Apocalypse Now

For most of my life, from time to time, I have seen cartoons in magazines satirizing street corner prophets of an apocalypse. The usual caricature is of a scruffy man, in a shabby robe with a long scraggly beard carrying a sign which reads "The End is Near" or some such.

Well, it's early morning and I am not carrying a placard as I start this piece. I am in a robe (bath) but I don't have a long beard although I am as of yet unshaven. I don't have a placard but I do have a blog and a computer. However, I have just read a piece on the web from the morning New York Times by Thomas Friedman, and so here's my message: "The End is Near."

Four years ago I began work on my book The Coming of the Quantum Christ. At the very end of my introduction, I described Science as being both Christ and Anti-Christ and raised the question of whether the scientific study of the Shroud of Turin could be the "Coming of a Quantum Christ." It was a rhetorical question. By the time I got to Chapter 17 of the book in the spring of 2014, the question was no longer rhetorical because there was in 2014 a flood of scientific reports from a wide variety of sources that climate change was real and its devastating effects were already being felt in a multitude of places. Time is running out.

Today, as I read Friedman's article my conclusion is that while time may not have completely run out, the end is fast approaching. I crammed a great deal into Chapter 17 because the principal focus of the Quantum Christ is the authenticity of the Shroud and, if authentic, its meaning. One of the items I touched on in that chapter was the claim that climate change was causing war. Some are dubious. Be dubious no more.

Friedman's Time's piece is dealing with the unprecedented heat wave that has struck the Middle East this year with a heat index as high as 163°. Millennia old sources of water are drying-up and disappearing. Governments in Iraq and Iran, among others, seem to be powerless. Electricity, and thus air conditioning, is rationed.

I am not a fundamentalist Christian. If anything, I guess I am a disciple of paleontologist and Jesuit priest Peirre Teilhard de Chardin. To a certain extent so too is Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and, I surmise, Francis, the first Jesuit Pope.

Michelle Bachman is a former member of Congress, briefly a 2012 candidate for President, and professed fundamentalist Christian. In a radio interview last April, she rejoiced that Obama was actually bringing on the "End of Times" [the Apocalypse] and what a privilege it was to be alive at this moment.

Needless to say, I am not as "rapturous" as Ms. Bachman about the onset of the Apocalypse. I do believe that Pope Francis is a prophet of apocalypse and is endeavoring to avoid it. His prophecy Laudato Si is addressed not only to Roman Catholics but to all humanity. His message has reached, and been embraced by some fundamentalists, Jewish rabbis, Buddhists and humanists.  On Tuesday, August 18, Islamic leaders from 20 countries after a two day symposium issued an Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change.

Echoing Pope Francis prophetic Laudato Si but placing it in an Islamic context it began:

"God – Whom we know as Allah – has created the universe in all its diversity, richness and vitality: the stars, the sun and moon, the earth and all its communities of living beings. All these reflect and manifest the boundless glory and mercy of their Creator. All created beings by nature serve and glorify their Maker, all bow to their Lord’s will. We human beings are created to serve the Lord of all beings, to work the greatest good we can for all the species, individuals, and generations of God’s creatures."

To my fundamentalist brothers and sisters in Christianity: Do not rejoice in "End of Times" but continue to ameliorate the miseries visited on humanity with the self sacrifices that so many of you have demonstrated. The message of our Gospel is that ultimately we will be judged not by what we do for ourselves but what we do for our neighbors who are in need. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Christ made clear that helping those in need was not limited to co-religionists. Our "neighbor" is all humanity.

JFK said in 1961 "on this Earth, God's work must truly be our own." Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar some 400 years before: "The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves." I take my prophets and prophecies where I find them.

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This post is not intended as a sales pitch for Quantum Christ, but if you are interested in Quantum Christ check out http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-coming-of-quantum-christ-has-arrived.html

Riding the Red Horse of War

The opposition expressed by Senator Charles "Chuck" Schumer and Congress Member Eliot Engel to the nuclear accord with Iran evokes memories of the 2002 debate over the Joint Resolution authorizing George W. Bush to commence war in Iraq. The war that was authorized by that vote led to 5,000 military deaths, tens of thousands of wounded veterans and the death of more than a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians. It has cost an estimated three trillion dollars and counting.

Schumer's opposition to the Iranian accord is uniquely challenging. He is the designated successor to Harry Reid as leader of Senate Democrats when Reid retires at the end of his current term.

Among the Democratic Senators who voted for the 2002 war resolution were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards and Schumer. Engel was one of 81 Democrats in the House of Representatives who supported the war authorization while 126 Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, opposed it.

