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A Massive Mystery

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Quantum Mechanics describes particles as vibrations in time and space. The intensity of the vibration in time (i.e. – when it is) reflects the particle’s energy; the intensity of the vibration in space (i.e. – where it is) reflects its momentum.

In large-scale reality, such as baseballs and buildings, those vibrations are way too small to influence the results of experiments. In studying these “classical” systems, physicists discovered certain mathematical laws that govern the relationship between momentum (p) and energy (E). Believing that these rules should still be manifested in the quantum realm, they were used as guidelines in building theories of vibration.

In Special Relativity, that relationship is (m is the mass of the particle):

m2 = E2 – p2

In the case of electromagnetic waves, we have m = 0. Using a fairly simple mathematical analogy, the equation above becomes a wave equation for the electromagnetic potential, A. An electric field (that drives electricity down a wire) arises from the gradient of the potential; a magnetic field (that causes the electricity to want to turn) arises from the twisting of the potential.

The contribution of P.A.M. Dirac was to find a mathematical analogy that would describe the massive particles that interact with the electromagnetic potential. When the meaning of the symbols is understood, that equation is not hard to write down, but explaining the symbols is the subject of advanced courses in physics. So here I’ll focus on describing the nature of the equation. Let’s pick an electron for this discussion. The electron is a wave, and so is represented by a distribution ψ.

Physically, the electron is like a little top: it behaves as though it is spinning. When it is moving, it is convenient to describe the spin with respect to the motion. If we point our right thumb in the direction of motion, a “right-handed” electron spins in the direction of our fingers; a “left-handed” electron spins in the opposite direction. To accommodate this, the distribution ψ has four components: one each for right- and left-handed motion propagating forward in time, and two more for propagation backwards in time.

Dirac’s equation describes the self-interaction of the particle as it moves freely through space (without interacting with anything else). Now from the last post, we know that nothing moves freely through space, because space is filled with Dark Energy. But when Dirac wrote his equation, Einstein’s axiom that space was empty still ruled the day, so it was thought of as “self-interaction”. That self-interaction causes the components of the electron to mix according to m, E and p. When the self-interaction is applied twice, we get Einstein’s equation, relating the squares of those terms.

So what does the mass term do? Well, it causes right-hand and left-hand components to mix. But here’s the funny thing: imagine watching the electron move in a mirror. If you hold up your hands in a mirror the thumbs pointed to the right, you’ll notice that the reflection of the right hand looks like your left hand. This “mirror inversion” operation causes right and left to switch. In physics, this is known as “parity inversion”. The problem in the Dirac equation is that when this is applied mathematically to the interaction, the effect of the mass term changes sign. That means that physics is different in the mirror world than it is in the normal world. Since there is no fundamental reason to prefer left and right in a universe built on empty space, the theorists were upset by this conclusion, which they call “parity violation”.

Should they have been? For the universe indeed manifests handedness. This is seen in the orientation of the magnetic field created by a moving charged particle, and also in the interactions that cause fusion in the stars and radioactive decay of uranium and other heavy elements.

But in purely mathematical terms, parity violation is a little ugly. So how did the theorists make it go away? Well, by making the mass change sign in the mirror world. It wasn’t really that simple: they invented another field, called the Higgs field (named after its inventor), and arbitrarily decided that it would change sign under parity inversion. Why would it do this? Well, there’s really no explanation – it’s just an arbitrary decision that Higgs made in order to prevent the problem in the Dirac equation. The mass was taken away and replaced with the Higgs density and a random number (a below) that characterized its interaction with the electron: m ψ was replaced with a H ψ.

Now here’s a second problem: if space was empty, why would the Higgs be expected to have a non-zero strength so that it could create mass for the electron? To make this happen, the theory holds that empty space would like to create the Higgs field out of nothingness. This creation process was described by a “vacuum” potential with says that when the Higgs density is zero, some energy is available to generate a density, until a limit is reached, and then increasing the density consumes energy. So space has a preferred density for the Higgs field. Why should this happen? No reason, except to get rid of the problem in the Dirac equation.

And what about the other spinning particles? Along with the electron, we have the muon, tau, up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top and three neutrinos, all with their own masses. Does each particle have its own Higgs field? Or do they each have their own random number? Well, having one field spewing out of nothingness is bad enough, so the theory holds that each particle has its own random number. But that begs the question: where do the random numbers come from?

So now you understand the concept of the Higgs, and its theoretical motivations.

Through its self-interaction, the Higgs also has a mass. In the initial theory, the Higgs field was pretty “squishy”. What does this mean? Well, Einstein’s equation says that mass and energy are interchangeable. Light is pure energy, and we see that light can be converted into particle and anti-particle pairs. Those pairs can be recombined to create pure energy again in the form of a photon. Conversely, to get high-energy photons, we can smash together particles and anti-particles with equal and opposite momentum, so that all of their momentum is also converted to pure energy (this is the essential goal of all particle colliders, such as those at CERN). If the energy is just right, the photons can then convert to massive particles that aren’t moving anywhere, which makes their decay easier to detect. So saying that the Higgs was “squishy” meant that the colliding pairs wouldn’t have to have a specific energy to create a Higgs particle at rest.

