Scientific theology: a new history of creation

Chapter 10: Is this story true?

10.1: Creed, Trinity and Universe
10.2: Narcissus and Theory of Everything
10.3: Trinity and the multiplicity of divinity
10.4: The Christian god and the initial singularity
10.5: The quantum and the continuum
10.6: Action and logic
10.7: Algorithms and symmetry
10.8: The future History of Salvation
10.9: Paradise
10.10: Human rights: Agency, freedom and privacy
10.11: The rule of Law
10.12: The Holy Spirit: Le Milieu Divin
10.13: Cultural variation and selection
10.14: Democracy: local control
10.15: Economics: the social flow of value
10.16: Pain and compassion
10.17: Can the Roman Church become truly catholic?
10.18: The reception of the divine universe

10.1: Creed, Trinity and Universe

This has been a long story. Now the critical question: Is it true? Or perhaps How true is it? It began as a rather bitter and extended critique of the Roman Catholic Church:

This essay is dedicated
to all people,
past and present,
who have been harmed
spiritually, mentally or physically
by the Catholic Church
or its agents:
invaded, murdered, burnt, tortured,
raped, abused, molested,
beaten,
deceived, deprived, disrespected, denied or abandoned.

Personally, I sadly regret having been systematically indoctrinated as a small child with a heavy load of false and politically motivated fiction.

I have proposed an alternative, but I must be sure that the cure is not worse than the disease. In this chapter I go back over the old ground, looking for the weak spots in my story and the strengths of the Church.

I must acknowledge that the Church is an immense and ancient organisation. It has a 2000 year history and currently directly and indirectly influences the lives of maybe two billion people. In terms of politics and wealth it is probably the most powerful organization the world has seen. It is not to be confronted lightly. My own experience tells me, however, that many of its doctrines are a serious weight on the human spirit and in need of reform. I also realize that it has huge momentum, so that any significant change of course will probably take generations. History of religions - Wikipedia

The history of Christianity began with the first written stories of gods and people that were written about 5000 years ago. We have archeological and architectural evidence of religious sentiment stretching possibly a hundred thousand years further back. The specifically Christian story begins with the Hebrew Bible and the Eastern traditions that fed into it. Its documentary evolution then passed through the authors of the New Testament, the Fathers of the Church, the Medieval universities and the long line of Church Councils and Papal documents that developed and clarified its doctrines up to the present. Robert Crotty (2012): Three Revolutions: Three Drastic Changes in Interpreting the Bible, Ray Norris: The world's oldest story? Astronomers say global myth about 'seven sisters' may reach back 100 000 years

The standard reference for Catholic doctrinal development is Denzinger in its various editions. The doctrinal foundation of the Church began with the broad spectrum of ideas and opinions current around the ancient Mediterranean region expressed in the work of poets, philosophers and sages, the Bible and the writing of the Fathers of the Church. These variations were gradually selected into two broad categories which we might call "truth" and "heresy". As time went by the sanctions against heresy and heretics grew stronger until they emerged in the medieval period as military crusades against regions considered by the Church to be heretical. Henricus Denzinger: Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, Christopher Tyerman: The World of the Crusades

In the modern era, the only large organization that exercises a level of thought control comparable to the Catholic Church is the Communist Party of China. While the Church under its current Pope Francis appears to be relaxing its grip on the human spirit, the Chinese regime under Xi is clamping down harder on freedom of thought and action. It is implementing methods reminiscent of medieval crusades and Nazi concentration camps to align its subjects with its official world view. Kinling Lo: Academics 'need freedom to speak' for China to become an ideological powerhouse

The emergence of democracy and free thought which began in Europe with the rise of science in the renaissance and reformation has broken much of the ancient grip of the Church. Although it is still in a position to deny jobs to "heretics", imprisonment, torture and murder are no longer in its repertoire. I am fortunate to live in an place and time where I can freely criticize the Church without fear for my personal safety.

This starting point for this book is the Nicene Creed. This creed formalized Christian belief using the doctrine of the Trinity as a framework. Later Augustine and Thomas Aquinas developed a psychological model to explain how god could be both one and three. The essence of my story is that the idea that god can become three personalities while retaining its essential unity can be extended to a divine universe developing a transfinite number of personalities while retaining its essential unity.

We identify the traditional trinity as a minimal network, two personalities connected by a third. In the theological tradition, the person of Spirit is understood to be the the mutual love between the Father and the Son. From a formal network point of view, we understand a personality as any entity that can both send and receive massages. I am a person. I can read and write, listen and talk, watch and move, emit odours and smell, and all the other sensory modalities that are available to a human being. These ideas can be applied equally to the persons of the trinity and to the elements of the communication networks, sources and channels that make up our universe.

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10.2: Narcissus and Theory of Everything

For many thinkers a central issue in human psychology is consciouness, our ability to think about ourselves and wonder about things like the meaning of life, how we got here and what we should do about all this. A modern incarnation of this line of thought is theories of everything. Traditional theories of everything are often classified as mythology. The theory of everything that we associate with religions we call theology.

Our cultures abound in stories of creation and origin which serve to put our lives in context and give them meaning. They also serve as foundations for self and community control. In English the title of Denzinger cited above reads "Compendium of Creeds, Definitions snd Declarations in Matters of Faith and Morals." Faith deals with thought control; morals with control of behaviour.

Western culture has depended very heavily on ancient Greek and Roman poetry and mythology. These were for a long time central to the education of the elites. An important figure in the history of self-consciousness is Narcissus. Psychologists define a narcissistic personality disorder marked by grandiosity, excessive need for admiration and an inability to empathize. We may see traces of narcissism in our own judgement of ourselves as superior to all other species on Earth. The Catholic Church states that we are created in the image of god, and that the church itself has received "the gift of ultimate truth about human life". It has gone so far as to declare itself infallible, a feat of narcissism which may ultimately prove fatal. The radical anthropocentrism of the Catholic Church, expressed in the Catechism, is a form of narcissism which, I think, prevents the Church from being able to broaden its horizons to a true understanding of god. It is fixed on its ancient glory as an institution founded by its god. Narcissus (Mythology) - Wikipedia, Catholic Catechism: Created "in the image of God", John Paul II: Fides et Ratio: On the relationship between faith and reason, First Vatican Council: IV: Concerning the Infallible Teaching of the Roman Pontiff

Of course I am open to suspicions of narcissism for confronting this great Church. I make no defence. I feel that the work is necessary. I have done more than fifty years of investigation since the Dominican order originally blackballed me. Further, my criticism has a positive intent, to eventually establish the Church as a truly catholic institution, following best practice in the realms of human rights, political democracy and scientific integrity to justify its claim to provide spiritual guidance to the world.

I understand theology to be a theory of everything. The term is commonly used in physics. There it is principally concerned with creating a theory that explains the physical structure of the universe based on the nature of the fundamental particles and the gravitational milieu in whicb they exist. Theology goes beyond this to seeking to understand human nature and the evolution of human society and culture: not only everything that is constructed from the fundamental particles, but how these structures came to be.

Christianity is one of many theologies. I am an inhabitant of Australia which, because it is little more than 200 years since it was invaded by Europeans still retains vestiges of the languages and culture of the its first people who arrived approximately 100 thousand years ago. After nearly two centuries of efforts to eliminate and or assimilate these people, their ownership and occupation of the land is now beginning to be recognised and subjected to careful study. They have a rich tradition of creation stories and an oral culture which has been shown to contain memories of events like sea level rise and the extinction of large mammals that occurred many thousands of years ago. Lacking the sophistication of the urban cultural elites that grew in the empires preceding the Christian era, their theology and culture remained closely connected to the land which they depended upon for their survival.

My intention has been to connect the work of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas with our modern understanding of the world. Aquinas was the last Christian writer to present a comprehensive theological picture of the place of humanity in creation. The foundation of this new connection is the assumption that the universe itself is divine. Aquinas and his contemporaries depended on Aristotle for their understanding of the world. Aristotle knew almost nothing about the world as we now understand it. Aquinas saw the world as basically a puppet, observed and motivated everywhere and at all times by an omniscient and omnipotent god which existed outside the world. Modern cosmology and physics show that the world is self sufficient, in no need of an outside god. The path to the identification and the world is foreshadowed by quantum mechanics.

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10.3: Trinity and the multiplicity of divinity

My starting point to the identification of god and the world is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. We have already touched on the Trinity in sections 3:6-7 and 6.4. The doctrine of the Trinity developed by Augustine and Aquinas explains how the one god can comprise three components. Here we extend this idea to a divinity comprising a transfinite number of components, the simplest of which are the fundamental particles revealed by physics.

