Good Friday 2021

Until they can identify Christ with re-Crucified Black bodies hanging from a lynching tree there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America and no delivery from the brutal legacy of slavery. 

James Cone

 

CURRENT LIFE in the form of the trial of the police officer who murdered George Floyd, the terrible, repeated accounts and documents of the actual event during Holy Week, leading to today's memorial of the Crucifixion of Jesus proves the point that the great Black liberation theologian James Cone made in his late life sermon The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone pointed out that the acts of crucifixion in subsequent years, often by those who professed a belief in the divinity of Jesus, especially of those whose theological understanding of the Crucifixion of Jesus was at the center of their religious thinking was a scandal and an outrage, those who failed to understand the use of murder, extrajudicial or, I'd say, by the state and its most intimate relationship to what is presented as the judicial murder of Jesus by the Roman state and the Temple leadership who acted, according to John, especially, out of fear of mass lynching of Jews by Rome due to a revolt provoked by the radicalism of Jesus. It being the gangster-empire of Rome that did it, it was the profound economic justice of Jesus that was at the heart of it. If Rome didn't use the terror-execution of mass crucifixion to impose its "Pax Romana" on those people it conquered and colonized it wouldn't have held any of them just as the slave power used violence and terror to keep Black People enslaved, as the United States government used the same to conquer the American territory. To pretend that any Christian churches who supported that violence and terror for those purposes were AND ARE not analogues to the Temple priesthood in the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion though not having to worry about the dangers to their followers in the case of white American religious bureaucrats is also important to call out. 

 

Those who witnessed the official murder of George Floyd are the Women who stayed witness to the Crucifixion of Jesus, the ones who feel haunted by their inability to intervene for fear of being killed as well, no doubt, had their counterparts at the Crucifixion of Jesus, though the Gospels don't mention them. The powerlessness of those who knew the injustice of both in the face of the power of the agents of the legal and economic power are real too. If any of our government, our legal system escape from further guilt in the lynching of George Floyd, if they break out of the pattern is yet to be seen in that one case, it certainly has not often done so in other Crucifixions by the American empire.  

George Floyd is Jesus in a story of the Crucifixion as it should be told this year, his killer is the Pilate-Temple leadership and Roman soldier doing the actual torturing and murdering on behalf of the ones behind the act. Roman soldiers might have murdered innocent Jews but they wouldn't have crucified them unless they were acting on behalf of those with power over them. Neither did the killers of George Floyd. And you can say the same about a long, long list of People murdered in similar ways, even as they were simply living their lives, EVEN SOMETIMES IN THEIR OWN HOMES. That's my Good Friday meditation this year and, I am certain after hearing James Cone's sermon, from now on.

Francis Poulenc - Ave Verum Corpus

 

Ave verum corpus Christi, natum ex Maria Virgine, Vere passum, immolatum in cruce pro homine. Ave verum corpus Christi, natum ex Maria Virgine. 

Hail, true Body, born of the Virgin Mary, having truly suffered, sacrificed on the cross for mankind. Hail, true Body, born of the Virgin Mary. 

Danish National Vocal Ensemble.

Conducted by Stephen Layton

William Byrd - Ave Verum Corpus

 

Alumni choir of Victoria School and Victoria Junior College Nelson Kwei, director

Holy Thursday Thoughts

DURING THE RECENT VISIT by Pope Francis to Iraq, I read the interesting bit of trivia (though hardly trivial to Christians in Iraq) that he could have said a mass in which the Eucharist was not consecrated using the formula of initiation, the words of Jesus at The Last Supper in which he said, "This is my body," while breaking the bread and,"This is my blood," over the cup of wine.  The reason founded in the enormously long history of Christianity in the region is too complex to go into, here's the article I read about it in.  The permission of Catholics of the Chaldean rite to attend masses which retain the local form of mass is used, in which the idea expressed in the formula is held to be enough to fulfill the act is a rare instance of broad-minded generosity during the John Paul II years, one which I'm surprised wasn't overturned by the more precisian neo-medievalism of Benedict XVI's court.