Of course, there’s a lot of other stuff going on when high-energy particles collide. So a squishy Higgs is hard to detect at high energies: it gets lost in the noise of other kinds of collisions. When I was in graduate school, a lot of theses were written on computer simulations that said that the “standard” Higgs would be almost impossible to detect if its mass was in the energy range probed by CERN.

So it was with great surprise that I read the reports that the Higgs discovered at CERN had a really sharp energy distribution. My first impression, in fact, was that what CERN had found was another particle like the electron. How can they tell the difference? Well, by looking at the branching rations. All the higher-mass particles decay, and the Higgs should decay into the different particle types based upon their masses (which describe the strength of the interaction between the Higgs field and the particles). The signal detected at CERN was a decay into two photons (which is also allowed in the theory). I am assuming that the researchers at CERN will continue to study the Higgs signal until the branching ratios to other particles are known.

But I have my concerns. You see, after Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize, his predecessor on the podium, Carlo Rubia (leader of the collaboration that reported the top particle discovery) was in front of a funding panel claiming that the Higgs seemed to be a bizarre object – it wasn’t a standard Higgs at all, and the funding nations should come up with money to build another even more powerful machine to study its properties. Imagine the concern of the Nobel committee: was it a Higgs or not? Well, there was first a retraction of Rubia’s claim, but then a recent paper that came out saying that the discovery was not a Higgs, but a “techni-Higgs”.

One of the characteristics of the scientific process is that the human tendency to lie our way to power is managed by the ability of other scientists to expose fraud by checking the facts. Nobody can check the facts at CERN: it is the only facility of its kind in the world. It is staffed by people whose primary interest is not in the physics, but in building and running huge machines. That’s a really dangerous combination, as the world discovered in cleaning up the mess left by Ivan Boesky and his world-wide community of financial supporters.

The God Particle

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When I did my undergraduate studies in physics at UC Berkeley, the textbooks (always a generation behind) celebrated the accomplishments of great particle physicists of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The author lists on the papers, typically eight people, offered a picture of personal and meaningful participation in revealing the mysteries of the universe.

When I stood one step down on the stage at Wheeler Hall, giving my thesis adviser a height assist when passing the Ph.D. sash over my head, the realities of research in the field of particle physics had completely changed. While I had worked on an eight-person experiment, the theorists had dismissed the results even before they were published. Many of my peers worked as members of geographically dispersed teams, either national or international in scope. The design and commissioning of apparatus had become major engineering projects requiring a decade or more to complete. Some of them never sat shift to acquire data, but published a thesis based upon computer simulations of what their data would look like when (or in some cases, sadly, if) their experiment was run. They were forgotten cogs in collaborations involving hundreds of scientists.

The sociological side-effects of these changes could be disconcerting. The lead scientist on my post-doctoral research project acquired most of his wealth trading property in the vicinity of Fermilab, sited in bucolic countryside that sprouted suburbs to house the staff of engineers and technicians that kept the facility running. Where once a region could host a cutting-edge experimental facility, eventually the sponsors became states, then nations. The site selection process for the Superconducting Super Collider, the follow-on to Fermilab, was a political circus, eventually falling in favor of Texas during the first Bush administration. The project was cancelled in a budget-cutting exercise during the Clinton Administration. This left CERN, the European competitor to Fermilab, as the only facility in active development in the world, with thousands of researchers dependent upon its survival.

Obviously managing the experimental program at such a facility requires an acute political ear – not just to manage the out-sized egos of the researchers themselves, but in packaging a pitch for politicians approving billion-dollar line-items in their budgets. I watched with trepidation as every year a low-statistics survey was done at the limits of the machine’s operating range, with the expected anomalies in the data held out as evidence that there was “something right around the corner” to be uncovered if the machine was allowed to continue to operate. This happened year-after-year, and that can have bad consequences: the frustration of the funding community creates pressure that causes things like the Challenger disaster to happen.

When I left the field in 1995 (yes, 1995! And it’s still relevant!), two specific problems were held out as motivations for continued funding. First, the equations used to calculate reaction probabilities developed a serious anomaly at the energies targeted by the next set of improvements: the values were greater than unity. Since an experiment can have only one outcome, this was held out as proof that something new would be discovered. The other problem was the existence of the Higgs boson, known popularly as the god particle.

There are many explanations for that soubriquet: “God Particle”. Some attribute it to Stephen Weinberg, a theorist whose frustration with the difficulty of proving or disproving its existence led him to call it “that god-damned particle.” I had a personal view, which was that every time theoretical physics ran into a difficulty, it seemed to be resolved by introducing another Higgs-like particle. But the cynic might also be forgiven if he claimed that the Higgs had become a magic mantra that induced compliance in mystified politicians, and spirited money out of public coffers – pretty much as atheists like to claim religions do.

