The Way I Understand It

Of course I could be wrong, but that's never stopped me before. My understanding of Aristotle's statement is something like the chicken and the egg. The egg precedes the chicken, but the chicken cannot precede the chicken. I don't think that your "me of then and me of now" example applies here. You are you, the you of then and the you of now are the same person. Your parents preceded you, but you did not precede yourself. Another way of saying it might be, "Nothing existed before it existed."

Apparently Aristotle was not a Mormon. They believe in something called "the pre-existence". To understand that, you have to understand the concept that a person is not a body that has a soul, a person is a soul that has a body. In other words, the soul is the real core of the person, the body is just an appendage. Mormons believe that your soul, which means the real you, existed in Heaven before it occupied your body here on Earth. When your body dies, you soul goes back to Heaven from whence it came. Technically, I suppose that's not the same thing as preceding yourself. You are the same person now that you were before, only now you exist on the Earth instead of in Heaven. I don't think you can exist in both places at once, according to Mormon doctrine.

I think, when Obama said "No god ordered this." it was a response to the Islamic terrorist belief that Allah wants them to kill all the infidels (that's us). Funny, during the Crusades, the Christians called the Muslims "infidels". I think the generic term means "unbelievers", so I suppose it could be used either way. Anyway, Obama seems to be saying that the terrorists are mistaken, no god ordered them to kill us. I doubt that he has an inside track into the mind of Allah, so he was probably just expressing his opinion.

My understanding of the Big Bang Theory is that all the matter and/or energy that is present in the universe today was there before the Bang, but it was all compressed into this incredibly dense body of uniform material. All this compression caused a lot of heat, which eventually resulted in the Big Bang, which caused all this stuff to expand outward in every direction. As a result of this expanding process, this uniform stuff differentiated itself into the elements that make up the universe today. Therefore, the Big Bang was not a creation process, it was a transformation process, which makes it consistent with our law of the conservation of matter/energy.

Maybe it's not correct to classify math and logic as languages, but they certainly are constructs of the human mind. These constructs were constructed in the human attempt to understand the nature of nature. I don't know whether or not that makes math and logic purely abstract systems. I would think that the laws of nature would still function if math and logic had never been constructed, but we might not be able to understand them the way we do. Our lack of understanding would certainly not prevent the laws from functioning, they would just be functioning without us understanding them.

Saying "God bless you" when somebody sneezes may be just a figure of speech today, but it is my understanding that the phrase originated during a time when people believed that evil spirits could enter your body when you sneezed. Invoking God's blessing on the sneezer was an attempt to prevent that from happening. Similarly, the habit of covering your mouth when you yawn might prevent evil spirits from entering your body through your mouth while it's open.