The Heart of the Sun

 As the last of the leaves fall in my neighborhood, and a deeper chill sharpens the air, winter's arrival feels almost upon us.  When I walk the dog in the morning, the rising of the sun tells that truth too.  It's lower on the horizon, and the shadows it casts stretch across lawns and gardens even at the height of the day.

Though winter remains technically weeks away, it feels present, nipping at my face and fingers.

That rising sun leavens the bitterness, light and heat pressing through the almost leafless trees as it crests the rise to the east.  The dark fabric of my winter coat absorbs its energies.  It feels quite pleasant.

I meditated on this on a recent walk.  What we experience of our friendly neighborhood G-class main sequence star is light and heat.  What else is a star, after all, but light and heat?

All of those energies rise from the sun's visible surface, the crackling seething radiance of the ten thousand degree photosphere.  Above that rage the fires and mass ejections of the sun's coronal atmosphere, which is paradoxically much, much hotter, millions of degrees hotter.    Our mental image of the sun is precisely that, a bright sphere surrounded by flame, planted in the upper right corner of a child's drawing.

But that radiance is not what makes a star a star.  What makes a star burn bright in the heavens is fusion, as hydrogen is gravitically compressed into helium, which is in turn torn into hydrogen, which is again compressed into helium, each reaction releasing the immense self-sustaining energies that fill the heavens with light and heat.  On this little world, it's what sustains the existence of every living thing.

That process, we do not see.  It lies deep in the heart of the sun, out of view and unviewable.

On that cold morning, I mused on how that can mirror the human tendency to mistake the energies of our raging at one another for the heart of human purpose.  What we see, as we compulsively tell stories of wars and rumors of wars, is not the engine upon which we rely for our being.  What we experience, as we lose ourselves in parasocial relationships with celebrity and influence, is not the essence of our personhood.

 None of these things, bright and hot as they are, is the truth and life of us.

Throwing Things At Each Other

It was an aside, one of those remnants that come with surprising frequency whenever I putter around in ancient languages as part of my sermon prep.

It was the story of Jesus going out to be tempted in the wilderness, to be tempted by "the devil."

Only the transliteration got all literal, and presented the Greek word diabolos not at the word "devil," but as its prefix and root.

He was tempted in the wilderness by the "thru-caster," it said.   Huh, I thought.

So I looked up the root of the word "devil," and found that it comes from the root word bolos, or "to throw," and dia, a polyvalent prefix meaning "through" or "between."

The "devil," then, is the personification of relationship projectiles.  It evokes a throwing-between, not in the "friendly game of catch" sort of way, but in the "I intend this to hurt you" sort of way.

Taken that way, the word speaks to both distance between souls and violence directed towards another, as we stand at a remove and lob hatred at one another.  That can be physical, or it can be verbal.

Diabolos can also mean "throwing through," which reminded me of the verb "to defenestrate," the act of hurling an enemy--or an object--through a window.

Again, it is the personification of violence, inflicted upon or directed towards an object of hatred.

Either way, it seems like a fair description of the heart of our blighted world's unpleasantness.

Stories, Data, and Truth

It was an excellent little article, an exploration of the struggle many Americans have with science.  On the one hand, we say we love it, because science is awesome and nifty and stuff.  On the other, we seem to have trouble processing science as a decision-making framework.

When presented with scientific findings, we are perfectly willing to ignore them, or find reasons to just keep on blundering along.  Science tells us that the universe is 13.9 billion years old, and does so definitively.  But we ignore it.  Science tells us, with charts and graphs and clear deductive reasoning, that homo sapiens sapiens evolved.  But we reject it.  Science coughs and suggests, strongly, that perhaps it might be a mistake to turn our planet into a superheated, carbon-choked Venus.  But we listen to the lies told by the folks who sell us gas instead, because we like our big SUVs.  Science sees us choosing not to vaccinate, and struggles not to punch us in the nose for being such complete morons.

It's a clear dissonance.  The question: why?

