Authority in Scriptural Interpretation

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Since I have taken on a pet peeve with the “rational”, let me raise one against people of faith.

In arguments of scriptural interpretation, it is all too convenient to claim the authority of God. This was certainly the case during the ministry of Jesus. It was a claim made by the Temple priests and the Pharisees. While Jesus offered parables of counsel to the learned, he also railed against their role in dividing the people from direct relation with God. In part, it was his effort to free the Hebrews from the mistaken “authority” of human consensus that led Jesus to the cross.

We should contrast this with the experiences described in Acts 3. The authority of Jesus is manifested in Peter through the miracle of healing. Peter attained this capacity, as recorded in Matthew 10, directly from Jesus himself. His understanding came through direct revelation. It is clear, in the intervening ages, that few of us attain that same capacity. We have been men teaching men, and something was lost in the transfer through the generations.

Now in Acts 3, the Pharisees and priests are afraid to take action against Peter because they see that the people are moved to God by the power of the grace that moves through Peter. This was proof of the authority of Peter’s understanding, despite that he was “unlearned” (Peter was qualified only by his relationship with Christ). So for those that would assert that any teaching is evil that contradicts theirs, I would counsel: “Take care! Unless you can do the things done by the Apostles in Acts, you cannot claim to have full understanding of the teachings brought by Christ.”

What would those teachings have concerned themselves with? Well, from the words of Jesus himself, it was no less than to participate in the administration of his rule over heaven and earth ([Matt. 28:18] and the Parable of the Talents [Matt. 25:14-30]). Obviously, the scope of Jesus’s concerns exceeds those of human perception, extending even to the angels. It was because of this greater scope of understanding that Jesus was able to explain much that was hidden in the Old Testament. These two things are thus indivisible: Jesus interpreted scripture correctly because and only because he was capable of doing the work. Those that would claim authority to judge the interpretation of others should therefore be modest in their proclamations unless they can claim to be completing the work that Christ left unfinished.

Or do you believe that it will be somehow different when he comes again? Will he truly have nothing new to add to human understanding?

Before you pass judgment on others or denounce them as evil, ask yourself: “Can I do the work described in Revelation?” If not, be humble in your speaking. In particular, do not call fear into the hearts of others with statements such as “Because your interpretation of scripture differs from mine, you are falling into darkness.” No mere human has the authority to render that judgment. Considering the Temple priests and Pharisees, we might hazard that neither does any group of people.

Tomorrow, then, let’s take another look at pronouncements of judgment in Revelation, trying to adopt not the human perspective, but the perspective of one ruling over both heaven and earth.

Can ‘We’ Be Selfish?

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I need to try this argument out, because I am being driven crazy by a pattern that has developed in my conversations with rational people.

The pattern is, when arguing about morality, to observe that I identify specific benefits to myself of caring for others. Those rewards (such as joy, a sense of purpose, and spiritual strength) are interpreted as evidence that I am simply being selfish like everyone else.

There are two points to be made here. The first is to assert the definition of selfishness. From OxfordDictionaries.com, we have:

lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure

In other words, to be selfish is to disregard the effects of our choices on others. When we are selfish, the survival and rights of others are of no consideration when we set out to acquire resources or satisfy our bliss. In fact, that lack of consideration is an important psychological element in preparing us to destroy others in the service of our self-interest.

The lie of selfishness is that acquisition of power and pleasure makes us better prepared to survive. Raw power can serve any purpose, but requires skill in the wielder. If we focus only on power, we never learn to channel it in acts of creation, because to create is to consume power. We are required either to share our power with those that have learned to create, or fall into the terrible abyss of acquiring resources through the destruction of the people that hold them. The latter course ultimately renders us powerless, because without people we have no means of converting the resources that we have accumulated into value.

The second point is that of the three benefits of caring for others, joy and purpose are entirely subjective. Only spiritual strength is a resource to overcome life’s challenges. But spiritual strength arises as a projection from those we serve. It is to assert “Yes, I want this person in the world.” That good will follows us around like a cloud, and pushes against the will of those that seek to harm us.

