Victoria has banned religious organisations from running prayer groups, handing out Bibles and delivering other unauthorised information sessions in state schools during school hours.

The directive has been issued by the Education Department under recent changes to the delivery of Special Religious Instruction (SRI) to students in public schools.

A government spokeswoman said the directive only affected religious activities that were run by unaccredited teachers or external groups.

But Dan Flynn from the Australian Christian Lobby said the guidelines appeared to cover all activities by students.

"In the SRI policy, the formal wording appears to ban prayer groups, youth groups, clubs, info sessions or workshops," Mr Flynn said.

"It says that those forums or the events constitute promotion of specific religions in schools outside SRI and are not permitted.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-31/victoria-bans-prayer-groups-and-other-religious-events-school/5637242

"The best theologian he ever met, David Hume [1711 – 1776] used to say, was the old Edinburgh fishwife who, having recognized him as Hume the atheist, refused to pull him out of the bog into which he had fallen until he declared he was a Christian and repeated the Lord's prayer."

 

In our little arcane pigeon loft, in need to inject a meaning of life, we contemplate the end of time, but one will have to wait a long long long long time. 

The apocalyptic end of stuff, the eschatological moment, the Armageddon minute/or hour is a long long long way away... In the small corner of our universe, the sun is middle-aged and still has a good five billion years left in it. The galaxy we call the milky way ("our" galaxy) seems to have at least another 100 billion years of its own existence, who knows, and the most pessimistic Gustimate for the entire universe is about 1000 billion years before the universe runs out of expansionary fuel — dark matter. The universe is young.

But we can relatively wipe out life on this planet. Humans are good at inventing stuff that can destroy other stuff. Well, life is somewhat resistant and as suggested by many prophets of nuclear doom, the cockroaches and other small life-forms might survive our madness. But are we mad, or just in desperate need to find an escape to our torment: being human. Being an animal? Being part of life itself?

So we invent "something else": god. We have this ability to dream and modify our consciousness, but rather than use this for enjoying the moment and make the best of smelling the flowers, we prefer planning for the next, the "other" side... because there must be a "better side"... There must be a better one, since this one is crap? Not in Gus' book.

Individually, the end of time comes at the moment of our individual death. Simple. 

No angels with trumpets, no hells-gates opening, no Dante's inferno, no heavenly lit tunnel toward whatever. Just a few nice words from our friends and relatives who, teary in the eyes, remember the good times at a piss-up in our honour. Hopefully. A vase of ashes, an inscription, a tombstone... We're a-gone. And forgotten after a while, by the next wave of humans. 

Am not I 
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me? 

This quatrain is from William Blake's The Fly. William Blake mentions that "without contraries is no progression". This was not a new concept in his lifetime.

The bible is based on the "battle" between "good and evil", god and the debbil. The concept on contraries also exists in the "yin and the yang" philosophy.

We, humans, feel that we need to explain our behaviour with two sides, a good side and a bad one... The Abrahamic religions harp heavily on the "original sin" that tends to make us born bad. Real Bad. So we need to do some religious gymnastics or accept that the man who died on the cross came to remove this original sin in the heart of believers... Unless we have to kill a few infidels, whatever comes first to take you to the other side with confidence... 

The fact is human nature is strongly related to animalistic behaviour. Should we want to survive in the planetary environment we need to do a few things. We need to eat, we need to defend ourselves against various aggressions, from nature and from other humans, and we need to be reactive while protecting our young. Some people call this the selfish gene. Whatever. I describe it as our innate need to fight for survival, which in a social context can develop into a destructive socio-psychopathic trait. The neo-fascists cultivate this trait for profit.

Because of social dynamics, in which survival may have necessitated an orderly structure against a destructive chaos, we have developed over more than 200 thousand years of e-vo-lu-tion, this fantastic ability to be stylistic — which is a resultant of our reactivity and of a concurrent growing memory size, which has expanded beyond the existential need of survival. 
Stylistic activity soon becomes subjective, and becomes our interpretation of our need and management of our "well-being", individually and in a social context. We know pain and we want to minimise pain. Still do. the proof is the countless advertisements about headache tablets on the tele. 
WE seem to also need the cultivation and management of a cosmic angst, as we discover the planets and the stars... A fly can see a smaller universe for its own need of survival. Knowing about the stars and the planets may be somewhat irrelevant to a fly, apart from night and day, while watching for the sneaky spider webs which millions of years of evolution has not stopped this "contrary" in the life of a fly. In the life of a spider, not catching the fly means death... this would be a terminal contrary.