Part of it, I think, has to do with the way we human beings understand our world.  We are creatures of story.  Our stories define us, give us a sense of ourselves, and give us a sense of purpose.

And this, as the article describes it, is part of the problem.  For our understanding of what is true, the article laments, we rely on "stories rather than statistics."

We prefer our truths told as tales, not as data points.  So we'll base our decisions on anecdotes, which as we really should know, are not reliable reflections of broader realities.  That story spun out by the mom at your preschool whose sister knew a woman whose kid started showing signs of autism after he got his MMR shots?  That has more value than the reflections of a thousand researchers, God help us.

And that's problematic on a deeper level, not just because anecdotal evidence causes us to make stupid decisions, or to spin out tales that are fundamentally ungrounded in reality.

It is problematic because if we set the storytelling part of our humanity aside, we cease to be human.

None of us understand our lives in terms of statistics and data points.  That is not what gives us our personhood, what establishes who we are.  Narratives create both individual identity and community cohesion.

Deeper still, narrative establishes purpose and moral ground, in a way that science simply cannot.  Storytelling creates meaning, and establishes the valuations that determine how we choose to act on the information we're encountering.  The deepest and most transforming stories don't even need to have actually happened to create moral purpose.  The stories told by my Teacher, or the wisdom fables of Aesop?  They didn't happen, and yet they frame existence in a way that creates identity.

The purpose of science is establishing what is or is not empirically true in our material reality.  That's the point of scientific method.  What it cannot do, and has neither the tools nor the desire to accomplish, is make any meaningful statement about how that information should be used.  Data is simply the ground for gathering more data.  Knowledge serves only knowledge.  And that path, clinically removed from its impact on persons and living systems, is a dangerous one to journey.

So where, in this dialectic tension between these two very different ways of knowing, lies the synthesis?  How do we integrate the data into the tale, and the tale into the data?

It lies, I think, in being willing to listen to the impacts of our stories on reality.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is radical compassion for neighbor and stewardship over creation, the report we'll get back from the data will go one way.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is material power, profit-maximization, or the glazed-eye pursuit of a snarling, fever-dream delusion, the data will report back another way.

Ye shall know them by their fruits, as the Teacher once said, in a pause between stories.

#Nolivesmatter

The hashtag is out there, circulating among my #hashtag-hip progressive friends, as our culture struggles with the lingering poison of centuries of class/race conflation.

#blacklivesmatter, it goes.

Of course they do, I want to say.  But, dammit, my mind insists on deconstructing it, slicing that hashtag up, analyzing it.

The one that stabs at me: "matter."  What makes a life matter?

What gives it importance?  What gives it meaning?  What gives a life...as the word "matter" implies...substance?

And as much as I want to say, yes, of course, all lives matter...the reality is that this is not true in our society.  I cannot affirm that as a real thing.

All lives have the potential to matter, of course.  Every self-aware being is capable of creating and engaging with meaning.  And as a Jesus-follower, I hold that meaning exists, deeper than our subjectivity and our cultural values.

As a person of faith, I understand my purpose.  I know what gives my life substance and worth.

But within the value set established by a society, we can also not matter at all.

In a culture that lacks any purpose but profit, what does "mattering" mean for any of us?

It certainly can't have been easy for Eric Garner to think that his life mattered.  What, from the value set of our culture, would have given him a sense of worth as a person?  He'd had a job, but work is hard to come by.  He's been arrested, multiple times, for the picayune, meaningless, should-offend any-card-carrying-libertarian crime of selling individual "untaxed" cigarettes.

Meaning, he purchased a pack of cigarettes, on which had been levied an intentionally punitive and hefty tax, which Garner would have paid.    Then, he broke it out and sold the individual cigarettes for fifty cents.  Making a little money on the side, off of a legal product, legally purchased, his own property, all taxes paid.  A "loosie," as they call it.  Fifty cents.  A quarter here, a quarter there, nothing more than pocket change.

