Your introductory post said you are an Evangelical Xian.

Exorcisms are a Catholic thing. 

Did your whole family just convert to Catholicism? 

Nah, fundy Protestants do it all the time.  Bob Larson is the perfect example. 

My fundy friends tried it on me when I began to question.  It didn't work.  A couple of years ago, my mother tried to tell me I was demon-possessed, so yeah, fundies are into exorcisms, too.  They may tell you that you are demon OPPRESSED rather than demon POSSESSED.  Whatever.  They both make about the same amount of sense.  

Ask them if they think that the majority of Europe is possessed as well as the rest of the world who does not follow your exact denomination. Make them think instead of just babbling out such blatant and absolutely silly statements.

I've been in need of an excorcism for years. At least according to the evangelicals I used to hang with.

The only way through this is to stay true to yourself. May the atheists here forgive me for invoking scripture, but "The Truth shall set you free". Seek truth. Any god that does not honr that is not worth following. Don't let people TELL you what to think, atheist or theist. Ask your own questions and don't stop asking until YOU are satisfied with the answers.

I come from a similar background. Demons were there ready to possess me all the time. Check out this book by M. Scott Peck who is very Xian. He claims such things are extremely rare. My take is that it is simply non-existent. Look, the mind is EXTREMELY complicated. Good luck to you. The book:

Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption

    I always loved that christian saying, that if you have doubts, satan will enter your heart......yeah BULLSHIT!!. So you might find out the truth, of course they don't want you to have doubts, if you have doubts you might think for yourself and not have them (the church, clegry/priests/preacher/etc) do the thinking for you, they rather control your thoughts than have you control it yourself. As for satan, god himself is more demon like if you ask me (If you ever get the description of god from Ezek 1:4-21 then you will understand). Controlling everything you do, think and say, wow, more like a dictator with a childish temper, don't like his rules, oh don't worry you will suffer for eternity (and yes i know a WHOLE bunch christians will say this isn't true any more, but we all know that's bullshit as well because in the end this is what christianity preaches, the majority of christianity preaches this crap).

    So in the end if you doubts, then you have doubts, welcome to the road to self enlightenment, doesn't mean you will stay on it, doesn't mean you have to like it, or even do it, however doubt is not satan, and satan, just like god, is a creation of man, all "good" needs and "Evil", even though god does state that he did create evil as well, so go figure this one out.  Many have had doubts, are atheists or doubters satan filled, immoral, sex crazied (ok some of us are sex crazied) pediophile, murderous, raping, pillaging, plundering bastards?......maybe, some, but the majority no, not even close. If atheists are so bad, why is history filled with atrocities committed by believers of all faiths (and yes mao, and stalin where atheists, they also followed communists dogma, which i have stated before any dogma can lead you into trouble), yet it is rarely the atheists that leads people into war, into ethnic cleansing, into religious jihad, or into crusades....wait those last few are committed by believers. so are atheists really Satan filled bastards? i say NO.

Could there be anyone in your house that is a non-believer or who also has doubts? Someone who you might be able to talk with honestly about this, someone you can tell that this needs to stop?

Hi zawn94 and welcome to the forums.

We'd like to get to know you a little better.  We'd love it if you'd take a minute and hop over to the General Conversation, Introductions and Humor forum and introduce yourself. 

Good words, brian.

Well, it depends on what field of study you are making reference to, but here is, basically, how we know the precise age of the universe.

Basically, it goes like this. Looking at light is like looking into the past, simply. The Theory of Relativity dictates that Time dilation increases with speed (time dilation essentially means that as you speed up, time slows down. This is true at any level, although utterly undetectable below a good fraction of light speed. If you are driving in your car, time for you is going more slowly than if you were sitting at your desk) Anyway, since light-speed is the final limit on the travel of information through the universe, it has maximal time dilation, in other words, if a photon could wear a wristwatch, that watch would stop completely. Light does not age, and since it has no mass, it's speed is always a constant 300,000,000 meters per second. This means that when you are looking into a mirror, you are looking at yourself roughly six billionths of a second ago, the amount of time it takes light to reflect from the mirror to your eyes. When you look at the sun, you are looking at the sun 8 minutes ago. When you look at the farthest pinpoints of light in the sky, you are looking at them around the time the dinosaurs died (65 million years ago). If the vast Red Giant Betelguese in the constellation Orion died right now, no one would notice for the next 500 years. In other words, light has a set speed limit and we can use that speed limit to find out how far away an object is, since all visible objects emit or reflect electromagnetic light. Light from an object takes a certain amount of time to travel to your eyes, and so, if we know for how long the light travelled to reach us, we know how far away the object is.

