The world has changed a lot since my last post in this blog. Isn't it? I am glad to be alive and safe amidst this pandemic. Time changes everything. The whole world is controlled by Time.
Few years back I made a blog post with the Title "God is both a murderer and a Savior" and I am not the only one who have come to that conclusion and I have lots of company with me. Here is one, please read, "Time as God and Devil" published in the comparative religion column in the University of Manchester.
Unlike the Christian God who is an Omnipotent, Omniscient and an Omnibenevolent anthropomorphic being, the God of the Historical Indo-Persian religion was a neutral God with no passions towards Good or Evil and as everyone knows this concept of God resolves all paradoxes like the Problem of Evil.
But wait, is such a God worthy of worship? What good is a God if he is not able to protect a woman when few evil men are raping her and trying to insert a rod into her vaginal hollow. My heart shivers by just hearing those words (This is what is happening in India right now). How can Stoic philosophers defend this? Well, some introduce the concept of bad karma and defend events like this by saying she is suffering now because of some bad karma in the past. This is complete bullshit when everything is pre-determined and fore-ordained by God there is no such thing as bad karma or good karma and for all of your kind information everything in this world is happening according to the will of the Father (God).
So then why God created us and letting us to suffer like this? what wrong have we done? The answer is God has created everyone in his own image and he is expecting us to become like him instead of we trying to fix the evil world which is impossible to do because evil will exist as long as ignorance exist and ignorance will always exist because not everyone have the same intellect to comprehend the divine at any point in time, they have to be educated or in other words initiated into the mysteries. So rather than blaming God I would rather blame ourselves for the current state of our world.
We as Homo Sapiens have let ourselves down by not trying to acknowledge this Cosmic fatalism and instead of trying to escape from this evil world and become like God what we have tried instead is to find ways of establishing rules and order in a chaotic evil world and mindlessly competing in the world in the vain hope that we can control this world and lead a blissful life without God. All this evil and suffering will not end unless and until every living being in this cosmos become like God. When you are living with a mind and soul detached from your body what evil in this world will affect your blissful state? This is why God created us in his own image so that we all can become like him and finally rest with him.
Most religious people including myself believe in a God because it offers ever lasting life or in other words it offers immortality and if you want to live forever then you need a time which doesn't end or kind of Infinite Time. For example Mithras Liturgy is a ritual performed by the initiate to receive immortality from Helios Mithras.
There is one forgotten religion where this concept of Infinite Time and Cosmic Fatalism was unequivocally expressed in their religious thought and that religion is Zurvanism which challenged the religion of Zoroaster which originated at a later time. Zurvanites believed in a superior God named Zurvan who was the father of both the good God Ahura Mazda and the evil god Ahriman.
Zurvanism - The Religion of Zurvan, the God of Infinite Time and Space
"The twelve Signs of the Zodiac... are the twelve commanders on the side of Ohrmazd, and the seven planets are said to be the seven commanders on the side of Ahriman. And the seven planets oppress all creation and deliver it over to death and all manner of evil: for the twelve Signs of the Zodiac and the seven planets rule the fate of the world and direct it".
So according to them in astrology all the planets are evil and all the Zodiac signs are good. The reason why Jupiter being a planet gives good results is that the Zodiac commander who is associated with Jupiter is far superior to him and hence the Zodiac commander subdues the evilness of Jupiter.
The idea of Cosmic fatalism is very well expressed by Zurvanites using statements like below.
"Though [one be armed] with the valour and strength of wisdom and knowledge, yet it is not possible to strive against fate. For once a thing is fated and comes true, whether for good or the reverse, the wise man goes astray in his work, and the man of wrong knowledge becomes clever at his work; the coward becomes brave, and the brave man becomes cowardly; the energetic man becomes a sluggard, and the sluggard energetic: for, for everything that has been fated, a fit occasion arises which sweeps away all other things. [So too] when fate helps a slothful, wrong-minded, and evil man, his sloth becomes like energy, and his wrong-mindedness like wisdom, and his evil like good: and when fate opposes a wise, decent, and good man, his wisdom is turned to unwisdom and foolishness, his decency to wrong-mindedness; and his knowledge, manliness, and decency appear of no account."