Is this a respected vocation?  Hardly.  Was he a "producer?"  No.  Was he thriving and prospering?  No.  Was he a celebrity, or wealthy, or influential?  No.

Was his life, in any way, valued by our culture?  No.  He was unimportant.  Unimportant enough that he could inform the people who were killing him that they were killing him.  He could ask them to stop killing him, politely and repeatedly, with no cursing or profanity.   He could say "please."  He may as well have not been talking at all, an inanimate object.  Eric Garner was nothing more than a broken window, useless, to be swept up and carted away.

His life did not matter.  A life, worth less than fifty cents, less than a pack of gum, less than a twenty ounce store-brand soda.

Nor, quite frankly, do most of us really feel like our lives matter in this society.  Ours is a culture that tramples the weak and the poor, despises them, demonizes them.  If we get sick, thems the breaks.  If we lose our jobs, we are lazy.  If the stress breaks our minds, then we are dangerous.  We matter only in so far as we have the ability to consume.  Once we do not, we are...unprofitable.  Meaningless.  Worthless.  It is that anxiety, the fear, that drives us.

My leftist friends, lost in the pointlessly divisive semiotics of academe, do not quite realize how much purchase such a death has.  How much it points to how our culture commodifies all of us.  How much it illuminates how we all scrabble against the cold soulless face of mammon, anxious in our poverty, anxious in our wealth, anxious because we know we are disposable.

#blacklivesmatter?  No.  Not against the central governing value set of our society, in which color is still a visually convenient proxy for class.  #poorlivesmatter?  No, of course they don't.

To the Creator of the Universe, sure.  To families and friends, yes.  But to this culture?  No.

None of our lives matter.

The First Libertarian

On a recent evening, I found myself digging around online for some baseline data on the term "libertarian."  It was probably because of a bit of sermon research that had involved Ron Swanson, America's Favorite Libertarian (tm).  As is often the case with sermon prep, I found myself swirling down a wild rabbit hole of concepts and ideas.

My interest, entirely unrelated to anything resembling the sermon that needed to be written: finding the root of the term libertarian.  Where had it come from?  What was its original meaning?  Given my preference not to wander far from theology in my preaching, I needed to do that on my own nickel.

Like most net-denizens, that meant starting out hitting wikipedia, where I learned that our conflation of "libertarian" with what amounts to a peculiar anarcho-capitalism is a more recent phenomenon.

The term first entered into broad usage to describe a particular flavor of communist.  The word "libertarian" in the late 19th century was primarily used to describe continental anarcho-syndicalism.  Or, if that term isn't exactly ringing a bell, it means the folks who trusted neither state nor big business, and who felt that a blend of radical personal freedom and voluntary association was the only way for a society to go.  

Still and all, it's a bit funny to know that the American conservatism of today not only uses a term that was a vital part of primal Marxism, but uses it in pretty much the same way the early Marxists used it.  This wasn't surprising.  If you've ever read any Trotsky...particularly where he talks about the curse of bureaucracy, or the need for every citizen to have access to guns...you know that there are some weird resonances between the very very far left and the very very far right.

But the first use of the term, as deep back as our wiki-brain could find it, was in a collection of essays by obscure British Enlightenment-era philosopher William Belsham.  Here, a big thank you to Google books.  Lord, but this one would have been hard to find twenty years ago.  But there it was, scanned and ready and part of our collective subconscious.    So of course, to that essay I went, looking to stand in encounter with the very first libertarian.

Which, after a few minutes of reading Belsham, I realized I wasn't.  It took a little bit, because the structure of Belsham's essay wasn't exactly immediately accessible.  To be fuceffful in furveying philofophical effays of that era requires getting past a different way of thinking and using language...and writing the letter "S."  I still can't read original texts of that era without imagining they faid ftuff like thif back in the Fixteenth and Feventeeth Fentury, which actually makes it a little more fun.

