The Universe is NOT expanding faster and faster

When I was taking astro-pysics classes many moons ago, I wrote a treatise about my disagreement with the present thinking of astro-physicists who say the expansion of the universe is at 98% the speed of light.

My counter was that I could explain that issue, which I did, by showing the illogical reasoning that went into thinking that the red-shift plus certain steady light stars showing the shift. Only problem with that argument is that those stars do not align properly mathematically.

Now, the thinking is that after about 500 million years after the big bang, there was a big slow down of the universe and then it started going faster again. A totally illogical conclusion and it breaks several laws of physics. The primary being that an object in motion will continue in a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. Except, there is no way to keep this basic law in tact by saying there was any slowdown, so I rejected that theory.

Finally, the further in space we look, the further back in time we are looking. When we look at the deepest parts of space, everything is speeding around 98% of the speed of light, which is quite logical. But as you venture through time and observe galaxies that are much more close to us, you see they are not traveling anywhere near 98% of the speed of light. Also, we are part of a "local group" of galaxies, the two largest being ours and the Andromeda, with many much smaller galaxies also in our group which number 134. So by extension, it is reasonable to expect that other galaxy groups exist and the only proper way to guage the speed of outward motion is to measure the galaxies not singularly, but as a group which we cannot do at this point in time. And this shows we really do not know how fast the universe is expanding. My thesis was that the universe expansion is actually slowing down which actually is believed by a smaller number of pysicists.