As that description makes clear, spiritual power is contingent upon our continued commitment to consider the well-being of those that affirm us. It is to assert reciprocally “Yes, I want this person in the world.” It is to surrender some of our spiritual power to them.

The proposition of “We” is that the individuals in mutually supportive communities enhance their odds of survival by distributing power. In that state, the selfish have no particular reason to target any particular individual, yet when we face difficulties we have the pool of distributed resources to draw upon. And when resources are plenty, our creative efforts are amplified by the inspiration of others.

Of course, there are no guarantees. What happens when the challenges facing the community overwhelm its resources? Who is going to survive? To the loving person, facing the loss of all that they hold most dear, the response is simply “Who would want to?”

The promise of religion, of course, is that surrendering the flesh under those circumstances opens the gates to a far better reality. The power we store in things is lost when we die. The power conserved in our spiritual relationships endures.

Why do we feel driven to believe that acting in our self-interest is selfishness? I think that rather the opposite is true: we have been so indoctrinated to believe that “greed is good” that we simply cannot accept that selfishness (the belief that only “I” have any meaning) is just a really stupid idea. Our self-interest is in nurturing a caring community. It is to submit the needs of the “I” to the “we.”

Will the Pope Speak for Life?

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The Republican climate-change deniers were busy this week pre-empting the expected declaration by Pope Francis that responding to global climate change is a moral necessity. The foundation of their argument was that the Pope is not a scientist, and he should leave scientific matters up to those that understand the issues.

But is that the authority upon which the Pope Francis will issue his declaration? I certainly hope not. I think that the Pope should boldly speak for God, because in my meditations on this matter, it is clear where God stands on the issue.

To establish the scriptural basis for this assertion, I re-iterate the Book of Revelation. God sits on his throne surrounded by the twenty-four principal angels (in whose image we are made). In one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible, John describes (NIV Rev.4:9-11)

Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne, and worship him who lives forever and ever. They lay down their crowns before the throne and say:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created,
and have their being.”

What this is telling us is that the virtues of the angels are expressed and tied to life on earth. When life flourishes, the joy of its expression flows up through the angels to God. This is not just the joy of humanity, but the joy of all forms of life. The power of that gratitude is enough to force the angels to surrender their sovereign independence in deference to unconditional love.

But it is not limited thus. If joy and thanks is transmitted, so too must pain. I have felt this pain, a great crying out from the heart of life as it succumbs everywhere to humanity’s merciless exploitation of the bounty of the earth. Reading this passage, can anyone doubt that God would not hear and heed that grieving?

Pope Francis does not need the authority of science to speak out on this issue. That’s too bad for those who have purchased “scientific” opinions. No, if Pope Francis speaks, he will speak with religious authority, the authority of a true representative of God on earth. He will speak for all of Life. He will speak the truth of God’s anguish for the hypocrisy of those that claim to speak in his name while carelessly murdering his creation.

Capitalism: Friend or Foe

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This is a response to Kiss Me On a Burning Barricade and other recent post at Gods and Radicals. I do sympathize very much with the intentions and energy of this forum. I would just hope to see it focused more precisely on human behavior, rather than abstract ideology.

A speaker at a recent conference exhorted liberals to reclaim Adam Smith, whose concerns regarding abuse of workers under the system of capital have been ignored by the “Greed is Good” and “Invisible Hand” libertarians that took over the Republican Party during the Reagan era. Smith saw capitalism as simply the use of wealth to invest in technology that would amplify the effects of labor. It was this process that finally overturned Malthusian poverty (see The Grand Pursuit) because while the cost paid per shirt went down, the cost of a shirt fell even faster.

Under your definition of productivity, the core problem in the situation that you describe is psychopathy, which is subtle and seductive and has infected many of our institutions. In Smith’s work, this is articulated as the problem of the Commons: well-meaning people create value for one another, accumulate wealth, and then the psychopaths come in and steal it from them.