I'm kind of a heretic about the Eucharist, which I believe is valid in all its forms which have the right intention.   I think the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is due to the act of sharing food and drink, that it is as much the act of sharing that is the body and blood, the voluntary giving of the sustenance of the body and blood of the giver to others that is how the body and blood of Christ can come into our bodies.   It is a reenactment of the Creation of life, the free and generous act of God to give being to conscious creatures including us what is founded in the act of hospitality that Abram and Sarai gave to The Lord in the form of three strangers, an act that preceded the more dramatic one in which God tested the covenantal relationship by requesting the sacrifice of his promised son, his hope of his continuation into the human future on Earth, which, of course, turned out to be only a test which, however, sealed the covenant that Abram initiated with his act of hospitality. And I don't think that you have to say the words of initiation in an authorized mass to have that valid communion, the Eucharist.  I don't think you have to be a Catholic or a Christian or even to have heard of Jesus or Paul or even God, for that matter. 

The extension of that covenanted relationship happens throughout the Book of Exodus and become universal in the Gospels but the foundation of it in the extension of hospitality remains.  The act of giving the stuff of life, food and drink, is a faint human imitation of the very act of Creation which is ongoing and won't end, even if human beings under other influences and in our selfishness and vanity - the opposite of the covenant hospitality - destroy ourselves.  

I think the chronology of events in the Gospels, in which Jesus gives his body and blood in the form of food and drink to be eaten and drunk is intimately tied into him giving his body over to death in order to initiate the awareness of resurrection if not, according to traditional Christian theology - at least of some of it - beginning the universal resurrection to eternal life.  That's too varied, too complex, too controversial for me to get into - it would take a lot more reading and quoting and analyzing than the comparatively vapid thinking of Fred Hoyle's deification of "mathematics" and "the laws of physics" would.  

In my posts of the past several days I've pointed out that the scoffers and doubters and enemies of the Monotheistic tradition led lives and claimed the reality of rights and privileges even as they used their paid positions to undermine a belief in the legitimacy or even reality of what they would need to know to do any of it.  Certainly that is true of the lay public who buy their lines hook, line and sinker.   They have their like in "Christians" and others who profess to believe in the divinity of Jesus, of everything from the Virgin Birth to the Resurrection of Jesus to the "real presence" in the bread and wine (though that last one is bitterly rejected by some Protestants and is hardly identically believed among Catholics and Orthodox believers) but who reject the clearly stated commandments of hospitality, especially to those who cannot return it, to the least among us.   

One thing that I can say with total confidence is that if all of them, the academic atheist-materialist the Church of Prosperity type of heretic and hypocrite, is that if they went long without food they would know its lack very fast and it would become the most solid of realities that they have ever experienced in their lives.  Of course they would, their very lives depend on it.  An act of hospitality, of sharing with them at that point would be everything to them, surpassing all of their proudest professional and academic achievements, their maniacal and ecstatic emotional release in their "worship"  in their pagan-"Christian" cargo-cult.   It would mean everything that the neo-integralist "Latin Mass" Catholics (whose "worship" is only a different kind of show-biz than that of the as-seen-on-TV church of the variety show-night club).   It would be real, completely real, the act of giving, especially by someone who it would really cost everything too, would be pure worship.  

If Covid ever ends, I'm going to try to get an Intentional Eucharistic Community going here, the last church in town is dwindling down, it's the time for house churches again.  One where everyone says the formula together.