The Old Testament describes the complex relationship between the Hebrew people and their god Yahweh. There were many ups and downs and despite the people's faith in their god, the story ends in disaster with the Roman occupation of Palestine. History of Palestine - Wikipedia

The New Testament begins during the occupation with the many of the people awaiting the arrival of a Messiah, an anointed military leader, who would free the nation. Jesus of Nazareth was not this liberator, but he was a no doubt a political activist and trouble maker so that the Romans were glad to be rid of him. This was achieved with the connivance of the Jewish leaders so the political cost to the occupying force of this particular crucifixion was minimised. The details are murky, but we know that a series of skilled writers framed Jesus as a spiritual Messiah whose death somehow reversed the sanctions imposed on the human race by Yahweh. It was written that Jesus came alive again after he was murdered. This miracle, and the miracles attributed to him in life enabled his followers to propagate their message throughout the Roman Empire.

Part of this brilliantly contrived rewriting of history was the development of the Trinity. God the Father was a reincarnation of Yahweh. His Son became human as Jesus of Nazareth and introduced a new covenant between god and his people. Finally the Spirit entered the picture as the guide who led the new dispensation to global power. This story has become a self fulfiling prophecy, culminating in modern Chriatianity, particuasrly as embodied in the Catholic Church.

The definitive statement of Christian doctrine developed by the Council of Nicea under the direction of the empereor Constantine was built around the Trinity. The Father is the creator, the Son the saviour, the Spirit the source of knowledge. The Church is the promise of the resurrection of the dead and an eternal life to come. Nicene Creed - Wikipedia

The definition of he Trinity posed a problem for theologians: how can god be both one and three? The first major attempt at reconciliation was made by Augustine of Hippo in his book on the Trinity. Augustine's work was refined by Aquinas. Augustine of Hippo: The Trinity

After proving the existence of god, Aquinas turned to explaining the divine nature. To do this he introduced the logical method known as the reductio ad absurdum or the via negativa. Given a situation where there are only two possibilities, proof that one of them leads to a contradiction shows that the other must be true. Aquinas took the view that since god is so far beyond our understanding we can say nothing positive about it, we can nevertheless eliminate propositions that contradict the nature of God.

The first such proposition is that god is in some way composite, like the our world, where big things are made of small things. Aquinas ran through a list of possible components of god, eliminating them all to arrive at the conclusion that god is absolutely simple.

He was then faced with the problem of how an absolutely simple being could in fact comprise three personalities, Father, Son and Spirit. He did this in two steps. First he established that parenthood is a relationship. The relationship of father to son is paternity (Latin paternitas). The relationship of son to father is sonship (Latin filiatio). The spirit he understood to arise from the father and the son as their love for one another. In the absence of a proper word to express this relationship he chose breathing (Latin spiratio).

He then drew on the theological axiom that things which are accidental in created beings are substantial in god. So while the relationship of parenthood is accidental in the parent of a child, in the trinity fatherhood and sonship are of the essence of the divinity, and so do not contradict the notion that god is absolutely simple. He also applied this principle to knowledge and love. While knowledge and love are accidental in the human world, they are substantial in god, so the Father's knowledge of himself (sometimes called the Word of god) is substantially divine, just as the love of the Father and the Son for each other, the Spirit, is substantially divine. The substantial divinity of the persons of the trinity does not therefore break the absolute simplicity and unity of god.

In this essay we suggest that applying quantum mechanical versions of these ideas to the universe, show that it is both one and divine, but also manifests as a transfinite spectrum of different observable feature ranging from fundamental particles and atoms, thorough living creatures like ourselves to stars and galaxies.

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10.4: The Christian god and the initial singularity

Einstein's general theory of relativity provides us with a model of the universe as a whole which has become the foundation of modern cosmology. In the beginning he modified his equations to account for the belief that the size of the universe was constant, but astronomical observations revealed that it is fact expanding, as predicted by his original work.

One consequence of its expansion toward the future is that it was smaller in the past and close study of Einstein's theory yielded two unexpected predictions. First, that sufficiently large concentrations of energy would gravitationally contract down to to zero size, producing black holes; and second, that the universe as a whole may have started off as a structureless point (now called the initial singularity) which subsequently developed the internal structure which we now observe, including ourselves.

From a formal point of view, god as described by Aquinas and the initial singularity predicted by the general theory of relativity are identical: both exist; both are structureless; and both are the source of the universe. Here we accept this identity as a first step toward the identification of god and the world.

Aquinas, following Aristotle, describes god as pure actuality (entelecheia. Modern physics has a similar concept, action, which is defined as the product of energy by time. Action serves as a measure of an event. The quantum of action is the measure of the microscopic events described by quantum mechanics. Every event in the universe involves one or more of quanta of action. We therefore identify the initial singularity with the quantum of action and imagine that the initial singularity, like the god of Aquinas, is capable of reproducing itself (as the Father gave rise to the Son).

Christian doctrine limits the reproduction of god to three persons, Father, Son and Spirit. Here we place no bound on the reproduction of the initial form of god, enabling the creation of the universe within the initial divinity. This process has been called the big bang. This starting point provides us with the beginning of a quantum mechanical description of the creation of the world. The Trinity serves as an image of the initial stage in the multiplication of god from one through three to the transfinite numbers which we use to model the universe as it currently exists.

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10.5: The quantum and the continuum

Philosophers and physicists seem to have a bias toward seeing the world of the senses as something less than real. I was led to break with Catholic theology by Bernard Lonergan's book Insight: A Study of HumanUnderstanding. Lonergan was a Catholic theologian, and had to toe the Catholic line if he wanted to keep his job. The Catholic Church requires its theologians to maintain that there is no connection between the sensible accidents and substantial reality of the physical world. This position is necessary in order to preserve its doctrine of transsubstantiation which maintains that the human body of Jesus is really present within the appearances of bread and wine in the Eucharist. Transubstantiation - Wikipedia

The philosopher Sunny Auyang writes that "According to the current standard model of elementary particle physics based on quantum field theory the fundamental ontology of the world is a set of interacting fields." (6.1 supra) An alternative view is that fundamental particles are the fundamental ontology of the world. The field theory explains the world in terms of transformations in continuous Lie groups, rather overlooking the fundamental discovery of quantum mechanics that all actions are quantized. Feynman points out that the assumption of continuity leads to a lot of strife in field theory. We are led to ask how continuous quantities are represented in nature and why, if nature is continuous, every observable phenomenon from fundamental particles through grains of sand to galaxies comes as a quantum, a fixed clear and distinct object. Richard Feynman (1965): The Character of Physical Law page 166

The continuous view of the world is very old, at least as old as Euclidean geometry which is probably a compendium of work dating from well before Euclid's time. At this early period it was known that many numbers like the square root of two could not be represented by a fraction, that is a rational number. This led to the study of "real" numbers which correspond to every point on a continuous geometrical line. This invention reached a high point in the nineteenth century with the work of Georg Cantor. Thomas Heath: Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements

The quantized nature of the world suggests to me that any investigation of the fundamental ontology of the dynamic world must treat the world as a system proceeding stepwise in discrete logical steps, the smallest of which are measured by the quantum of action. This issue is discussed in detail in chapter 6.

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10.6: Action and logic

We therefore treat a quantum of action as a thing, represented by being embodied in a particle. Although in the physical world the quantum of action is measured by Planck's constant, we assume here that its primary definition is logical, and that we may interpret it as a logical not. From an abstract point of view every action converts some p (eg here) into some not-p (eg there). If the action is to move a mountain from here to there it may involve a huge number of physical quanta of action, all of which contribute to the overall effect. This logical interpretation of action means that we do not encounter a problem identifying god and the initial singularity, which effectively represents the whole universe, with the physical quantum measured by Planck's constant, which is very small.

Logic was once purely a pencil and paper or mental pursuit, but from the time of the abacus, people began to mechanise logic and calculation. The definitive step forward was taken in 1936 when Alan Turing devised an imaginary machine which could in principle perform any possible computation and showed that there were some things that it could not compute. Enormous effects went into manufacturing such a machine so that now about half the population of the world carry very powerful computers around in their pockets. The question then arises: does the universe process itself in a way analogous to a computing machine? Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem

It would seem that this is not the case. The high energy physics people have now got a fairly comprehensive theory about the structure of protons and neutrons and other particles made of quarks and gluons. It take long periods of work on the largest classical computers to work out details of this theory. In nature these particles work themselves out in tiny intervals of time. There is clearly a big difference between natural processes and ordinary classical computers.

Many hope that this problem can be solved with quantum computers, which are believed to be able to work much faster than classical machines. They must be able to do this if the fundamental layers of the world are to work at their natural pace. In quantum mechanics high energy means high frequency and very fast processes.