This is one of the two critical concepts we use to determine how old the universe and the objects in it are.

For most of history, astronomers, philosophers, etc. thought that the universe was infinte, had no beginning and was always there. That changed when not a physicist, but a poet, Edgar Allen Poe, solved a quandry called Olber's Paradox. This paradox states that if the universe is infinite, that means

a) There is an infinite number of stars

b) The light from these stars has had an infinite number of time to get here

Which means that wherever we turn our heads, night or day, the whole sky should be a dazzling, completely blinding, pure white color. But it is not. Why?

Poe solved it. He realized that there are not an infinite number of stars, and light has not had an infinite number of time to get here. There was a cutoff point, a point of creation of the universe, and we can figure out precisely how long ago that was.

The first way, to get only a rough approximation, is to examine the absolutely farthest visible object in the night sky from Earth (since the universe is isochoric and homogenous in topology which means it looks the same regardless of which way you turn your head) and see how far away it is. The real problem with measuring the distance to stars based on the light they emanate is that they can fool us. A distant bright star appears close and a close dim star appears distant. It was Hubble who first solved it. Up until then 1920s, the universe was very small. The astronomer community believed it to consist solely of the Milky Way, and that the Milky Way was a small and humble collection of stars, those stars which were visible in the night sky. But Hubble changed all that in one stroke by solving the luminosity problem, that is, how to calculate the distance to stars without being thrown off by the fact that a distant bright star appears close and a close dim star appears distant, by measuring a special stellar mass called a Cepheid which astronomers nicknamed the standard candle, because it regularly brightens and dims with exactitude, a precisely measurable interval like a lighthouse beacon. Since the brightness of the star is directly proportional to the pulsation time length, Hubble now had the ability to calculate the distance to stars he was observing. So imagine his astonishment when the 31.4 day pulsation worked out to be a distance of two million light years, well outside the Milky Way galaxy, whose disk extends from arm to arm of 100,000 light years. Repeating calculation after calculation, he suddenly realized with astonishment that the universe was not a mere handful of light years nor a motley collection of stars. The universe is, at least at present (it is expanding) 78 billion light years across (this is not contraditory since empty space can expand much much faster than light speed), and has a present contingent of 100 billion galaxies, six sextillion stars and five quintillion planets. In astonishment, Hubble realized that the pinpoints of light emanating from the most distant points on the visible sky are not stars, they are galaxies, each will billions of star systems, compressed into a single point of light due to sheer distance from Earth.

So, bearing this method in mind, we look for the farthest objects that emit light on the fringes of the visible universe, cosmic engines called quasars. Small and immensely powerful galaxies with a huge bright disk in the center, probably driven by a black hole. The farthest quasars are almost 13 billion light years away. That's pretty good. That gets us to 5% accuracy.

What all the stellar methods of determining astronomical distance such as gravitational lensing, spectroscopy, Cepheid variables etc  are for is attempting to determine Hubble's constant. The universe is expanding in size, which means, Hubble realized, that it had a beginning, a point of creation, which cosmologists called the Big Bang. Hubble's constant is called H, and we determine it by examining redshift. The color of light depends on its wavelength, and red has a shorter wavelength than white light. Since the universe is expanding, all the galaxies are moving away from each other, which means that when we observe them, they should have a reddish glow, since the acceleration away from us causes the wavelength of the light to squeeze (like an accordian). Measuring the redshift by measuring the distance of astronomical objects allows us to determine the rate of acceleration of expansion of the universe, and that allows us to determine precisely when the universe was born.