Putting My Desk In Order Before The Triduum

INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH, the accusation that I'm in favor of explaining religious faith by using science is one thing that I think isn't only dishonest but also is perilous because if you do that and the science you depend on turns out to be less durable than you had believed, you're no better off than if you hadn't done it. In that I agree with Fr. Georges Lemaitre, the person who discovered what his major scientific opponent, Fred Hoyle derisively called "The Big Bang" in order to use ridicule in a method not that far removed from what you accuse me of. There was an incident when Pope Pius XII was to address some scientists in which Fr. Lemaitre asked him, specifically, not to use his scientific findings to support the general Biblical claim that the universe had an absolute beginning in time and that it had been created out of what would informally be considered "nothing". He thought it would be best to not tie religious thinking to it too tightly.

Hoyle on the other hand explicitly used science to support his atheist ideology, something that, when you look at the genesis and the history of his scientific counter to Lemaitre, is remarkable as an instance of the ideological domination of the scientific community, and so of science, itself. Something that isn't supposed to happen according to the rules of science that are not at all infrequently violated ideologically by atheists for the purpose of supporting their ideology. The history of science, increasingly, from the 16th century has been used that way, in the area I've researched the most in depth, Darwinism, that use BY ATHEISTS WITHIN SCIENCE and outside of it started almost immediately and continues till today. And not only in modest ways but in ways insisted to be universally potent, an acid that destroys everything from the virtue of charity to the concept of human freedom and, indeed, the very concept of meaning and truth, something which made the Trumpian version of that far less startling to me because I've read the atheist-materialist ideological claims regarding that which have had an enormous effect, especially in the areas of philosophy and in claims surrounding neo-Darwinism. That vulgar economic materialism shares that with elite peer-published academic materialism isn't surprising, once you have, for yourselves and your peers, negated the truth of morality, the concept of freedom of thought, when your ideology forces you to reduce all human activity, including our thoughts to being the meaningless interactions of "particles and forces" literally nothing remains, it is no more shocking to me that those claims by a Brian Greene or a Richard Dawkins are made flesh in the likes of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or Rupert Murdoch or Matt Gaetz rife with hypocrisy than it would be that so many of the neo-atheists of the 00s were revealed to have flown with Jeffrey Epstein to his pleasure island and that he and his pimpess girl friend were the money behind the ScienceBlogs.   And I do think that all of those things are intimately tied to the ideology of materialism, both in its academic, elite form and in its Trumpian-Putinesque vulgar form.  They are the same.

There are two interesting articles that I read in thinking about your comment to me, one by Adam Curtis is an old one about how Fred Hoyle came up with and developed his "steady state" alternative to Lemaitre's and his colleagues model of the universe which is too complex for me to write about right now. The problem is I can see I've got to do a lot more reading to really deal with it. I have to say that the relationship between Hoyle's ideological insertion that dominated physics for two decades in the post-war period and how the dark, sour, dismal work of the Ealing Studios director Robert Hamer helped inspire it is an interesting thing to think about but I really don't want to have to go back and watch any of his movies.

Another one is a new article from Fr. Richard Rohr that presents the opposite conclusion from science to the one Brian Greene and atheist-materialism presents.

Nothing is the same forever, says modern science. Ninety-eight percent of our bodies' atoms are replaced every year. Geologists with good evidence over millennia can prove that no landscape is permanent. Water, fog, steam and ice are all the same thing, but at different stages and temperatures. The preface to the Catholic funeral liturgy says, "Life is not ended, it is merely changed." Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding, but it actually refers to things that are always true!

But God could not wait for modern science to give history hope; people just needed to believe that Jesus "was raised from the dead" so that the hope and possibility of resurrection could be planted in our deepest unconscious. Jesus' first eternal life, his "necessary" death, and his resurrection into the ongoing Christ life is the archetypal model for the entire pattern of creation. He is the microcosm for the whole cosmos, or the map of the whole journey, if you need or want one. Nowadays most folks do not seem to think they need that map, especially when they are young. But the vagaries and disappointments of life's journey eventually make you long for some direction, purpose or goal beyond getting through the day.