There is obviously an enormous amount of detailed work to do here to bring physics into line with theology, but given the highly energetic quantum mechanical nature of the world, there is no reason to believe that the world is simply a passive puppet in the hands of an outside god. It seems quite probable that can play all the roles traditionally attributed to god.

Taking inspiration from the theory of evolution we can sketch a scenario for the development of the world from an absolutely simple beginning to its present condition. The only requirement is that quanta of action, like the traditional god, are creative and able to reproduce themselves without limit. A mechanism for this development is the network model described in chapter 5.

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10.7: Algorithms and symmetry

The universe began, we have suggested, with an initial quantum of action identical to the traditional god. We identify this with the initial singularity derived from Einstein's general theory of relativity. This theory predicts that the expanding universe that we actually observe, when extrapolated back in time, becomes a structureless point.

Cosmologists incorporate this idea into the big bang model of cosmogenesis. This model proposes, on the basis of the principle of conservation of energy, that all the energy of the current universe is concentrated in this initial point. This is not easy to understand or believe, so here we propose that energy does not exist in the very beginning. The only attribute we can assign to the initial point is the potential to create, consistent with the traditional understanding of god. Big Bang - Wikipedia

We propose that the first step in creation is the emergence of energy and time. In classical physics, action is the time integral of energy. Classically, energy is defined as the ability to do work. Many workers, like the one I once was, are paid by the hour, so that their income is a product of the energy they expend working by the time they work. In quantum theory, energy is the frequency of action. Slave driving bosses always want workers to work faster, that is, from a quantum theoretical point of view, expend more energy in their work.

Traditional Christian theology teaches that god created the world out of nothing. Here we are suggesting that god created the world out of itself, but that from a formal point of view god has no structure, that is it looks very much like nothing. The method of creation proposed here is analogous to the production of particles and antiparticles proposed by quantum field theory. Imagine a photon as an example of nothing. Under the right conditions, a photon can become an electron and positron, which may annihilate back to a photon. In other words the two particles add up to nothing. The creative process in the universe we imagine to proceed in a similar way, nothing bifurcating into two somethings which add up to nothing. We imagine the creation of energy as the bifurcation of action into potential and kinetic energy whose sum (measured as energy) is zero. This avoids endowing the initial singularity with the energy of the whole universe and appears to be consistent with the general theory. Zero-energy universe - Wikipedia

We know that gravitation sees only energy, so we expect that given energy, the gravitational structure of the universe might be next. As a classical theory, gravitation is an application of the differential manifold dreamed up by Gauss and Riemann. Although classical physics can describe much of the large scale structure of the observed universe, it is now clear that we must turn to quantum theory if we want to know how things work. We need a quantum understanding of gravitation which has proven elusive. This remains a major failure of physicists' quest for a theory of everything.

This suggests that given the emergence of energy, the quantum picture of the word precedes the precedes classical theory of gravitation. As so often, we turn to Feynman's intuition for insight.

Feynman page 166: 'Probability amplitudes are very strange, and the first thing you think is that the strange new ideas are clearly cock-eyed. Yet everything that can be deduced from the ideas of the existence of quantum mechanical probability amplitudes, strange though they are, do work, through the long list of strange particles, one hundred percent. Therefore I do not believe that when we find out the inner guts of the composition of the world, we shall find these ideas are wrong. I think this part is right, but am only guessing.

On the other hand, I believe that the theory that space is continuous is wrong because we get all these infinities and other difficulties and we are left with questions on what determines the size of all the particles. I rather suspect that the simple ideas of geometry, extended down into infinitesimally small space, are wrong. Here, of course, I am only making a hole, and not telling you what to substitute. If I did I should finish the lecture with a new law.

The deepest problem in quantum theory is the relationship between the invisible quantum world and observable the classical world. The basic modern tools for research in physics are particle accelerators and their associated instrumentation, both of which are classical engineered constructions. These depend heavily on electrical, electronic and electromagnetic theory. The particles are accelerated and observed in classical Minkowski space. The physicists' task is to explain the observed behaviour of the particles. As Feynman notes, this explanation is expressed in terms of amplitudes which exist in Hilbert space. The root of the physical problem lies in the relationship between the Minkowski and Hilbert spaces.

It seems to be generally assumed that the primary mathematical domain of the world is Minkowski space, and that we are to understand Hilbert space by mapping it Minkowski space. So Veltman writes:

In general, if we do a Lorentz or Poincaré transformation then the state in Hilbert space will transform to another state. . . . Thus corresponding to a Lorenz transformation there is a complicated, big transformation in Hilbert space. Martinus Veltman: Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, page 20.

The alternative would be to imagine that the quantum mechanical Hilbert space is primary and Minkowski space is formed by quantum mechanical processes. The layered network model supposes that the lower layers in the universe serve as symmetries which are broken and applied by the higher layers.

Two facts hint at this ordering of Hilbert and Minkowski space. First, all interactions in Hilbert space are by contact, modelled as superposition. We explain the two slit experiment by saying that the underlying amplitudes, existing as states prior to the emergence of space, come through both slits and interfere like waves. They add to give the interference pattern that we observe.

We noted above in discussing the origin of energy that creation proceeds by bifurcations that preserve the underlying symmetry while creating new states. The emergence of space-time from Hilbert space preserves the contact interactions of Hilbert space in the newly emerged Minkowski space by the peculiar feature of the Minkowski metric which treats time as the inverse of space so as to create null geodesics. As Brown notes, null geodesics have the property of carrying amplitudes unchanged from one point to another in space so that they interact as if by contact: 'the quantum phase of a photon does not advance between its emission and absorption.' Kevin Brown; Reflections on Relativity page 693.

The second fact is the growing realization that the proper way to interpret quantum mechanics is not so much as a physical theory as a theory of computation and communication. This means that it is a suitable foundation for a description of a divine universe as a psychological phenomenon, involving insights and acts of creation exactly analogous to the work of mathematicians described in Chapter 3. Nielsen & Chuang: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

From this we conclude that the first two layers of form to emerge within the initial singularity are energy and quantum mechanics, and that quantum mechanics provides the computational mechanism to explain the subsequent emergence of the space-time described by Einstein's classical theories of special and general relativity. We shall now put physics aside and leap across billions of years of evolution to the current world where we are watching the emergence of politics building on the human nature bequeathed to us by Darwinian evolution.

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10.8 The Future history of Salvation

The Catholic Church is the solution to a non-existent problem. The authors of the New Testament based their plot on the first chapters of the Torah. The idea is to placate god with a human sacrifice to restore the paradise that was lost by the the Fall, disobedience by the first people prompted by Satan in the form of a snake. This story is drilled into the mind of every Catholic child, so there is little wonder that so many people believe it. From the point of view of any scientifically based history of humanity it is complete fiction. The advantage for the Church of course is that it brands us all as sinners, and therefore in need of the Redemption which the Church markets as its monopoly product. As with many useless products on the market, a large part of the advertising effort is devoted to creating a fictitious need. Torah - Wikipedia, Vance Packard: The Hidden Persuaders

The Church has built the need for redemption or salvation into an epic story known as The History of Salvation. This story is set out in detail in the modern Catholic Catechism which summarizes the Church's understanding of itself after the Second Vatican Council. Pope John Paul II and promulgated the new Catechism with the Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum. John Paull II: Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum

In the context of this book, the Church's claim to be the sole interface between divinity and humanity is spurious. Nevertheless, given that the universe is divine, we remain in need of an updated story of the relationship between humanity and divinity. Much of this has been outlined in the first chapters of this book. There can be no doubt that life can be difficult and we often long for paradise. For many death is their only release from pain and it is very consoling to think that it is the prelude to a life of bliss. I feel that the nature of the world is such that we can create relatively blissful lives for ourselves if we play our cards right. Unfortunately this requires global cooperation which threatens many people with the fear that they will lose what they have got to nebulous evils often called democracy, socialism or communism.

An analogy at the root of my position is the relatively good life enjoyed by the many trillions of cells that constitute my body. For a single cell, life can be nasty, brutish and short. The cooperative efforts of the cells in my body improve their lot immeasurably. A similar improvement may be open to us when we learn to work together in harmony with our planet. My cells work together because they share a genome. The history of theology and religion suggests that people best work together when they share a theology, a comprehensive picture of the world. My aim, therefore, is to propagate scientific theology, since this shows promise of unifying theology just as the scientific approach had unified the other sciences that were once based on dreams, gossip and mythology.

