The good old days

An Anti-Israeli musician articulates the desire underlying all those who object to Israel's right to defend itself when he states that he will play music "from the time when Jews didn't have armies and police to harass freedom fighters, when Jews were victims..." Ah yes, I remember those days. Wasn't there something about ovens back then? See Gaza Protesters for the full story, including reasonable explanations of why the Israelis are not the ones using innocent people as cannon fodder: Hamas is guilty of that.

Lectionary Meditation

Feeling rather gloomy, after the prayers for the people at the Ascension Day service suggested in not so many words, that the nation of Israel ought to just roll over and play dead (be dead) I was struck in today's office reading that Luke says Jesus was 'full of joy through the Holy Spirit." Luke 10:21-24

I'll have to do a search on this later, but it seems to me that Jesus doesn't really express a lot of joy or delight or pleasure. Mostly he is weeping or mad or just plain exasperated, particularly because the disciples just don't get what he is saying about his impending death. This time he is joyful because they are having an aha moment. As a teacher, I can relate! Okay, he may not have succeeded in reaching the "wise and learned" but he got through the "little children."

Please stop clinging desperately to the wisdom of this world. Read this: "Palestine Betrayed"

Multiverses

The miserable chaplain who's losing his faith in Catch-22, which I'm listening to on my iPod, wonders what God was doing for all that endless infinite time before the creation of the universe. That's actually a theologically correct question to ask, because God must exist outside time and space, whether there is one universe or many. You are probably aware that there is a sudden spate of programs explaining astrophysics to laypeople. Likely this is due to how good the images all look in Hi Def. The last one we watched dealt with the possibility of parallel universes. I knew physicists consider this a possibility, but I didn't know they'd actually got funding to run experiments in their giant collider that might possibly create a particle that could somehow prove their existence. Of course, it could go on indefinitely without disproving it.

Mr. Crackles and I got to talking. Maybe Heaven and Hell are just parallel universes. Heaven's the place where everything went right and we can't get there in these bodies but our souls can slip through the wormhole. There could be zillions of Hells. Maybe God exists in that Heaven dimension. He can reach through to us, but we can only reach Him with spiritual energy: prayer. Hmmm. The scientists say someday we could replicate our universe if we can figure out how to send something through to a parallel universe. Maybe God did that, made our universe that way.

I get a chill. Mr. Crackles doesn't see what my problem is. He likes that God can be explained as a possibility even scientists can accept. But then he's just bigger and better than us but not ontologically different. I can be annoying and use words like ontologically when I have to. But he's soo soo vastly beyond us: isn't that what God is? I don't think so, actually. Better isn't better enough for me to give my soul over even if my soul would benefit. My God can enter the space/time continuum but He doesn't have to. The God of a parallel universe seems stuck there somehow, not really infinite. My God does exist in some way I can't understand before time and space.