Hossam Badrawi Official Website
Wednesday article
Titled “Space-Time and Religions Again and Again”
Written by Hossam Badrawi
I receive, as many people receive, messages on WhatsApp every Friday, sometimes congratulations and sometimes supplications… And when you have a large number of acquaintances, friends, and those registered on your phone list, these messages become dozens and sometimes hundreds… These are messages not written by their sender, but rather transmitted, and sent as they are. They came from someone else, that is, they are impersonal messages that do not require a response, but they require stopping at the idea of sending a message that you did not write to a person who will not read it every Friday, as if his circumstances were being repeated, so what is the significance and benefit of that?!
In my dialogue with young people, I discussed this issue with them, and we touched on a more important topic, which is the repetition of “shared posts” without verifying their authority and veracity. We participate in spreading false news sometimes, and we may be unwittingly supporting a large network of misinformation created by those who want to spread negative energy in society. .
All I ask is to verify before publishing any post on your phone list without knowing its origin and origin. Science, intelligence, and awareness say so.
We must ensure the authority of posts, which sometimes not only publish false news, but also intentionally distort statements, and add pictures with falsehood, to create integrated stories that are far from the truth with a goal.
A young dreamer woman said: I think that Friday “posts” that are sent without thinking have become part of society’s behavior and evidence of its religiosity… Is there a spiritual value for Friday for Muslims, Saturday for Jews, and Sunday for Christians?… What is the origin of the story?… And what is the relationship between religion and the days? .
I said: I think it is a circumstantial, organizational relationship, not a divine one. She added: I have finished reading the book “My Own Universe” by James Bailey, followed by the book “Physics of the Future” by Mikio Kaku, the book “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene, and a summary of Stephen Hawkins’ book “Short Answers to Questions.” “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” and I became confused about time and what we take for granted on Earth, which is relative to the universe. So I went back to researching the expansion and contraction of time and its relationship to the speed of light and gravity… all of which began as scientific theories proven by astronomical discoveries and mathematical equations.
When I looked at the dozens of messages from friends and those I do not know, with “posts” that they often do not read, but rather resend to everyone on their phone, as I explained, about sanctifying supplication at a specific hour or day because God responds to the supplicant more than at other times, I asked myself about The importance of the day, what day, and why do people think that the day is very relative to the inhabitants of planet Earth from its north to the south pole, and the most relative between the Earth’s day in the first place and the day of Mars or Saturn, let alone the day of a planet in another galaxy?!, and I wanted to share with you in thinking outside of what is local. (In this case, the local, which is the Earth) to what is cosmic.
Another young woman said: Explain to us more.
I said: I invite you to think, in order to arrive at explanations worth considering.. If Einstein’s theory of relativity has proven the possibility of changing time and its relationship to space and speed, and that by increasing speed to near the speed of light, time shrinks and mass diminishes, and when reaching the speed of light matter ceases and time stops, then I can I understand things that were said and I was required to believe them as a matter of faith and not as a matter of using reason.
Another young man said: What’s the matter, doctor? What does this have to do with hundreds of Friday congratulations on social media?!
I said: I see the relativity of time and I think about some verses of the Qur’an, and the following verses stopped me:
“And indeed, one day with your Lord is like a thousand years of what you count.”
“He directs the matter from the heaven to the earth, then it ascends to Him in a day whose equivalent is a thousand years that you can count.”
“The angels and the spirit ascend to Him on a day whose duration is fifty thousand years.”
“So God caused him to die for a hundred years, then resurrected him. He said, ‘How long did you stay?’ He said, ‘You stayed for a day, or part of a day.’ He said, ‘Rather, you stayed for a hundred years.’”
I added: My new book, “An Invitation to Think,” which was issued by the Egyptian Lebanese Publishing House, discusses many similar topics, to increase knowledge and differentiate between what is human and what is divine.
Science is beautiful, and questioning is the origin of knowledge. As for those who wanted to consider that the mind took a license after the interpretation of the first two, what I am reading now, after more than a thousand years, and that faith in believing what has no proof is the path to God… I say to them that God gave us the mind to contemplate, think, and strive with the knowledge with which He began His book, and that what What distinguishes us from the rest of creation is this awareness of God’s blessing upon us.
The first young man said: We return to the days of the week. What is their source?
I said: In many cultures, the names given to the days of the week were derived from the names of the classical planets in Hellenistic astronomy, which in turn were named after the gods contemporary to that time in the minds of humans, a system introduced by the Sumerians and later adopted by the Babylonians and adopted by the Roman Empire. During ancient times, the seven-day week was adopted in early Christianity, based on the Hebrew calendar, and Saturday remained the seventh day, which is sacred to the Jews, and Sunday to the Christians. The Babylonians had named these days after the names of the planets known to them, and their number was five, and they designated the sixth day to the moon and the seventh day to the sun.
Diana as the Moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, Saturn for Saturday, and Apollo as the Sun for Sunday.
After that, a second stage came for the Arabs in which they followed the rest of the peoples, and adopted the use of a week consisting of seven days, and they did not count the weeks before that.
In the third stage, the days of the week were named by their known names today, which are: (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday). The names from Sunday to Thursday are divided from the same number, first, second, to fifth, and Sunday was the first of them. As for the origin of the name Friday, it goes back to gathering and gathering for the purpose of prayer or something else. Then the Qur’an came to establish a day for the group to meet and pray together.
So in Latin and English, the days of the week are named after celestial bodies, and at another time after some legendary figures in ancient history.
Because the English language depends on ancient Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages, these influences can be seen in its naming of the days of the week.
The original order of days between the first and second centuries AD was in relation to the Greek and Roman gods, and they were: (the Sun, the Moon, Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, and Cronos). After that, the names of the planets moved from Latin to other languages in southern and western Europe.
The Romans named the days of the week after naming their gods, because they saw a relationship between their gods and the changing face of the sky. Every night, they were able to see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in addition to the moon and the sun, which formed seven main astronomical bodies for them, so They were using these seven names when they decided that there were seven days of the week.
Then I said: They are all just names that reflect the cultures of different times. The week did not exist, then it existed, and it was five days and became seven, and the days were given different names, linked to the culture of their time, but in the end it is a human creativity that has its own history and respect.
It is thought, and sometimes some people believe, that repeating the names of days or their timing in weeks and months has a religious significance, as if time is repeating, and as if the events and location of the day and month return as they were at a previous moment, and this is not the case.. Considering the movement of the Earth around the sun, and the group of solar planets, And the rotation of the entire solar system around something else, and the movement and travel of everyone across the universe, returning to the same cosmic situation on the same day, month, or Earth year is impossible.
By the same logic, the Creator who is close to us, like our jugular vein, does not have a timetable for listening to our prayers, and all the weekly and daily divisions are organizational for human lives and not for God, because God Almighty exists at all times, in every place, and in every time.