So what is the Higgs particle?

Einstein is So 20th Century

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In the two centuries between Newton and Einstein, arguably the greatest physicist of the 19th century was the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell made fundamental contributions to thermodynamics, the study of how gases, liquids and solids change when ambient conditions (such as temperature and pressure) change, and how to convert heat to work. One of the results was an understanding of the propagation of sound waves through the air. But Maxwell also applied the new mathematics of differential calculus to create a unified theory of electricity and magnetism. These are the famous “Maxwell’s Equations” that predict the existence of electromagnetic waves, which we see as “light”.

Maxwell saw the relationship between electromagnetic waves and water and sound waves. Being steeped in a mechanical analysis of the world, he was unsatisfied with his abstract mathematical theory, and invested time in building a mechanical model of the “aluminiferous ether” – the medium in which light waves traveled. Having spent years studying his equations and their predictions, I am fascinated by claims of his success. It’s a magical world in which the linear motion of charges creates rotary magnetic effects. My understanding is that the model was not simple, but contained complex systems of interlocking gears.

Now Maxwell’s work was not merely a curiosity – it was the basis for the design of communication networks that broke down distances with the enormous speed of light. More than anything else, this has brought us into each other’s lives and helped to create the sense that we are one human family. (The social and psychological reaction to that reality is complex, and we’re still growing into our responsibilities as neighbors. In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin offers a hopeful analysis of the transition.)

So the world of scientific inquiry hung on Maxwell’s words, and in America, two of them, Michelson and Morley, designed an experiment to detect the presence of the ether. If the ether filled all of space, the Earth must be moving through it. Therefore the speed of light should change depending upon the motion of the observer through it. The analogy was with water waves: an observer moving along with a water wave doesn’t experience its disturbance – while one moving against it feels its disturbance enhanced. This is an example of Newton’s laws concerning the change of reference frames.

Since the Earth rotates around the sun, light emitted from the Earth in a specific direction relative to the sun should have a different speed at different times of the year. To test this hypothesis, Michelson and Morley built a sensitive instrument that compared the speed of light travelling in two perpendicular directions. As the Earth varied its motion through the ether, the pattern of dark and light on a screen was expected to shift slowly. Strangely, the result was negative: the image did not change.

The conclusion was that there was no ether. This was a real crisis, because Maxwell’s Equations don’t behave very well when trying to predict the relationship between observations made by people moving at different speeds. To understand how really terrible this is, consider: in Maxwell’s theory, charges moving through empty space creates a rotary magnetic field. But what if the observer is moving along with the charge? The charge no longer appears to move, so the magnetic field disappears. How can that be possible?

This was the challenge taken up by the Dutch physicist Henrik Lorenz. He analyzed the mechanical properties of rulers and clocks, which are of course held together by electromagnetic forces, and discovered a magical world in which rulers change length and clocks speed up and slow down when the speed of the observer changes.

This was the context in which Einstein introduced his theory of Special Relativity. He did not really add to the results of Lorenz, but he simplified their derivation by proposing two simple principles: First, since the vacuum is empty, we have no way of determining whether we are moving or not. All motion is relative to an observer (thus the title: Special Theory of Relativity), and so no observer should have a preferred view of the universe. The second was that the speed of light is the same to every observer. Einstein’s mathematical elaboration of these principles unified our understanding of space and time, and matter and energy. Eventually, General Relativity extended his ideas to include accelerating observers, who can’t determine whether they are actually accelerating or rather standing on the surface of a planet.

Special and General Relativity were not the only great theories to evolve in the course of the 20th century. Quantum Mechanics (the world of the microscopic) and Particle Physics (describing the fundamental forces and how they affect the simplest forms of matter) were also developed, but ultimately Einstein’s principles permeated those theories as criteria for acceptance.

Then, in 1998, studies of light emitted from distant supernovae seemed to indicate that something is pushing galaxies apart from each other, working against the general tendency of gravity to pull them back together. The explanation for this is Dark Energy, a field that fills all of space. This field has gravitational effects, and its effects in distorting the images of distant galaxies have been observed. However, this field cannot be moving in all possible directions at all possible speeds. Therefore, it establishes a preferred reference frame, invalidating Einstein’s assumptions.

Working physicists resist this conclusion, because they have a means of accommodating these effects in their theories, which is to introduce additional mathematical terms. But science is not about fitting data – it is about explaining it. Einstein used his principles as an explanation to justify the mathematics of his theories. When those principles are disproven, the door opens to completely new methods for describing the universe. We can travel as far back as Maxwell in reconstructing our theories of physics. While for some that would seem to discard a lot of hard work done over the years between (and undermine funding for their research), for others it liberates the imagination (see Generative Orders as an illustration).

