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The Book on Mormon

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The Conejo Valley Interfaith Celebration of Thanks has attracted Mormon participation in the last few years. As a recent schism, the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) appears to feel obligated to broadcast its political alignments. That was expressed in rather lengthy and unexpected mini-sermons that celebrated freedom of religion and events during the formation of the United States that brought their presider, George Washington, to the conclusion that divine agency was at work.

I’ve offered my thoughts on separation of church and state before. But these specific observations resonated far more deeply in me.

On the birthday that marked the end of my seven of sevens year, I was out at Taos, New Mexica, where my parents shared that I was conceived in the mountains that in the last half of the twentieth century become known as “Sangre de Christo.” Without foresight, my visit coincided with the Taos pow-wow. I arrived early and settled under the awnings that had been raised around the circular field. I tried to quiet my thoughts and sink into the ground, not wanting to disturb the proceedings.

As I sat there meditating, one of the elders came up to the nearest drum circle and asked “Would you like to start us off?” I remarked upon my good fortune, and let the wild thrum and staccato percussion wind its way through me. It drove me deeper and out, again the familiar stranger riding on a celebration of life. It wasn’t all simple – a just grief fills the people. I accepted their judgment, and drifted through it towards a red veil.

Piercing it, I found myself with Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior-shaman who had rallied the Indians against the perfidy of William Harrison, then governor of the Indiana territory. When he turned his attention to me, his great hunger found its way to our first African-American president. In self-consolation, he observed “So there is some justice.”

Tecumseh’s summation of the Native American experience of the European invasion is compelling:

Brothers, we all belong to one family; we are all children of the Great Spirit; we walk in the same path; slake our thirst at the same spring; and now affairs of the greatest concern lead us to smoke the pipe around the same council fire! Brothers, we are friends; we must assist each other to bear our burdens. The blood of many of our fathers and brothers has run like water on the ground, to satisfy the avarice of the white men. We, ourselves, are threatened with a great evil; nothing will pacify them but the destruction of all the red men. Brothers, when the white men first set foot on our grounds, they were hungry; they had no place on which to spread their blankets, or to kindle their fires. They were feeble; they could do nothing for themselves. Our fathers commiserated their distress, and shared freely with them whatever the Great Spirit had given his red children. They gave them food when hungry, medicine when sick, spread skins for them to sleep on, and gave them grounds, that they might hunt and raise corn. Brothers, the white people are like poisonous serpents: when chilled, they are feeble and harmless; but invigorate them with warmth, and they sting their benefactors to death. The white people came among us feeble; and now that we have made them strong, they wish to kill us, or drive us back, as they would wolves and panthers.

Only thirteen years after Tecumseh’s death, Joseph Smith reported his encounter with the angel Moroni, guardian of the teachings of the Book of Mormon. As many, I did not conjoin the two events. But when I read the book, having been given a copy by my supervisor at work, I clearly heard this heart-broken plea from the angels entrusted to guide the Native American peoples:

We will submit to the authority of your Christ. We will chain our people to the glory of your nation. But please, be merciful: Do not destroy our children!

I doubt that the speakers at Wednesday’s event will read these words, but I wonder how they would react, given their celebration of American exceptionalism including freedom of religion, to an understanding that their faith originated in a desperate attempt to survive cultural aggression of the worst kind – one of the two great Holocausts of America’s founding.

While I only spent a few months with the man who shared the Book of Mormon with me, we had several conversations after hours on religious and cultural topics, in which he struggled in particular with my support for same-sex marriage. What made those conversations memorable, however, was the phenomenon that accompanied them: the room would fill with light as we spoke. It was clear to me that my friend was seeking for Christ with all his heart.

A year or two later, the day after the pow-wow in Taos, I encountered an Indian elder in the pueblo craft shop. We fell to talking about his experience as an artist, which started with silver jewelry in the aftermath of his service in World War II. I asked how he learned the skill, and he said “I taught myself.” I bought a two-throated vase, noticing the defects of hand crafting. As we spoke, I walked to the door and looked out into the afternoon sky, feeling his awareness spread with mine. After wrapping the purchase, he concluded the encounter with these words:

I feel that we have touched the world today.