Anybody who holds any kind of unexplainable hope believes in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don't believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead. I have met such people from all kinds of backgrounds, religious and non-religious. I do, however, believe in the material resurrection of Jesus because it affirms what the whole physical and biological universe is also saying — and grounds it as something more than a mere spiritual belief. It must also be a material belief!

A trust in the physical resurrection of Jesus frees believers, if we let it, from the stripped-down belief in a Christ who came merely to "save souls for heaven" instead of liberating and healing bodies in this world. If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal and when the Creed says we "believe in the resurrection of the body," it means our bodies too and not just Jesus' body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him. So I am quite "conservative" and orthodox by most standards on this important issue, although I also realize it seems to be a very different kind of embodiment from all of the Resurrection accounts in the Gospels.

The Christian narrative is saying that reality's true story from the very beginning has always been Incarnation, that God's hiding place and place of epiphany is the physical world. Resurrection is, therefore, not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, rather the Jesus pattern is revealing the pattern of everything that God has created.

Easter is not one day, but Easter is apparently every day and everywhere.

Fred Hoyle, as he inserted his ideology into science, interestingly, accused his colleagues, some of them atheists, who accepted Lemaitre's worked out and supported theory of unconsciously doing exactly what he and his supporters were, in fact doing.

"The reason why scientists like the "big bang" is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to believe in the first page of Genesis"

From what I gather it was one of those witticisms that the BBC loves to air from prominent Brits, especially of an atheistic mindset.  It's especially interesting because, as things developed, the science supported his opponents point of view, so it was clear that the influence of "Genesis" may have aided the advance of science.  Or maybe not, as that quite fickle branch of scientific speculation Hoyle and Lemaitre were both engaged in may well change its mind, again.  I do think that by the "there's no reason to believe" standard that is one of those other unevenly applied rules of thumb so often used by atheist ideological assertion, today there isn't any to believe Hoyle was right.

 

The extent to which the self-destructive, alcoholic and repressed gay and pretty nasty director Robert Hamer was an inspiration to Hoyle, according to the first article, it might be worth considering that Hamer's goal in film making was, "I want to make films about people in dark rooms doing beastly things to each other." That is something that he was hardly alone in doing, it was pretty much the aestheic of modernism then and now. That aspect of atheist-materialist-scientism strikes me as a better reason to reject it than whether or not the absolute beginning of the universe stands up to future scientific evidence - assuming there will be any more of that.  These days the most nifty physicists and cosmologists seem to want to get by without that.  I'd suggest that's not much different from what they accuse religious believers of.

Which makes me think that that choice has its definite alternative in what John Lennox said when he was asked about Stephen Hawking's accusation that religion was a "fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark," He countered with "Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light"

 

If I choose to not be afraid of the light, I don't see how you can hold me to blame for that as, by your own ideological faith, I have no choice in the matter. I'd rather take the chance on me being right than on you being wrong. If you're right the end is as final and dismal for you as it will be for me.

If We Don't Junk The 18th Century Assumptions About Press Freedom And The Freedom To Lie Democracy Is Doomed

ONE OF THE WORST things that has happened in the past few decades is the lie that people, that consumers, that voters are purely rational actors capable of discerning and rejecting lies so that lies and the liars who want to tell them, whether to deceive someone who they want to cheat or to get suckered into voting against their own self interest must be allowed to lie freely and that it is the rest of us who are to blame when they succeed in gulling us into being robbed or our right to a government which works for us stolen from us.  That is a huge lie told by "federalists" "originalists" and other academic liars who have brought us to Trumpian decadence and put democracy in danger.  The academic scribblers and babblers who came up with that clearly fictitious kind of "rational actors" are right wingers, libertarians and the kind of phony, secular-liberals who are all in on the swindle.

Along with that billionaire financed lie campaign made so that judicial and Supreme Court fascists will have slogans and lines which are as dishonest as those they want to cheat us with is the rise of technology that literally will magnify the ability to lie by an incredible factor of influence.

