Living outside the United States, I really do not understand the motives for teaching Intelligent Design concepts which, acccording to some comments, is Creationism disguised in a cheap tuxedo.

The only logical explanation for pushing such view of the world would be that Bush gains political votes in keeping its obvious endorsement for the Christian right. But then, I’m not too sure. Knowing that a personal God does exist and that He cares for all of us is indeed good news. But why should the Bible have anything to do with that? Please see an extract of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ here to realize that somewhere on this planet, many centuries ago, someone explained the difference between getting to the ultimate reality -i.e. reaching God – by means of interior investigation or by simply loving God. You realize? Here is a God Who embraces both methods and gives us a clue as to which one is better!

Darwin's evolution is a scientific theory that has no other purposes than trying to answer the "where do we come from?" interrogation, on a biological level. In disagreement with some biblical interpretations, rationality and common sense say that some 10,000 years is a span of time way too short for making what we are today.

What do I know?

I did read some books on the theory of evolution but frankly, when I really want to get excited by existential questions such as "why do I live here?" and "for what purposes?", quantum physics and string theory are much more relevant for my own understanding.

I do not have to spend years of study at MIT or Princeton University to realize that, beneath our macroscopic daily lives, a fantastic godly play is awaiting!

It feels like there is magic in the air.

If I trace the way things are going in quantum physics, more and more do I realize that we are able to divide molecules, then atoms, then subatomic particles like protons, neutrons and electrons, then quarks. But that's not the end of the road...

We are now associating quarks with tiny vibrating artifacts called "strings" that would live in a 10 or 11 dimensional spacetime universe.

See the pattern here going from dense or concrete matter to more airy, or ethereal objects, to some kind of emptiness?

Let me figure this out.

We are in 2030:

Breaking news in New York Times:

"Are we on a verge of disappearing?

That's what a mind-blowing discovery would let us believe. Those vibrating strings, making up for a theory called M-Theory at the turn of last century, reveals to be literally insubstantial. That is, no determinate object that can be pinpointed but only dealt with as pure energy. Here, we have to realize that this ethereal energy is what constitutes the bricks of all our universe! All over the world, scientists are going berserk at such findings that, potentially, would require a re-writing of our knowledge of the universe as we know it.

Is Maya indeed the play of God?

Maya is a term used in Veda Hinduism that describes the universe as a transitory, manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates. In a ground to earth translation, that means we live under a fantastic illusion of materiality: your hand is an illusion of your immaterial nervous system that holds a daydream fantasy called a "cup of coffee"!

Already, tv and web networks are abounding with news, controversies and religious discussions of such phenomenal discovery..."

[----long news article cut here ----]


Back in 2005...
Remember when you (or your parents) used to read a little book called "catechism"? This book provided questions and answers to insure we did understand the origin of God:

Q. What is God?
A. God is a Spirit, and has not a body like men.

Q. Where is God?
A. God is everywhere.

Q. Can you see God?
A. No; I cannot see God, but he always sees me.

Q. Does God know all things?
A. Yes; nothing can be hid from God.

Q. Can God do all things?
A. Yes; God can do all his holy will.

In China, their catechism is called the Tao Te Ching where the term Tao could be referred to God. Here's an extract:

The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!
Blunt the sharpness,
Untangle the knot,
Soften the glare,
Merge with dust.
Oh, hidden deep but ever present!
I do not know from whence it comes.
It is the forefather of the gods.

In Buddhism, the realization of emptiness is called nirvana (paradise in christian terms) which is attained by following such rules as:

- to enter the "room" of compassion for all people;
- to put on the "robe" of gentleness and forbearance; and
- to take the "seat" of the emptiness of all phenomena.

What if, down under every cell of your body and every atom of your cup of coffee, something akin to a supra-consciousness of immaterial energy knowing everything and being love sensitive would live?

Aren't we at the edge of a reconciliation of religions and sciences here? A rapprochement not deriving from a naive vision of God?

You say it's far-fetched? Please consult a textbook vulgarizing quantum physics to discern that actual knowledge is already permetting such bold assertions.

Would even think it's quite safe to release our intuition and act accordingly on this matter as string theorists are now confronted with a wall of mathematical complexities that will take many years to decipher - unfortunately, empirical experiments are actually impossible to conduct at such small scales.

Jesus could be filling our void in a much more direct and unsuspected manner.