We need these people so much – their humility, their love of nature, their patience. I hope that if Christ should choose to return to them the power that he received in trust from the Great Spirit, the people that have assumed the name of Mormon will not fight against that restoration.

Anti-Christ Anti-Scientist

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A few years back, National Geographic ran a photo essay on the Alaskan tundra. In the publication notes at the back, the photographer recounted a conversation with a native regarding the urban tourists that passed through each year. When asked to characterize them, the native, a man who lived in solitude for most of the year, remarked that “They seem lonely.” That loneliness reflects not a lack of human association Rather, it is a deep disconnection in our souls from the root of life.

This problem is so characteristic of modern societies that, in our search to escape our constructed reality, we tend to gloss over the defects of ancient cultures. Pagan worshippers extol the virtues of Roman worship for its naturalism, ignoring the paternalism that gave license to fathers to murder their dependents. The homeopathic intuition of native healers is lauded, ignoring the vicious lore of hexes and curses. And nobody appears to want to reflect that xenophobia was endemic to all the ancient cultures, with outsiders that looked and spoke differently treated as inferiors.

But if the ancient world mixed its spiritual vices and virtues, it is still fair to ask why the spread of modern civilization has resulted in a spiritual divorce. Naturally, critics seeking to heal the divide focus on the dominant elements of modern culture. I am sympathetic to these concerns:

  • Science applies methods of analytical reductionism to reveal creative possibilities. Unfortunately, reducing things to their constituent parts is not something that souls engage willingly: to do so would be a form of suicide. Therefore, science achieves its most impressive manifestations in the material realm. Scientists seeking funding for fundamental research have a strong motivation to ignore their failure to explain spiritual phenomena, and tend actually to pretend that souls just don’t exist.
  • Capitalism heralds the efficiency of the free market in responding to unforeseen public needs and opportunities. Unfortunately (as recognized by Adam Smith), the metric of success – the accumulation of wealth – is too crude to support political control of resource exploitation by the greedy. Worse, concentration of wealth has allowed the exploiters to broadcast rationalizations for their behavior, almost all of which cast the exploited resources as spiritually deficient, and therefore not deserving of protection.
  • The traditions of Abraham (dominated by Christianity in American society) tackle the problem of masculine aggression by heralding the power released through submission to unconditional love. Unfortunately, the target population persists in its aggressive recidivism, to the extent that scripture is often quoted selectively (when not completely rewritten) to justify destructive behaviors that are decried universally by the avatar(s). This perversion divorces us from the noblest masculine manifestations of spiritual maturity.

Given the problems outlined above, I would be surprised if it were impossible to assemble evidence that each of the three elements can facilitate depravity. The science of eugenics justified medical experiments on populations (both human and animal) that were considered to lack souls, and therefore believed to be unable to feel pain. Unbridled greed first drove the adoption of slavery in the New World – both of native populations and imported Africans, and now drives us pell-mell down the road to ecological collapse. And the “Great Commission” to propagate the good news of Christ’s resurrection has been used to justify violent suppression of indigenous cultures.

But is it fair to stop there? After all, is not the material construction of our modern reality, with its buildings, appliances and tools, far more conducive to liberty from fear than the natural world we inhabited previously with its predators, diseases, weather and natural disasters? Does not capitalism also distribute wealth and create monetary velocity that supports personal initiative, thereby providing an escape from exploitation? And have not the traditions of Abraham been foremost in providing charitable support of those in need?

For those seeking spiritual reconnection, this seems to leave us in a limbo of ambiguity. If we cannot find the seeds of disconnection in our history, then how are we to escape from the mistakes of the past?

The answer I have held out here is that the way out is to recognize that it’s not just about us.

One of the great gifts of the Bible is that it charts the progression of human spiritual maturity from the heralded “era of innocence” experienced by primitive cultures. In The Soul Comes First, I explain the Biblical days of creation as the history of the evolution of the senses as revealed by the souls that survived the experience. The Garden of Eden is a similar metaphor, in my view. It describes the ideal state sought by the pagans – man and spirit united to create a world of peace. But that unity is sundered by the serpent, who tempts the woman – the nexus of life-engagement – into partaking of the “fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” For that sin, man and woman are cast out of the Garden.

