Yet again, JFK [and the Shroud]

I am working to update and mold the material in Quantum Christ into a new book tentatively entitled "The Pope and the Apocalypse [and the Shroud?] Distractions abound including four matters that are still in litigation at one stage or another. Also, current events of an apocalyptic nature including the refugee crisis are a necessary distraction but a component of what I will be writing about.

However, today on Salon.com is a lengthy excerpt about a newly published book on the JFK Assassination that echoes into my life, my family and my abiding interest in the UNSOLVED mystery of the assassination. Also, my belief that those of the scientific community who used the discredited carbon dating of the Shroud to impeach the authenticity of the Shroud are like those who support the conclusion of the Warren Report the Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut without co-conspirators. See: Why the Media Want the Inquiries to End, http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

My late brother Herman was a longtime employee of the CIA. I was careful to never plumb Herman for sensitive information that might be classified. Nonetheless we did have a few careful conversations about JFK. Herman initially echoed the CIA back-up story that Castro did it. Indeed, in my opinion one of the aims for the assassination was war with Cuba.  At one point I had a question about something of CIA protocol totally unrelated to the JFK thing: it concerned the protocol for the hiring of an agent (the subject had defected to the Russians). In response, I received a telephone call from David Atlee Phillips who, if you read the citation at the end of this post was a central figure in most "CIA did it" theories. It was brief conversation of no relevance to JFK.

This morning there was published on Salon an excerpt from a new book by David Talbot. David is not only the founder and first editor of Salon; he has spent a lifetime digging deep in the JFK assassination. I thoroughly recommend the Salon posting. And the next time some scientific expert or skeptic derides the authenticity of the Shroud as being disproved by the "evidence," think JFK and the Warren Report.

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/22/inside_the_plot_to_kill_jfk_the_secret_story_of_the_cia_and_what_really_happened_in_dallas/

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This is not a book promo, but if you are interested in: "The Coming of the Quantum Christ: The Shroud of Turin and the Apocalypse of Selfishness.

http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-coming-of-quantum-christ-has-arrived.htm

It includes a 15% discount code on the printed copy which is beautifully illustrated.

Palm Sunday, March 24, 2013: Christ, Kennedy and Lincoln

For the past two years we have been celebrating day by day the 150th anniversary of events in the Civil War. This year is  huge. There is the horrific Union loss at Chancellorsville followed by the turning point victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July, followed by the Gettysburg address at which Lincoln  redefined our  Nation, turning us toward the fundamental values of the Declaration of Independence.

This is also the fiftieth anniversary of two events of the JFK presidency. The first was the June speech at American University in DC where he first publicly proposed a ban on the atmospheric testing of Atomic weapons. Both he and Khrushchev had looked into the abyss the previous year during the Cuban Missile Crisis and knew the desperate path the World was trodding toward nuclear annihilation.

Kennedy's speech is best remembered by this phrase about the need for US-Soviet cooperation:

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Kennedy lost the White House on November 22, 1963. There is substantial evidence that he did plan to pull of Vietnam after the 1964 election and already had drafted an order to pull back our commitment. All that ended in Dallas, His successor gave the military-industrial complex the war it wanted.

Lincoln finally won his war in 1865. He visited vanquished Richmond but a week later he too was assassinated.

I have come to believe the enduring truth of the Christian faith (or myth, if that suits you) is not the resurrection but its transfiguring of all human experience into the divine. Lincoln and Kennedy both enjoyed great triumphs before their assassins struck. The cheers in Dallas were still ringing in JFK’s ears when all went black.

Today is Palm Sunday when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of an donkey. Cheers were ringing also in his ears. Then came the crucifixion and three days of black for his disciples. And then came Easter morning and the witness of Mary Magdalene that some thing  marvelous had happened.

Today is Palm Sunday and we can not forget even as we celebrate that Good Friday lies only five days in the future. But then two days more and it is Easter.

I close with a quotation from Elaine Pagels, author of the Gnostic Gospels:

“In its portrait of Christ’s life and his passion, orthodox teaching offered a means of interpreting fundamental elements of human experience. Rejecting the gnostic view that Jesus was a spiritual being, the orthodox insisted that he, like the rest of humanity, was born, lived in a family, became hungry and tired, ate and drank wine, suffered and died. They even went so far as to insist that he rose bodily from the dead. Here again, as we have seen, orthodox tradition implicitly affirms bodily experience as the central fact of human life. What one does physically—one eats and drinks, engages in sexual life or avoids it, saves one’s life or gives it up—all are vital elements in one’s religious development. But those gnostics who regarded the essential part of every person as the “inner spirit” dismissed such physical experience, pleasurable or painful, as a distraction from spiritual reality—indeed, as an illusion. No wonder, then, that far more people identified with the orthodox portrait than with the “bodiless spirit” of gnostic tradition. Not only the martyrs, but all Christians who have suffered for 2,000 years, who have feared and faced death, have found their experience validated in the story of the human Jesus.”[i]

We in this generation are blessed with a new revelation. His Shroud which not only registers the fact of His crucifixion, but whispers the hope of his Resurrection, and ours.

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[i] Pagels, Elaine (2004-06-29). The Gnostic Gospels (p. 99). Random House. Kindle Edition.

Is Obama channeling JFK?

A dream died on November 22, 1963.

To many Americans, who are old enough to remember, John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas was the principal reason for a long American nightmare of which Bush II is simply the culmination. Ted Sorenson, the other night, stated that the 1961 Inaugural address was only Kennedy's second best speech. The best was, in Sorenson's opinion (and mine, his June 1963 American University speech at which he chartered a course to end the cold war. That he had plans to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 election is a matter of public record now. All that ended in Dallas.

I have always felt that second biggest casualty at Dallas was Khrushchev. The Cuban Missile crisis had scared them both and Khrushchev had staked his won career on his new relationship to JFK. His leadership survived for several months but eventually was ousted.

Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut gunman. To some, his cloudy intelligence background and the incredible convenience of JFK's death to those who were looking to profit from the Vietnam War is more than a convenience.

If anybody is interested, I wrote an op-ed piece on the media and the environment using Kennedy's speech American University as a starting point. http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

I wrote an op-ed piece for Newsday (which made the WP wire) in November 1993 which discussed the media and the assassination. http://www.johnklotz.com/new-jfk.htm

In any event, you can graph the dissolution of the Americans trust in government has beginning it sharp climb to the time when the public discovered that LBJ’s peace campaign of 1964 was a con job.

I don't know if Obama has Kennedy’s Irish political smarts and I don’t think he has quite obtained JFK's eloquence [maybe he needs a Sorenson], but he's getting there. And beyond political smarts, he has the intellectual capacity to be a truly great President. He will bear the heavy burden of enhanced expectations.

But, after a years of pessimism about the future, and years of second rate intellects occupying the White House, I am suddenly optimistic about the future. I have seen the future and it's Barack.

johnklotz.blogspot.com