God and what we talk about - Ch2 Open

I am a bit of a slacker when it comes to keeping on top of things. I finished a class a month ago that I had been blaming for taking all my time and yet I am still just now getting to chapter 2. Which, by the way, is a really long chapter.

OPEN

There seems to be two camps and you have to belong in one or the other. Either you are a theist or you are atheist. But what about the people who identify as "other"? I would say that I am still biased in many regards (The whole supernatural thing always bugs me). However, I would also say that I am not firm set in my ways and can accept other view points most of the time (There will always be exceptions, like Scientology). I wish more of the world was more accepting of people. Instead if they don't fall within the systems of either side they are shunned and hide from the "normal" world. There are groups that I know that don't speak up, they wish they could but the world doesn't understand. The world always focuses on the bad and a few rotten apples mean everyone has to suffer. When an event like 9-11 happens (I am writing this sitting in the shade of a 9-11 monument) suddenly if you look Muslim you must be a terrorist.

Rob goes into a high school physics lesson (and a little AP Physics) discussing space and time, atoms and quarks. While we can find patterns and compute probabilities, we can't say anything for certain. Why did a certain particle interact the way it did? Who knows, but we can tell you what the odds were that it occurred.

Rob talks about blurring the line between matter and spirit and how observation changes things in the quantum world. This reminds me about one of my harebrained ideas in high school that maybe, just maybe, the world observed away god. I am talking schrodinger's cat, except with the operation of the universe. What if the atoms and the quarks and the fact that plants need nutrients in the soil didn't exist, until we went looking for them? There is more that goes into it that probably only a Software Engineer would think about, but I'll save that for another time.

"We are an exotic blend of awesome [...]." We can describe a great deal of our physical composition, but our soul is still a mystery. The soul is real (A persons sense of identity. I think, therefore I am.), but it is beyond analysis and description. Rob suddenly gets a hardon for the Germons because they have a word to describe the one "beyond analysis and description"'.

If there is anything to pull from this chapter, it is to not be so nitpicky and accept that people believe different things. They might be right and they might be wrong, but so might you. Can't we all just be friends?