As I expressed it recently to a friend, the great tragedy of the Fall was the sundering of trust. That trust was not only between mankind and spirit, but between man and woman. Ever since, we have been engaged in the sterile course of trying to fix blame for the problem. What we fail to realize, however, is that the source of the problem existed before the Garden. We did not create the serpent, although we were susceptible to its wiles.

We were cast out of Eden not because application of our intelligence was evil, but because we had admitted sin as a guide to our intelligence. Rather than allowing Life to guide our intelligence for good, we became committed to a course of resolving the difference between good and evil, and of developing the strength to choose the good. This is an extremely dangerous path, and the spiritual collective decides that we must be cast out lest we partake of the “Tree of Life” and live forever.

Again, we can think of this in material terms, but from the perspective of the soul of life, this is to say “if man, having admitted the serpent into his mind, enters into the Soul of Life now, then we will never be rid of the serpent.” In Revelation, this aim is made quite clear: the serpent/dragon attempts at one point to assault heaven, and is ultimately destroyed in the final confrontation with Christ.

But what is the serpent? The best way to characterize it is in the contrast between reptilian and mammalian parenting: while the mammalian newborn is nurtured for weeks or years before being forced into independence, the baby Komodo dragon must climb a tree to avoid being eaten by its mother. The reptile manifests the virtues of the predator, seeing in others only resources to be consumed.

So the problem is not science, or capitalism, or Christianity – it is with the ancient reptilian spiritual infection that we must purge. It is our path, on the knowledge of good and evil, to master that influence. It is a skill first encouraged in Cain (“sin crouches at your door, but you can master it”) and delivered by Jesus to the Apostles when he says “what you loose here on earth will be loosed in heaven, and what you bind here on earth will be bound in heaven.”

But until we as a species accede to the disciplines taught by Christ, we will discover, the further we walk with sin down the path of knowledge, the more distant will become our relationships with the Spirit of Life. Not because we can be expected to do differently, nor as punishment for our weakness, but as a matter of its own self-preservation.

Revelation Abuse

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I spend a lot of time managing fear and anger – not my own, but the fear and anger that people project into me. One of the principal reasons for writing The Soul Comes First was to deal with the Book of Revelation, which contains murky and frightening imagery that allows psychopaths to manipulate victims by linking fear to the promise of redemption that emanates from the Cross.

An example of the consequences of such manipulation is organized criminality in the  guise of religion, where “leaders” of inspirational movements demand that their “flock” emulate the early church, surrendering their worldly assets for management by the “community.” You can be assured that those at the top live in luxury, while the “flock” scrapes by in poverty.

So, while I would love for people to read the book, let me summarize the main points regarding Revelation. The most important is that John’s experience of the angelic realm should be interpreted as the experience of someone following links on Wikipedia. The flow of events is not strictly linear, and John tends to emphasize events on Earth that are sometimes tangential.

  • The seals were opened billions of years ago. The six symbols seen by John are not manifestations of God’s glory, but manifestations of selfishness: domination, infestation, opportunism, death, vengeance and fury. They are released onto the Earth so that their captives can work themselves free through the process of living.
  • The 144,000 were spirits gathered (billions of years ago) not from the tribes of Israel themselves but from the angels that became the patrons of the tribes of Israel. The are sent down to Earth to facilitate the liberation of the captives.
  • The trumpets correspond powerfully with the facts that paleontology has revealed regarding the great extinction episodes over the last billion years.
  • The Age of Man does not begin until the angel stands with one foot on the shore and one in the sea.
  • The beast with the number ‘666’ represents the spiritual collective that arose on the sixth day of creation, which is not Man, but the mammals.
  • The bowls represent the consequences of our exploitation of the resources that we were told to harvest. Those consequences are coming to full force right now in the modern age.

One of the great and marvelous consequences of the love that emanates from God is that it empowers us to grasp the truth, and moreover to move with confidence and determination to respond to the demands it makes upon our compassion.

