July Tenth 2025: Thursday
Once, twice, maybe three Times a year, I drink a soda pop, Coke or root beer, what in my growing up years we called "a cole drank", or just "a drank" (can I have a nickel for a drank?), and this afternoon is that Time. (You put your commas where you want yours, and I'll put my commas where I want mine, nomesane?) Only ice water tastes better than Coke and even though, as a CHF counter-measure, I step on my scale every morning, I'm long ages away from how it feels to be thin.
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For sixty and sixty-five years, beginning with several years of intensive study and telescope viewing during our three years in Japan, I've been intrigued with what astronomers call "the red shift" (light moving toward the red spectrum as it recedes, meaning if light looks red on a spectroscope, that light is not stationary but is moving away as its light waves are compressed, in the other direction), indicating that galaxies are speeding away from us and from each other, and rapidly expanding the Universe.
The red shift is like the doppler sound of an automobile horn, honked as an automobile approaches your car at speed, the horn tone going up in pitch, rising because the sound waves are compressed as the car comes toward your car, then falling, dropping lower as the car drives on and the sound waves are stretched, receding in the distance.
Actually, I've not heard that doppler effect of car horns in many years; but it was common when I was a boy riding with my parents and siblings as we drove from Pensacola homeward toward Panama City on the lonesome two-lane highway at night. Cars seemed frequently to honk the horn as they approached then passed a meeting car at night. It was in the nineteen-forties, and I remember best the long, endless, desolate area between Philips Inlet and the tall twin orange mounds of sand just before Destin.
21st century six-lane highway US98 through housing developments, souvenir shops and condos is far, far different from the quiet, woodsy world of northwest Florida that I grew up in.
Anyway, the red shift. It isn't mentioned in the essay introduction below, but the red shift has been the basis for theories about the expanding Universe. This essay, the study, indicates that what astronomers thought was the whole Universe expanding may actually be the effect, as experienced from Earth, of our being inside a space void from which outside, stronger elements are being pulled away gravitationally. Thus, the red shift would only appear from within the void, and maybe theories about the expanding Universe need further exploration.
To me as a semi-retired mini-minor vocational theologian of sorts, all this is more captivating and more likely than that the Creator of all this - -
- - Whoever Whatever said "yeh-HI" (the Word spoke and was spoken/sounded/heard in Hebrew, and it was jussive, not imperative, not mandatory but permissive) and consented to the Big Bang, would be so concerned about what Mark Twain has Satan characterize in "The Bible According To Mark Twain" as a doubtful experiment - - when God gathered the Heavenly Council to thrill them with the news that He had created Humans, Satan's response is, "Excellency, why?" - - to which God stutters as he fails to explain the inexplicable; and then Satan's advice is, "I'd drown the whole lot of 'em" - - that God would be concerned and interested in sending his Son to live exemplary and die excruciatingly on Earth (one of conceivably octillions of planets in the Universe) to save me, one of some 117,000,000,000 (117 billion) people who have lived on Earth since the beginning of humanity, from my sins into Heaven when I die - - in this Universe of some two trillion galaxies, of which our Milky Way Galaxy
is only one of, again, some 2,000,000,000,000 (two trillion) galaxies. It should blow the mind but is really not surprising that we self-centric humans define our deities with characteristics that are what we admire and exactly what we think we need - - we, the center of it all.
Our God as worshipped and creedaly defined is too small, the Earth-focused vision we have of God is too small. A hobby task as I sink deeper (or swim, or rise higher) into extreme old age, is imagining comprehending and defining an ineffable, incomprehensible God, considering what we know about Creation that our Nicene forebears could never even have imagined. If I begin my definition as they did, Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεὸν Πατέρα παντοκράτορα "We faith in one God Father almighty ... " what more can I say that would not be outrageously diminishing of God? That would not make God laugh. And that would not be enragingly arrogant as Job came across, antagonizing and embarrassing God?
Or perhaps a bit of humor might be a safe approach, eh? IDK. Or maybe God is still getting a kick out of what the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople decided about God and under heavy pressure from Caesar and his bishops, voted in as mandatory orthodoxy!!
RSF&PTL
T89&c
top pic I've had a long Time. did not take it myself, I think it's the Arizona desert sky gazing at the Milky Way at night, which I've seen, years ago when Linda's parents lived in Scottsdale, and we visited and drove out into the desert
Oh, and here's that essay intro:
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