd rather move them to this more public one, so I'm moving the post to here. The text consists of excerpts from Nibley's article and, except for my [insertions] are only his words.


Hugh Nibley, "The Meaning of the Temple," Temple and Cosmos, Ch. 1:

One basic proposition receives particular attention ... the well-known second law of thermodynamics: everything runs down. ... Let us quote [Lyall] Watson, the biologist:

Left to itself, everything tends to become more and more disorderly, until the final and natural state of things is completely random distribution of matter. Any kind of order ... is unnatural and happens only by chance encounters. ... The further combination of molecules into anything as highly organized as a living organism is wildly improbable. Life is a rare and unreasonable thing ... infinitesimal.

There is no chance of us being here at all. ... The nuclear physicist P. T. Matthews asks:

Why is the proton stable... [with a lifespan of 50 minutes vs. 10 to the -8 seconds]? There is no obvious reason why it should not disintegrate into, say, a positive pion and neutrino... . By relentless operation of the Second Law, essentially every proton would by now have decayed into lighter particles. Clearly the opposite is the case, and there must be some very exact law which is preventing this from happening. ... A human being is at very best ... quite unimaginabl[y] improbabl[e].

So the physical scientists and the naturalists agree that if nature has anything to say about it, we wouldn't be here. This is the paradox which Professor Wald of Harvard says, "The spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. ..." [Matthews continues]

If, after seeing a room in chaos, it is subsequently found in good order, the sensible inference is not that time is running backwards, but that some intelligent person has been in to tidy up. If you find the letters of the alphabet ordered on a piece of paper to form a beautiful sonnet, you do not deduce that teams of monkeys have been kept for millions of years strumming on typewriters, but rather that Shakespeare has passed this way.

It was the evolutionist who seriously put forth the claim that an ape strumming on a typewriter for a long enough time could produce, by mere chance, all the books in the British Museum, but did any religionist ever express such boundless faith? I don't know any religious person who ever had greater faith than that. ...