Please share this with anyone that you know to have been trapped in fear through manipulation of the teachings of the Book of Revelation.

Bronze Age Atheism

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Stephen Colbert, practicing Catholic, missed a fat, slow one over the plate in his interview of acerbic atheist Bill Maher. In response to Stephen’s invitation to return to the Catholic Church, Bill spouts the usual “myths invented by people who didn’t know about germs” critique of the Bible.

Well, Bill, that’s a Bronze-Age mentality all right, but practicing Catholics have a lot more material to draw upon, material that focuses on finding a redeeming human purpose in the amoral universe of the scientist. That material was produced as early as St. Augustine in the fifth century, and includes the writings of others such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Miguel de Unamuno, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton.

Bill, you might try reading some of it, and giving us an honest critique of modern Catholicism. No, it’s not always what you’ll find in the homilies on Sunday, but homilies are offered to ensure that everyone, no matter their level of education, walks away with something of value.

From the Earth to the Sun and Back Again

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One of the hazards of engaging in epistemological debate is that they almost always become religious. We look back through the haze of history, trying to understand the practices by which knowledge is revealed to us, hoping to glean insights that help us heal divisive intellectual conflicts in the present.

Currently, these discussions become religious because our era suffers from an extreme bifurcation in our pursuit of knowledge. In no other era of human history have the two great pursuits of understanding – religion and science – been perceived as diametrically opposed. The linear causality of Einstein stands in contradiction of the gift of prophesy, and the power and predictability of dumb matter seduces us into believing that we can achieve all of our desires right here on Earth. Conversely, science denies us the comfort of meaning, to the extent that some denounce the search for meaning, or go even further to propose that this reality is evidence of a malefic creator.

Given this modern myopia, in looking back at the great episodes of resistance to truth, we tend to focus on the conflict between science and religion. Consider, for example, the succession from geocentric models of the solar system to the heliocentric models. The oppression of Brahe and Galileo is characterized as resistance by a religious elite threatened by the destruction of a Platonic universe whose geometrical perfection (circles moving within circles) was advanced as proof of the existence of the Christian God.

In fact, the history was rather more subtle, and its consideration brings a great deal of insight into the intellectual resistance to the program of this blog, declared on the title bar: “Unifying Science and Spirituality.”

The Greeks advanced both the geocentric and heliocentric models. If the ancients had been capable of building the instruments used by Galileo, they would certainly have settled on the latter. They resolved on the former for entirely practical reasons: they were concerned with using the positions of the stars to calculate the calendar date and the position of objects on the Earth’s surface. Culturally, their needs were absolutely geocentric. To solve this problem, they correlated geographical position with stellar observations and the progression of the seasons. Next, they sought methods for compacting this large body of data in a form that could be used by voyagers. The technology most adaptable to that purpose was the mathematics of circular revolution. Not only was the mathematics of circular revolution relatively simple, it was easy to translate to mechanical form as instruments containing rotating dials.

The “geocentric” model of the heavens was not in essence a philosophical proposition, but a proposition of practical technology. The principle motivation for upending the model was that over the centuries, the circular approximations began to fail. Designs specified in the first century produced the wrong answers in the eleventh century. A more reliable model was necessary, and the application of the new mathematics of elliptical analysis revealed that the heliocentric model fit the data more reliably than did the geocentric model of circular revolution.

As for the resistance of the Church, Galileo insisted on publishing an insulting parody of the Pope with his observations. He made his science a political issue. This was not an idle matter: the Church used the feudal compact to constrain the rapaciousness of those with a monopoly on the instruments of war. Those scientists were well accepted that chose to engage with the Church with the aim of minimizing the social disruption that always comes with new knowledge.

In my own intellectual adventures here on this blog, I find myself confronted by those that tout modern cosmology as proof that the universe is a machine unfolding without purpose from its initial conditions. The foremost intellectual challenge to that conclusion has been “fine tuning” – the delicate balance of the fundamental constants of nature (specifically the relative strengths of the four forces) that must be preserved if life is to survive. The solution to this conundrum has been the “multiverse” variant of the Big Bang theory (the name itself is a mischaracterization). The multiverse proposition holds that universes exist with and without life – we just happen to occupy one in which life is possible.