For example, the sleepy Savings and Loan industry of the ’60s and ’70s allowed the middle class to pay itself interest at 6% while borrowing at 7%. Reagan deregulated the industry, allowing raiders to take the assets it had accumulated and transfer them to high-risk instruments. Now the middle class borrows at 18% and gets interest on deposits of 0.2%.

Regarding the specific situation you outline, there is a movement among the restaurant workers to establish humane working conditions in an industry that exploits mercilessly. Among the industry’s crimes include lobbying against a general working wage increase in order to protect an extremely low minimum wage for their industry. As agitators document, in many states the tips we leave are in fact the bulk of the worker’s wage.

Abstracting from Smith, the theory of Capitalism and productivity is a means for organizing information about economic activity, including work practices. While proponents of capitalism cite the benefits in increasing productivity, the information they gather can also be used to identify psychopathic behavior. The reason that you have the numbers to criticize the workplace practice is because of that theory. Don’t blame the messenger – attack the root cause.

Terrorism: The Use of Pseudo-Sociology to Foment Cultural Hostility

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One of the lynchpins of the Third Reich was the “science” of eugenics. The conflation of genetics and culture justified an organized assault on disadvantaged minorities that spread to those that spoke out against their annihilation.

I find it hard to escape this precedent in reading Kenneth Krause’s “Religion, Violence and Terrorism” (Skeptic Vol 20, No.1, pp 48-56). The primary defect of Krause’s analysis is to reason backwards from his conclusion, which is militantly anti-religious. This leads to pseudo-sociological analysis that ignores the historical context that inflames conflict between the Muslim world and the West. Moderating those passions is going to require analysis that is both better and more honest than Krause presents.

For example, on page 49, Krause advances David Eller’s theory of violence as a basis for an argument that religion contains all the characteristics that foment violence. However, Krause fails to notice that the characteristics of religion are generically characteristics that cause believers to “expand both the scope and scale of their activities.” In my reading of history, that has included much that must be upheld as good, such as caring for the disadvantaged and speaking out against injustice all over the world.

What matters, then, is what religious leaders actually teach their followers, and whether scripture provides a sound basis for exposing immoral teaching. In substantiating his opinions (pp. 50-52) regarding the uniquely perverse nature of the traditions of Abraham, Krause cherry-picks from the most objectionable passages, failing to recognize that the exhortations he decries, when implemented methodically, are reported in scripture to have resulted in the destruction of the community of believers. Applying the discipline of anthropology, honest treatment of the religious edicts of the Old Testament would also recognize numerous occasions on which God decried the extent to which he suffered from the perfidy of the religious and political elites. This should be taken, by the mature reader, as an indication that human political ambitions corrupted the practice of the religion, which obviously would best be implemented by subordinating scripture to political ends. This is known to have occurred in documented history – so how could we not expect it to have occurred when the elites had complete control of the holy word?

Finally, Krause avoids the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who overthrew the religious justification for violence and eviscerated all dualistic systems of judgment (not only “good and evil”, but all legal codes that purport to categorize us as “guilty” or “innocent”) with edicts that we are to treat every interaction with people as an opportunity to create strength in them. Jesus’s exhortations reiterate the wisdom of the judgment upon Cain: our Darwinian heritage makes moral conduct difficult. Rather than destroying those that fail, we should give them the opportunity to pass on the lessons they have learned.

In summary, Krause’s scriptural analysis of the traditions of Abraham suffers terminally from confirmation bias. He seeks out passages that support his thesis, and ignores all others. Worse, he advances his selections and interpretations as typical dogma, when in fact I have never heard these passages used as moral guidance in any American church, synagogue or mosque. At least in the developed world, the religious have moved on. So should Krause.