 

Democracy here and around the world cannot exist if this kind of lying is allowed under the idiotic interpretation of "freedom of the press" that currently rules in alleged and nearly real democracies because it makes assumptions that don't even really work when "the press" means words and pictures in ink on paper.  The assumptions that government which is the result of a choice of The People in an election is more dangerous than mass media which can subvert the nature of government is one of the stupidest ideas that Jefferson and Madison had.  They had no experience of egalitarian democracy, either in approximation or in the modern sense, as slave holders and aristocrats they, even Jefferson, had too much contempt for We The People when that phrase includes People of Color, Women, People of modest means and without the means of obtaining a good education.  

 

They certainly had no notion, whatsoever, of technology that would do what can already be done to deceive a margin or a plurality of people into putting fascists into office such as is shown to be a real and present danger to us our equality and the democracy that is merely a product of the desire for equality as informed by the truth.   

The Supreme Court will prove to be the last part of the government to get it because they are the most out of touch, the most arrogant, the most tradition bound and, frankly, under the Republican-fascist control of it, hostile to equality and democracy and the truth as it is.  I think that if democracy is going to survive even by the skin of our teeth, we will have to destroy the 19th century innovation of Supreme Court review of laws made to address these modern crises because, as they did campaign finance laws and other laws to protect electoral democracy, they will work to destroy the possibility of those as certainly as this technology will.

And every sand becomes a gem Reflected in the beams divine Blown back they blind the mocking eye

Greene insists all that is — all that exists — consists only of particles and fields. Nothing but "Particles and fields … . To the depths of reality that we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else."

This passage quoting Brian Greene from the review I quoted shows exactly what I said, that materialism (whether you want to honestly admit that's what it is or under its aliases such as "physicalism" or "naturalism") is not only a closed system, denying the possibility of there being anything outside of it but insisting that they know that, its rule setting insists that things be rigged to come out with the conclusion their rules serve.  I might look at the book, but I wonder if this claim isn't Greene's attempt to come up with something as pithy as Sagan's "Cosmos" credo of pop materialism from his very uneven and way too influential PBS show.

Physics BY HUMAN INTENTION AND HUMAN DECISION, CONSCIOUSLY MADE deals with nothing but "particles and fields," and only those. Its rules and procedures, methods and habits could only find those because science is an artificial set of rules and methods and habits that are made to look at very limited possible areas of investigation. Those rules, applied to the best of human abilities for all times could find nothing except those things and their actions, they can't even tell you if there are other things about those very limited aspects of reality, particles and fields, that fall outside of the scope of what those can tell us about them. Modern physics has, on the contrary, given us every reason to believe that WE CAN NEVER KNOW THROUGH PHYSICS everything there is to know about any and every particle or certainly everything about every field. I would be surprised if they are not far worse at coming up with a theory of everything about fields which they know through the incomplete knowledge of particles in those fields than they do about the particles.

What materialism is is a particularly arrogant and stupid insistence that the entirety of reality or even a majority of it must conveniently fall within human perceptions and methods of knowing and within the methods and tools we contrive to extend those - which is an issue all in itself. After what modern physics has revealed to us more than ninety years ago shows that materialism is as antiquated a notion as some of the aspects of 17th and19th century physics that was discontinued with the rise of modern physics in the 20th century. But professional scientists and mathematicians are still insisting on their favored ideology being exempt from all of the inconvenient developments in their own fields.

That quote I used last night was from a poem by William Blake which I have to say I didn't understand adequately until I'd read a lot of Walter Brueggemann and the Old Testament under his and other theologians' influence.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;

Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!