The random generation of universes in the Big Bang, however, results from the proposition that we can explain all of nature by using two branches of mathematics: group theory and Fourier analysis. Both of these methods are relatively susceptible to hand calculation. What is little understood by the public is that the theorists trumpet their successes and ignore their failures. The application of current theory to study of the hydrogen nucleus is summarized here, and the results are incredibly ugly.

Why is the theory not abandoned? For the same reason that the geocentric theory was not abandoned: physicists and astronomers have used the current theory to justify the construction of multi-billion dollar observatories. As the Church did, they oppose any idea that might destabilize the social order that pays their salaries.

What is scandalous is that the interstellar navel-gazing saps money from problems here on Earth that desperately call for the full commitment of our best and brightest minds. The scientists need to get the heads out of the stars and back onto the Earth.

Abuse in the Linux Kernel Community

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Proclamations of concern over the abusiveness of the Linux Kernel Community of been growing louder in the open-source world. Steven Vaughn-Nichols summarizes the concerns in Computerworld. My comment on the matter?

Ancandune remarks wisely on the problem that “rude and hostile” imposes to the transmission of knowledge. I do not necessarily subscribe to his characterization of the motivating psychology. Perfectionists are driven by their own set of hostile interior voices. They don’t just produce something and throw it over the wall – they lie awake at night thinking about all the ways it can blow up in their face. What Linus may be attempting to demonstrate in his communications is how he goes about thinking when he writes code.

Is Linus a healthy person? That’s for him to judge.

The important question is whether the community is healthy. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had boardrooms filled with over-sized egos to help them manage their succession plans. What is Linus going to do? Anoint a successor? Or will the community devolve into a WWF RAW! donnybrook with the last man standing holding the belt? Another possibility is that the corporations that finance many contributors will step in and appoint a successor.

Linus’s authority arose organically over many years. The community allows him the right to be critical. But it is not being critical of others that conditions his success – it is his ability to think critically. The community should recognize that distinction, and mercilessly criticize and purge those that emulate his style without bearing his gifts or responsibilities.

To illustrate my point regarding self-criticism, here’s the content of an e-mail characterizing a problem we had with the build at work recently:

It’s the usual stupidity – I don’t even remember why I created this file, but it’s just a copy of MotorIDCommander.cpp. It was probably intended to link AutoCommCommander with MotorIDCommander, but I never modified the contents.

Anyways – it’s excluded from the build in debug mode but not in release mode. Khalid is off at physical therapy today with the project file checked out, so I can’t publish a fix. If you can do it locally, that would get you moving forward.

Sorry

Brian

This is like the fourth or fifth time I’ve done this – left a file in the build for release mode after excluding it in debug mode.

The Physicist Contemplates Life

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After I finished my graduate course in Quantum Mechanics, I came to realize that even in a blade of grass there is enough going on to humble the grasp of the human mind. The miracle of life’s operations, manifested in subtle chemical variation, constantly unfolding into new expression – we are embraced by a diversity of wonders far more magnificent than the rigid panoply of the cosmos!

Posturing Women

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It has been fifteen years since I have let a women caress my body. That hasn’t been for lack of opportunities, but after my marriage collapsed, I realized that I am constructed to engage problems that most people run from, and that the spiritual intimacy of intercourse made it impossible for my ex-wife to avoid entanglement. Her response was to use anger as a protective shield. That was disastrously painful to my spiritual intimates.

So I’ve been very careful and reticent about drawing someone else into that milieu.

Dance is the foremost expression of my entanglements, and the context in which women most often flirt with involvement. Having confronted the surrender of the Southern California sage to drought back at the turn of the millennium, I found myself repeating this flow again and again during the celebrations: standing with legs spread apart, I would position my hands over my heart, and lean to one side in a lunge, pushing energy down into the ground. The repetitions alternated from side to side, until a deep yearning would bring me to my knees. Scooping up the suffering spirits from the floor, I would raise them to the heavens, weeping.

