Hi Dweezil! I'm Walt. I hope yo enjoy your stay, and steal all the towels you like!
It occurs to me that given the ability to change religions due to social factors, how can anyone know if they've got the "right" faith, or sect?
I was raised Southern Baptist, too. But though I was "on fire for God" for a period in my teens, it didn't hold my attention for long, and I branched out into a study of the supernatural in general. I could see that the existence of a supernatural realm or dimension was a necessary condition before the question of a [G]od inhabiting that realm could be broached.
But, I'd been interested in science since I was fairly young. When I was ten, I could rattle off all kinds of cool facts about the solar system. I loved rock collecting, and looking at pond water through a microscope. So it didn't take me too long to realize I was on my own in managing to survive, since I'd figured out by then that God never answers prayers, if he did there wouldn't be nearly as much misery in the world as there is. Every second of evey day things are dying all over the Earth, and much of the planet that
isn't dying is in misery to one degree or another, many in extreme agony.
In my late twenties I got a job that allowed me to read, during the night shift. Played a lot of chess, too. In all I was having a grand ol' time. My reading materials were books such as, e.g.,
Timescale, by Nigel Calder, a logorythmic graph of the events since the big bang, starting at t=0;
Powers of 10, that shows the universe from a man's hand out to 10 billion light years, in stages of, you guessed it, powers of ten. Then it went the other direction, focusing smaller and smaller into the man's hand, down to the quark level, which was a little fuzzy, since it pushes the envelope of what scientists know. I've been after "the big picture", as I call it, trying to keep in mind that what I know isn't necessarily true. It's hard to tell the difference between thinking I know something and that something being true, in correspondence with the "real" world, whatever that turns out to be.
All kinds of books, mainly about theories of the large scale structure of the universe, but a lot about things like the brain, particle physics, philosphy, stuff like that. I can think mathematically when I need to, usually, but I'm not a mathematician by any means. I mostly read books for laymen, but good ones like those of Carl Sagan or Bertrand Russell, et al. I think I've had the most fun with Frank Tipler, who wrote
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with John Barrow. Then Tipler wrote
The Physics of Immortality (without Barrow) which certainly had an interesting worldview. I thought it would be superb to be able to be resurrected at the end of time, to do
what I don't know. But I pictured it something like Baron von Munchausein, just galavanting around the realm of all possibility, having adventures. Or like the end of one of those Heinlein books, where the protagonists are in a world where all possible fictions can play out, riding their intelligent (and bossy, sometimes) "vehicle".
Hell, sorry to talk you ear off, just getting aquainted! I'll be here all week.