You throw the sand against the wind,

And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem

Reflected in the beams divine;

Blown back they blind the mocking eye,

But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus

And Newton's Particles of Light

Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,

Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

We all, Brian Greene, Peter Woit, you, me, all of us live in a reality as real AND I WOULD ASSERT MORE REAL, as subatomic particles and the forces that modern physics studies and reveals, though a lot of what was studied as promising theories didn't turn out that way - we're always supposed to just stop thinking about things that come up with nul results, though they were held to be credible enough to make the effort to study them at the time. Brian Greene's colleagues, the thousands and thousands of physicists who have spent the past 40 years on string theory - and its cousin theories, certainly most of the WRONG - have been banking on brilliantly devised theories that, if Woit is right, are little more than snakes that eat their own tails and will not even make it into future textbooks as failures. 

 

I say more real because the world of our daily experience is more known to us than even the findings of physics that are held by materialists to be the ground of all reality because the prerequisite beliefs that those findings are grounded in are, ultimately, our every day experience starting when we were infants.  The conceit of physicists of a materialistic bent that all of reality must bend to the most banal details of what they study insists on ignoring that it is their childhood experience of reality that those are governed by.  And the majority of their professional and personal lives prove that they don't really want to believe what they claim when it comes to what they value most. 

I'll bet every single one of them whether a post-doc or a fully tenured professor with a big income would have no problem if the institution that employs them forced them to do more work without compensation or otherwise upset their sense of their personal economic justice. They certainly would expend enormous amounts of effort on pursuing justice for themselves, certainly if their published ideas were worth money they would want to make certain that no one took the profit and, probably as important to them THE CREDIT for their property. But none of the arguments, none of the preexisting stands or rights or claims of justice to them which they would use to try to get what was due them could be found in Brian Greene's or any other materialists list of what was real in their realm of particles and forces. They would knowingly or unknowingly be making the same claims to those that are made by The Children of Israel, articulated for them by Aaron at the instruction of Moses all asserted to have been true because GOD WANTED IT THAT WAY. Maybe, in light of their claims of the exclusive nature of reality being bound by the limits of their professional activity, the administration that wants to screw them should demand that they justify their claims in equations using the limits of the methods of physics to do so. I don't see how they could complain about it in ways that would be consistent with their ideological claims.

 

Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain

ON THE CONTRARY, the attestation of the Gospels to difficult, troubling things like Jesus's dying lament that his Father had forsaken him MAKES ME MORE CONFIDENT IN THE HONESTY OF WHAT THEY CLAIM.   It would be far easier to leave such things out, if someone was interested in making up the story they would have made it less instead of more difficult.  That I don't understand what it means doesn't change that, if it were easy to understand it wouldn't have that value for me.

The Materialists Need Of Carving Out An Exception For Themselves From Their Monistic Straight Jacket

IT IS WITHIN THE REALM of absolute certainty that I will not read Brian Greene's latest popular science book, Until The End of Time because I got enough of him in his previous work as a popularizer of the decadent phase of modern physics, one of the more public apostles of string theory. While I'm sure Peter Woit wouldn't like much of what I say, I agree, in so far as I have any understanding of the issues with what he said about Greene's religion last August

String theory is not a new, promising idea that needs time to develop. It has been around for about forty years, has been intensively pursued by thousands of physicists for about thirty years now. The end-result of all this work has just been a better understanding that the huge problems with the idea of string theory unification seem to be fatal. If you make the most optimistic assumptions about string theory unification schemes doing what they are supposed to, you end up with the “landscape”, a theory which can’t predict anything at all.

The basic problem with string theory unification research is not that progress has been slow over the past 30 years, but that it has been negative, with everything learned showing more clearly why the idea doesn’t work. The problem with progress in string theory as a function of time is not the size of the derivative, but its sign.

Though from what I also saw when I searched Woit's blog, I think maybe Greene is walking back from string theory a bit, he has been among its most influential popularizers.  I saw a little of his NOVA PBS series on it and it struck me as quite decadent even then.  I haven't much watched NOVA since.