The remainder of the article presents survey data that substantiates the oppressive opinions of the populations of largely Muslim nations. The glaring defect of this study is its failure to consider other factors that might contribute to the attitudes expressed by the sampled population. For example, at the recent Skeptics Conference, Ian Morris noted that foraging societies tolerate violence to a far greater degree than do fossil-fuel cultures. Islam is the religion of the poor: many of the nations in the survey data lived at or near foraging levels until last century. That lifestyle was obliterated when a large number of these nations were granted enormous oil wealth, which has given their monarchical elites the means to propagate their social codes in an attempt to secure stability in the face of sophisticated social critiques brought back by youth educated in Western universities. We should not be surprised that these nations, granted sudden and enormous wealth, should use it to propagate their social standards. That includes, as happened during the Spanish Inquisition, support for religious “scholars” willing to corrupt scripture to justify violent oppression (Wahabbism, which foments the most virulent extremism, is a recent construction of the Saudi monarchy). I would argue that the failure to consider this and other social factors (such as the organized attempt by Western-educated elites to uproot Muslim culture in the 20th century) leaves readers of Krause’s article vulnerable to the classic misattribution of “correlation as causation.”

My disappointment is that this shoddy piece of analysis was published by an organization that claims to promote science.

The Moral Arc

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As a scientist and mystic, I am frustrated with the conflict that divides the scientific materialists from the Biblical literalists. Both camps contain people that are well-meaning who tend to focus on the defects in the world-view of their disputants, rather than considering the good that can be done by joining forces.

When I first framed this debate at everdeepening.org, I celebrated three great threads of human thought: science, which is concerned with creating languages that accurately model objective reality; philosophy, which refines language to ensure that we understand one another; and spirituality, which is concerned with the negotiation of the boundaries between the I and the we (encompassing politics as well as religion). I have argued here that science can explain spiritual experience, but we cannot avail ourselves of its predictive powers to control spiritual growth. We simply cannot establish initial conditions without mutilating the personality that we would like to study. As a result, moral growth is unavoidably consensual.
The Moral Arc
Looking at the moral liberation of humanity from that perspective, with a balance between material and spiritual experience, I summarize our moral growth in the figure. We began as animals, completely amoral creatures. This is to say that morality was not initially a consideration of our existence: we simply did what needed to be done to survive. As relative newcomers on the spiritual scene, the weight of mammalian behavior patterns overwhelmed rational analysis. The exit strategy towards moral discourse was monotheism: a cold and callous rejection of all spiritual associations that were not wholly human in their origin.

Was this a clean process? No, it was a bootstrap process (witness the Bible). People exhibiting animalistic behaviors had to learn painfully from experience the consequences of failing to think carefully about the consequences to others of our actions. They had to develop languages to support moral analysis (philosophy), and they had to form communities willing to surrender resources to those pursuing that study. The Bible is best understood as one culture’s experience of that growth.

The rise of moral philosophy that culminated with Jesus of Nazareth asserts that Unconditional Love, which is the divine presence, propels our ascent. In part, it is because the contract is that the moral analyst must commit himself to the service of others.

Not everyone can master the nuances of moral discourse. What the faithful can do instead as moral actors is to invest their hearts and souls in caring for the world. There is no social system that can guarantee that investment – in fact, most of our social structures tend to consolidate the gains of those that abuse the contract. Only by reliance upon a divine external source can the less clever be ensured that their investment in moral conduct will be made good. Does this presence actually exist? Well, that is a matter of faith and personal experience (see the closing paragraph).

The difficulty in modern moral discourse is that the power of science outraced our philosophy. The world is changing rapidly around us, and most of humanity is still mired in amoral patterns of behavior. The power of science is often unleashed with terribly destructive consequences. This creates fear in the faithful that the institutions that safeguard our spirituality will be destroyed.

The counter of the scientist is to reject spirituality in favor of pure rationality (top of the diagram). What they seem not to understand is that most of humanity is not capable of participating in the discourse under those terms, but requires the deep psychological immersion of religion to substantiate trust in the mysteries tended by the intellectual elites. The faithful can only judge the trustworthiness of that elite by their pronouncements. Words like “stupid”, “sheep”, and “irrational” obviously will be interpreted as inconsistent with reliable moral stewardship, and tend to push the faithful into the arms of sociopaths that promise to protect them (as if that were possible, given the problems that we have mounted up against ourselves).

