COVID-19: Perceived Reality in Purgatory

From Worldometer, I continue this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  15         1    578   1558      324            97               3        6351

        16         ?    525   1796      318          139               4        6239
        17   1290    575   1338      298          151               1        6857

        18         ?    482   1090        41            74               2        4888
        19         ?    433   1117      410            10               2        4344
        20         ?    454   1202      399            64               2        4307
        21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362
        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650
        26         0?  260     779      288            19               2        3102

Summary:

• A good Sunday, for new deaths declined throughout, except for South Korea, which jumped from zero to 2.  The U.S. leads with 779 new deaths, with the UK at 413 in second place.
• The USA still leads with new cases at 18,007.  Second place is Russia with 6,363 and third, the UK with 4,463.  Worrisome are Turkey with 2,357 new cases and Peru with 2,186.

My Sunday religio-sci sermon.  What is real and what is not?  If something is visible, is it real?  Probably, except maybe for ghosts and angels.  As you can't see most microorganisms and anything beyond our visible range, are they real?  Of course.  Why can we only see and/or measure 4.9% of what apparently exists?  Scientists have declared, for example, that 95.1% of everything that exists in our Universe is dark, meaning, it's there, but can't be seen and/or measured.

Something so simple as light is still an enigma.  Photons are not atoms and have no mass, but can be related by Einstein's famous energy equals mass times velocity (speed of this photon) squared.  Like magic.

Fundamental science is, thus, nebulous and uncertain, even more so than religion, which at least mostly has a common prime mover, God.  While the Christian, Islam and Buddhist God leans towards mostly being male, some argue that It is genderless, which is closer to most Hindu references, at the foundation an androgynous universal life force.

Even Jesus, as interpreted by a few modern scholars, could have been female.  As society changes over the next millennium, who knows what Jesus or God might be someday.  Like science, religion seems to be adjusting, yet The Bible has for almost two millennia been certain about the Genesis. Will science get any closer to determining the matter of the Big Bang and what is what?

Calculation by biblical scholars seem to home in to a Planet Earth at the age of around 6000 years.  Scientists at the time of the American Revolution a couple of centuries ago guessed an age of about a million.  It took until 1913 for 1.6 billion years to be the age.  In 1956 Clair Patterson and George Tilton said 4.55 billion years.  Today?  4.54 billion years old.  This is taught in elementary school, and again and again.  Yet, polls show that 40% of Americans believe our planet is 10,000 years old.  How can one explain this perceived reality?  It goes back to what goes into the mind from youth.

In any case, as time marches on, the trend seems to be that God will ultimately not be human-like.  More like a force, or the sum total of the Universe, a metaphor, abstraction, an allusion...perhaps even an illusion.  Which gets back to why I'm here today:  perceived reality.

Science has three branches:  formal (like mathematics), natural (physical/life) and social (like sociology).  The further you move away from math towards psychology, the less rigorous science gets, with the transitioning humanities essentially merging with religion.

Yesterday (scroll down to next article), we had brain scientists explaining why a brown and light blue dress is not seen as a brown and light blue dress.  Dress, yes, but gold and white or black and royal blue?  Fundamental science attempts to explain perception and gets lost when it comes to dark energy/matter.

So to the matter of why we all once believed in Santa Claus, but in our approach to adulthood, either continued to believe in an omnipresent God or not or neither.  This is what Richard Dawkins "might say about the Santa Delusion":

My goal in all of this is that, as children, you should be raised only on truth, reason, fact, and intellect. Together we should be working toward a point in the not-so-distant future where the words "Santa Claus" or "Kris Kringle" or "Father Christmas" create the same response as fingernails on a chalkboard. There is nothing wrong with disbelief in Santa. I can see that the topic makes many of you uncomfortable. However, this should not be viewed as a bad thing. You may weep now, but your tears are a positive, not a negative.

If you're waiting for the first compelling evidence that God exists or not, it won't be at this blog site.  What was the Universe before the Big Bang?  Who created God?  Either one, or both, your best guess would be your perceived reality.  Why Purgatory?  It's a long story that started with this posting, but later expanded to Planet Earth.

And speaking of expiating sin (this is what we're doing in this perdition before going to Heaven), here is what a college friend sent me yesterday, from her brother, who got it from an acquaintance. It was not intended for inclusion here, but the timing is ideal to provide a point of view about what could well be the situation in Purgatory today, and the possible consequences:


It’s telling, how right-wing “Christian” fundamentalist America fails to appreciate how truly biblical are these times.  God repeatedly gets pissed, and people die.  He gets pissed at His own worshippers as much as unbelievers, maybe more so.  He gets pissed the worst and most frequently when people are mistreated.  He gets most pissed at the rich and powerful, but everybody suffers.  He destroyed Israel because its priests and royalty didn’t take care of the poor and disadvantaged.  Just ask Isaiah.   Whenever immigrants are involved, He’s on their side.  He harasses and kills people we would normally consider innocent, like the Egyptians who suffered bugs, frogs, boils, blood and killer fog because of Pharaoh’s intransigence.  Apparently He holds us all responsible for our leaders.  He uses available infidel armies to punish His own people – Assyrians, Hittites, Babylonians (and the Russians are now available).  But most importantly and most biblical, the people He’s pissed at don’t get it, despite multiple warnings.  Pharaoh didn’t get it.  The judges of the nine tribes didn’t get it.  The priests of Judah didn’t get it.  The Pharisees didn’t get it.  “Christian” America doesn’t get it."

So let me neutralize some antagonism with another item sent yesterday.  Here is something a lot more uplifting.  It's about a mother who turned a mentally deficient child into a genius.

Go ahead, click on it.  Only a minute long.  You will shed a tear or two.  But was this true?  Snopes looked into this story and determined that there was no such letter.

Oh, well.  Let's continue my chronological nostalgic musical pathway to my present.  Here are the top 30 songs from 1963.  The first half of the year was a difficult time for me, as threatened with the draft and getting sent to Vietnam, I joined the Army Reserve and was sent to 8 weeks of basic training.  I'm not exactly the soldier type.  Some of those songs helped me through this trying period.

However, I was so physically challenged that I had to overcome, so extended this rigor into 8 more weeks of advanced infantry training.  Got to learn how to shoot all kinds of weapons.  More importantly, I became a stronger person and kept watching my physical health for the rest of my life.  In all my years at the University of Hawaii,  and I still go to my Manoa Campus office, I have not taken a day of sick leave.  Returning to 1963 when I became a normal citizen, I was assigned to that famed 442nd regimental group.

But that was only for two weeks in the summer, for I was still in the sugar industry where I was too far away to attend weekly training.  A good part of that year was spent at the Kilauea Sugar Company on Kauai, and our home was a trainee cottage, where our backyard was the Slippery Slide from South Pacific.  This is where I took this photo of Pearl and Pepper.

To close, another song, Hawaii Aloha, 1000 unified voices from us to the World, and a second, Island Style:

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