The review of his latest book by Richard G. Malloy doesn't, though, require extensive knowledge of mathematics or the latest in physics to understand what's wrong with at least some of what Greene says because, as Malloy points out, him just saying is a demonstration that he doesn't really believe what he's claiming.

In his latest book, Until the End of Time, his argument goes too far or not far enough. His view presents the kind of paradox you expect in a quantum universe that exhibits spooky relationships between particles, where "what is" isn't "what it is" until someone observes or judges "that it is" (think Schrödinger's cat).

Greene argues that much of what is generally outside the domain of physics, aspects of reality like thought, language, art, ourselves and the holy grail, consciousness, are nothing but particles set in motion at the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.

Greene insists all that is — all that exists — consists only of particles and fields. Nothing but "Particles and fields … . To the depths of reality that we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else."

Really? Nothing but particles? Plumb deeper, farther.

Greene's reduction of all reality to particles means there is no free will. Yet, Greene's ruminations uncover a chink in the reductionist armor. He asks why the particles that make up a big rock remain inert as a tree limb falls, threatening to land on someone, while the particles that are "you" or "me" will rush over and pull that someone out of danger. Note, we wouldn't worry about the rock getting smashed.

Greene argues that such salvific action is not free will or choice. The particles of the rock, "you" and "I" are all subject to the same inevitable and unchanging laws of physics. It is just that "you" or "I" have a more "sophisticated internal organization [that] allows for a rich spectrum of behavioral responses" not available to the rock. Curiously, Greene argues, "This notion of freedom does not require free will." He admits this use of the term "free" is a bit of a "linguistic bait and switch.

His admittance is more than that. It is more than particles of synapses firing in his fertile and impressive brain. It is an argument. And a person making an argument must be free, or it is no argument.

A belief in the mystery we call God, awareness and trust that there is a reality beyond physical reality, grounds assertions of free will and argues for purpose and ultimate meaning to our existence and the universe.

But we are more than the particles that physicists can measure. Reality is more than what our knowledge of physical reality reveals. Our knowledge itself, our consciousness, the laws of physics, math — all transcend physical particles and fields.

Ironically, Greene loses the argument that the act of argument is unfree, and in the long run, meaningless. He loses by making an argument.

It's nearly a universal trait among materialists that they insist on carving out exceptions in their mechanistic univers for what they value, science, mathematics, the findings of scientists (really those should be considered assertions, not findings to be consistent with their materialistic faith) and, of course, the professional product and status of the scientists and materialists (some of them work in other fields such as philosophy, the writing of fiction and the lower end of entertainment) . But if you're going to be consistent you can't allow them to try to have it both ways because their materialism is a hermetically closed system, it cannot allow ANYTHING to escape it and for anything to have any significance at all it would have to escape.

If everything we assert is a mere arrangement of particles that was set at the time of the Big Bang then there can be no significance to anything any scientist says and them taking pay for what they do is not only a fraud but a demonstration that, in so far as their interests lie, that they don't really buy it for themselves. If their being paid and considered to own what they earn by their work is merely an arrangement of particles in time and space then so is the person who cheats or steals or makes laws against the unionization of faculty members and it is 100% as justified (or unjustified) as them insisting that they have a right to collective bargaining and what they get from it.

It never fails to impress me at how hypocritical the materialist double-step is because everything about their ideology destroys what is to their liking and is in their perceived interest as surely as it destroys the idea of the God articulated by Moses and the Prophets and Jesus, though it certainly doesn't need to destroy other descriptions of God, or, rather gods. They could be there fiddling around with things, they could even have set the Big Bang in motion with all of the particles going where they will by their design and physics would be as powerless to disprove their role in it as it is, in fact, powerless to disprove the role of God in it.

I think modern physics, which, as can be seen from the state of decadence it seems to be in these days, has enough problems without trying to answer questions it is not equipped to consider. I think Brian Greene should spend a little time justifying him being paid or his rights to the product of his labor according to the same rules with which he wants to rob the minds of all of us of any significance, any but the most remote of all possible chances of arriving at even one truth within our lifetimes. How are we supposed to escape the random chance of that happening? How can he have claimed to?