My experience is that economic exchange exploits our strengths and exacerbates our weaknesses. Obviously, it is in the interest of intellectuals to trumpet and enhance their virtues. But what I find, with Hume, is that spiritual engagement with such people is often hollow in the heart. The substitution of science for monotheism elevates rationality without replacing the guarantee of moral stewardship. In my own experience, that guarantee takes this form: when my heart is ready to break under the burden of the pain in the world, I open it a little wider and a great flood of love rushes through. I know that power is not mine.

Beyond Good and Evil Round II: A Response to John Zande

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John:

The proposition of good and evil is not a functional moral dichotomy – there is simply too much conditionality in moral analysis. I think that there are really only two principles that inform a meaningful moral dialog. The first is power – the capacity to make reality conform to our will. The second is love – an irrational desire to create power in the object of our affection. Moral analysis focuses on “who are you loving with your exercise of power?” The ultimate moral condemnation is “only yourself.”

I do not deny that the world is full of pain, but that is an inheritance from our Darwinian past, which is a process free of morality. In Genesis, when the Bible heralds the Fall as the entry of sin into the world, it is to recognize a separation from that past into a future of rational moral analysis. “Adam and Eve” are a metaphor for the human struggle with shame, guilt, forgiveness and redemption (all in the context of human society – God doesn’t need to deal with these issues).

The question is whether there is a force that lifts us up from brutal biological competition toward rational moral discourse. The Christian proposition is that Jesus came and died to demonstrate that there is nothing that can alienate us from God’s love or qualify us for preferential treatment in his eyes. This was demonstrated even in the face of murder at the hands of the culture that he came most immediately to love. His victory was to create a foothold for divine love in the world, and that foothold has broadened enormously over time.

So my response to your position is: yes, things are still bad, but they are far better than they were. It is only by looking at the trends that one can form a judgment concerning the efficacy of love. I experience its power day-by-day in a world that you seem to not to experience.

You have a great deal of intellectual energy, which you seem to focus toward the purpose of creating pain in others. My experience is that such people often are “doing as was done unto them”, looking for someone strong enough to show them how to heal. I can only offer Hume’s response to Hobbes (the latter whom you echo, btw). Hobbes averred that life for most was a “war of all against all” and “nasty, brutish and short.” Hume’s response was: “Mr. Hobbes has forgotten the operation of his own heart.”

If you want a person committed to the proposition of loving to read your book, you should start by offering a testimony regarding the things that you do love. That’s a point of contact that might allow them to engage your view of the world.

As it is, those of us that love have improved enormously the condition of life on this Earth. We’re at a turning point in that process, having nearly exhausted the resources that were laid up in the past. Under those circumstances, it will ultimately be those that learn to work together that survive.

Brian

Zande’s response to this was an assertion that he was trying to clarify the true nature of the reality we inhabit. My response was:

John:

Thank you for your considered response. I find myself, however, still seeking a declaration of the allegiance of your love.

Truth is indeed terribly important. Those that divorce themselves from truth ultimately abandon power (the ability to make reality conform to our will). For those that love, the truth of suffering is an essential goad to action. But the truth is only what it is. The goal of any active intelligence is to create new truth. It is through creative action that I find greatest meaning in life, and my ability to create is largely contingent (in the “no man is an island” sense) on the good will of others. That means offering them good will in return.

From a Christian perspective: yes, in its foundational state, this creation was indeed a reflection of Lucifer’s character. But I see the action of Divine Love in the mechanisms that are provided to heal his insanity. It is the simple existence of that possibility that I celebrate.

Good luck on your journey!

Brian

Mr. Zande’s response was to ask me to remove my religion from his blog – which I found odd because the only religious statement was actually an affirmation of Mr. Zande’s thesis.

Why God Is Love

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As a man of faith, my greatest challenge is seeing selfish behavior validated in the world of things. In the extreme case, the perpetrator of psychological abuse secretly withholds resources from the victim, blames others, and then meters out sustenance while saying “You’re so worthless. Nobody will ever love you like I do.” As a result, many victims actually identify with their abusers and seek to protect them from the authorities.