In the 2004 Presidential Election, the Democratic ticket consisted of war "liberals" Kerry and Edwards. By that time, the antiwar movement had grown geometrically. Barak Obama, an Illinois state legislator who had opposed the war, electrified the 2004 Democratic Convention and went on to win election to the United States Senate. In 2008, his early opposition to the war played a major role in mobilizing his support and in the defeat of his pro-war opponent Hillary Clinton.

The vote for or against the Iranian accord is ultimately another vote for or against war. The same forces that cowed Kerry, Clinton, Edwards, Schumer and Engel into supporting the Iraq war authorization are now at work opposing the Iranian accord. That accord was the result of years of painstaking negotiations. John Kerry was its principal negotiator; Hillary Clinton has announced her tentative support but Chuck Schumer and Eliot Engel have announced their opposition.

The opposition is based upon fantasies spun by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who also supported the Iraq war. The defeat of the Iranian accord may very well be more devastating, than the Iraq vote. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a myth swallowed whole. Iran's program to build a nuclear bomb is not. Other than war, the consensual Iranian accord is the only path open to stopping Iran obtaining nuclear weapons short of war.

The international sanctions regime was carefully crafted under the United States' leadership. Included were Germany and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council among them Russia and China. If the the accord is defeated those sanctions, other than the United Sates, will collapse. So will United States pretense to international leadership in the Middle East.

Lined-up in support of the Iranian nuclear deal are an impressive array of three dozen retired Generals and Admirals[1] and 29 scientists including several Nobel Prize winners.[2]

The opposition includes in addition to Tea Party "know nothings" the Republican leadership of the House and Senate who are committed to making Obama fail whatever the cost to the nation. Powerful pro-Israeli and Netanyahu lobbying groups give the appearance of a unified Jewish community but that is hardly the case. According to a national poll of self-identified Jews conducted by LA Jewish Journal in July, more Jews supported the Iranian accords than opposed it.[3]

On August 17th, 340 US Rabbis issued a statement supporting the Iranian accords that was published in the National Catholic Reporter.[4] Among other things they noted that "[w]e've seen many of the leaders of Israel's military and intelligence community declare that this deal is the best path for Israel moving forward.

In 2001, I was Chair of a Sierra Club task force that reported on the relationship of terrorism to the environmental movement in the wake of 9/11. I also was allied with those in the Club who sought to have the Club oppose the 2002 war resolution. When Nancy Pelosi opposed the resolution, the San Francisco Chapter sought to honor her for her decision but was forbidden to do so by the national Club leadership. Ultimately, the Club leadership belatedly opposed the war ‑ but it was too late. Kerry and Clinton had already supported it and in 2004, I believe that Kerry and Edwards paid a price for their early war support. Certainly in 2008, Clinton did.

Schumer and Engel will win only if they lose.

Should the opposition to the Iranian accord fail, whether by senate filibuster or failure to override a threatened Obama veto, it is likely that neither Schumer nor Engel will suffer for their opposition. Already, some Senate supporters of the accord state for the record their support for Schumer apart from his opposition to the Iranian accord. But what if Schumer and Engel stumble to a win for their position? What if their opposition does drag enough Democratic legislators with them to defeat the Iranian accord?

If the Iranian accord is defeated inevitable chaos will ensue in the already chaotic Middle East. The international sanctions regime that brought Iran to the negotiating table will evaporate. The door to Russian and Chinese hegemony in the Middle East will be opened wide.

Israel's only remedy will be to attack Iran. That seems to be Netanyahu's aim, but the blood will be on the hands of Engel and Schumer. Neither of them have any record of military service nor scientific training. That may seem a harsh judgment but that is what is at stake. Eventually, that blood may very well be American as well as Muslim and Israeli.

Listen! Can you hear them? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding; they are just beyond the horizon, but they are fast approaching. Their horses are white, black, pale and red.They embody pestilence, famine, death and war.

The Red Horse symbolizes War. Too many people, often for their own selfish reasons, are eager to follow the rider of the red horse. In another context recall Moby Dick and the crazed decision of crew of the Pequod to follow Captain Ahab to their extinction. Only the narrator Ishmael survived.

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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/retired-generals-and-admirals-back-iran-nuclear-deal/2015/08/11/bd26f6ae-4045-11e5-bfe3

[2] http://time.com/3990001/29-scientists-obama-iran-nuclear-deal/

[3] http://www.jewishjournal.com/nation/article/new_poll_u.s._jews_support_iran_deal_despite_misgivings

[4] http://ncronline.org/print/news/politics/340-us-rabbis-we-support-historic-nuclear-accord

The God of Probabilities: How voting fraud in Iran demonstrates the existence of God

Is the title of this piece a jest? Am I kidding? What possible relationship could there be between voting fraud and the issue of God’s existence. Well there is, at least metaphorically; but it will take some explanation. Bear with me. You may actually find a pay-off here.