What became clear, though, was that the term was coined as an insult.  Belsham, very much a creature of his day, was using the essay to snipe at those who stood in opposition to the hard determinism of the Enlightenment era.  Divine providence and design were the nature of things, as established by the Necessitarians.  Necessitarians,  Belsham argued, understood that Divine Providence was immutable and as set as Manifest Destiny.

In the face of the insight of the greatest philosophers of the day, there were fools who suggested that the Deity was not in charge of every last instant.  Their insistence that we were free beings, able to make meaningful choices that did not hew to a single preordained order of being?  Absurd, and an insult to both reason and the clear design that could be found in the unchanging deterministic will of God and God's Providence.

To those fools, whose arguments against determinism were so absurd that they barely merited a response, Belsham gave a name.

"Libertarians."

So in what I thought were my wanderings away from theology, I found myself right back in the thick of it.

Funny, how often that happens.

Emergence and Purpose

Amongst the folks I blog-feed, there are many who are wrassling now with the state of "emergence," that conversational/relational movement within Christianity that fluttered into being just about a decade ago.

Emergence has been described as many things, and presented in many ways.  It's resistance to the theological rigidity of literalist fundamentalism.  It's a struggle against the strangling formalism of the dying old-line denominations.  It's a wandering away from the bright shiny falseness of marketized Christianity.  It is those things.

But mostly, it has been talking.  Or rather, talking about talking.  Emergence is, in my experience, a fundamentally epistemological movement, to use a big honking incoherent philosophical term that just shows you how very smart I am.  Ahem.  Epistemology means, more or less, the study of knowing how we know.  It is seeking to know how we know.  It is talking about how we talk.  It's very postmodern.  It's very academic, in the pejorative sense of the term.

Epistemology is a sign, pointing to a sign, pointing to a sign.   It goes nowhere, an ouroboros serpent devouring its own tail.   Epistemology has defined philosophy for a hundred years, which is why philosophy as a discipline is now utterly irrelevant.  It is also a defining feature of emergence, which is an ill wind for those who hope it might become something more than it is.

To be a movement, emergence needs to find its ontology.  Meaning, it needs to be articulating something fundamental and transforming about the very nature of being.    Philosophy used to have the ovaries to make such statements.  That's what made it fun.  That's what gave it purpose.  That's what made it relevant.  Not "culturally" relevant.  Bigger than that.  Deeper than that.  Relevant to our existence as beings writ into the fabric of reality.  Relevant to what God hath wrought.

Making those statements...using theology as a way to point to the depth of the creation we inhabit...is one of the things that faith needs to do if it is to be meaningful.  Faith says: this is how the Creator has spoken and shaped the Universe.  This is the Real.  Because of this, I will orient myself towards reality in thus and such a way.  It doesn't dither about, unwilling to commit itself to any statements about anything.

Why is it important for the faithful to be tolerant and open minded?  Why is relationship and transforming conversation so meaningful?  Why should we place such a high value on creativity and dynamism and seeking the joyous New?

And...for Jesus folk... why is this way of understanding faith a more reliable expression of God's Word than the faith claims of fundamentalism?

Emergence needs to be able to claim that it knows something about what is true.  

I think it can, but for that, the conversation will have to change a wee bit.

More on that tomorrow.

English, Dragonish, and the Problem with Fundamentalism

Yesterday, as I bumbled my way through a reasonably productive Monday, I encountered two things that got me thinking about faith and language.   The first of those two things was the video below, which was pitched out onto Facebook by the former head of the religious school at my family's synagogue.   It's a pleasant little bit of history, the history of the English language, presented by the inimitable Open University.   The Open University, in the event you haven't heard of it, is a British institution, one that allows easy access to quality, college-level coursework to anyone who has the desire to partake of it.   Back then I lived there in the late 70s, much British daytime programming during the day on one of the three television channels was dedicated to Open University lectures and course preparation.   Those wacky socialists and their educations!  Anyhoo, here it is, ready to sop up 10 minutes of your life.  It's a bit naughty in that wry British way, so thou art forewarned:



After this little excursus into the organic evolution of the English language, I took a break from FB and blogging, did a few chores, and then settled in for a bit of day-off gaming.  I'm playing my way through Skyrim on the PS3, and it's a remarkably entertaining, deep, and well-constructed game.  One of the elements that Bethesda Softworks has really nailed in both this game and others is a well-crafted soundtrack.  It's a contextual soundtrack, meaning the music shifts and varies depending on location, time of day, and whether or not you're blowing up zombies with balls of magical fire.