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10.9: Paradise

Genesis places the first people in a paradise, the Garden of Eden. We can learn what it was imagined to be like in Eden from the list of punishments that god visited on the first people when they ate the forbidden fruit. Death, pain, and work entered human life and we were expelled from Paradise. This story seems to date from the origin of human consciousness.

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (2:15-17)

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (3:1-24)

Genesis: King James Version

Christianity restored the promise of paradise using what appears to have been a time honoured method: offering a human sacrifice to the god to win their favour. The special feature of Christianity is that the person sacrificed was cast as the Son of God.

The paradise offered by the Church comes with strings attached: one has to believe the Christian message, be baptized and conform to the Christian model of a morally exemplary life. One could win instant paradise by being martyred for the faith. Even then real eternal life in paradise is not to be restored until after the end of the world. A significant proportion of the population who do not fulfill the requirements will be doomed to an eternity of excruciating pain in Hell. Thus the Christian churches provided carrots and sticks to recruit members and billions of people (including myself) have been seduced to contribute to the wealth of the Christian theocracy.

Christian doctrine, in the first instance, makes no difference to reality. Every living creature has to work for a living, and will enjoy pleasure, suffer pain and eventually die. What the doctrine does do is put these facts of life into a fictitious narrative that provides a role for the Churches in the control of human life. In history Christianity has both increased the welfare of some populations and been the cause of much war and suffering for others. Both the peace and war have served to develop our modern culture. Me and this book are products of the of the Christian milieu that emerged around the Mediterranean over the last two millennia. Margaret Macmillan: War: How Conflict Shaped Us

In the Christian history of salvation, the human role is largely passive. The omniscient and omnipotent god controls every moment of our lives and will decide when the end of the world is to come. They will and judge the living and the dead to see who is to live in Paradise and who is to live in Hell. There has been much theological debate over the centuries about what role if anything, our own personal beliefs and actions play in deciding our fate.

This is a very ancient debate. Many have believed that our lives are governed by fate, and there is little we can do to change it. The alternative, built into more modern concepts of human life, is that we can have some control over our own lives by the choices we make, but life is still unpredictable for most people most of the time. The next phone call may herald of death or disaster or maybe a big win.

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10.10: Human rights: agency, freedom and privacy

Our universe began with a divine agent and has grown within it to become the magnificent system we now inhabit. On the whole we may guess that most ancient writing sprang from a literate people who were often in the employment of rulers, queens, kings and priests. One of the principal problems facing the ruling class was then, as it is now, to control the masses in order to sustain the flow of taxes that supported their imperial magnificence. We owe much ancient art and culture to this structure even if we are not particularly sympathetic to the violence and slavery upon which it was built.

This problem of control may help to explain the preoccupation of philosophers and priesthoods with with eternity. They were keen to understand that their entitlement to the top of the hierarchy was an ancient and inalienable right. Parmenides took the view that we cannot have true knowledge of the moving world because it changes all the time and so he postulated that the world has an eternal heart. This idea was accepted by Plato, who imagined that the structure of the visible world is but a shadow of a perfect invisible world of eternal forms. This idea carried over into the Christian idea that god might be the form of the good.

Aquinas maintains that god is eternal because it is immutable. His argument is that god is pure act and therefore contains no potentiality. In other words god is everything that can possibly exist, and so we might say that there is no room for it to move. Aquinas got his picture of potency and act from Aristotle, who defined motion as the passage from potential to act. Aristotle also held it as axiomatic that no potential could actualize itself. This led him to postulate a first unmoved mover which is pure actuality. Aquinas used Aristotle's idea both to prove the existence of god and to conclude that god is pure actuality. Here we follow modern physics, which sees kinetic (actual) energy as identical to potential energy so that, as in a pendulum, potential energy can convert into kinetic energy and back again without limit as long as there is no friction. Aquinas, Summa: I, 9, 1: Is god is altogether immutable?

We understand the quantum mechanical layer of the world to be pure activity. It is in perpetual motion. We therefore reject the ancient idea of eternity.

This does not rule out immobility, however. Mathematical fixed point theorems establish that under certain broad conditions, moving systems have fixed points, parts of the system that do not move. A mathematically perfect spinning wheel, for instance, has a a single point in the centre which does not move. The wave equations of quantum mechanics are examples of fixed points. The equation is an invariant algorithm which may be instantiated in an infinity of different ways, each of which represents a vector in quantum mechanical Hibert space. Each of these vectors, is represented by a complex number which is in effect a mathematical version of a spinning wheel, a circle group. Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia

What this all means is that the world need no longer be imagined as a puppet moved by an omniscient and omnipotent god. It carries in itself the source of its motion. We, as parts of the world, have the same property. As long as we are alive we are agents, the sources of our own motion.

Because we are agents, we not only need to be free to move, but we also need privacy. The sources of our own motions must not be controlled by an outside agent. As a child I was taught that god saw every thought I thought and every move I made. This god was totally intrusive, judging me all the time and totting up all my actions to decide whether I would go to heaven or hell. The model proposed here rejects this intrusion. We all have aright to silence, a right not to be tortured to give up information, a right to decide what we are going to say and do. Our model of god is consistent with modern views of human rights.

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10.11: The rule of law

One consequence of the invention of writing was that it enabled central authorities to project their influence over wide areas. One way to emphasize their power was to carve their words in stone, as Yahweh did for Moses on Mount Sinai. Long before Moses the Babylonian king Hammurabi circulated a written code of laws and punishments to enable local administrators to know and execute his will. Code of Hammurabi - Wikipedia

People began to see that there were also laws embedded in the world, laws of nature. Perhaps the most famous of these in recent times was Newton's law of universal gravitation which guided the motions of the heavens. Einstein revised Newton's work to give us the general theory of relativity, a very succinct mathematical statement which reflects the structure of the whole universe.

Einstein introduced a new understanding of physical law, so that we now speak of symmetries and transformations rather than laws of nature. Descartes introduced the idea of using frames of reference to visualise mathematical statements. Using cartesian coordinates, we can draw pictures of parabolas. Physicists took up the same idea, but they realised that nature simply goes its own way and the coordinate systems we use to describe it are our own own construction, not part of nature. Cartesian coordinate system - Wikipedia

Language has a similar relationship to reality. There are thousands of different languages and thousands of different expressions in each language to describe a sunny day, some more expressive than others. Beneath them all a sunny day is a sunny day, and this is why we can translate from one language to another. The invariance of the sunny day is the symmetry, the translations are the transformations. The general theory of relativity is a classical transformation which connects the motion of any reference system in the universe to the underlying reality.

The symmetry underlying the rule of law is that we are all identically human. All the legal systems we create to manage human affairs must respect this symmetry, making it possible for anybody to enjoy their humanity in any consistent system of laws. At present this freedom is not widely available. Geoffrey Walker: The Rule of Law: Foundations of Constitutional Democracy

The foundation for the application of law is a system of justice. A key feature of the rule of law is 'due process'. In 1215 the Magna Carta began the establishment of due process in England when King John, agreed to be judged by a elected body of barons if he was alleged to have broken the law. Clause 39 of this agreement stated that:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

The absolute power of the monarchy, historically enshrined in 'the divine right of kings' was thus limited by the law, although it took some centuries for this to become a settled doctrine. Due process - Wikipedia, Magna Carta - Wikipedia

We understand the observable Universe to be the fixed points in the dynamics of the seamlessly active first mover imagined by Aristotle and appropriated for Christianity by Thomas Aquinas. These fixed points are connected to one another by the divine dynamics. The dynamic processes of a network fall into two categories, deterministic, which we can model with Turing machines, and non-deterministic, which can at best be modelled statistically.

We model the world as a layered computer network. The fundamental element of this network is a communication link between two sources talking to each other. The sources may be people, nations, computers or any other system capable of generating and receiving messages, that is of physically encoded information. The important feature of error free communication between two sources is that the encoding and decoding must be deterministic, that is computable. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is a product of network communications, where sources may interrupt and redirect one another at random times in random directions. All elements of the global network, including ourselves and governments, are subject to such random input.

We can compare the constitutional doctrine of the rule of law to classical physics, beginning from the assumption that classical physics is deterministic and computable. This is an ideal that can be realized in a small way in human space. When the posted speed limit is 100 km/hr, a police officer with a suitable instrument can judge, within a relatively small margin of error, whether a vehicle is exceeding the speed limit. The same can be said for all laws which specify physical parameters which are controlled in legislation dealing with trade. Accountants, for instance, can be held to use arithmetically consistent software in their work, although their applications of arithmetic may be rather creative.