So, for example, why didn’t Michelson and Morley detect the ether? Maybe ether is more like air than water. Air is carried along with the Earth, and so the speed of sound doesn’t vary as the Earth moves about the sun. Maybe dark energy, which Maxwell knew as the ether, is also carried along with the Earth. Maybe, in fact, gravitation is caused by distortion in the Dark Energy field when it is bound to massive objects.

The Writing of The Soul Comes First

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In Catholic terminology, thaumaturgy is the working of miracles through love. Raised by a skeptical father and steeped in science that disproved the possibility of such experiences, for most of my life I disbelieved.

That changed with the millennium, when personal and political crises brought fear into my life. I began to read widely on spiritual and religious experience. Then one Sunday I entered the sanctuary at St. Kolbe’s in Oak Park, CA. A thirty-foot statue of Christ hangs from the ceiling, not nailed to the cross, but suspended before it. Confronted with this powerful image of human suffering, I instinctively put my hand over my heart, held it out to him, and thought, “Use this for healing.”

In the intervening years, I have learned a great deal about healing through divine love. I learned that many “evil” people are simply doing what was done to them, and desperately looking for someone with the strength to show them how to get over it. I learned that people used to being in control find the sensations that come with being loved to be frightening, almost a betrayal by the thirst of their hearts. I learned that many intellectual atheists are “spiritual”, and those that are not do not realize how frightening others find the strength of their minds. I realized that Biblical literalists use their dogmatism to hold those minds at bay.

As I sought for answers, the astrophysicists announced the discovery of Dark Energy. To those that remember the philosophical roots of modern physics, this discovery was shattering. Einstein’s theories of relativity are based upon the assumption that space is empty. Dark Energy demolishes that assumption. With that called into doubt, we might notice another oddity in the history of physics: where from Ancient Greece to 1950 the complexity of nature was always understood by positing structure inside the smallest objects we could observe, in the modern era physicists assumed that no additional structure was needed. Taking away relativity and adding additional structure reveals a whole new class of theories that have the potential to reconcile science and spirituality (see Generative Orders (GO) and GO Cosmology).

I began to share these insights in 2005 with the web site at http://www.everdeepening.org, in which, as a Greek philosopher might have, I try to prove that love works. Realizing that the material was really difficult, I wrote a “layman’s” treatment back in 2008, the unpublished “Love Works.” Unfortunately, attempts to teach others demonstrated that the ideas were still difficult to grasp.

Then, in 2013, I was moved to re-read the Bible cover-to-cover, and saw it in a completely new light. I realized that what Darwin and paleontology had revealed about natural history was written right into the Bible. No conflict existed, and in fact the consistency of science with the Bible served to substantiate everything else written within.

Reading through the book in such a short time, I also saw the greater work on human nature, and the majesty and brilliance of God’s efforts to prepare us for the manifestation of Christ.

So I sat down at my computer and wrote The Soul Comes First in three weeks. In it is contained all the hopes that I pray I share with Christ: the unification of reason and faith, the hidden strength that will give humanity victory over fear, and the healing of the world through the power of love.

The message may be frightening to some. The job that we forsook in Eden is a big job, and difficult. All I ask is that you remember that it is not in human hands that the work is held. We all do our part, and the farm hand that plants a sustainable crop is no less essential than the ecologist that plans the restoration of a forest. The housewife serving in the soup kitchen is no less essential than the CEO commissioning a new factory. The counsellor that saves a marriage is no less essential than that politician that negotiates a peace treaty. With love, the strength of Christ, and the unifying wisdom of the Holy Spirit, all things are possible.

Dawn of the Dread

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At the Reagan Presidential Library, a plaque commemorating T. Boone Picken’s financing of the Air Force One hall also recounted his influence over Reagan’s financial policy. He had apparently explained to the President that “like Eastern Europe, money should be free.” One manifestation of that policy was the deregulation of the Savings and Loan industry. What had once been a sleepy industry used by the middle class to finance home purchases and college education became a cash cow for some of the nation’s most imaginative financial schemes.

The details of the ensuing Savings and Loan disaster invoked justifiable moral outrage. At the same time that the industry was liberalized, Reagan cut the regulators responsible for monitoring the industry. This meant that two banks in Colorado could trade an undeveloped property back and forth, increasing the purchase price each time, and treat the land as an asset to secure loans for ten times the final purchase price. When the banks went under, it was the government that was obligated for covering the depositor’s losses.

This pattern was paralleled in the history of the hedge fund industry and the mortgage arbitrage disasters of the 1990’s and 2000’s. Industry professionals lobbied extensively against regulation, citing the power of innovative methods to reduce overall financial risk. In both cases, the sense of security encouraged risk-taking at unprecedented levels, until major players in the market collapsed.

In all cases, it was the public that bailed out the industry, not just through tax receipts, but also through the release of trillions of dollars in low-interest or no-interest money to the financial industry through the Federal Reserve. This is money that the government must nominally pay interest on through the promissory note mechanism. Through that method, the nation’s money supply is issued by private money-center banks, and the government pays interest to the banks for the privilege. Is it any wonder that the financial industry accounted for 50% of corporate profits in the year immediately following the 2008 mortgage disaster?

