Did God Create the Universe?

One lady caller on Shawn Hannity questioned whether God really was responsible for the big bang that created the Universe.  Let me weigh in on this right now.  I believe the universe would not have come into existence without the actions of God.  Shawn asked how all of that matter that had just been sitting there in some compacted, energy-less state could suddenly explode into the big bang without some divine spark supplying the energy.  Well first of all what we now as matter and time and space did not then exist.  There was no “time elapsing” while that matter or proto-matter was in its inert state.  The Higgs bozons that govern gravity and time had not yet even come into existence yet.  We are told the Universe began with tremendous heat where it took time for this material to cool into the bozons and quarks and such such as protons and neutrons that make up matter today.  As I said in September of 2004 we cannot even say when this occurred.  Even though there is a cause and effect trail that leads back to a point in time - - since from God’s point of view the “time” had not yet come into existence- - from God’s point of view he could have artificially created “the past” as well as “the future” and all we are experiencing now is just all this playing itself out.  It is our teaching that we usually show some exploding asterisk spreading out not into space but into Time.  Time and space were both what’s known as “not yet formatted”.   Picture time-lines spreading out in all dimensions.  They would seem virtually infinite in number but mathematically they are not infinite.  It’s a quantifiable number, however it is very large.  But not only did God create matter and time and space, he also created Life, and that’s a whole other complex ball of wax.   I would stress that the Big Bang has been all proven now and that the causal chain of evidence points back to a singular point in time.  The remaining question is whether there is any connection with the Big Bang and “What happens to a black hole once it’s formed”.  That question I don’t know the answer to.  Remember that black holes drop out of “formatted space” into a Void.  And when the Universe began expanding after the Big Bang it expands into a Void of unformatted space.  As such I do not believe that there is an “edge” to the universe because “infinity” is another mere artifact of God.  It’s speculation but since it’s a supposition that kills two birds with one stone it seems like as good of explanation as any.  That is- - - it explains what “happens to Black Holes” once they are formed and it also explains where all that “building material” came from in the first place.   

Bernie Sanders won West Virginia with just over fifty percent but Bernie got 14 delegates to Hillary’s ten.  Trump won both West Virginia and Nebraska.  Winning Nebraska was another death blow to Ted Cruz who up until yesterday was contemplating reviving his presidential campaign.  Now he won’t.  Thom Hartman still thinks that Trump is going to turn into Ronald Reagan as your “actor” who wants us to “feel good about America again” and do amazing things though he won’t say how.  Shawn Hannity wants any candidate who will slash taxes, particularly for the rich, and build up the military and eliminate regulations and hype up the energy business and get those strip mines going in West Virginia again- - and build up an America where the poor pull themselves up by their boot straps.  All of this would be to the tune of hysteria over Latino minorities and Islamaphobia.  As such Shawn’s view of America is fundamentally different from mine.  If the Republicans try and turn Trump into Ronald Reagan he will lose all those crossover votes that he had been getting from disaffected Bernie supporters.  Meanwhile Republicans are concerned about the Congress going democratic.  So who do I vote for if I don’t vote for Trump or Hillary.  There is Gary Johnson or Jill Stein of course.  I could write in “Ron Paul” just to be funny.  Norman Goldman is on now and he’s been talking about Venn diagrams and there is a definite overlap between the Trump circle and the Bernie Sanders circle as strange as that seems.  However I concluded that in the Venn diagram between myself and Hillary- - the overlap of our interests is a lot narrower than I would have thought four years ago, when I was a lot more inclined to vote for Hillary this year. 

Three people have returned around here from long hospital stays.  Bill has been gone exactly two months from March 11th to May 11 and he returned just after three thirty.  They wanted him to wait to return so he could walk half way decently on his leg- - that had knee replacement surgery.  He had two pairs of pants stolen.  Glen Nelson returned yesterday.  He wasn't that talkative and didn't want to give me any instant coffee for three brown cigarettes because he doesn't like brown ones.  David Shaner returned today at Dinner and was loud and boisterus in the dining room.  He was complaining a lot at Harbor Villa where it seems all three of them were.  I was never able to get information.  I had just heard that the food was better there and you could get all the coffee you wanted.  All three have been long time residents here.  

Remember when coups and assassinations were secretive, when presidents were obliged to go to Congress and tell lies and ask permission for wars, when torture, spying, and lawless imprisonment were illicit, when re-writing laws with signing statements and shutting down legal cases by yelling “state secrets!” was abusive, and when the idea of a president going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays to pick whom to have murdered would have been deemed an outrage?

All such resistance and outrage is in the past by mutual consent of those in power in Washington, D.C. Whoever becomes the next president of the United States could only unfairly and in violation of established bipartisan precedent be denied the powers of unlimited spying, imprisoning, and killing. That this is little known is largely a symptom of partisanship. Most Democrats still haven’t allowed themselves to hear of the kill list. But the widespread ignorance is also a function of media, of what’s reported, what’s editorialized, what’s asked about in campaign debates, and what isn’t.

The new book, Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program, from Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, is terrific to see even more for what it represents than for what it actually teaches us. We’ve already learned the details it includes from the website of the Intercept, and they fit with similar details that have trickled out through numerous sources for years. But the fact that a media outlet is reporting on this topic and framing its concerns in a serious way around the dangerous expansion of presidential and governmental power is encouraging.

The United States is now working on putting into action drone ships and ships of drone planes, but has never worked out how in the world it is legal or moral or helpful to blow people up with missiles all over the earth. Drone wars once declared successful and preferable alternatives to ground wars are predictably evolving into small-scale ground wars, with great potential for escalation, and nobody in any place of power has considered what candidate Obama might have called ending the mindset that starts wars, perhaps by using the rule of law, aid, disarmament, and diplomacy.

I recommend starting The Assassination Complex with the afterword by Glenn Greenwald, because he reminds us of some of Senator and candidate Obama’s statements in favor of restoring the rule of law and rejecting President George W. Bush’s abuses. What Obama called unacceptable at Guantanamo, he has continued at Guantanamo and elsewhere, but expanded into a program that focuses on murder without “due process” rather than imprisonment without “due process.”

“Somehow,” writes Greenwald, “it was hideously wrong for George W. Bush to eavesdrop on andimprison suspected terrorists without judicial approval, yet it was perfectly permissible for Obama toassassinate them without due process of any kind.” That is in fact a very generous depiction of the drone murder program, as The Assassination Complex also documents that, at least during one time period examined, “nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.” We should think of drones more as random killing machines than as machines killing particular people who are denied the right to a trail by jury but are suspected of something by somebody.