That would feel like Intelligent Design indeed!

This site is actually in a big redesign for the sake of refreshing its look among other things. That explains for the time being the lack of new posts here... Rethinking a web site is trendy but, more important, we really feel a need for being much more accessible and conformant to the specs of W3C. We also decided to completely revamp our blogging system. Alas, running on ASP.NET is not the easy way for such a change...

We first looked at available popular tools like Movable Type and WordPress since they are first-class in features and usability. Bump ahead: installing those publishing systems would be like putting an Intel processor in a Mac as they feel at home with MySQL, Perl, or PHP which are strange citizens on Windows' built-in Internet Information Server (IIS) web server.

We then naturally searched for other blogging tools well-suited for Windows Server 2003 and ASP.NET. Blog Software Breakdown was a nice first start but also the abysmal revelation that blogging tools supporting ASP.NET are rare to say the least. But we contended that the road must not end there and found such systems as Community Server and dasBlog. Both solutions appear acceptable but the main shortcomings are that they do not provide adequate xhtml and css support -sites constructed with those systems appear all the same and are not enough conforming to web standards. Look at web pages found on CSSVault, Stylegala, CSS Beauty or the classic Zen Garden and you will discover that Microsoft sells web servers and Visual Studio, not the concept of usable web sites.

Microsoft must feel the pressure somehow as they are actually providing facilities for ASP.NET users. But they are late on the scene and those tools are not at par with the established ones found on Apache/PHP platform.

Blogger was a strong candidate as it publishes web pages that are much more in line with web standards. It's free, quite easy to use and platform agnostic. What's more, that publishing tool is quite popular. However, their commenting system is not what we're targeting for and there are no facilities for categories of blog entries.

What are we deciding now for origaNo? Well, we are building our own blogging system. ASP.NET is really an elegant platform for programming everything. Still, as said earlier, running on such platform is not the easy way for blogging with usability in mind!

In June 1905, Albert Einstein submitted a technical paper to the Annals of Physics (Annalen der Physik more precisely...) that changed the world since then. That paper dealt with motion, space, and time in a way that still challenges our normal understanding of the universe.

Thus, 2005 marks the centenary of that work known as the Theory of relativity (afterwards qualified as special in contrast to the one called General theory of relativity, published some ten years later).

When you feel outside down, get acquainted with the theories in one of those numerous books - that will only help you feel, beyond novels like Da Vinci Code, that we're indeed living in a strange and peculiar world. You will close the book saying "Gee, and this is not sci-fi!"...

You can also immediately get a feel for the former theory in an interactive demo that attempts to demonstrate how our space-time is indeed relative.

And this is well before the theory of strings which is still more far-fetched!

origaNo is back on feet under Windows XP SP2!
For those on Internet Explorer with Windows XP SP2 who could not see Flash contents, now is the time to discover those movies!

See for instance:
kurukshetra
aurora
amadeus
tea with mussolini
lost horizon
etc.

Sorry for past inconvenience!

Once upon a time, there was no iron horse running on rails through mountains and valleys. While horses were still built of flesh and bones, rivers were flowing naturally to lakes and oceans while cows were grazing peacefully in wild fields.

Then came civilization that made paper from beautiful centennial trees and garbage from papers. Since then, rivers are obeying to market laws of energy and production. Big canals and chimneys pour out their wastes in rivers and among clouds.

There is no more clear blue sky because of lights necessary to protect people. There is no more silence because of the sound of big machines. There is no more peace because of egoistic civilizations. On the other hand, there are more hungry people because of the richer ones. There is more sickness because of abuses of any kind.

Where are we going today?

Is there any relation between God & sciences?

« Sure there is! », « Absolutely not! », « Maybe but we have to consider this & that ». As you already know, this subject is akin to a minefield. Nevertheless, the more you read on the far-edged front of quantum and super string physics, the more you suspect a blurring line between both spheres. This is not a trivial pastime as it defines our soul behavior, our morality and, not the least, our own life.

Strangely, the American society is perhaps the best example of a peculiar dichotomy. It simultaneously embraces sciences as well as the naive representation of the good bearded man representing God in our childhood.

That is, we both derive from the long Darwin chain which emerged from the big bang some 14 billion years ago, and at the same time, our civilization and galaxies appeared suddenly following the desire of God some thousands years ago, as reported in some scriptures and views.

Think I will have to spend some more time on that topic...