The recent disasters reflect a more dangerous trend: the complexity and speed of modern market mechanisms make it almost impossible for either regulators or consumers to assess the nature and value of the services provided. The use of complexity to defraud consumers was most visible in the health insurance industry. The availability of health care outcome data allowed new players to enter the insurance market and target only those subscribers least likely to need health care. Obviously, these subscribers were those that in their prior plans funded the claims of patients needing extended services. As they were siphoned away, existing health plans went into the red, and premiums skyrocketed. A large number of chronically ill patients fell out of the pool of insured, and their conditions worsened. To ensure access to a doctor, they began to lie on their health insurance applications. Carrying an insurance card, they would then be admitted to a hospital, which by law could not discharge them until their condition was stable. The hospitals would find out after the provision of services that the patient was not covered, and would have to pass the unrecouped billings on to regular patients, which drove up their premiums. And on the insurer’s side, a whole army of bureaucrats was hired with the goal of finding cause to deny coverage. Thus the system was further burdened with administrative costs.

The net result was that, prior to the Health Care Affordability Act, health insurance was on its way to being a “pay-as-you-go” system with enormous administrative overhead. The rational choice for those that could finance their own care was to be uninsured.

The complexity of market mechanisms also played a large part in the Enron fraud in the California electrical supply market, which saw traders calling up friends at power plants to take generators off-line during brownouts to create leverage over state regulators. It also was a major factor in the Madoff financial fraud.

If the myth of efficiency and rationality in financial markets wasn’t bad enough, the pathological influence of the philosophy has extended to the provision of basic public services. When workloads at forensic laboratories exploded with the war on drugs, private contractors stepped in, claiming that they could adapt more rapidly to the increasing work load. What has become apparent as these laboratories entered the Physician Health Plan market is that they have accomplished higher throughput by cutting corners on procedures. The profit motive drives all other factors aside. As those profits grow, these providers have used their resources in the political arena to generate legislation that opens new markets for their services.

What is truly frightening in this last case is that the failure to adhere to scientifically defensible practices has made the public at large responsible for huge claims for wrongful incarceration. Prior to privatization, local law enforcement had some visibility and control of the forensic laboratories. Now they are completely beholden to them, and the possibility of class-action civil lawsuits brought for lost income and privileges during incarceration makes disciplining the contractors unpalatable.

So I see patterns emerging, and those patterns all point in the same direction: siphoning of resources from the public to those with control of the nation’s financial and social infrastructure.

What is the impact on the spiritual plane? I’ll offer an experience I had in the aftermath of 9/11. I was struggling with fear in an intimate, and decided to go spelunking one night to find out what was driving their anxiety. After plunging through their personal fears, I found myself on a wavelength of fear that had as a fog enveloped the entire nation. Curious, I put my psychic mitts under it and lifted it up to look around. When I let go, it fell back down to earth.

What is the solution? As an act of will, stop being afraid. Love those that are close to you. Recognize that the financial elites, as always, are divorcing themselves from the reality that sustains them, and will fall when we organize ourselves around relationships that create value, rather than relationships that promise us security.

And seriously consider whether God isn’t a key asset of that discipline.

Distributing the Treasure

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In the parable of the fields, Jesus says of his kingdom that:

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Then in the parable of the talents, Jesus addresses the Apostles and says of the servant that hid the money he had been given to invest:

‘You wicked, lazy slave…take away the talent from him’…For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away

The two parables illuminate the challenge of bringing divine power into the world. The unsuspecting finder of faith has no idea what to do with it. Looking at the history of the Hebrews, it is obvious how fragile faith is. From Aaron to the Pharisees, from Saul to Herod: the leaders of the nation of Israel corrupted faith for political and economic purposes. Aaron acted in good faith because the people were afraid when Moses disappeared on the mountain, but in the time of Jesus the Pharisees twisted the fear of divine retribution to line their pockets. Saul, having been anointed king by Samuel, was angered when others threatened his authority. In Herod’s time, that pattern had become so entrenched that oppression of dissent was not even remarkable. Given this, perhaps it would have been best to keep the treasure hidden.

But the Apostles were students of a master who prepared them to exercise faith in service to the oppressed. They had seen what faith could do. All that they required to see it multiply was simple courage. For those demonstrating courage, the master would not judge between those with greater or lesser skill in the exercise of power, but reward them all. For those lacking courage, the portion of power that was given them would be given to others.

The tension between the two parables should be heeded by us today as we ponder how to go about distributing the riches that Christ has provided us to do good in the world. As people of compassion, our natural tendency is to respond to fear and righteous anger with promises of aid. The obvious first step is to eliminate the cause of the fear and/or anger. When that cause is hunger, it would be hard to fault an offer of food. But when the cause is political tyranny, forceful intervention (as currently in Russia) can be propagandized to justify further oppression. The Russian people have offered adulation in response to Putin’s aggressive militarism.