Such computability is quite limited in human affairs and may not help much when a court sets out to determine whether a person is guilty of murder, for instance, particularly if the evidence is circumstantial. This difficulty gives rise to the vast literature, exemplified by the work of Agatha Christie, on the detection and punishment of crime. Here instead of using instruments and computable processes we enter the realm of jury trials. The presiding judge has a duty to control the admissibility of evidence permitted by law and to determine the sentence should the jury find that in fact the defendant is guilty as charged. But the actual judgement of the defendant's behaviour and credibility is left to a human jury. The principle of requisite variety is honoured to using people to judge people.

Court procedures are the result of long evolution. In criminal matters, juries are required to pronounce guilt only when the evidence presented to them convinces them 'beyond reasonable doubt'. In civil matters, juries are instructed to decide 'on the balance of probabilities. William Shrubb: Jury directions and a 'reasonable doubt'

Computer software is generally written in relatively restricted languages precisely defined in a logical and mathematical idiom designed to force a logical machine to interpret them in exactly one way. As we saw above, Turing was able to write software that showed that there are decisions which no machine can make.

Law, that is state software, as it comes from parliament, is formal written text. Their language is much closer to natural language, and even though it follows long traditions of legal development, can nevertheless be open to different interpretations. Many court cases depend on careful exegesis by judges and counsel. The aim of their work is to determine what the legislature sought to achieve through the law, that is to look beyond the surface of the text to discern the spirit of the law.

A computer program in a machine is in effect sufficient unto itself. It may require a library of software in the machine or on accessible network to be executed but everything it needs is effectively predetermined. Human law, on the other had, refers implicitly to the whole language of the society to which it refers. The search for the spirit can range very widely, into the world of explicit and tacit theological, religious and legal history,

Monarchies like the Papacy would like to have the sort of total control over human behaviour that they attribute to god. Here we claim that such control is impossible, and that attempts to implement it lead to violence. The only way a single person can control many people is by reducing their behaviour to that of a single person, that is by destroying their individual freedom. This is the policy followed in the classrooms of my youth where our teachers required that we all sit still and upright in our desks with our hands behind our backs, our mouths closed and our complete attention directed them. This approach forbids everything which is not explicitly permitted. An important rule for children: only speak when spoken to.

The alternative is to respect our freedom, where everything is permitted except actions explicitly forbidden by law. A practical democratic society recognizes two sources of law, nature and the decisions of elected legislative assemblies. These assemblies debate written draft laws, amend them and perhaps pass them to become law of the land. The laws are promulgated in written form available to everybody. The law produced by the legislature is the software of society. All members of the society are presumed to know the law, even though the effective body of law in a modern society may run to hundreds of thousands of pages. Rule of Law - Wikipedia

Natural law is self executing. If you drop a hammer it falls. If it hits my foot, I feel pain. The software in a computer has a similar property. Once it is set in motion it does what is written. If there are errors in the software, there will be errors in the execution and processes may fail if the error detection and correction mechanisms built into the software are inadequate.

Human law is intended to control human actions, but the coupling between law and action is much looser. This means that human societies, in addition to having procedures for making law also require procedures for detecting and judging breaches of the law. Because of the uncertainties in human motivation, they also require procedures to determine whether breaches of the law are deliberate or accidental, or in complex cases, whether there was a breach of the law at all. So we need an independent judicial system to test the offences alleged by law enforcement to see if those charged are really guilty.

The judiciary has a lot in common with science. Like science, it proceeds by testing for consistency. We require that the formal body of law established by parliament to both self consistent and consistent with reality as it is currently understood. This work begins with the lawyers who draft bills for consideration by parliament. Further work is often trusted to law reform commissions and commissions of inquiry.

We also require that each instance of the application of law is consistent with the facts. Law enforcement develops the conjectures: we allege that x did y. The judiciary takes care of the refutation: yes or no. In some jurisdictions this is decided by an adversarial court procedure, in others by judicial investigators whose task is to collect and weight the facts of each case. Whatever process is used for judgement, the rule of law requires that judgement be both fair and seen to be fair. The scientific approach to transparency is publication and peer review. The judicial equivalent is hearing in open court and the publication of judicial decisions. Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Peer review - Wikipedia

The roles of the three elements of the rule of law, parliament, executive and judiciary are also defined by law. This circular nature of this structure can raise questions of self reference: can a parliament pass laws to pardon itself for breaches of the laws that it has made? How can we avoid this circularity, which is tantamount to corruption and defeats the purpose of the rule of law.

There are two answers to this problem. The first is that the judiciary should seek to understand the spirit of the law, the intention of the lawmakers, and base its judgement on this rather than the letter of the law. The other is the establishment of a hierarchy of laws. This approach is consistent with the layered network model we have previously outlined. In this network, each higher layers is dependent on the layers beneath it to provide it with the processes it needs for its operation and survival. Each higher layer therefore has an interest in maintaining the layers that support it.

The highest level in the legal structure of a nation is the constitutional law, which establishes the overall structure of society, defining the roles of the elements of the state. The unity of the state is reflected in the establishment of a head of state, the role that carries with it the determination of the day to day responses of the state to the changing circumstances that it faces.

In monarchical systems, common in the past, this role has had unlimited and unquestionable power of life and death over members of the community. The monarch was effectively above the law. The rule of law requires that every role, even the head of state, be subject to the law. The head of state becomes a 'constitutional monarch' whose acts are controlled by the law and subject to judicial review.

States may bind themselves to a multinational body such as the United Nations or the European Union, ceding to it the power to resolve issues which cannot be resolved within the national legal system This is the national equivalent of the 'social contract' which individuals citizens are deemed to accede to when they agree, tacitly or explicitly, to be bound by the laws of their society. At present we do not have a global system with sufficient power to effectively arbitrate all inter- and intranational problems, but we can imagine the possibility of such a system and work towards it.

The ultimate recourse in legal problems is to what we have called god, which is tantamount to reality as a whole. In theocratic systems, generally ruled by military force, the rulers may take the role of god upon themselves, defining the nature and desires of the divinity to suit their own purposes. Ultimately, the only way to to establish a true rule of law is through scientific theology which reveals the true nature of god using the scientific method designed to get to the truth of the human condition. Divine right of kings - Wikipedia

The development of the rule of law has a long history, and it remains far from being established universally. Throughout history the ultimate criterion for the establishment of a political system has been violence, so that 'divine right' and 'trial by battle' are effectively equivalent. We still find, in general, that when the rule of law fails the political systems degenerate into military dictatorships. In democratic systems operating under the rule of law, governments are tried by voting. Where voting fails, government may be controlled by large public demonstrations. Military dictatorships may suppress such demonstrations by violence in order to maintain their existence. The re-estabshment of the rule of law is not easy and remains an outstanding problem. Politics of Thailand - Wikipedia

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10.12: The Holy Spirit: Le milieu divin

We have made considerable progress in our understanding and expression of natural law over the last few centuries. Clearly this task is far from complete, but we can at least imagine that we are aiming for a fixed target. The laws (symmetries) of nature were embedded in the universe long ago. We do not expect any changes in the foundations of the world expressed by the symmetries of quantum theory and relativity.

From an engineering point of view we may see the law as social software. What we are trying to do is to liberate and develop the human spirit. How do social software engineers execute love and spirit? The answer lies in improving communication in both its content and its ubiquity. Communication is the enemy of secrecy and inconsistency. From a practical point of view, love is the tendency to communicate no matter what the difficulties. In the Christian adage, we are to love the sinner while trying to correct and forgive the sin.

Good software engineering seeks out the symmetries of the system it is exploring in order to make the software consistent and easy to understand. The software is implemented as invariant algorithms that execute the symmetries, the properties common to large categories of similar systems. Climate models, for instance, are built around thermodynamics. The construction of effective human law follows the rule of law, which is an expression of human symmetry: we are all equal before the law.

We may imagine one of the oldest and most universal expressions of both humanity and divinity is spirit. The spirit was there at the beginning, shaping reality:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)

In this book I like to identify spirit with action, the dynamic heart of the universe that serves as a bridge between classical and quantum physics. We also identify spirit with soul and mind, and the identification of god and the universe suggests that the universe is best understood as a psychological phenomenon, exhibiting the creative powers of imagination and mind which have brought it from the initial singularity to its present state,

Many current practical models of mind are built around classical computation and communication. We agree, however, that the basic functioning of the universe is described by quantum theory so that quantum computation and quantum communication seem to be the natural engineering disciplines to provide analogies for an understanding of god and the universe.

Everything we experience in the world is a thing made of many parts. A thing is a unit, like a chair or a planet. The element of any thing that makes it into a unit is its spirit. Physics teaches us that the universe is a gigantic process. The ultimate parts of this process are the smallest possible processes, quanta of action. Quanta of action are indivisible, atoms of action. They are also elements of a universal symmetry. We may identify them with the classical god, absolutely simple beings whose specific reality is to be. In the language of ancient philosophy, their essence is identical to their existence.