As I settled in with my controller yesterday, though, something caught my attention.  At the beginning of the game, during the initial load screen, there's a song.  It's a big bellowy hoo-hah song, all pomp and bombast, the sort of music that stirs the small Viking fragment of my genetic heritage.   In the midst of drums and blaring brass, a big male voice choir grunts and vocalizes, and then starts yarping gibberish in an MMA-meets-Glee testosterama.

When the yarping began, I realized, suddenly, that they weren't singing nonsense words at all.  For the purposes of verisimilitude, the game has a language that was made for it, a language spoken by dragons.  The words in that tongue are spoken throughout the game, and in a moment of geekish epiphany, I recognized dovakiin, the Dragonish word for "dragon-born."  And then the word Anduin, the name of the great dragon who brings about the end of time.  It was a bit like that time I first attended a synagogue service after learning Hebrew.  Only geekier.

I went online, and found the...cough...English "translation," which goes like this:



So here's a language, or the framework of one, that exists solely in-game.   I'm not sure there's enough there there for the American Bible Society to attempt a translation into Dragonish, but I figure if you can translate the Bible into Klingon, anything is fair game.

Twice in one day, then, there came the reminder of the ephemeral character of human language.  It's one of the reasons I find fundamentalist literalism so completely bizarre.

Sure, the nature of God is unchanging, and the nature of the Being that God speaks is boundlessly, deeply real.  But words?   As much as I love 'em, words in human tongues aren't the thing itself.  They can evoke.  They can suggest.  They can point to, and lead to, the Holy.  But they are not the Real that rises from our Maker.

Perhaps that's why we find it so easy to fight over them.   As MacDonald puts it:

God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency in His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words...even He must depend for being understood upon the spirit of His disciple.

Viva la Neoreformacion!

Product and Service

I'm typing this on an iMac, which is unsurprising, because my house is littered with Apple products.

The wife and I both have iPhone 4s.  That's 4s, plural, not Four - Esses, which we probably won't get.  My Four is the fourth iPhone I've owned, as the first two met untimely demises at my clumsy hands, and the last one got handed down to my son.

The boys both have old nanos, which see intermittent use.  One has a Touch, which is his camera and primary portable gaming platform.  The other has that repurposed, de-simmed iPhone 3GS, which is serving the same function.  To replace our recently flamed-out first-gen Intel Macbook Pro, we acquired an Air, which is a lovely piece of kit.  Oh, and my wife has a 3G iPad, first gen.

If you've invested in Apple over the years, our family has done our part to insure that your investment yielded handsome returns.

The legacy of Steve Jobs is, without question, those exceptionally well-designed products.  His legendary precision and unrelenting focus on product excellence was what made him such a competent CEO.  The bottom line, if you are making something to sell in the marketplace, is to make that product as well-designed and constructed as possible.   That was always Job's focus, which meant that he had absolutely no tolerance for mediocrity.  He was an absolutely legendary perfectionist, and had an unerring sense of what makes for a solid product.

That, frankly, is what guarantees the profitability of a corporation.  If you focus on making an excellent product, and price it fairly, you will succeed.  If you focus on profit above all else, you will become distracted from that primary goal.  You will start making Chevy Vegas, and you will fail.

In that, Jobs knew and lived out what it takes to be successful in business.

But in the thickets of hagiography for this profoundly accomplished entrepreneur and businessman, I hazard to ask:  is that what matters?