So we have to ask, when offering aid, “What are you going to do with the power we offer you?” When the hungry man is fed, will he then seek employment? If an oppressed people is offered political assistance, how will they organize to overcome the tyrant? If these question can’t be answered, then their troubles are merely symptomatic of a large social disease that must be addressed before individual problems can be solved. They may need education, or political enfranchisement – or assistance in finding a leader that can articulate their needs.

I think that many of the world’s problems today require the last: for those offering Christian compassion to go beyond simple charity to supporting the development of leaders motivated by Christian ethics. In assessing candidates, I favor strongly the wisdom of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. In developing leaders, the program upholds this law:

A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

These qualities are an interlocking web of virtue that ensure that power is not diverted for personal gain, but rather directed towards those that first inspired our compassion. They are not qualities that necessarily translate to the easy currency of popularity. That is gained all too often through promises of an end to fear and oppression that cannot be made good until the people themselves begin to manifest the qualities of true leadership. As it is said in the Chinese I Ching:

Of the great leader, when the work is done the people say ‘We did this ourselves.’

God took 2000 years to work his will on the people of Israel. For those continuing that work in the world today, patience (although perhaps on a more human scale) is essential. As in Jesus’s relationship with the Apostles: It is not upon us to do the work ourselves, but only to offer the oppressed the hope that it can be done at all. Hope is the seed of courage, Christian compassion is the seed of faith. When courage and faith combine, anything is possible.

Islam and Christ

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The Christian Bible is the story of how one people succumbed to corruption, thereby surrendering a privileged relationship with God, and then wandered in a spiritual wilderness until Jesus demonstrated the discipline to surrender himself in caring for the world. In navigating this process, God relies throughout on the law of natural consequences: when the people heed the inner voice that guides them, they prosper; when they disown it, they suffer. For this reason, while history trends steadily upwards, it has its high and low points.

What is true throughout is that God meets us where we are. That’s a source of a lot of confusion when interpreting scripture. For example, in Matthew 5:18, we have:

For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

And then Jesus undermines its authority (Matt. 19:8):

Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard.

And in John 8:7, he says:

Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.

So Jesus is saying to teach the law, but set it aside when it suits us? As a child “Do as I say, not as I do” drove me crazy. Or is this “Say as I say, but do as I do?” In either case, hypocrisy seems right around the corner.

The difficulty can be resolved with the understanding that different people are on different stages of the journey. The Law is a code of conduct that seeks to prevent the spread of moral corruption. For people without the tools to heal corruption, that discipline is essential.

Jesus introduced his Apostles to a new stage of the journey, making them healers of the flesh and spirit. As reagrds the Law, his is final teaching to them was [Math: 22:37-40]:

Love your God…and love your neighbor…All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

However, this was not the entire Jewish people – it was only twelve of them. Was the law to be demoted for everyone, or only for those twelve and the others like them? I think only for the twelve and those like them. This does create some difficulty for those teaching Christianity that don’t claim to be able to do the things that the Apostles accomplished in Acts. Where are they on the scale, and how are they to lead their congregations into apostolic faith?

The solution, in the modern age, is that Christians chose the congregation that helps them take their next step on their journey to Christ.

Along the way, though, a stop was made in the Middle East. The Islam teachings of Muhammad (pbuh) came at the people of Mecca out of left field. There was no cultural tradition of Law. The community was at the level of Abraham in their relationship with God.

The Islamic path is therefore “The Middle Way” between the strict legalism of Judaism and the conditional morality of Christianity. It has rules – though far less pervasively than in the Law – that allow people to establish themselves in religious practice. While eliding Hebrew history, it upholds the character of the prophets as exemplars to inspire Muslims to maturity. Finally, it disintermediates the priesthood, upholding a personal relationship with Allah with promises of forgiveness and ultimately salvation.

The principle problem with this program is the divinity of Jesus. If he was the word made flesh, then the overwhelmingly difficult conditional morality of Christ stood as a barrier to Muslim practice. It meant that those that worshipped according to the rules would be second-class citizens in the faith. That the teachings of Jesus were received second-hand would be no obstacle to those interested in manipulating such divisions: there is enough in the Gospels to prey on the fear of those unprepared by experience and education to understand Christian moral philosophy.

To prevent this exclusion from the faith of those that needed it most, Jesus was demoted, being made only a prophet. This was extended to his crucifixion.

Should this make a difference?

The point of faith, as I see it, is to provide us with the strength to do good in the world. Most Christians find great strength in the sacrifice made by Jesus. But there are also those that flee Christianity because Christians cannot act according to that standard. If Muslims find hope that they can do good without failing the standard set by the Son of God, is that a bad thing? Particularly if their tradition holds out the hope that they will ultimately aspire to that standard?

I think not. I think that God meets us where we are, and that all that matters is the degree to which our faith encourages us to open our hearts to him.

Whose Free Will Is It Anyways?

