Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'

reply to post by LiveEquation


I fear you totally missed my point. If there is a superior creator that did indeed want people to "walk by faith not by sight", any attempts to "put him to the test" would be null and void being that such a creator would not be subjected to our weak and feeble test's.

reply to post by BLKMJK


I think it is irrational to come up with ideas of a supreme being that can do that and decide to hide himself. If my mom wants to talk to me she calls me. She and i talk, i can hear her and she can hear me.

The idea of god on the other hand holds people to praying and faith. NO communication. The religion then tells you are not perfect because you are sinful and hence not worthy of eternal life..who cares about eternal life? what's the point of eternal life anyway?

Oh well, if Stephen say's so..............

He's made of flesh and blood like the rest of us.

His proof is what exactly?... becuase he's not very convincing even if you didn't believe in a God.

reply to post by LiveEquation


Yes but yet complete form came from nothingness. Which is what you cannot deny.

Originally posted by gemineye
reply to post by spacedonk

 

How the hell does Stephen Hawking know whether heaven exists or not? Last I checked, he hasn't died. How'd he find out?

Last time I checked no-one has went to heaven and came back to tell about it either

Originally posted by EnigmaticDill
reply to post by LiveEquation

 

Yes but yet complete form came from nothingness. Which is what you cannot deny.

define nothingness....what is it? i don't know of any nothingness. At zero kelvin there is no nothingness...energy still exists

reply to post by LiveEquation


So where does the of beginnings the laws of nature originate, where did thought originate? Where does any structure or coincidence come from? Something has to know the seperation of the infinite and where does the ideas of the infinite come from?

Your underestimating your ideas of God.

personally, I Believe in an afterlife of sorts. not an afterlife where you walk up to Mr.Christ and shake his hand as he shows you the many beautiful gardens on a cloudy space. Rather a judgement of spirit. If one is a spirit of peace and love, they will be peaceful and loved in the next life. If one is a spirit of hate and spite, they will be hated and spited in the next life.
Today, my great-aunt, Maizie, passed away in my home, in her bed, surrounded by her loved ones. It was beautiful, and made me think of what goes on after a person dies. then I see This and think "Within a woman with such a beautiful soul there is no possible way nothing happens after one dies." Maybe It's just me but I do believe that a spirit, once it has left the body, is free and continues far after this body is decayed and gone.
Just wanted to share my 2 cents. Sorry if I offended anybody in any religion.

First, who made Stephen Hawking the Specialist of Everything? And for a man who can only move one finger, teaches at the university, gives interviews, writes books, etc, ( and I am not even talking about his personal life ) it seems to me he does more than a lot...

He gave us his opinion on Aliens, now Life after Death... What next?

From what I've come to understand, Jesus' references to "heaven" or to a "kingdom of heaven", appear to have referred to a type of incorruptible first/last cause, from which has arisen, and continues to arise, our manifest reality as "daily bread", which is always fresh and new, like an eternal wellspring of life meeting life everlasting. It's the kind of concept that many modern scientists (Hawking excluded, obviously) refer to as a "tangled hieararchy", and it's something that mystics from all traditions have been speaking about, for millenium.

What strikes me is the degree to which we've backslid in terms of our understanding of reality and our place within it, a devolution or a degeneration in understanding and awareness made rather explicit in this very thread given many of the comments.

The materialist monist, arrow of time worldview, which Hawking subscribes to so as to avoid the God-theory at any and all cost, is dead and dying, and in truth, much of the problems of the world can be ascribed to the vaccuous, purposeless, and meaningless reality that the Godless worldview purports, in absolutely uncertain terms.

I think that the creation is made of the densest of all materials to the most evaporate one.
When we die, we evaporate, but eventually, we will condense again and fall to the ground, mixing with the Earth to form a new conscious life. We lose ego in the transition, but the water we are is eternal.

Nothing gets created, nothing is lost, all changes.

Originally posted by EnigmaticDill
reply to post by LiveEquation

 

So where does the beggings of the laws of nature originate, where did thought originate? Where does any structure or coincidence come from? Something has to know the seperation of the infinite and where does the ideas of the infinite come from?

Your underestimating your ideas of God.

edit on 16-5-2011 by EnigmaticDill because: (no reason given)

what do you mean by laws of nature, be specific.

Contrary to what you may think of how i think about god...this is what i understand so far:

We have something we dont understand that we call energy, and the language that best describes it is mathematics. Now what if life as we know it is mathematical in nature (actually it is). If you took any form of engineering systems course you will know that interaction of systems or mathematical equations produce other systems that seem stochastic in nature and yet they are not. Now this is where you, i , ideas. life, universes etc etc come in. We are consequences of interaction of these systems.

