© 1991 The Fellowship for readers of The Urantia Book
I hope you enjoyed the first issue of the SGH and that you found the LIGHTEN LIFE NEWS interesting. As always your comments and contributions are welcome especially newsclippings that suggest changes in the world prompted by the work of Deity.
In the clips that follow please note that many are excerpts for space reasons LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK
Toronto Star Jan.31/91
LONDON (Special) -
Astronomers are groping in the dark after the revelation that all their best ideas about the structure of the universe and the creation of the galaxies are deeply flawed.
A comprehensive survey of the cosmos has revealed it is too lumpy and uneven for existing theory to make sense.
A group of astronomers from Britain and Canada has mapped more than 2,000 galaxies, out to a distance of some 450 million light years, to produce the first chart of our “local area of the universe.”
The results, published in today’s issue of the scientific journal Nature, mean none of the present models of galaxy formation can explain the existence and distribution of large star clusters and intervening voids.
Cosmologists have difficulty understanding how the universe could have got so lumpy as to produce the clusters of galaxies.
Toronto Star, Feb. 20/91
As part of an exercise in a World Religions course, Grade 11 and 12 students at Parkdale C.I. were asked to lint the “big questions” they consider important. Following are some of their responses:
Was I adopted?
Will I be forced to go fight for Canada?
Will I be successful later in life?
How did the human race come about?
Why am I brown instead of white?
Where did God come from, if there is one?
How did the world begin?
Why aren’t there limitations on religious rituals?
What is the purpose of religion?
Am I going to go to university?
How long am I going to live?
Is there any god?
How did the world begin?
Are we alone in the universe?
How many girls are there in Canada? (same person as above)
What is the most powerful religion?
What is the first religion in this world?
What high school should I go to?
What am I going to do after school today?
Should I get a job?
Is the world coming to an end soon?
Will I live to get married?
Will peace all over the world ever happen?
What is man’s purpose? (asked by a female student)
What is real happiness?
Why are there so many different gods?
What is real love?
Why do believers think unbelievers are going to hell?
Why do people need God?
Where will I be 20 years from now?
Will I graduate from high school?
What will my wife be like?
Is there more than one god?
Is there reincarnation?
Is there such thing as a spiritual life?
Do you believe man evolved from apes? (I thought a lot about it but I don’t think my ancestors were monkeys regardless of all the “proof” that exists.) do?
Am I doing what God wants me to do?
How was the world created?
Why do people believe in religion?
Why can’t we have one religion?
Is there an afterlife?
Is there a supernatural essence that people search for in becoming at one with life?
What is it like to be dead? life?
What am I going to do with my life?
How am I going to get rich?
What is my future?
If I believe in God, will I be saved? me?
Will university do anything for
How many chịldren will I have?
When will the world end?
Toronto Star, Nov. 20 / 90
PARIS (Stafi) - For 20,000 tanks in Europe, it’s the eve of destruction.
They’re being blown up, bashed with steel balls, sliced to pieces, filled with concrete, turned into fire trucks or retire: to museums.
The details of destruction are explliat Europ terms of the Conventional Forch it Europe agreement.
It was signed yesterday by formar adversaries, the North Atlantic Treaty Organimation nations and those of the Warsaw Pact.
The Soviets, under the terms of the agreement, have to rid themselves of 16,500 tanks, 17,000 armored vehicles 15,000 pleces of erthlory, 8,000 combet aircraft and 1,450 helicoptets.
The Americans are giving up 3,600 tanks, 100 armored vehicles and 235 helicopters.
To demolish the tanks accordifing to the rules of the pact, a steel ball must be dropped on them until their hulls are cracked in at least three places and the turrets are cracked once.
Explosives are only good if the gun mount is ruptured.
The agreement says only eight tanks can be put in a museum. It also lays out 14 roles for obsolete tanks, including their use as bulldozers, cranes, fire trucks, rescue vehicles, vehicles for cleaning oil spills and all-purpose transportation.
Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1990
WASHINGTON (AP)-For the first time in a decade, the nations of the world are spending less on weapons, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency reports. Among them is the Soviet Union.
Developing nations accounted for most of the decline, spending $ 25.1 billion less in 1988 than the year before. The overall drop was $ 36 billion.
Even so, spending on arms surpassed $1 trillion for the second year in a row. Military spending in developing countries has been dropping since 1984.
The $ 11 billion decline among wealthier nations is the first drop in a decade.
The Soviet Union spent $ 299.8 billion on arms in 1988, a drop of 4 percent.
The U.S. led the world with $ 307.7 billion, showing a slight increase over 1987.