Jobs created great, innovative, well-designed products.  But do they make the world a better place?  I remember what it was to be alive in the pre-iMac era, and a time when Apple was not my preferred provider of quality electronic devices.

Honestly?  It makes no difference.  What has been created is ethically neutral.

Sure, I can use that iPhone to open up new lines of communication with a deaf shut-in, or help a lost stranger find his way.  But that same tech allows that guy down the street to video-sext with his lover while "working late" in his upstairs office while his wife sits alone in their bedroom, or your 15 year old daughter to send NSFW pictures to her manipulative 18 year old boyfriend.   Sure, I can use my Air or my iMac to blog about justice and grace, or to drop a supportive comment on the Facebook page of someone in need of prayer or kindness.  But I could also use them to spew anonymous hatred as the stalker-troll on some other human being's online presence.

The world is shinier and faster and more elegant.  But better?  To speak true, it does not feel so.

As I consider Jobs' life, I wonder at the meaningfulness of a life driven by perfectionism.   Having worked in the field of philanthropy for a while myself, I know that unlike many leaders in industry, Jobs had no interest in charity.  It simply didn't process.  He had no time for it.  He was far too busy and far too focused on product.  Unlike Bill Gates, who has poured his wealth into fighting diseases, or Warren Buffett, who has used the fruits of his business acumen to support Gates in that effort, or countless other leaders in the business sector, Jobs did not use his wealth...or the wealth of Apple...towards any end other than the improvement of Apple products.

Though the products are desirable, and exceptionally well crafted, they are just that.  Products.

And I wonder...is perfectionism what makes for a worthy existence?

And I wonder...is creating profitable and elegantly-designed products what merits a "that'll do, pig, that'll do" at the completion of this life?

I respect Jobs ferocity of purpose, and his creativity, and his intelligence, and his showmanship.  There was much to admire in his life.  I'm just not sure I'd want to live it.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

My delving into M-Theory has continued over the last few nights, as I've waded into Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Greene is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Columbia University, and his writing for a popular audience is both substantive and accessible.  Unlike Kaku's Parallel Worlds, which routinely used terminology related to faith, Greene is more vigorously secular.  Issues of meaning and purpose are subordinate to determining mechanics and structure.  The book makes very little effort to explore the whole Meaning of Life question.  It's purpose is to go deep into the underlying processes of reality.  Period.

Well, perhaps that's not quite right.  As Greene lays out his own journey of understanding, the first outside reference point relative to meaning and purpose is the existentialist movement.  His opening chapter is full of talk of his adolescent reading of Sartre and Camus...which, of course, endears him to me immensely.

What's interesting in Greene's brief discussion of philosophy is that he neatly steps around the struggle for meaning.  Meaning, Greene assumes, can be found in the "...assessment of the universe at all possible levels."  (p. 21)   That is his Sisyphian "struggle to the heights."  Instead of the application of the will in shoving that rock up a hill, his existentialist purpose comes in shoving knowledge further and further into the mysteries of the universe.

In the midst of affirming the value of heaving string theory up that mountain, Greene surfaces...as, if I'm remembering correctly, did Kaku...a famous quotation from physicist Richard Feynman.  That little snippet of wisdom claims that a knowledge of cosmology deepens appreciation of everything.  In contemplating a rose, for instance, one takes in color and scent and texture, but then that goes deeper.  You see..."the wonder and magnificence of the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes." (ibid).

Here, I found myself suddenly bemused.   I find the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes of creation equally wonderful and magnificent.  But when you go to that place of marvelous complexity, are you still contemplating a rose?  Or has the rose qua rose ceased to be relevant, just as space and time themselves cease to be relevant at Planck distances?

During a time of midweek meditation at my congregation a few months ago with a few of the old saints of my church, I was similarly contemplating a stained glass window in the sanctuary.  It's a bright and impressionist rendering of Jesus.

Deep in meditation, I found myself lost in the the light of the reds and greens, in the rippled textures of the glass, in the way light hung and refracted.  Seen from that level, the reality to which the window pointed ceased to be discernable.  The image vanished.  The meaning and intent of the artist disappeared in a thicket of other inputs.