The Scandal Of The Doubt Of Jesus And Why It May Have Happened

TODAY IS PALM SUNDAY in many Christian churches. In the Catholic church is read the story of Jesus entering into Jerusalem and people laying down palm fronds in front of the donkey carrying him - a clear implication of his Messiah-ship, a provocation of the kind the Romans were always looking out for among the Jews and which often led to mass crucifixion of those who might follow such a potential threat to Roman rule. Followed by a Gospel account of the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus.

Growing up, going to Mass, the thing I found the most disturbing, scandalous, were the last words of Jesus after his torture and just as he was dying, as Mark gives it:

And at three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice,

“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”

which is translated,

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Some of the bystanders who heard it said,

“Look, he is calling Elijah.”

One of them ran, soaked a sponge with wine, put it on a reedand gave it to him to drink saying,

“Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to take him down.”

Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.

I never could understand how Jesus could have believed himself to be what the later churches taught about him, that he was consciously some kind of aspect of God, divine, though the churches and Christians in general articulated many different meanings of what they meant by that, mixing the Gospel accounts, what Paul and the other letter writers said with ideas from outside the Scriptural tradition to arrive at those different holdings.

When I was young our catechism classes were taught by not terribly well educated nuns from a teaching order from a Catholic school in an adjoining town. It being a French-Canadian parish they were all heavily influenced by priests largey educated at a notoriously reactionary seminary in Quebec, some said it was the last stand of Jansenism which continued with that heresy centuries after it was declared one due to the remoteness of Quebec from hierarchical figures who had an interest in suppressing it. I do know that we were taught some rather silly ideas about the implications of Jesus's divinity, I remember one of them saying that Jesus must have known everything even as an infant, that Jesus had to have had all of the knowledge of God even then. It would seem that a number of the earliest heresies that denied the humanity of Jesus were alive and flourishing in 1950s and 60s New England, too.

How can anyone understand that passage from the Gospel if they believe that Jesus had total knowledge and total confidence in his own divinity? It makes absolutely no sense unless you think that in the extremity of his pain and suffering he temporarily forgot what he is asserted to have known, which would certainly mean that Jesus didn't share in the divine attributes of being all powerful and all knowing - I mean, how, if you're going to assert those things about God, are you going to explain a lapse in that state of being?

I certainly don't understand it except that what Jesus said is certainly an expression of the feeling of total abandonment I expect to feel at the point of death, if I am conscious of it. Of fear of being extinguished, or of just the terrible pain of the kind of death by torture an in a total theft of all dignity and life. In that cry Jesus is not only totally human, he shares in the common experience of all creatures at the point of death when we are awake to death.

Someone I was very close to, though, as they died from a heart attack, on their way to the hospital told the paramedics just as they died not to try to revive them. I was very close to the person and that has both haunted me and been a source of hope that though they had been fully expecting to die before the ambulance came, they became reconciled to it in the end. I know that's not how it always is, I've got family lore of a few rather beautiful deaths as well as the most terrible. But that would not have been a demonstration of God's solidarity with his creatures in the most challenging of all circumstances. The expression of doubt contained in those last words of Jesus in their rawest and unmitigated form in Mark's Gospel is, I think an expression of that.

If Jesus, IF EVEN JESUS harbored doubts about his relationship to God, who he called his Father, I think we lesser beings can be forgiven for our lapses which every honest believer, I believe, has, especially when we are up against it, at the point of death.  I don't think our condition as created creatures will be held against us.  Perhaps that is part of why it happened the way it did, as a demonstration that we won't be expected to be more than what we are or can be.   Paul said that Jesus was like us except in that he was free of sin.  If that is true and consistent with the Gospel, our doubt isn't a sin in itself.