How can the victim see past that trap? Typically, it’s by looking at the circumstances of their abuser. People that love us share their power with us. If we are truly loved, we should feel stronger every day.

So let’s now step back and take the long view of this process – the process of merging our souls into heaven. This is described in all of the great religious traditions. But should we seek that so eagerly? Heaven is described as a place of love, but why should it be that way?

We know that there is conflict there: Lucifer rebelled against God. So could heaven not be a place just like Earth, with different types of pain, the pain of angels struggling against each other?

Imagine the evolution of the angels. Did they have wars and battles before love ruled the heavens? If so, why did they choose, ultimately, to submit to Unconditional Love?

To understand this, we have to recognize the difference between angels and us. Angels are beings of pure spirit. They relate to each other not through the exchange of material objects, but through interpenetration of their spirits. It is impossible for an angel to destroy another angel, only for one to suborn another’s will to their own. So naturally, selfish angels would want to establish boundaries that kept their captives from having the opportunity to join another personality.

Then along comes Unconditional Love. Love says, as I explained above, “Let me create strength in you.” What an attractive proposition! Who could resist it? But unconditional love goes beyond that. It says “I love everything equally, and want nothing for myself.” So the selfish angel, in serving only itself, must push away unconditional love, thus losing the benefits of its power. The alternative is to be infected by Unconditional Love, and thus to submit to the re-organization and eventual liberation of its captives.

Is renouncing love that a big deal? Maybe not initially, but you see all those smaller angels now find a place of refuge inside unconditional love. It enters into them and says: “Look, if you join with this other angel, you’ll be more powerful.” Unconditional Love is a restless seeking to find strength in the other angels. As that occurs, the angels that submit to its tutelage become more and more powerful.

In the warring regions of heaven, parts are broken off from the combatants, and some turn to Unconditional Love as a refuge. The most aggressive angels, to penetrate that refuge, must allow themselves to be infected by unconditional love. If they manage to seize part of the community of Unconditional Love, the lost part immediately withers and loses its vitality. Fighting against Unconditional Love is a losing proposition all the way.

So in the realm of the angels, once Unconditional Love came into being, there was no sensible angel that would resist its ministrations, no selfish angel that would survive an assault on it, and no conflict between angels that would not liberate pieces to join Unconditional Love. In the end, the corporate personality of heaven had to be ruled by love.

As we will be here on Earth, at least once enough of us realize that the soul is what matters most.

My Background in Particle Physics

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I earned my B.A. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1982. That spring, I was asked by the undergraduate adviser where I had been accepted for graduate studies. I told him that Princeton had rejected me, and that Harvard expected me to find $10,000 a year. Face paling, he excused himself to go talk to the department head. When he came back, he said, “Here’s an application for graduate school at Berkeley. Fill this out. I’ll walk it down to the admissions office. If you don’t get accepted, don’t worry: you won’t have to pay the application fee.”

So I did my graduate work at UC Berkeley as well, receiving a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1987. There were two significant things about this era. First, it was when the fundamental ideas of particle physics and cosmology (the study of the early universe) were assembled.

Particle physics had been pursuing the use of group theory as a framework for unifying our understanding of the four forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravitational). The theory had some really ugly problems. It did not account for particle masses, it produced infinities in its calculations that had to be “renormalized” away, and it had no satisfying explanation for the mathematical structure of the four forces. With the exception of the first, these problems were resolved by bringing gravity into the framework (through a Grand Unified Theory that was finally refined as superstring theory).

With regards to cosmology, the Big Bang had become dogma back in the 30s when Hubble discovered the red shift. The only available explanation for the result was the relativistic Doppler shift. The problem was that the universe was far too smooth to have been created in an explosion involving normal matter. The contribution of Alan Guth was a model of the early universe with ten spatial dimensions heated to the Planck scale, followed by an “inflation” driven by a Higgs-like particle with extremely large mass. Normal three-space and matter would only appear after the universe had cooled enormously, and light would slow down tremendously in the process. However, it turned out that there were tens of millions of possible configurations of the laws of physics in that cooling. Again, there was no way of explaining the mathematical structure of the four forces. This was addressed by assuming that our universe was only one of an infinite number of universes spawned from the original super-heated Plank plasma.