It was a delightful, calm moment.  Yet at that level of contemplation, something was absent.  The awareness that a sentient being applied to create that particular arrangement of matter, the intentionality that went into creating that image, the narrative underlying that image...all of that was not evident.

There was still beauty.  But the storytelling and the imprint of sentience were gone.

When Greene implies that meaning can be found by knowing the universe "on all possible levels," I wonder if that is true.  One can find beauty on almost all of the levels.  But meaning?

Cosmology and Purpose

Those dancing strings sure can make the world odd..

As I finished up my reading of Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds yesterday, I'll freely confess that large chunks of it came off as coherent as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  As uffish in my study I thought whilst sitting by the Tumtum screen, the words describing string theory and superstring theory came whiffling through my tulgey brain, and burbled as they came.

Part of this...a large part of it...comes from the inhuman scale of quantum mechanics.  I'll catch images here and there, as my spacetime-formed mental clutch graunches gears mightily against eleventh dimensional cogs.   The best I can get are approximations, images that rise out of my knowledge base in a feeble attempt to represent a reality that is utterly beyond my capacity to experience.  As I struggled to conceptualize strings, the best I could do was think of those little wiggly dragon tongues from James and the Giant Peach.  When Kaku got into talking about the challenge in modeling the music of membranes, the dimensionally expanded forms of string theory that provides the "M" in "M-theory," I found myself thinking of drum-heads.

This is the pesky thing about being a mystic and not a mathematician, I suppose.  The swirl of symbols that Kaku doubtless uses to conceptualize these things are surely more precise.

Then again, when it comes time to lay out the "why this matters" conclusion, the summative chapter of Kaku's book has no answers.  As far as Kaku is concerned, the structures of the universe may prove to be elegant and beautiful mathematically.  But there's no meaning to be found there.  He writes:

...I do not believe this design gives personal meaning to humanity.  No matter how dazzling or elegant the final formulation of physics may be, it will not uplift the spirits of billions and give them emotional fulfillment.  No magic formula coming from cosmology and physics will enthrall the masses and enrich their spiritual lives.  (p. 358)

And then, Kaku goes on.  While he claims not to derive his ethics from his cosmology, the purpose Kaku finds in life is remarkably relativistic.  We build our own meaning, says he.  Meaning is what we make of it, nothing more, and nothing less.

Being a good sort, Kaku tries to articulate this in a way that affirms some generally good stuff.  If we're really creating meaning, then, well, we're going to create good meaning.  Work hard!  Love people!  Carpe Diem!  Be a mentor!  Work for justice!  Dominate the globe with your unstoppable army of quantum-forge-powered robots!

Well, not that last one.  Kaku's brilliance in cosmology seems to wander into Joel Osteen's shallow waters when it comes to ethics.   It's earnest and well-meaning self-actualization talk, but without a clear vision of what that might mean relative to concepts like "good."   He tries, for a whole page, to talk purpose and ethics, but it's just a gloss.  A pity, because the vision of being he proposes does seem to give a foundation for talking about "good" in terms that integrate with his physics.

When he talks about fulfilling potential, it feels for an instant like he's catching the importance of intentionality in an m-theory universe.  When he talks about the fundamental unity of quantum reality, it almost...almost...feels like the foundation of the mystic ethos.    But those things flutter away, undeveloped.

No matter.  It's still a faskinatin' book, and Kaku's efforts to translate this mindboggling complex stuff into lay language are to be strongly commended.

Born Again? Watchoo Talkin' 'Bout, Jesus?

Jesus never said we should be born again.

To which the logical response would be, "Well, of course he did! Look at John 3:3! 'In reply Jesus declared, 'I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.' Look at John 3:7! 'You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' Pastor David, haven't you read the Bible? Just what are they teaching in seminaries nowadays?"