I was greatly heartened by the identification Jamie Grace made with Persephone, but even she wanted me to lay my burdens aside. One day as I was dancing alone, I felt her looking into me as she rested against the wall, urging me to liberate myself into joy. An enormous pressure forced me to the floor, and, crawling and squirming, I tried to work my way out from under it. As I spread my awareness, I realized that the source was a spiritual membrane that encircled the globe. There was no escape except through the violence of birth.

The only woman to actually engage me in my dance of restoration was innocent of the consequences. I felt her standing in front of my as I bowed to the ground, and opened my eyes to find her lifting along with me. Surprised, I stood and put her hand over mine as I reached out into the world, thinking “Guide me.” She hesitated but did not run, so I took the world out of my heart and handed it to her. Her face broke in sorrow and fear. I tried to put it away as she fled into the arms of one of the elder ladies. I approached from behind to caress her heart, but she turned a shoulder to me. Realizing that she could not manage the burden she had accepted, I sat on the floor, cupped the pair of women in my hand, then raised my fingers and slowly rotated them to separate her from the moment that had overwhelmed her. Her features relaxed, and she settled more deeply into her comforter’s embrace.

I had a friend tell me that I lost Jamie Grace because I rejected her, but I didn’t see it that way. Every time she came into the room, my heart leapt to embrace her, and she would stop in the doorway and look away, silently begging me to come to her. Eventually we would work our way around to it, but she never let me dance with her again. Perhaps that was because I would dance first with other women, those other manifestations of Life’s thirst for healing. Perhaps she didn’t see in them what I did. The closest we came, until the last day two years ago, was when I stopped, took her hand, and placed her palm on my heart. She paused, then took it away and positioned it more directly into the flow that emanates from me there. But when I turned around to expand our expression to include the community that surrounded us, she became visibly angry. Given past experience, I was compelled to withdraw.

Without anyone to help me channel my creative energies (the second chakra being that source), I am wide open to women that seek to engage that energy in its most primitive procreative expression. I occasionally engage in visualization with those that I perceive have a deep connection to Earth: walking in the forest, and stopping on the shadowed crest of a bluff to rest with her legs over my shoulders, my head on her belly, my mind spreading into the earth through her womb. Or lying naked on the bed as she brings her yoni down on my heart, allowing its compassionate power to rise into the heavens and spread.

But the frequency with which someone breaks through and gets into me sexually has dropped steadily over the years. I am building up resistance, establishing barriers. The great sex-scene in Golem will be read by many as the fevered production of a frustrated old man, but in fact it was my way of saying good-bye to sex – of allowing it to wash over me one more time before putting it aside.

There are spiritually mature woman that I find occasionally looking in on me. Not long after writing that passage in Golem, I woke one night to some really passionate yearnings. They just wouldn’t go away, and one of my friends showed up in concern. The source of the desire wasn’t apparent, and in frustration she announced to me, “Maybe you’d better just give her what she wants.” As I blissed, I found myself floating in space billions of years ago, regarding the gathering nebular gas as it ignited and give birth to the Sun.

Are we here because it was possible for the infinite she to receive love from us?

This is Power

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in 2002, Time magazine published a cover article that related the scientific consensus regarding the end of the universe. It was a terribly depressing outcome, with iron planets and neutron stars scattered across intergalactic space, all except the matter that was vacuumed up in black holes.

I was going through a really depressed stage of my life, and faced the strong urge to rebel against that outcome. One option was to take the day off from work to lie in bed. The other was to reach for another alternative. It came to me in this way: at the core of almost every galaxy is a super-massive black hole – an “Active Galactic Nucleus.” We know that galaxies are bound together in clusters, and every now and then pass through each other. Over a long enough period of time, it seemed to me that the AGN’s will eventually collide, spewing out the matter they have absorbed to initiate a new cycle of stellar evolution.

Then I thought: “Well, if that’s how stars get made in the end, maybe that’s how they got made to begin with. Maybe stars don’t come first, and then collide to form black holes. Maybe the black holes are made first, and the quasars we see in the earliest age of the universe are the signature of the light and matter created in that process.”