The second significant aspect of this era was the rise of Big Science in these fields. I was lucky to work on a team of eight, and turned my Ph.D. around in five years. Most of my peers worked on far larger projects, anywhere from one hundred to (at the end) a thousand researchers. The projects involved hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Because the work had absolutely no practical utility, the arguments for funding became more and more abstract (often invoking science as a fundamental moral imperative), and then became simply political. To illustrate: the organizational success of the particle physics community, in alliance with the Department of Energy, was scandalous to the material science community, whose funding was drained to support the construction of large and larger particle colliders. The rebuttal came in the form of a proposed designer for a linear collider to study particle zoology at the Plank scale (10^40 electron volts, as opposed the the 10^15 electron volts at CERN). The sarcastic concept drawing showed a linear collider superimposed on the galaxy.

I was offered a job at BellCore (the telephone systems research lab) after graduating, but decided to give Particle Physics one more chance by joining a neutrino mass project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The woman that taught me particle theory, Mary Gaillard, was despondent. I had the feeling that she felt that I was joining the evil empire. Indeed, the nuclear weapons facilities were a vortex that absorbed a lot of talented particle physicists (I guess that DoD was worried that we’d go off and invent something even more destructive than the hydrogen bomb). So the ten years that I spent there were amidst a vital community of theorists, and I was able to keep abreast of developments in particle physics and cosmology.

I chose my position at LLNL because I knew that if particle physics didn’t appeal to me, I would be able to change careers. I did so after three years, entering Environmental Science. Unfortunately, I became married in 1994 to a trauma victim of the Soviet secret police. That trauma made it impossible for my peers to sustain their relationships with me. I was encouraged to leave the Laboratory for industry.

When I made a decision to restructure my personal life in 2000, I went through a period of enormous volatility in my career. My peers at LLNL (some of who had intervened in my personal life with disastrous effect) decided to throw me a lifeline, and I was back there in 2004 and 2005. The latter was the centenary of Einstein’s “anno mirabilus”, when he published his papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity. The speaking schedule that year was dominated by cosmologists and particle theorists. I was able, in that venue, to come up to date on current developments in the field. What I came away with was confirmation that nothing had changed, and that theorists were simply adding parameters in order to match data that they couldn’t explain, often with unsatisfactory results. It was so dire that the NSF head of fundamental physics declared that the field needed “revolutionary” ideas.

I had begun to assemble the thoughts presented here in 2000 (see the “New Physics” tab), and offered them to some of my peers. It was then that I ran into political restrictions. I was told “wait ten years,” which was the foreseeable duration of the CERN research program. Well, that ten years is up.

I did receive some recognition while I was there. During a budget cutting exercise, funding of the National Ignition Facility was threatened. I ate lunch frequently at the NIF cafeteria, and one day found myself looking at the promotional poster on the wall, wondering how to make the program work. As I sat there, I had the sense of having a conversation with researchers from a number of disciplines. When I published that analysis (several months later), the budget discussions were resolved with an increase to support new research directions, and I was invited by the Associate Director’s office for a program participant’s tour of the facility. It was the only concrete evidence I received of the political contributions I had made to the laboratory in the eighteen months that I was able to remain there.

In a Nutshell: Separation of Church and State

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Any law can be corrupted, and each individual has needs that cannot be addressed under laws covering multitudes. Religion closes those gaps. Government must ensure the stability of the social order in the face of predation. Religion must create community that erodes predatory impulses. When religion succeeds at its work, government fades into the background. When religion fails its work, government grows in importance.

So a religion or religious leader has lost their way when exhorting the government to coerce people to abide by religious precepts. That is to authorize, rather than erode, predatory behavior.

A political leader can turn to religion for inspiration, but the final formulation of law must be in secular terms. Otherwise arguments of state are brought necessarily into religious forums, undermining their amity.