Unfortunately your argument about all religion being a system of control is as uneducated as ever. Like I've told you before, the picture of a highly profitable church is a very narrow view, with mostly Roman Catholicism in mind.
I do know you're still the same person that denies any of those TV priests have anything to do with
your Christian religion, so I think we both know where the truth's at. I was in fact talking about religion in a very broad sense and not only about money.
Calling me uneducated is childish at best here, where you're really just ignoring what is happening because according to you it's not part of 'your religion' (or you claim to never have seen bla bla bla).
PHeMoX, I don't know what's unusual about Joozey being agnostic on the basis of neither side disproving the other. Most people I know who are 'uninterested' in the topic assume that God has been proven not to exist, and are atheists. Few people I know describe themselves as agnostic, and those who do have logical grounds for their position.
What exactly are you trying to say here? I was neither attacking Joozey's belief, nor stating that agnosticism is wrong or something. I already explained what I did mean to say.
MMike's description of time not being constant and so on is not uncommon as a scientific concept (or at least the general gist of it), and this is why: Science attempts to describe natural phenomena without using "God" as a reason; either the chain of cause-and-effect needs to have begun with something that is not bound by the limits of cause-and-effect (What caused the Big-Bang; what caused that? What was the first cause? "God" is an easy answer there)
[quote] or time as we assume it works is an illusion and isn't as simple as a cause-and-effect chain, but instead best related to a curve with an asymptote at 0 -- never having a starting point.
You're talking about two different things here though One is philosophical, the other scientific. Time as a metric concept that relates to our mortal lives and time space spread throughout the universe that influences the 'tempo' of things in a literal sense. (this can be measured and calculated)
I am pretty sure general consensus in the scientific world is that this time space is definitely
not an illusion.
As for time space having a beginning (or end for that matter), we can really only speculate. If you can only see half of a circle at this point in time, you can not know if it's going to be a perfect circle or a spiral.
In general though on a very basic level, things set in motion tend to have a cause and it might very well be that big bangs, universes coming into existence and all that are reoccurring events. There's a whole range of theories already invented/proposed around this idea.
One thing to note is how potentially inter-dimensional or even multidimensional events can cause for things in this, but perhaps also other universes.
There seems to be an ever more 'optimistic' view on the whole multiverse theory.