That is one way how we know the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Given the rate of expansion of the universe, if we wind the clock back to the point of creation, it occured 13,700,000,000 years ago give or take a couple hundred thousand years.

This is all enough to debunk the literal interpretation of Genesis, which, if were true, would indicate that the universe would have a total radius of 6000 light years, and that the farthest stellar object on its fringe would be 6000 light years away. This is obviously not true. By clever detection, we can count a total of 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the visible universe, each of which has 100,000,000,000 stars, hence, if all of that was shoved into the radius of 6000 light years, the fabric of space time would implode under gravitational distortion so immense that it would rend a hole in the universe. The density and rate of expansion of matter does not allow for such a young universe. If the universe was 6000 years old, it would still be primordial, very small, extremely dense and immensely hot and matter would not have cooled down enough to form subatomic particles. What we had instead was a thick, and extremely hot soup of sub-particles called quark-gluon plasma. Hell, there are even some single objects in the universe (tears, Red Giants, spiral galaxies) that are vastly larger than the tiny, 6000 light year disk that creationism would have us believe, is the universe. There is a massive void/hole 10 billion light years away, near the fringe of the universe, which, alone, measures almost a billion light years in diameter.

Another aspect of this which helps to debunk Genesis is the quasars themselves. The interesting thing is, we can see quasars, but there are almost no quasars left in the universe. What we are seeing is the light that left the quasars after their formation. A galaxy takes billions of years to die. If they were created in a day, ex nihilo, 6000 years ago, the universe should be infested with quasar engines. The quasars are the primordial step of cosmic evolution. Very powerful, but very young galaxies, that have long since been destroyed. This is obvious evidence of a ten-billion year long cosmic evolutionary process.

But anyway for precise calculations of the age of the universe, we don't look at stars, we look at something the afterglow.

The Big Bang theory dictates that the universe was born in an immensely and uniformly hot and extremely dense point which expanded outwards in accordance with thermodynamics, this means that as the spatiotemporal fabric expanded, the universe and its matter cooled greatly, very quickly in fact. The average temperature in the universe is 2.7K, which is -270 C. Since the universe is homogenous, what we should see is an afterglow, a faint radiative microwave background that dates back to the Big Bang (recall what I said about light showing us the past), the fluctuations of which became everything we see around us. In other words, if we could look past the quasar engines at the fringe of the visible universe- we could see the moment of creation itself. And based on the rate of cooling of the universe, the age of the universe matches precisely with the homogenous temperature of the bulk of space, which is 2.7 Kelvin, extremely cold. The radiation afterglow of the Big Bang's disappation indicates it is the result of an event that occured 13,700,000,000 years ago, give or take a paltry couple of hundred thousand years.

The cosmic background radiation is the most distant and old thing that humans have ever observed. It was initially opaque and white, but as it cooled and spread out, it became black roughly 380,000 years ago. The microwave background, in other words, is a picture of what the entire universe looked like just moments after it's creation, and a COBE photograph of it was taken by spectroscopes and microwave radiation probes by a device called the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe. This is a picture of what the entire universe looked like just after it was born:

It doesn't look like much, but those patches represent all the microwave fluctations of temperature after the Big Bang, and the information within them eventually became everything. All the stars, all the galaxies, all the planets, etc.

I hope that helps.

Now, that is the cosmology, onto the astronomy. I said that planets, stars etc take millions of years to form. This is true. Based on our observations of quasars, the earliest star formed 200million years after the Big Bang. By the reckoning of Genesis, all the stars that were ever made were created within a day, and this also means no new stars form. This is simply not true, nor can stars be created in a single day. The birth of a star (which we have seen) is one of the most public and obvious things to happen in the universe. A budding astronomer with a teloscope can see that the Orion Nebulae has a hazy patch in the middle of the Sword, part of the Perseus Molecular Cloud Nebulae chain, the patch is from the brightest star within, the NGC1333. Inside the nebulae chain is a massive dark swirl of gas that are collapsing under the pull of Dark Energy to become rotating gas disks that condense into Yellow dwarves, like our sun. The dark patches around the star are filled with an infared glow, as young stars condense, they shoot out massive jets of hot gas back into the nebulae cloud, which produces a glow visible from Earth. Even with your eyes, you can watch stars being born, very slowly, as the process takes millions of years, but you can watch snapshots of it nonetheless, since many different stars are in different stages of formation.