Some of the Zurvanites even refrained from doing any good deeds.
"Different [from the atheists proper],' he says, 'are the atheists called Dahris. They give up their religious duties and make no effort to practise virtue: [rather] they indulge in endless discussion....They believe that Infinite Time is the first Principle of this world and of all the various changes and [re-]groupings to which its members and organs are subject as well as of the mutual opposition that exists between them and of their fusion with one another. [They believe too] that virtue goes unrewarded, that there is no punishment for sin, that heaven and hell do not exist, and that there is no one who has charge of [the rewarding of] virtue and [the punishment of] sin. [They believe too] that all things are material and that the spiritual does not exist."
Time has been elusive to physicists as well. Most of the equations in Physics are deterministic and time reversible i.e. according to the mathematical equations there is nothing preventing the water to flow uphill or for a broken glass to join back together. Yet our observations shows that only one of the processes happen by its own and the reversible process require some energy from an external system. This is due to the second law of thermodynamics which prevents entropy to decrease in a closed system. Physicists are still puzzled as to why such an arrow of time exists. We also have the psychological arrow of time where we can only remember our past memories but forever ignorant of our future timelines. Therefore physicists like Lee Smolin and Sean Carroll have come to the realization that physicists should start treating Time as a real entity rather than as an illusion.
Lee Smolin's Time Reborn
Sean Carroll: Why Does Time Exists
How or Why entropy was so low at the time of Big Bang?
Sean Carroll was joking that "May be the universe comes out of a universal chicken". Well, to the Greek Orphic and the Indo-Persian religion this is not a joke because according to them the universe did came into existence from a cosmic egg. According to the Orphics, Phanes originated from the cosmic egg and created the heavens and the earth including all other beings and similarly according to the Indo-Persian religion, Hiranyagarbha the golden embryo created all the creatures. But wait how did this egg came into existence in the first place? Doesn't this resort into the classical which came first, the chicken or the egg paradox? This is where the concept of Infinite Time comes into picture because according to the Greek tradition it was Chronos, the God of Time who created the cosmic egg from where Phanes originated in the first place. But wait, Who created Chronos? Well, there is no one above him, according to the Orphic tradition he was self created which (although there are other legends which says that Uranus and Gaia created Chronos) shows that Time is the ultimate reality.
KHRONOS (Chronos) was the primordial god of time. In the Orphic cosmogony he emerged self-formed at the dawn of creation. Khronos was envisaged as an incorporeal god, serpentine in form, with three heads--that of a man, a bull, and a lion. He and his consort, the serpentine goddess Ananke (Inevitability), enveloped the primordial world-egg in their coils and split it apart to form the ordered universe of earth, sea and sky. After this act of creation the couple circled the cosmos driving the rotation of heaven and the eternal passage of time.
The figure of Khronos was essentially a cosmological double of the Titan Kronos (Cronus) ("Father Time"). The Orphics sometimes merged Khronos with the creator-god Phanes, and also equated him with the Titan Ophion. His equivalent in the Phoenician cosmogony was probably Olam (Eternal Time) whose name is written Oulomos in Greek transcripts.
Below depiction shows a comparative religious idea across different cultures.
Chronos ~ ~ Zurvan ~ ~ Savitr ~ ~ Infinite Time
Hiranyagrabha ~ ~ Phanes ~ ~ Ahura Mazda ~ ~ Demiurge ~ ~ Finite Time ~ ~ Good
Danavas ~ ~ Yatudhanas ~ ~ Ahriman ~ ~ Archons ~ ~ Finite Time ~ ~ Evil
Super-determinism is still one of the unclosed loopholes of the Bell's Theorem and one of the possible solutions to the enigmas of Quantum Mechanics. Therefore Quantum physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder and Gerard 't Hooft are working towards a super-deterministic theory of Quantum Mechanics.
Rethinking Superdeterminism
