John Wright

STARQUEST: SPACE PIRATES OF ANDROMEDA Now available: tinyurl.com/urshcn2w Space Opera must be Great! Gallant! Gigantic! Grandiose! This tale told by a Grandmaster vows to return the glory that was lost! Remember the days gone by, when science fiction was fun? Now new hope is here! If you are weary of weak, wan, woke and wasted works, your wait is ended! Here is an epic, as grand as any tale of old -- here you will hear wonders told! Meet Captain Athos Lone, Ace agent of Star Patrol, in his one-man mission of vengeance! He must infiltrate the Space Pirate fleet to kill the haughty King of Pirates. He dons the Deathmask of his ancestors to assume the powers of the Ancient Mariner, who like an iron ghost, when slain, must rise again! Meet the mysterious spymaster called Nightshadow, who walks in dark worlds but serves the light! He faces the sinister Syndicate of Space, ruled by the Secret Seven, a gathering of galactic gangland crimelords! Meet an Imperial Deathtrooper fated to reverse his loyalties, and fight his own clone-brothers! A thought-policeman for the Inquisition, tasked with hunting down any deviants displaying traces of psychic talent, he hides his own ancient heritage in the psionic arts! Meet the mystic Space Princess Lyra, heiress to eerie powers, sole survivor of a destroyed planet, robbed of realm and family by the Evil Galactic Empire. She seeks to find and end the star-killing super-weapon known only as the Great Eye of Darkness! But first she must find her missing past. Against these heroes looms the unseen menace of the Four Dark Overlords: Lord Pestilence, Lord Famine, Lord War, Lord Death! An utmost evil the unwary galaxy thinks long dead! Will Darkness fail and Light prevail? Read On! For All True Tales are but Part of a Greater! #scifi #spaceopera #fantasy #starquest #superversive #starquest

The next in my series of letters to my Godson, attempting to explain the mysteries of Christ. Today, we explore God as transcendent, immanent, incarnate. x.com/johncwright200…

@elonmusk The aliens landed on Pluto, but then were so offended that we degraded that noble world to 'dwarf planet' status, that they are sulking and refuse to contact us. They trampled several crop circles to show their displeasure, but until Pluto is a planet again, they remain hidden.

Where are the aliens? This is one of the most fundamental questions.

@mistressdivy Motive. Batman is driven by vengeance over the murder of his parents before his eyes. Kim Possible, when seeking summer temp work, on her website boasted she could do anything, and accidentally became involved in crime fighting.

Without mentioning Age, Gender or financial status tell me the difference between Batman and Kim Possible. Quickly.

Imagine being sent to prison, hit with 3 years probation, losing your family, job and privacy. Labeled a “domestic terrorist” and “insurrectionist” by the entire nation all for a false narrative pushed by liberal politicians and media. That’s my life. My actions were at most a summary offense. I never touched a door knob. Capitol Police let me inside after tear-gassing and flash-banging me outside. This was pure shock-and-awe politics. And now liberals wanna cry about righting the wrong, too bad. Justice is coming.

@darwintojesus Please also add eyewitness testimony, relics, miracles. I confess I am weary of skeptics treating the existence of God as if it were a scientific question, to be answered by experiment, rather than a philosophical or historical question, to be answered by witnesses

Observable evidence that God exists: Design Information Fine-tuning Intelligibility ...and the total lack of evidence that God does not exist

@_dxllz7 Don't know. But I have heard: MARY POPPINS STAR WARS My wife worked in a video rental store where the overhead television played one movie over and over again to lure the customers into renting. These were the two films the staff never tired of seeing repeated.

Name the most re-watchable movie in history

@thebencheah I respectfully disagree. Faith is being true to your word, to what you believe, to remain loyal, even when the very strong temptation of a false world and treasonous friends baffles and gaslights you. Faith is the grace to remain reasonable in the face of unreasonable doubt.

Faith is the belief in something real, even if you cannot personally explain or justify it yet. Consider gravity. Philosophers, scientists and mathematicians have been tackling the subject since at least the 5th century BC. Their collective efforts culminated in Isaac Newton's formulation of the law of gravity. Did gravity exist only after their experiments and studies? Of course not. Gravity has always been around since the dawn of the observable universe. The ancients did not know how to articulate a formal theory of gravity, but they did not have to. They knew that what went up must come down. They organised their lives around this principle. They took it on faith that everything always seeks the lowest point. Even today, we do this. We don't think about how or whether we would float away if we stand up or jump into the air. When we hold out an object and open our hands, we don't think about whether it will fall or not. We already know it will. Your average person probably won't be able to describe how gravity works at the level of a scientist or mathematician. He doesn't have to. For everyday life, it is enough that he knows that gravity exist. He doesn't even have to think about it. That is faith. And that in turn implies that faith is in turn founded on honest, genuine, epistemological inquiry. Faith exists in the liminal zone between belief and knowledge. The object of faith is something real. The person of faith may be unsure whether it is real or is unable to fully explain it, but treats it as if it were real anyway. To get to this point, recognise that the boundary between belief and knowledge is not a wall, but a bridge. So long as you cling to the notion of absolute certainty as proof that something exists, you will never understand faith.

@Anyachi4ox Let me answer this as a completely sincere ex atheist who converted. I'm only speaking for myself, not for anyone else. Without faith, I did not recognize the evidence that was staring me in the face. I would not have admitted the evidence was valid. I would not have looked.

Why does God require faith instead of providing clear evidence?