Greek, actually. In the Greek in which John was written, what Jesus says in the two verses above is that we must be "gennethenai aneuthen." The first word means "born," and it has a familiar root. Think "generate," or "genesis." The challenge comes with the word aneuthen, which the NIV and the KJV translate as "again."

That word occurs 31 times in our Bibles. It surfaces eighteen times in the Septuagint--that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was circulating at the time of Christ--and thirteen times in the Gospels and Epistles.

Of those 31 occurances, it is translated "again" only three times. Two of those are the verses we just saw in John 3. The third is in Galatians 4:9--but there it disappears into part of a two-verb construct with the verb form palin. And palin is--guess what--the most commonly used Greek term for "again." I really hope the Republican party doesn't know this.

In every other location, aneuthen is translated to mean "over," "on top," "from the beginning," or "from above." Let's take a look at seven examples from the NIV, where I've bolded the English translation:

Gen. 27:39 "...away from the dew of heaven above."
Gen. 49:25 "..who blesses you with blessings of the heavens above,"
Exodus 25:21 "..Place the cover on top of the ark.."
Job 3:4 "..may God above not care about it.."
Isaiah 45:8 "...You heavens above, rain down righteousness.."
Jeremiah 4:28 "..the heavens above grow dark.."
Ezekiel 1:26 "Above the expanse over their heads.."

Here are seven more from the New Testament:

Matthew 27:51 ".. the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom."
Mark 15:38 "The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom."
John 3:31 "The one who comes from above is above all.."
John 19:11 "Jesus answered, 'You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above'.."
John 19:23 "This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom."
James 1:17 " Every good and perfect gift is from above.."
James 3:17 "But the wisdom that comes from heaven..."

Given the dominant Biblical meaning of aneuthen, what Jesus said in that conversation with Nicodemus--despite the influence of the English translations--was not that we should be born "again."

The word we hear in scripture does not mean simple repetition. I would contend that Jesus is expressing a much more powerful spiritual truth to Nicodemus--that we should be born "from above," or born "from heaven."

So you say...so what? If he said we were to be "born from above"...so what? What possible difference does that make?"

If I were a closet Raelian, this would be the point where I'd start explaining, IN ALL CAPS AND BOLD TEXT ABOUT HOW JESUS WAS REALLY TALKING HERE ABOUT THE ALIENS!!! IT COMES FROM ABOVE!!! JESUS IS SAYING ALL CHRISTIANS MUST BE ALIEN BABIES!!!

But the transmitter implants the Presbyterian Church put in my pineal gland are still working nicely, so I won't say that.

I could also be proposing changing the term "born again," claiming that it never occurs in Scripture. But that wouldn't be valid, as the term "born again" does actually occur in the New Testament. It isn't in the Gospels, but in 1 Peter 1:23, where the Greek word anagegennemenoi is used. Ana means "again" and gegennemenoi means "y'all-are-born," so that term--legitimately translated--means "y'all-are-again-born." Think, for example, of how anabaptist means "y'all-are-again-baptized" or anakournikova means "y'all-are-again-wearing-little-tennis-skirts."

Honestly, for mature Christians, the distinction is mostly moot. Even with that verse historically mistranslated as "born again," we still know exactly what Christ was talking about from the broader context of his teachings. We are to be transformed. We are to be "born of water and the Spirit." (John 3:5) Those who have felt the Spirit moving in their lives, and whose lives have been--and are being--changed by Christ know what it means, no matter what word is used. They're feeling it. They're living it.

Nonetheless, the reality that a term that Christians have used to describe themselves for several generations has only a very tenuous root in Christ's teachings is...interesting.

It is also interesting that the words recorded in Scripture have a specific theological meaning, one that resonates with all of Christ's other teachings about the change he is bringing us. The birth that Christ describes has something to do with what is "above," which in the context of John's Gospel indicates a connection with the eternal and the heavenly realm.

Though it's a minor shift, just a single word, it does reinforce that the transformation Jesus is describing is our being born of and into our eternity.