You call this system god and i do not.

reply to post by NewAgeMan


Like original sin, the serpent (devil) tricks Eve by getting her to act upon a lie, that is all it takes to corrupt our image of reality is when we lie to ourselves (which is apparently constant or untill we make this revelation in its totality).

The devil says if you eat the fruit you will not surely die, well God clearly said that you will surely die, the devil twisted the truth because she might no die immedietly but she died every day slowly by sinning against the flesh untill her death.

And this was done so that Eve doubts or thinks that God is hiding something from her. This takes away a pure walk of faith.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

reply to post by LiveEquation


I think many of us are simple saying that God is the eternal "omegapoint" of absolute perfection into which increasing complexity is drawn or compelled towards as an object of beauty and perfection, or the MO of a first/last cause, which is motivated by love and the desire for variety, mutuality, experience and impressions among other inscrutable needs and desires ie: that life is not without purpose and meaning, and therefore not without an intent of the will. We are only trying to be rational and logical in the face of the evidence, that's all.

When you have some time to spare, go google 'Stephen Hawking wrong'. It will take a loooooong time to wade through all info presented. The man has got to quit thinking HE is a God and just get on with stuff he knows best.
He needs to clear his cache.

reply to post by EnigmaticDill

The inevitability of should and shouldn't - it's always a problem for parents and children alike.

It is a law against which we can only break ourselves. The tree of life OTOH is a formative historical causation rooted in what ought to be, nourished by love.

From one family, who is corrupt, adopted into a new one, which is incorruptible and eternal, this is how I understand the whole Biblical frame of reference.

Some among us however, dismiss the whole thing out of hand without even thinking twice, wisdom of ages passed down from the Pharoes of Egypt in the person of Moses, discarded as nothing but the rantings of Christian conservative fundamentalists, and then, to add insult to injury, they make jeuvenile and snide remarks thinking they're being intelligent!

Today in 3 hours i will be attending the funeral of a boy taken tragically at age 14. he was my kids closes friend growing up. they had adventures and lived the life of carefree kids building cubbyhouses in the bush etc.

Did stephen hawking ever stop to think that maybe its just the thought of heaven and the chance that we will see our loved ones again that gives us the strength to go on?

so before everyone who likes to throw it out there that dead is dead, just remember, there are those for who the pain of that thought is just too much. for gods sake.....leave them with some hope.

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
reply to post by LiveEquation

 

I think many of us are simple saying that God is the eternal "omegapoint" of absolute perfection into which increasing complexity is drawn or compelled towards as an object of beauty and perfection, or the MO of a first/last cause, which is motivated by love and the desire for variety, mutuality, experience and impressions among other inscrutable needs and desires ie: that life is not without purpose and meaning, and therefore not without an intent of the will. We are only trying to be rational and logical in the face of the evidence, that's all.

Ideas Ideas...isn't it time to know the truth and stop hypothesizing about perfection and beauty...traits that do not mean anything

Isn't it time to know?

reply to post by bellagirl

That's not real faith, and while I can't speak for everyone, that is not where us "believers" are coming from. Me I'm just trying to be open minded and rational in the face of everything I've learned and have come to know and understand.

The belief in heaven as "something more" or greater than, waiting at present in the unexplored realm of an unknown unknown, is just being reasonable in the face of a very mysterious and unimaginably vast universe.

It's not motivated by a fear of death as "the end", but it based on the evidence life presents to us.

It's the more jeuvenile, infantile, close minded, rebellious teenage angst, which is driven towards the nihilism of a meaningless, purposeless and Godless reality. It's incredibly arrogant, presumptuous, small minded, and ignorant in the face of all evidence to the contrary the hard atheist position is. I feel sorry for unbelievers who've sold themselves the lie that believers only believe born of a fear of death as a finite end. It's absurd! That's not "it" at all.

Sorry to hear about the little kid, but what comes from God returns to God, so there's nothing to worry about!

reply to post by LiveEquation

Look around. The kingdom of heaven is spread out before your very eyes.

"Have you not seen, have you not heard, have you not been told since before the very foundations of the Earth?!"

You're right that it's a gnosis, not a "belief in", not a faith per se.

Edit: And the bride and the brigegroom say "come, and freely drink the living water!"

It's an invitation, extended by love. it is given to be understood and accepted, or rejected, either out of ignorance, or a humorless, hardened heart, with a sneer..