So, stars cannot be created in a day. Ever since we discovered nucleosynthesis, we have gained a rather complete understanding of the stellar life cycle. All stars begin as a diffuse cloud of hydrogen gas called a protostar which starts to collapse as driven by gravity. As hyrogen accumulates, the gravity increases, and it starts to condenses faster and faster, acting like a gas jet, sucking in hydrogen, it starts to spin rapidly (this often results in binary star systems), this causes the star's dense core to heat up so much it starts firing off particles called gluons, fusing hydrogen atoms together to make the next heaviest element in the periodic table- helium. This is called "ignition", because the star starts to burn it's hydrogen. And this is the longest part of the star's life, the part our sun is roughly halfway through now. This is how a star is born. Not a process that can occur in 24 hours, believe me, or even 24 days, or 24 months, or 24 years, or 24,000 years. Cosmic evolution takes place on timescales that outstrip the one propogated in Genesis by the same order of magnitude that the distance between New York and Los Angeles is larger than the distance between me and my computer screen.

Another interesting thing, on the subject, is star death. When super-heavy stars die, they collapse into black holes. When this happens, it releases a massive, incredible, highly radioactive jet of energy called a gamma ray burst. It's a good thing our eyes cannot detect gamma rays, since if they could, then once a day, completely at random, from a totally random direction, the whole sky would just turn completely and blindingly white for a few seconds. At the rate of star death, if stars were not periodically born (as Genesis suggests all stars, ever, were created within a day) we would long since have been out of stars, and our universe would be dark and lifeless.

This is just a snapshot of the Cosmology to help my first two claims. I haven't even bothered with things which are actually my field of endeavor. Molecular evolution, the formation of Planets, the age of the Earth (that's geology), etc. I trust this is a helpful first demonstration?

Deluded, if you want Theists to read/understand your posts, don't make them so complicated. Keep it simple. If they cannot understand it, they won't respond to it.

FOC, try telling your parents that stars are very far away,(millions even billions of light years) and the light must first reach us, because it has a limited speed.

It really is that simple. There are other proofs of course, but this is the easiest to understand. 

I'm just saying since you seem upset in other topics by the lack of replies. I don't know how many times you posted your entropy essay, and I have never seen a response.

FOC, I'm going to be repeating some things from other's posts, but I think they are worth it.

You were not a coward for thinking or voicing your thoughts. You did a brave thing. (In my opinion, if anyone needs intimidation to convince you of something, you should question the validity of their argument.)

 My advice is to remain the calm center of your universe. Don't get sucked into yelling or drama. You will find people to talk to. They won't necessarily agree with you entirely, but you will be able to at least talk about these issues.

If all else fails, remain civil and you can get on with your quest at a later date.

-Triften

Even all-powerful beings will have slight problems with that one. The trouble is, light is not an entity. Light is just an electromagnetic field oscillating and 90 degrees to a radiation field. One does not generate a field in transit without a emitting entity. Even God cannot violate F=MA, since light has no mass.

And even if one could spontaneously generate light, it would carry no information, so if the light was created "in transit", it wouldn't reflect anything when it reached our eyes, so it would be as if the sky did not exist. The only way we could see the stars is indeed because the stars themselves are emitting the light.

And besides, Carl Sagan, God incarnate, dealt with that first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOJPprykkrI

FOC,

Be pragmatic about this. If your family has financial leverage on you, it is not cowardly to play the game until you are independent. Many great men of the Renaissance were forced to dip their heads to the will of the Catholic Church. This fact does not make them cowardly. They simply did not wish to die on a pyre.

So, research the issues yourself, gather information and wealth, and reveal yourself when you are at full strength.

You are no coward.  You should always be pragmatic.  That's what Machiavelli would have of you, and he lived through similar times.

With regards to how long it takes light to reach us, and the age of the universe... I guess it means the observable universe it 13.7 billions years old, but it’s possible that the universe itself it much old, right? Which if so I guess would be a mystery to is.