The spirit of a thing made of many parts is what makes it into a unit. We understand the world through art, the things we make. Ultimately, it is the spirit of the law that drives the letter. We construct engines for the work that they do. In the Old Testament Genesis story the the spirit of god created the world. In the New Testament that Christian authors built on the Old Testament, the spirit of god guides the salvation of mankind:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, "Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased. (Mark 1:9-11)

The Holy Spirit made its definitive intervention in human affairs at the Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus' resurrection and ten days after his ascension into Heaven. The Acts of the Apostles describes the appearance of the Spirit to Jesus' followers while they were meeting to celebrate the Jewish Feast of Weeks:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts, 2:1-4) Ascension of Jesus - Wikipedia, Pentecost - Wikipedia

The visit of the Spirit filled the followers with the strength and energy to spread the word of Jesus. It brought them into a new state of mind that some see as the beginning Christian Church. In modern terms, Jesus' followers became activists, working for the transition from the Jewish religion to what was to become Christianity. A similar process of personal, social and cultural change is common in the evolution of religion. We are currently in the middle of the transition from absolute monarchy to a democratic scientific model of governance which is more closely consistent with the divine nature we inhabit. Robert Crotty (2017): The Christian Survivor: How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors

Since its beginning the Church has relied on the guidance of the Spirit to maintain what Pope John Paul II claims to be 'the gift of the ultimate truth about human life'.

The aim of this book is to bring god out of the closet, beginning from the work of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas who used the philosophy of Aristotle to create a new synthesis of Christian theology, placing the stories of the Bible, augmented by the Fathers of the Church, into a picture which became and remains the theory of everything embraced by the Catholic Church.

Although Christianity is built around the story that god revealed themself by becoming human in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, the Catholic god is essentially an invisible, mysterious being which is claimed to be beyond human comprehension. It is descended from the Platonic tradition in philosophy which holds that true reality is invisible to us. The world we see is a shadow of the real.

Plato and many of the philosophers who formed the foundations of our theological world view were members of the ruling elite, and the notion that divinity and real reality are invisible to the common people is of supreme political value to them. It enables them to put their own imprint on heaven, to tell us what god wants and how we should behave to win divine favour. In modern constitutional theory, this idea is called the divine right of kings. It is a right, established through history, by violence and military force. It is no accident that most of the ancient gods are warlords.

The Roman Catholic Church has taken this position to the extreme by declaring its official positions infallible. The Communist Party of China takes a similar position and its most recent and critical appearance was in the decision of the US Republican Party to go to the recent election without any stated party platform, leaving itself open if elected, to govern by fiat. For some time now this party has shown clearly that it is working toward establishing a one party state in the US similar to those managed by President Trump' coterie of favourite dictators. Richard McGregor: The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

The radical solution to this problem is to make god visible so that it can be subjected to scientific study and we can learn in detail how divine law, divine governance, divine prudence and divine providence have worked over many billion years to take the Universe from a structureless initial singularity to its current magnificent complexity. Implicit in this project is the notion that we ourselves have been created by divine the universe, and have much to learn about ourselves and how to govern ourselves by studying how we came to be. What we seek to understand is the spirit of god.

The Catholic Church attributes its durability to the guidance of the Spirit, which is invisible and mysterious and yet, they believe, effective. If the Universe is divine, on the other hand, the working of the spirit is much clearer. We live in a divine milieu. Its basic manifestation of this is that we are social animals. The fundamental mode of operation of the spirit of truth is the scientific method which is designed to tune our imaginative fantasies into the divine reality of our world. Aristotle: Politics, Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu

If this is the case, we might ask how an organization like the Catholic Church which is largely based on mythology and ancient texts with little historical value has done so well. There are a number of answers to this question.

The first is that the authors of the Bible incorporated a lot of perfectly acceptable ancient wisdom into their work. There is little doubt that the texts that we have now were preceded by tens or hundreds of thousands of years of human experience and oral tradition before they were finally committed to writing. We are also becoming aware that there are a large number of similar ancient texts that for one reason or another did not make it into the Biblical canon.

The second is that a community of doctrine is the foundation of cooperation. The power of cooperation is so great that its ideological foundation is of secondary importance compared to the fact of cooperation. Few would claim that the ideology of the Nazis or of the Chinese Communist Party is true, but such organizations were are very powerful simply because all their members are in agreement even if their beliefs are false and much of their cooperation is obtained by deception and violence.

The third reason is akin to the second: organizations like the Church enjoy great political power because they are supported by large numbers of people, and so they are in a position to murder or otherwise punish non-believers. Since most of us are keen to stay alive, people who will risk murder, torture and imprisonment to oppose unhealthy regimes are relatively rare. The ancient practices of burning unbelievers at the stake or hanging, drawing and quartering them are a strong disincentive to dissent. Present day dictatorships continue in this violent tradition.

The final reason for their power is secrecy. The Roman Catholic Church has appropriated God and defined it to suit its own purposes. One of the principal features of the Christian God is that it is invisible and, since the Ascension of Jesus, no longer communicates directly with us. Instead the Church claims that it alone speaks for God. Although the Church remains very secretive in its judicial processes, it has reformed considerably since the days of the Inquisition. This is not the case for all the other secret police forces on the planet which make a living by working to extinguish human rights to keep their sponsors in power.

The spirit of truth opposes these forces. Journalists, police, politicians and activists work to expose the evils among us. Our evolutionary history has equipped us with a basic sense of truth, since survival depends critically on true evaluation the difficulties of life and developing effective strategies to deal with them. On the whole, we know the difference between fairness and unfairness. We can see the need to replace legal systems designed and constructed by the powerful to serve themselves with laws designed to protect and serve everybody.

The basic gift of the Spirit is the love envisaged in Jesus' commandment of love. Jesus exemplified the universality of love with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Here we are inquiring into the role of love in the creation of the Universe. Aquinas and other theologians saw the person of the Spirit as the realization of the love between Father and Son.

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10.13: Cultural variation and selection

I have applied the evolutionary paradigm to construct the universe layer by layer from the initial singularity to our current state of culture and consciousness. This idea is drawn from Richard Dawkins' book Climbing Mount Improbable. The traditional omniscient and omnipotent Christian god created the universe is six days according to a plan that they had in mind since eternity. In fact the evolution of the universe has taken about fourteen billion years and a huge number of incremental steps.

The Christian story of creation is easy to understand. God knew everything and could do everything, so it was easy for them to make a universe. But where did god come from? The only logical answer is that it is eternal, existing before time began. The hardest bit to understand is how an absolutely simple being with no internal structure is able to hold a mind full of plans of a universe as large and complex as ours. The big bang theory poses a similar problem, replacing the absolutely simple god with the structureless initial singularity.

Variation and selection seem to be the only possible answer. So we imagine that the initial singularity as pure action with the power to try anything. Some of the tries it comes up with are self sustaining, and form the foundations for further tries, and the result is what we see. This process, described in detail in chapter 6, suggests a route from the beginning to now, and there is no reason for it ever to stop.

Here we are particularly interested in the ability of evolution to create intelligence and love, two defining characteristics of the human spirit.

Natural selection is in effect a tautology that produces a community of survivors. Living is often easy, but the interaction of the Malthusian paradigm that pits the exponential growth of reproducing organisms against the fact that the resources of life are both limited and subject to cycles of shortage and abundance. This means that living creatures are frequently confronted with critical situations which require that individuals capable of successful reproduction be preserved at all costs. Here we see the advantages of intelligence and love. Intelligence enables a creature to find novel solutions to the problem of finding the resources for life; love is one of these solutions, where cooperative action motivated by love enables some members of a group to reproduce and pass on the trait even though some of their helpers may lose their lives. Malthusianism - Wikipedia

Here we reach the critical test of conscious love recorded in John's Gospel:

13:1 Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. . . .

34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another. . . .

15: 13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

The authors assume that because he was divine, omniscient and omnipotent, Jesus know what was to befall him and the consequences of this event. He was able to tell them that despite this disaster, all would be well, and he was going voluntarily to a fate which he could easily have avoided.

The key dramatic event in Christianity is this human sacrifice, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. We are led to understand that this was organized by his Father, the Christian rebranding of the Hebrew God Yahweh. Yahweh comes across as a loving warlord, quite happy to help his Chosen People practice genocide against the original inhabitants of the Promised Land. Whether this actually happened is an open question, since much of the Bible appears to more symbolic than historical.