I'm a faithful Christian. I converted after a lifetime of being atheist. Nonetheless, the fine tuning argument is unpersuasive. "There is no known physical law that requires universal physical constants to have the values they do" is logically insufficient to prove all or some or any of them could have been different. We are not dealing with a case where you enter an empty room and find 50 coins laying face up on a desk. In that case, because we know the coins all have two sides, and we suspect the coins are evenly balanced, we can reasonably speculate that it is unlikely that the coins all fell at random without a single face down landing out of 50, so we assume a coin collector arranged them. But this is a case where we do not know if the coin has another side. We have never seen another universe, and we can never see another universe. We do not know out of 100 universes what percentage of them of them have the same gravitational constant as we do, we're the same Planck constant, or the same speed of light. For that matter we do not know if other universes exist, or can exist. The idea that these values could be different is a gratuitous assertion. In logic, a gratuitous assertion can be gratuitously denied.

P1: The fine-tuning of the universe for life is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design. P2: It is not due to physical necessity or chance. C: Therefore, it is due to design. The universe has roughly 30+ independent physical constants—numbers baked into the fabric of reality itself. These constants are mutually independent. There is no known physical law that requires them to have the values they do. They simply… do. Some atheists will say “Maybe the constants couldn’t have been any other way.” That is an extraordinary claim with zero scientific support. Physics gives us no reason to think the constants are locked in. String theory alone suggests an almost unlimited landscape of possible universes with different constants. The necessity objection is essentially wishful thinking dressed as physics. They will also say “Given enough tries, any outcome is possible… maybe we just got lucky.” 1) Without a multiverse, invoking chance against odds like 1 in 10^(10^123) isn’t a serious explanation, it’s a placeholder for ignorance. An improbable outcome demands a better account. 2) With a multiverse, you’ve only pushed the problem back. When necessity and chance are exhausted, design isn’t merely what’s left—it’s the only category of explanation that accounts for specified, complex, improbable arrangements.

@PhilosopherJoeC It is the difference between thinking about an author and thinking about the book the author wrote. If you ask me and I say I'm thinking about Tolstoy, I could mean either one. But they're not the same.

A man on the left is thinking. You ask him what he is thinking about and he says "God." Another man is thinking. You ask him what he is thinking about and he says the Universe: everything that is the case. What is the difference between their thoughts?

@David_Kicinski I am not convinced that is true ... Oh, wait ...

No amount of evidence is ever enough to convince someone of something who doesn't want to be convinced.

@WittyEchoes Obedience is a virtue.

Why do parents say "because I said so" instead of explaining their reasoning?

@BeeGuyTravis Lattimore.

If I wanted to read The Iliad and The Odyssey, what is the actual best translation?

@leinad_luelp Faith perfectly rational when the concept is properly understood. It does not mean believing something blindly. It means believing something because authoritative testimony confirms it, experience confirms it, history confirms it, but one's own internal nature inflates doubt.

Glaube selbst ist epistemisch irrational, weil er systematisch gegen die Grundregeln vernünftiger Überzeugungsbildung verstößt. Es gibt keine guten, unabhängigen Belege dafür, dass irgendeine spezifische Religion wahr ist (bestimmter Gott, Wunder, Jenseits, Seelen etc.).

@greya88 Perhaps you read this goodreads.com/book/show/2677…

"I read history and I became catholic." What the fuck did they read? The Cathar genocide? The sacking of Constantinople? The countless freaky ass Popes? I can't wrap my head around it at least be Orthodox or something.

@PoobahTheCat @Shaun_Fosmark Wow. Thank you.

@johncwright2001 @Shaun_Fosmark I remember that series! Quoted it a lot when Inwas reading it. Judge of Ages is still one of my favorite all-time books. The surprise ending, the trick with the rock, the judge's speech-- all stuck in my mind over a decade later.

The geometry of a particle, a black hole, and the universe are all the same.

No, I understand entirely: a fallacy of ambiguity. The incarceration is involuntary in the sense that the man has no ability to leave the locked room, but voluntary in the sense that he has, by hypothesis no desire to leave the locked room. You are using this as an analogy to explain how it is possible to create a man who lacks voluntary capacity to control his own thoughts and acts and yet in the same sense, at the same time, volunteers to think and act only as and how his creator prefers. Which is why, with your permission, I bow out of the discussion. I fear it would be futile to repeat myself.

@johncwright2001 You're misunderstanding. Of course the incarceration was involuntary. The question is whether the man's remaining was voluntary.

I'd say the best argument is the problem of suffering. One particularly trenchant question is: Why wouldn't God just create heaven and populate it with creatures having perfected natures?

@NoInnrMonologue @UcheMaryOkoli Mary knows better.

@UcheMaryOkoli The immaculate conception is not in scripture. Thomas Aquinas rejected the immaculate conception, but you know better. Okay..

Catholic Trivia!!!! "I am the Immaculate Conception." Who did our Lady, the Mother of God, said this to? A. St. Dominic B. St. Bernadette C. St. Lucy, St. Francisco, and St. Jacinta(Fatima children) D. St. Carlo Acutis E. None of the above(mention the person).

Ascension was 33AD ish 'Mid 1st Century' is 50AD ish. In the pre-printing-press world, that is breif. Apostles need write no letters to churches near at hand, nor those not active long enough to drift, hence need instruction or correction. Christ founded a Church, which wrote a book. He did not write a book.

One difficulty Christians have to deal with: We have no written record of Jesus - at all, anywhere - until the mid-to-late first century.