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“Let’s say that you are on a camping trip with your son, and he suffers a snake bite. What if there was a source of information, freely available everywhere in the world that could tell you how to prepare the leaves on that bush to make an antidote. Would you accept that information?”

“Nobody tells me what to do!”

That was a real conversation on a Boy Scout outing. I didn’t say that there was a connection between receiving the gifts of love and choices that we make elsewhere in our lives, but that was assumed by the listener. Not that I didn’t make different choices: I was the father that stayed behind on that trip when the other dads went off to gamble, or to the topless bar.

As a physicist, the whole proposition of free will makes no sense to me. Given the initial conditions of the universe, things will unfold according to the laws of nature. Given that I believe that the soul can be encompassed by our theories of nature, there doesn’t seem to be any room left for choice at all. We are simply machines moving through time. Choice is an illusion.

But we have choices forced upon us all the time, don’t we? When a vulnerable person turns to us for security in exchange for sex, we have to decide whether to be faithful to our spouse. When a problem in a contract threatens our company, we have to decide whether to miss coaching the youth soccer playoff game or risk being fired. Those are hard choices, but nothing compared to the man watching his children starve who puts a gun into his pocket and goes out to find money for food. Or in an abusive family, the sensitive child that turns to drugs to block out the psychic pain.

What does making any of these choices have to do with “free will”? It seems like there’s no good solution, at least no solution that allows us to feel good about ourselves. If we have “free will”, wouldn’t we choose to have better choices? And if God truly loved us, wouldn’t he give us better choices to make?

But the fact of the matter is that humanity creates our own choices. We decide to accept sex in exchange for the promise of security, when we could donate to charities that provide a safety net for people in trouble. The lack of that safety net pushes that man out the door with his gun. We could narrow our role in the family to “bread-winner”, never be that soccer coach, and vent our frustrations on that child.

This, then, is the Christian promise: God promises that your soul won’t be trapped in the bad choices you make. Your soul, when it sees the opportunity to receive love, will always be free to accept that offering. That may mean death, as so many Christian martyrs have joyously accepted as a surcease from their struggle against hatred, but they receive it willingly because they can feel God’s love reaching down to them in that moment.

Do you ever think whether God is free to choose not to rescue us when we are in need? Think about it: it’s certainly not easy.

When the adulterer is caught in the lie, is he still going to receive love from the spouse that promised to love in the name of God? When the abuser is finally caught by the social services, is she going to receive love from the child that was blessed with the emotional sensitivity to understand her sorrows?

No, because we were offered love, and chose to strengthen the parts of our spirit that don’t want to receive it. Of those parts that we have denied, we have to look for replacements, because often they have fled back to God of their own free will. Is it right for God to force them to come back so that we can try again?

This is the true miracle of this day, the day of the Savior’s birth. Unconditional Love came as man to prove that we have all the parts that we need right here. We have each other, we have the gardens and animals: we can choose to love them, and when that choice is abused by the recipient, God is there to fill us up again, and rescue us when the physical world rejects our gift.

You see, it’s not “free will” from love, which is the choice that only a crazy person would make. It is freedom from the crazy people that refuse love. It is the promise of an escape from the boot on the neck: we don’t have to succumb to the bastards that want control more than they want to share in our choices.

And for the crazy people, it’s the promise that there’s a way back that doesn’t depend upon fixing all the wrongs that you’ve committed. Eventually, yes, you will want to make up for them, but the door opens for free.

Did love have a choice? No. The sacrifice of Jesus was the only way that it could be done: Humanity was given the gift of intelligence to do this work of salvation of the world. It wasn’t enough. Love had to come in human form to show us how it was done.

But it was a gift given freely, of love’s own free will.

Religious Intolerance in the Military

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I’ve been active on the Religious Tolerance group on Facebook. I declared my position fairly early on in a posting that stated “all great religious teachings serve to transform an existence driven by lies, fear and death into an existence guided by truth, hope and life.” However there are those that see me as a Christian proselytizer, largely because I quote scripture. This makes me sad. I write there because I believe that “Christian intolerance” is rooted in false teaching, and that if we look in scripture, we will find evidence to that effect. I quote scripture because I believe that it is the best tool that we have for combating intolerance masquerading as Christianity.

This is nowhere more evident than in those that use death threats in order to conquer institutions in “the name of Christ.” I have been made aware recently of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the death threats issued against its members and their families by Christian militants.

We don’t have to attain much depth of spiritual experience before we become aware that spiritual evolution did not begin with humanity. The dominant personalities in the spiritual realm, prior to our emergence, were the predators that stand atop the biological food chain. These would have been the dinosaurs (which appear as the serpent in the Garden of Eden and the dragon in Revelation) and the bear and great cats (the mammalian predators) that appear in Revelation and Daniel’s Dream of the Four Beasts.

Revelation is best understood as the history of the unseating of predation as the driver of evolution in favor of intelligent engineering that is informed by unconditional love. This is not a clean and simple process, and is made more difficult because humanity has only a dim perception of the spiritual dynamics. What transpires in Revelation 13:11-15 is that the dragon dresses up as the lamb and empowers the mammalian predators to religious dominance. As it is written: “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast – all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”, that lamb being Christ. Clearly, those that follow the beast do not follow Christ.