In the Catholic story, Jesus was sacrificed to convince his Father to make humanity and the world whole again after the Fall. He rose from the dead, Christians believe, thus guaranteeing our afterlife. He appeared to his followers to reassure them that all was well. In a final speech, he promised his followers divine assistance:

And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. John, 14:16-17: The Spirit of truth

We can imagine that the crucifixion of Jesus was just a routine execution of a troublemaker by the Romans in occupied Palestine. The authors of the New Testament have immortalized this event which, with the help of the Roman Empire, has played a significant role in shaping the last 2000 years of human history.

Sacrificing life for loved one's is a persistent human trait with an evolutionary origin. We can see how it may be exploited by politicians to increase their own power. All that is required is to create the fiction that people are confronted with a mortal enemy which will destroy them if they are not prepared to sacrifice their lives to save themselves. In some cases this may be true, but the history of politics and war suggests that in most cases truth and intelligent diplomacy could have saved many lives.

Much of this book touches on the bitterness and pain that arises from the misappropriation of the loving human spirit by political forces exploiting the love of others for their own good, persons who feel that they are entitled to ask others to give their lives knowing that the love built in by our evolutionary history has made it possible to exploit people this way. The fact that people can be induced to give their lives for a cause has been falsely glorified through the ages, most particularly in the idea that Jesus-god was such a person that he gave his life at the request of his father for a largely vacuous reason. It was the father who had visited arbitrary punishment on the people he had created and imbued with curiosity. In this story god the Father took advantage of the Son's loving human nature and ripped him off.

Particularly now that the life and death imperatives of evolution have been softened by global supply chains for all the basic necessities of life, food, shelter and health care, we can conclude that most life and death situations have been artificially created by powerful and malevolent actors for their own political reasons.

Politicised religious forces have been responsible for hundrds of millions of deaths since the crucifixion of Jesus, and the reason is very similar to the motivation of imperial Rome whose standard operating procedure was to protect its hegemony by murder.

There are many points at which church policy conflicts with humanity. The evolutionary variations that we need to make to the the ideology of the Catholic Church to bring it into line with our natural life in the divine universe include the following:

1. All roles in the Church must become blind to gender: In 1994 Pope (now Saint) John Paul II set out to establish beyond doubt that women would never be priests. Here he echoed the opinion of his predecessor, Pope Paul VI. Pope Francis, despite his apparent sensitivity to modern reality, confirmed this view in a recent interview. John Paul's arguments were weak. First, he claimed that this is what the Church has always done and said, ignoring the role of women in the early Church. Second, Christ chose only men for his Apostles, as far as we know. Men, after all wrote all the accounts we have of Jesus' career. There is no reason to stick to these ancient prejudices against women. Paul VI: On the question of admission of women to the ministerial priesthood

2. We need to face the fact that we live and die on Earth:. The Church teaches that we have immortal souls. It teaches that Jesus will come again, that everybody who has ever lived will rejoin their bodies and that the Earth will be restored to its pristine state. There will be a last judgement through which the good are confirmed in a life of heavenly bliss in heaven and the bad to an eternity hellish pain. This is nothing but wishful thinking. Death is a reality. Catholic Catechism: I believe in life everlasting

3. The Church is human and not above the law. It does not rule by divine right: As well as claiming infallibility, the Pope enjoys supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he can always freely exercise. Such power has led the Church to ignore human rights. Not only has it been responsible for widespread sexual abuse of children, it has frequently attempted to pervert the course of justice to hide these crimes. This evil has cost the Church not only its claim to moral and ethical superiority in the human community, but civil claims against the Church continue to absorb a large fraction of the funds donated by the faithful for its upkeep. It must learn to recognise universal human rights and the rule of law. Russel Shorto: The Irish Affliction, Spotlight (film) - Wikipedia, Kathleen McPhillips: Church's moral failure on trial at the Royal Commission

4. In the divine Universe the dichotomy between matter and spirit is artificial, simply two ways of looking at the same reality: The Church's business plan is based on its claimed monopoly on communication with a God. Part of the cosmology that goes with this claim is that human spirits are specially created by God and placed in each child during gestation. Neither we nor the Church are of this world, but in some way alien to it. The sciences show, with overwhelming probability, that we evolved due to the creative powers of the divine Universe, and all those qualities which we call spiritual are as much creations of this divine power as the so called material world. Catholic Catechism 366: Human soul created immediately by God

5. We and the world are not damaged by original sin : The whole reason for the existence of the Church, it tells us, is to save us from the consequences of an original sin committed by the first humans. There is no evidence for such a sin, and so no real foundation for the existence of the Catholic Church. All its promises are fictitious, based on a fictitious story about the origins of the world and the human race. Catholic Catechism: Original sin

6. The Church must abandon the magical belief that certain rituals and forms of words can change reality: The Church claims that it can remove the imprint or stain of the original sin from the the souls of people by Baptism. This involves pouring water on the person to be baptized and uttering a few words. It has six other 'sacraments' which have similar magical effects. Of these, the most egregious is the Eucharist. The Church believes that the priests' words 'This is my body, this is my blood' 'transsubstantiate' the bread into the 'body, blood, soul and divinity' of Jesus. Since there is no change is the appearance of the bread or wine, this dogma requires a sharp distinction between the reality of bread and its appearance. This is totally contrary to modern physical understanding. The consecration of the eucharist is symbolic, not real. Catholic Catechism: The Sacrament of Baptism, Catholic Catechism: The Eucharist - Source and summit of ecclesial life

7. The Church must accept the divinity of the world: The Church holds that 'this life' is a period of testing in a fallen world to determine who is worthy of salvation. As a result of the murder of Jesus, God will repair the damage caused by original sin, the blessed will enjoy an eternal life of the blissful vision of God, the dammed an eternity of suffering in Hell. There is no evidence for any of this scenario. Catholic Catechism 769: The Church, perfected in glory

8. The Church must accept that pain and death are not divine punishment, but simply the way things are: In a similar vein, the Church holds that endurance of pain, even self inflicted pain, is a source of merit. It overlooks the fact that pain is in general an error signal that enables us to diagnose and, ideally, treat errors, diseases, corruption and other malfunctions that impair our lives. Included here is the unnecessary pain caused by the false doctrines of the Church. Death is a natural and inevitable feature of extremely complex organisms which cannot repair all the errors that occur in their constitution as they age. Catholic Catechism: Marriage under the regime of sin

9. The Church has no special knowledge, no gift of absolute truth: From a scientific point of view, the Catholic model of the world is an hypothesis, to be accepted or rejected on the evidence. From the Church's point of view, the fundamentals of its model are not negotiable, and anybody who chooses to disagree with them is ultimately a heretic and to be excommunicated from the Church. There is no room in the Church for the normal scientific evolution of our understanding of our place in the Universe. Catholic Catechism: Heresy, Catholic Catechism: Excommunication

10. The Church must reject the idea that salvation is earned by human sacrifice: In the Christian History of Salvation the Father oversees the death of his own Son, in order to placate himself for the 'original sin' committed by the first people. This story, which probably has origins shrouded in ancient mythology, places violence at the heart of religion. Since the Christian God is omnipotent, he could have dealt with original sin without turning to murder. We might divide Churches generally into those that will go as far as murder to get their own way, and those that hold life sacred. The Catholic Church, unfortunately, has a long history of killing unbelievers, and still takes violent retribution by denying employment to those who do not accept its beliefs. James Frazer; The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

11. The Church must embrace modern means of corporate governance: We now hold that all people are born free and equal. Social structures which give some people arbitrary control over others are seen to be obsolete. We now replace monarchies with free and open associations of people whose resources, including power, are shared by all. The Catholic Church with its celibate, male, priestly hierarchy culminating in an absolute monarch remains very far from this ideal and suffers severely for its inability to absorb modern culture. First Vatican Council

12. The Church's marketing of itself must become evidence based, embracing modern quality control and consumer protection: The Catholic Church believes it has a duty to indoctrinate everyone into its version of reality This is the natural foreign policy of an imperialist organism whose size and power increases in proportion to its membership. But the modern world expects any corporation promoting itself in the marketplace to deliver fair value. People contributing to the sustenance of the Church and following its beliefs and practices need proof that they will indeed receive the eternal life promised to them. Vatican II: Ad Gentes: The Missionary Activity of the Catholic Church, Vatican II: Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church § 2

13. The Church must realize that we need to control our population and our impact on the Earth: The Papacy, through Francis, has at last realized that we need to care for our common home. It is becoming urgent to control our living population lest our footprint crushes the resources of the Earth. In the days when infant mortality was very high and political power was closely linked to the breeding rate, there might have been a case for forcing women to have as many children as possible. This is no longer the case, so the Church must respect the right of women to choose whether or not to have children. The Church must accept that contraception is essential for continued life on Earth.

