So sad to learn of Charlie Kirk's assassination. A young man murdered for his speech. So sad.

Why is hate directed at conservative Christians? To the point of assassination? Why is the message of Christianity maligned? Why are those spreading the Good News of the promise of eternal life so hated by some? x.com/LarsonDelbert/…

Perhaps the hate comes from the limits Christianity places upon our lives. Treating another as oneself means loving the weak, which can include life in the womb, which leads to moral restrictions that can be in conflict with some selfish human desires. x.com/LarsonDelbert/…

Perhaps the hate comes from those who seek an authoritarian culture & government wherein their side rules. The authoritarian has no greater fear than a Christian populace that puts God above country. Such a populace is notoriously difficult to control. x.com/LarsonDelbert/…

Perhaps the hate comes from those who feel guilt or fear? Guilt for promoting, or having taken, actions they know in their heart are wrong? Fear that their present power and/or income might be reduced should Christian morals be ascendant? x.com/LarsonDelbert/…

We as Christians must not give in to hate and fear. I'll return to science and philosophy topics tomorrow. Rest in Christ's Peace Charlie Kirk; prayers for your wife and children.

I learned martial arts in the very special dojang of Master John Shepperd. As a requirement for the brown belt, a paper on personal philosophy was required. My personal philosophy underlies my physics, and my posts will now extract from & augment that paper of many years ago.

Modern sophists often pit religion against science in a competitive contest to see which path leads to truth. Martial artist training instructs that what appear as competing opposites may be better understood as complementary facets of a greater truth. x.com/LarsonDelbert/…

In preparing to write about my philosophy I read some Plato & started to read some other old authors. One of them, I've forgotten who, said he would write from a perspective of someone who had never studied prior philosophy. So I stopped reading & began to write down my thoughts.

What is the World made of? Is there a God? Is there Life after Death? What is Life? What is a Soul? Do I have a Soul? Who am I? These questions are at the heart of philosophy. They are quite difficult to answer definitively, and have tried the best minds in history.

To approach the large questions of philosophy, it is useful to put our present knowledge in scope. The known universe contains over 100 billion galaxies, each containing between ~100 million to over one trillion stars. And that is only what our present technology can observe.

While presently prevailing philosophy dictates we know much about the size of the universe, the ancients made a similar claim. They knew the Earth was the center of all & it was surrounded by spherical shells; shell motions were found to an exquisite accuracy. They were wrong.

We have managed to send a probe to outer portions of our solar system, but only to a distance that light travels in ~1000 minutes, whereas the size of the known universe is estimated as ~100 billion light years. This is a factor of 50 trillion. We really haven't been far.

The best we can hope for is to confine our philosophical quest to what we have some knowledge of, which are our experiences here on earth and nearby, while at the same time admitting to our minuscule volume of experience, and admitting to vast possibilities in the great unknown.

I am a physicist with new fundamental theories on space, time, quantum mechanics and elementary particles. The philosophy of the natural world is an important foundation for those topics. But we'll save that for later. We'll start here with more basic concerns.

In developing a philosophical overview of all there is, it is useful to start along the lines of the ancients, by dividing things into parts. Then, we can investigate each part in turn. One such division, our starting point, is attempting to define what is and is not me.

Making a definition of what is and is not me may at first seem simple. Surely we all know what makes up “me”! But after more thought it becomes clear that an accurate definition is difficult. Are hair and fingernails part of me? Are they still part of me when they are cut off?

Skin, organs & even limbs can be separated from the body; yet “I” will still exist. Stripping parts away from “me” to the logical conclusion, upon death of the body itself, the essential remnant that remains, what we may call the soul, is that which I would truly define as “me’.

With the rise of the new atheism, it is questioned whether a soul even exists. But whether we call it "a soul" or whether we call it "consciousness", I assert that it is that entity which is the essential essence of what truly defines "me". x.com/LarsonDelbert/…