And this "contraries mechanism" which helps "progression" is also very much in line with chaotic statistics. Should all the flies be caught by spiders, the spiders would become extinct. 

Thus contraries happen everywhere and occur very prominently in science. Archimedes action/reaction in a bathtub, the polarity of electromagnetism, the seemingly distant duality of light and gravity, and many other phenomenon such as particles and anti-particles behaviour, are concepts used to explain a lot of the world we live in. And these concepts WORK. They provide the necessary grounding of most human inventions.
The genetic sciences are now going at a pace unimagined in the 1940s, or when genes were first suspected (from 1880)... And genetics are based on our scientific understanding of atomic constructs, quantum chemistry and NO fairy dust. 

Thus, not all is defined by "contraries". There are associations, fields and relationships that create moments. 

It is likely that time is a quantum function of a quantum bit ("particle"— whatever which energy level) but with so many quantum bits in the universe, time and space have become a "continuum" within a micro-micro-second of the big bang. 

Is it possible that the big bang happened because all the time quantum of MOST of the quantum bits became harmonically aligned and created a powerful INSTANT in which a small percentage of particles survived while less anti-particles did not?  The result is a DIFFERENTIAL universe or in Einstein words: a relative universe. In this differential universe, there are many inevitable concurrent, associated and dissociated fluxes, in which out of seemingly huge chaos come strong associations, including the molecular associations that are at the basis of life.

And we know many of these associations, including the relationship of gravity and temperature that create "elements" in stars and heavy stars. These are not fiction, but definite understandings.

As I have mentioned before, the universe needs "flaws" in order to exist. It needs disturbances to stop it becoming a uniform blancmange of non-associated particles (Which Gus postulates as the dark matter — i.e. non-associated undetected particles which fill the vacuum and accelerate the expansion of the universe).

So in the end, the end is far far far far away... We have plenty of time, though we might fluff it for our selfish-selves...

Gus Leonisly
Your local time keeper...

 

Dark matter scientists are doubling down on efforts to catch the elusive particles thought to constitute most of the matter in the universe. These theorized particles make themselves felt through gravity: They appear to tug on the normal matter throughout the universe but they otherwise can’t be seen or touched. Experiments aiming to observe the rare occasions when dark matter particles interact with normal atoms have been operating for decades without success and have already ruled out many of the most basic explanations for dark matter. Rather than give up the search, however, three of the largest experiments recently won approval to make big upgrades, potentially allowing them to reach the sensitivities needed to finally pin down these cagey missing particles.

read more: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-matter-search-second-generation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScientificAmerican-News+%28Content%3A+News%29

 

"General relativity correctly describes what we observe at the scale of the solar system," reassures Constantinos Skordis, of The Universities of Nottingham and Cyprus. "It all works beautifully at this scale and it has been tested." The problems arise when you look at the Universe at very small or at very large scales.

At the turn of the twentieth century people realised that at very small scales, in the realm of atomic and sub-atomic particles, the world looked very different from what they had expected. The theory ofquantum mechanics grew out of that realisation and posed a new challenge: the descriptions of the fundamental forces of nature now had to be adapted to the new quantum mechanical insights — they had to quantised (see Schrödinger's equation — what is it? and Let me take you down cos we're going to .. quantum fields).

The problem is that general relativity stubbornly refuses to comply in this undertaking. "Einstein's theory cannot be easily quantised; we can't find a quantum counterpart in the same way as we found one for electromagnetism," explains Thomas Sotiriou of the University of Nottingham. In fact, the problem of finding a quantum theory of gravity is so challenging, and so important, many consider it the holy grail of modern physics.

Another mystery arises when you look at the Universe as a whole. Since 1929 physicists have known that the Universe is expanding, a fact that came as a shock even to Einstein: stars and galaxies are moving away from each other. Nearly 70 years later, in the 1990s, observations of far away objects also showed that this expansion is speeding up. General relativity cannot explain what causes this acceleration. If we believe the theory, then we must concede that there is something else out there, a mysterious form of energy which drives the acceleration. That something has been dubbed dark energy.

http://plus.maths.org/content/problems-gravity