Tim wrote:
Let me remind folks that I am areligious...I no more believe in a god or goddess or afertlife or supernatural things than I believe in the Easter Bunny. I view all religions as cults of magical belief.
There are two ways of modeling the Universe. One can build it from lots of copies of the null set, or one can take the undifferentiated whole, and subdivide it into countless fragments in equilibrium with each other in various complex ways. Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method of modeling, created for people who can't do the math, and who have never bothered to wonder why all the choirs of angels form such neat little arrays. God is the thing you have before you start chopping it up. God is the abstraction that has everything in the universe as a possible instance. Archangels are chunks of a coarse partition of God. We are chunks of a fine partition of God.
Having said this, all of the Mormons I have known have been unusually honest, forthright, and hard-working. I worked with a fair number of them at Intel, and they were solid contributors. And the Mormons are doing well financially, here in the U.S. and abroad.
Mormons make perfect employees. They are always bathed, well-dressed, hard-working, self-reliant, well-educated, respectful of your authority, and they hardly ever mention that after they die, they hope to rule over other planets in physical bodies, and have a wonderful sex life. Then again, they'll put their teenage children in a mental institution in a heartbeat for defying them, or acting gay. Mormons are the true Stepford citizen units. Perfect on the outside, dangerous on the inside.
He was a hell of a lot more interesting than JC, that's for sure. I recommend "The Prophecy," the wonderful movie with Christopher Walken as the angel Gabriel.
The Nephilim are a fun bunch.
As such beings and such deities are fanciful, I am more interested in the psychological state that allowed a 7th-century merchant to write such a book.
The whole universe is inside you, Grasshopper. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"