The beast continues to promulgate teaching that “anyone that does not worship the idol must die.” The beast famously bears the number “666.” While John points out that this is the number of man (who was created on the sixth “day”), six is also the number of the “day” of mammals that attained evolutionary dominance after the fall of the dinosaurs.

So what is directly written in the Bible is that the use of death threats is false teaching, and actually anti-Christ.

That this teaching is particularly strong in the military, which is an institution organized to harness the forces of predation, is not at all surprising. As I see it, those that resist this process, such as Mr. Weinstein and his colleagues, are agents of truth and life, and regardless of their profession of faith, are held in the heart of Christ with the most tender concern and honored regard.

The Conservative Agenda

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Today, I got a teeny glimpse of what it’s like to be a blog star. I responded to an MSN editorial that supported the Republican agenda on the grounds that lower property taxes and denial of global warming would encourage us to have more babies, which would prevent our economy from being overtaken by higher-growth cultures. I surveyed the realities of living in high-growth nations, and offered that maybe if the ultra-rich had kept the manufacturing jobs on-shore, the middle class would still be able to buy houses. Furthermore, California’s experience with property tax cuts has been that it’s made it really difficult to educate the kids we have now to the competitive standards in the 21st century. I had three-digits in likes by lunch-time.

The Republican Party likes to position itself as a bastion of “conservative” values and practices. You know, prudent fiscal management, results-driven policies, and stable families. But, looking at the record, I find it hard to escape the conclusion that it is actually driven entirely by the financial industry, which loves budget and trade deficits because federal bond issues and currency trading brings them a tidy guaranteed income. That, at least, appears to be the principal difference, since the Reagan era, between Republican and Democratic administrations. Republicans: tax cuts, deficits and off-shoring. Democrats: budgets brought into balance, and a focus on workforce and ecological sustainability.

Now some will complain that I’m just declaring my biases, and I am a registered Democrat. But I’d really like to see conservatism reclaimed as a political philosophy. I did encounter a coherent definition in Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

For much of human history, institutions were not only hard to create, they were almost impossible to sustain. That’s because running them requires time away from basic survival, and when that is threatened, people think first of themselves. That results in disbanding of the institution, and often looting of its assets.

In this context, conservatism is aptly named: it creates value by preserving institutions. Those most suited to that defense often take a prejudicial view of the public they are meant to serve. They assume that the public should be denied power until it can explain how it will organize institutions to provide sustainable solutions to social ills.

Unfortunately, as suggested in my survey of Republican policies, that is a rationale that all too often simply caters to greed. To the ‘80s mantra “greed is good”, I always riposted with a gibe at the neo-conservatives’ “Tinkle-down Theory” of economic growth.

The antidote to conservatism is liberalism. A liberal recognizes that power can get trapped in institutions that prevent its spread to those that need it to solve problems. They advocate methods, such as taxation or regulation, to reallocate power to those that are motivated to create a better society. The disease of liberalism is the slippery slide from reform into destructive revolution.

The psychosis in modern American politics was born in the New Deal government set up by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. All of a sudden, the liberal Democrats had control of extremely powerful institutions that were designed to preserve the welfare of the common man.

Across the aisle, the Republican party of business was committed to dismantling those institutions. This created a kind of schizophrenia for them. They were to defend the institutions that existed prior to the New Deal, and try to destroy those that came with it. The mantra that finally produced policy leverage in the ‘80s was the ideal of corporate innovation. Unfortunately, corporations aren’t designed to innovate: for the most part, they suffer from the same organizational lethargy as government. Rather, corporations disseminate solutions created by others.

With these glaring breaks between theory and reality, conservative philosophy was open to corruption by those with a simple will to power: people with a strong motivation to get what they want, no matter the cost to others.

And so we have the kind of analysis that I responded to this morning: raw manipulation of the public’s hopes and fears, with nonsensical segues into policy prescriptions.

I work in control systems, and this kind of output is known as “open-loop.” It occurs when the feedback provided by the affected elements of the system (in this case, the public) has no meaning to the controller (the ultra-rich that are buying our political system). The moneyed class no longer has any vested interest in the public well-being. In fact, public misery produces larger and larger deficits that correlate directly with their financial success. It’s like a heater running with the thermostat temperature sensor wired backwards: the hotter it gets, the lower the temperature reported by the thermostat, and the more fuel pushed into the heater. Things are just going to get worse, until the heater explodes.

What’s the solution? Well, I think that it’s to put all of this conservative/liberal division aside. George Santayana wrote a wonderful little book called Three Philosophical Poets, analyzing the work of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. Santayana say them as representing life lived according to reason, faith and will (respectively). His closing hope was that someday a poet would come along to merge the three. I don’t know if that is possible, but I would hope that our political leaders would try to find some balance between them.