When I was but seven years old, I began catechism class in the Catholic Church. Once a week we were “released” two hours early from public school so that we could go to our local churches for religious instructions. As I recall, the very first lesson we learned from our blue-covered Baltimore Catechism was that we could never understand God because he was immortal, had always existed and his ways were beyond human comprehension. Having taught me at age seven that God was incomprehensible, the Church has spent the last 65 years explaining God to me. I think there’s a incongruity there.

I transferred from public school to Catholic school for grammar school and high school. I won a gold medal for science and although I didn’t pursue science as a career, it has always been an interest of mine. So to has been my religion for which I also won a gold medal.

It is a fact of history that science and religion have been at best uneasy intellectual partners in the quest for meaning of the human condition. Many things that were thought to be divine and supernatural in earlier times have yielded to scientific explanation. The supernatural became the natural. Early gods included fire, wind, the oceans, volcanoes, star, planets, comets, the moon, and the sun, among other phenomena we now explain blithely in scientific terms.

Twenty or so years ago, I suffered a mild crisis of faith. I had been become familiar with a smattering of chaos theory and quantum analysis. I was startled to learn that atoms were not like miniature solar systems. The popular conception was a nucleus of protons and neutrons around which electrons orbited. Rather, this basic structure of all matter was chaotic and the location of “particle” of it unknowable at any given moment. It seemed that all of existence, at its most basic level was governed by the “Law of Probability.”

That’s a tough thing for a person of religious bent to digest. Is all of existence merely the result of a cosmic coin flips? But then another thought took hold. If there is a “Law” of “Probability” whose law is it? Why should the chaos of quantum existence ever be ordered by anything?

Concurrent with the scientific thought that all existence was chaos ordered only by the Law of Probability, has been scientific investigations into the issue of human consciousness and, as is claimed by some, the interaction of human consciousness with a greater consciousness which some claim to have observed. Piere Teilhard Chardin and others have discerned a “noosphere” of intertwined human consciousness that has evolved from interactions that lower level of consciousness are incapable of joining. Freud’s heretical protégé, Carl Jung, postulated a “collective unconsciousness” which might be better described as collective consciousness.

Ironically, perhaps, scientific experiments designed to explore the issue of collective consciousness rely primarily on the applications of the law of probability. Among the most accessible is that of The Global Consciousness Project: Meaningful Correlations in Random Data whose work is explained at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

The purpose of the project is “”to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.” It’s principal activity is to “collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world.” The issue is whether major events that effect the psyche or consciousness of large masses of people distort the results of the random number generators into more than standard deviations from the norm. In sum, the scientist involved in this project believe they do, and their data demonstrates they do.

There are a number of other projects of a similar vein described by journalist Lynn McTaggart in The Field, (Harpers, New York Updated Edition 2008). Among the experiments she describes are coordinated remote prayer. The Field has an extensive bibliography if you are interested. The results reported by Ms. McTaggert all show consciousness interactions that distort results beyond those expected from standard deviations of the law of probabilities.

So how does election fraud in Iran relate to the issue of God’s existence?

On June 20, 2009, the Washington Post, published a study by Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University. They analyzed the results of the Iranian elections. Their thesis was that given the length of the numbers reported in the results, that the last digits, irrespective of their original authenticity, should have reflected the law probabilities. In sum, there are ten digits, 0 to 9, and in the absence of consciousness intervention by humans attempting to jiggle the results, there ten digits should have been distributed relative evenly in the last column (i.e. each digit approximately 10% of the time). This was of course subject to standard deviations which depend on the size of the sample and in this case the length of the numbers preceding the last digit.

The point of the authors was that the variations were not in accord with the law of probabilities and well beyond standard deviations. They also used a second neutral analysis (the number of non-adjacent digits in the last two columns). That also exceeded standard deviations.

Their conclusion was that the probabilities of the election results not being manipulated was one in two hundred. By applying the law of probabilities we learn that there has been conscious intervention. This is not the same thing as the Global Consciousness Project, but it is at least a metaphor about the interplay of probabilities and consciousness on a cosmic level. But then, even St. Augustine recognized the Genesis was not history but a metaphor for deeper truths - truths that have now been overtaken by science in the “Big Bang” theory and evolution.

So existence is governed by the law of probability, but deviations from law are evidence, at least in some cases, for conscious intervention. In Iran, the conscious intervention was by the operatives of a corrupt regime engineering a fraudulent election. But, in the chaos of quantum existence, the evidence of conscious intervention leads ultimately to a consciousness beyond just humanity, beyond just this universe, but inclusive of all the infinite number of universes that may exist.

All hail the God of Probabilities who creates the law and then lights the way to move beyond it. I believe that way is love. But that’s another story. See http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html