THE TORONTO STAB
March 3, 1991
Suppose, sometime in the future, the expanding universe stopped expanding and began contracting until it eventually collapsed on itself in a big crunch, the reverse of the Big Bang. Could the force of the implosion create another Big. Bang - a new universe born from the ashes of the old? If so, was our universe created from the collapse of a previous universe?
This is the old oscillating universe theory, popular among cosmologists a few decades ago, but relegated to the theoretical trash can in recent years. Now the oscillating universe idea has been tevived by University of Alberta astrophysicist Werner Israel.
The birth of a new universe from the death of the old one is the most ancient of all cosmologies. References to the concept in Chinese and Indian writings date back at least years. Says Israel: “The idea of cycles of birth, death and rebirth are embedded in the subconscious of all human beings.” But it will be hard to prove whether reality parallels these deep-rooted musings about the universe.
July 25 / 91
WASHINGTON - The search for planets beyond our solar system has turned up a bizarre new candidate about 10 times the mass of Earth.
The planet, if it exists, is in orbit around a pulsing dead and dark star some 30,000 light years from Earth. A team led by British astrono. mer Andrew Lyne announced the discovery in today’s issue of the journal Nature.
If independent observers confirm the finding, the planet will win a place in history as the first ever discovered around a star other than the sun. It could also upset mainstream theories about how dead stars get that way and abut their life after “death.”
“This could be the Picasso of stars — having a ‘family’ very late in life,” said David Black, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
Unsolved mysteries: The instruments of the 1990s are intended to solve cosmic puzzles left over from the 1980s. In that decade, a burst of discoveries radically changed our notions of the universe. Infrared and optical telescopes in orbit and on the ground found galaxies arrayed in a complex, structured way-what astrophysicist Alan Dressler of the CarnegieInstitution’sobservatories in Pasadena, Calif., sees as “more like sculpture than spatter.” The galaxies sparkle like glitter on soap bubbles: galaxy upon brilliant galaxy lie on thin, curving sheets surrounding immense voids. This finding challenged the dogma that the universe is homogeneous, without structure. What wasn’t explainable was simply humbling. X-ray detectors gathered evidence that humongous radiation-spewing beasts lurk in the centers of violent galaxies and left theorists scrambling to find a power source that could explain them. Optical observations of stars in galaxies implied that some 90 percent of the matter in the universe is zipping around totally undetected by any instrument, let alone the human eye. Somewhere out there is a shadow of
It’s been less than 70 years since astronomers discovered that galaxies are not bright clouds in our Milky Way, but island worlds scattered through the cosmos. Having yielded one of her celestial mysteries, nature has managed to stay well ahead of scientists’ pursuit of her other ones. In the 1990 s, some of the enigmas may finally yield. Yet even as the next generation of telescopes explores the art and architecture of the cosmos, astronomers will inevitably, and serendipitously, stumble upon yet deeper secrets. Vera Rubin is convinced that “some of the most mysterious features of the universe have yet to be discovered.”
We asked that straightforward question, that people everywhere hold in their hearts vivid impressions of the Supreme Being, that these visions reveal the grandest extent of the human imagination and show us as much about ourselves as about the ultimate reality
…asks Life in its December / 90 issue.
Sir John Templeton, eminence grise of the investment industry, says we’re about to enter a global Golden Age.
The collapse of communism and the explosion of scientific discoveries leading to new products and processes will overshadow economic problems, soaring government debts and precarious financial markets. And, Templeton believes — as usual — the stock market will be one of the beneficiaries.
“We are coming into the most wonderful period in world history for gains in our standard of living,” the soft-spoken, 78-year-old Templeton told The Star in an interview yesterday. "Goods will be higher quality and lower cost. We will have have more variety and more new conveniences. The whole development process is speeding up.
Jan.3/91 N.Y. Times
A critical element of the widely accepted Big Bang theory about the origin and evolution of the universe is being discarded by some of its staunch. est advocates, throwing the field of cosmology into turmoil.
According to the Big Bang theory, matter from the explosive moment of cosmic creation originally was evenly spread throughout the universe. But galaxies tend to be clumped together, an awkward fact that astronomers have sought to explain by assuming that cold invisible matter is a major attractive force.
The cold dark matter model, as it is called, accounts well for local clustering but could not explain the giant superstructures recently found in galactic surveys, like the “great wall,” a string of galaxies that stretches across the sky for at least a half billion lightyears.
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Lighten Life News Editor
Brent St. Denis
1088 Barwell Ave.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
K2B 8H5
phone…(613)828-1685