Scripture offers us three kinds of wisdom:

  • Regulation, the accumulated wisdom of what does and does not work in relationships.
  • Situational ethics, describing how the Divine presence led our ancestors out of trouble when they made mistakes.
  • Meaning, revealing the evolutionary process that provides understanding to guide our investments in the future.

When I look at the situation in Congress today, I see a terrible perversion of this process. I see:

  • In our penal code and permissive gun laws, a process that segregates our population into camps based upon fear, undermining relation.
  • A “survival of the fittest” mentality that insists that poverty is a sign of unfitness and wealth a measure of greatness. People that fall ill are consigned to misery, those that cannot master rapidly changing technology are pushed aside in the workplace, and those that do not subscribe to predatory management practices are ostracized.
  • The unchecked politics of terrorism, where those that resist the changing future throw legislative Molotov cocktails, threatening their opponents with impeachment, harassing civil servants and not-for-profit leaders, and obscuring or simply denying objective truth regarding the consequences of their policies on global climate change, economics, international relations and campaign finance reform.

I would like to be able to corner Rep. Chaffetz to ask, “Mr. Chaffetz, did you ever withdraw during ejaculation? Did you ever avoid sex while your wife was ovulating? If so, then you intentionally prevented the birth of a child. When do you intend to turn yourself in for manslaughter?”

I would like to be able to confront the Biblical literalists with the insight that the whole experience of the nation of Israel from Noah to Jesus was to demonstrate the inefficacy and injustice of fixed systems of laws. The Law of Moses was authorized by God, but it is not “God’s Law” because it condones murder, contrary to the experience of Cain and the teachings of Jesus. The only law that binds a Christian is the law of love, and when you attack and demean those that serve the disadvantaged, you violate that law.

He walked up the sidewalk, his mind whirling with the pattern of creation unfolded from beginning to end. But at the periphery of the beauty were the people that brought him forth but rejected him, and the women that he would serve but that had resolved to force him to comply with convention. Those stains threatened to spread.

In his mind’s eye, a light entered the atmosphere, rushing downwards, clouds rolling away from the super-heated air in its wake. It passed over his shoulder and slammed into the hills ahead, a huge cloud of dust engulfing the spring day that he walked through. In his mind, a great cry of fear arose.

“No. No. I choose that spring day. I choose life.”

Two months later, in the home of a woman that loved him, he found a newspaper open to an inside article that documented that a planet-killer asteroid had passed between the earth and the moon two months before.

That is power. It is power that arises from looking into the things that are wounded and seeing the possibility of their healing. It is to forgo destruction of that which is broken and ugly. It is to serve those that serve, rather than to be a servant to convention.

Rather than seeking glory, it is to be regulated by the sorrows of the world.

All males are created to change things. It is far easier to change things by breaking them that it is to create something new. We indulge the former in boys. It is time for you to be men. If you don’t like tet way the world is, give us concrete and documented demonstrations of what does work.

Otherwise, get out of the way.

Our Extraterrestrial Saviors

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Astronomers tout a “high-frequency” (every couple of years) flickering in the light emanating from the star KIC 8462852 as possible proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. The extent and frequency of the flickering rule out the normal cause of such variation: temporary occlusion of the star by a planet in its orbit. This leaves open the possibility that the occlusion is due to a planetary-scale artificial structure.

The possibility of such structures was first popularized by Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” novels. However, the stresses on a ring encircling a star are inconceivably large – no material imaginable would be able to sustain the strain.

Exotechnologists thus turned their attention to another possibility: the spread of huge tree-like lifeforms rooted in Jupiter-size planets. Natural seasonal cycles would cause the density of the canopy to vary over time, thus explaining the flickering.

Given the huge quantities of carbon dioxide transferred to the stellar wind from such growth, CO2 sequestration, long pooh-poohed as prohibitively expensive, now appears to have long-term market potential. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is leading commercialization efforts, beginning with leasing of the world’s largest radio telescopes in the hope that CO2 deliveries can be arranged before global warming exterminates life on Earth.

The SETI program, in reaction to this plan, reasons that “extraterrestrial intelligence must exist, because it is impossible that intelligence not exist somewhere in the universe.”