14. The Church must abandon the doctrine that poverty, chastity and obedience as particularly pleasing to God: The Church obtains an enormous amount of free labour from its priests, brothers and nuns by deluding people with the idea that giving their lives to god is some way improves their chances of getting to Heaven and avoiding Hell. This exploitation must cease.

The theological hypothesis proposed in this book facilitates the evolution all these necessary changes in the church and so from practical point if view, can be seen as promoting the survival of the church.

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10.14: Democracy: local control

Einstein represented the fundamental features of the large scale structure of the Universe with his two theories of invariance, special and general relativity. Special relativity tells us how objects in free fall look to one another when they communicate with particles travelling at the velocity of light. It is a local theory which based on the principle that the laws of physics are the same for every system in free fall, that is in inertial motion.

Einstein said that the happiest thought in his life was the realization that he could build a model of the whole of space-time from local inertial space-time. Newtonian physics tells us that things only accelerate when they are pushed by a force. General relativity tells us that there exists relative acceleration between inertial frames that feel no force. This acceleration arises from the shape of space-time. From a Newtonian point of view, the people in the space station experience weightlessness because the centrifugal force arising from the acceleration in their curved orbit exactly balances the gravitational attraction of the Earth. The general theory, on the other hand, tells us that the inhabitants of the space station experience weightlessness because they are moving inertially in a space station moving in curved space-time.

Einstein's work tells us about a fundamental layer in the universal network. According to our model, he describes a fundamental symmetry that continues to hold through all the layers of the network up to the human layer and beyond. In every layer, we use local observations to understand the whole. This applies to our study of the network itself. The basic unit in any network is a trinity, two sources and a channel between them. The theory of communication tells us everything we know about this trinity, and from it we can extrapolate to any network of any size.

We the inhabitants of a democracy governed by the rule of law are said to be free. By analogy with gravitation, we may say that we are in free fall. Our social space is not completely flat, however. The laws introduce a curvature which we understand as social structure, so although we move freely, there is also a form of gravitation in social space. Like people standing on the surface of the Earth, we only experience the force of gravitation when our free motion is blocked by the ground we stand on.

The Catholic Church takes the view that it possesses the final and absolute truth about human existence. It claims that this has been revealed to it by its eternal God, and therefore cannot be revised. Ultimately, to deny Catholic dogma is to be expelled from the Church, excommunicated. This is, of course, an administrative act which has no meaning in any system which is blind to religious affiliation. We are all within God and not available for expulsion except by being killed. The Church is ruled by the Code of Canon Law which is established by fiat of the Church hierarchy and does not appear to bind the Pope. We read in Canon 333 §3 that 'No appeal or recourse is permitted against a sentence or decree of the Roman Pontiff.' Code of Canon Law

The absolutist totalitarian attitude has been the cause of many disasters. We see large ones when we follow the careers of people like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Mao's addled thoughts about economic 'great leap forward' ultimately led to be the starvation of some 36 million people, the incident described in Yang Jisheng's Tombstone. How could one man do so much damage?

Jishen summarizes the nature of Chinese Communist Party totalitarianism:

The basic reason why tens of millions of people in China starved to death was totalitarianism. While totalitarianism does not inevitably result in disasters on such a massive scale, it facilitates the development of extremely flawed policies and impedes their correction. Even more important is that in this kind of system, the government monopolizes all the production and life-sustaining resources, so that once a calamity occurs, ordinary people have no means of saving themselves.

In the chapters that follow I will relate how the People's Republic of China combined a ruthless suppression of political dissent with a highly centralized planned economy to produce a system that Mao Zedong himself characterized as "Marx plus Qin Shihuang." This combination of Soviet-style autocracy and ancient Chinese despotism resulted in an abuse of executive power exceeding that of the Soviet Union or any of China's emperors, controlling politics, the economy, culture and ideology, and every aspect of daily life. The dictatorship's coercive power penetrates every corner of even the most remote village, to every member of every family, into the minds and entrails of every individual. Referring to this system as "totalitarianism" denotes the expansion of executive power to its ultimate extent and extreme. Jisheng: Tombstone page 17

This static system of top down power is designed to completely suppress any feedback from lower layers. The democratic alternative sees the source of power at the bottom of the pyramid, in the people. Democracy follows the dominant paradigm in the divine Universe, power comes from below because god is the foundation of everything. The Universe is god. The source of disaster is the blockage of freedom, as we find when we fall from a great height.

There are great difficulties in designing a system which will share the power of government equally among all those who are governed, and we have a long way to go, but once it is established that people are the source of government's power, we might expect democratic systems to evolve toward the ideal of universal equality of power corresponding to our universal equality of rights.

The first step is to recognize human equality, so that everyone's opinion has in principle equal value. By involving everyone in decision making, we automatically control our tendencies to be biassed by self-interest. Given a scientific unification of theology we can work toward a unification of our understanding of the world based on real experience. The foundation of this unification is our biological unity as one species, all capable of interbreeding with one another. This serves as the common physical layer of the human network.

Our bodies are a relatively peaceful assembly of some four trillion cells. The root of the harmony is their common genome. By analogy, the root of a unified world view is a common notion of the divinity which, given the assumption that the world is divine, is based on our scientific understanding of the world. Our current crop of religions are the product of millennia of imaginative attempts to understand the world but their development has been controlled in the main by the ruling class, for their own benefit.

Our minds are formed by our culture and education. The foundation of good education is the nature of the world embodied in all the spheres that underlie us upon which we depend for our existence. The ancient belief that we rely on obedience to god for our life, health and prosperity remains true in the divine Universe.

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10.15: Economics: the social flow of value

Economists and accountants divide expenditures into two general classes, current and capital. These are usually measured in money, but of course the real value lies in the underlying goods, food, health and housing for instance. The difference can be quite hard to decide, but is usually defined by accounting standards which vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. AASB: Australian Accounting Standards Board

From the point of view of the population one of the most visible roles of the state is its control of the economy. Money and power are very tightly linked. The basic approach to power, since time immemorial, is to use military violence as a means of extracting taxes to pay for further military violence. This approach is tempered to some extent by the need to maintain the productivity of the taxpayers. This comes down to allowing the producers to accumulate a little capital to increase their productivity.

The rich and powerful feel irresistible pressure to become richer and more powerful. Where military methods are outlawed manipulation of the economy is the method of choice. We have seen the Chinese Communist Party at work in the previous section. The latest oligarch to feature in the global psyche is the President of the United States, Donald Trump, a billionaire whose work for his fellow billionaires is blatantly obvious in the forthcoming overhaul of the United States Federal tax law. NYTimes Editorial Board: A Historic Tax Heist

On the whole economists and accountants have been willing servants of the proposition that what is good for the wealthy is good for everybody. This is known s trickle down economics, and has survived as a zombie despite a long history of refutation. Quiggin: Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us, Craig Stirling: Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn't Trickle Down, Study Says

For economists, money is the universal measure of value. Every trade in the economists' world occurs when the participants in a deal reach agreement on a money price for the good they wish to exchange. This approach to the exchange of value in the marketplace overlooks the majority of human values including peace, love, security, health and happiness. Until a mechanism is found to attribute a monetary value to such features of human life, they play no role in the measured economy.

For the Catholic Church, the ultimate good is beatitude, which is equates to the vision of God. Much of the Catholic theory of beatitude was developed by Thomas Aquinas, who is said to have had a vision toward the end of his life which made him see all his work as straw. Another theory is that this was 'burnout'. Thomas Aquinas: My writing seems like straw to me, Jonathan Malesic: A Burnt-Out Case

According to the Catholic story, everything was rosy before the original sin. There was no death, agriculture was easy, there was no disease, deformity and suffering. This was the state of original justice. Of course this never happened, although we can aseume that less conscious animals are unaware of the hardships of life. Adam and Eve were presumably still just naive youths, easily seduced by Satan. Original justice went out the window when they ate the forbidden fruit, and a vindictive God reduced us to our current state where we die, often painfully, have to work for a living, and find childbirth a very intense and sometimes fatal experience. All marketed by the Church as punishment for sin.

The Church says it has a mission from god to fix all this. The faithful are told that the reward for being a good Catholic is the beatific vision, meeting god face to face. On our present hypothesis, all of our experiences, good and bad, are face to face meetings with god. The Catholic Church, however, never stops reminding us that we live in a vale of tears more or less of our own making. Later, if we are good, we will experience the astoundingly wonderful post mortem experience of the vision of god. Vale of tears - Wikipedia

Thomas Aquinas has given us a careful and reasoned account of this vision. He is a believer, and accepts the Church's position without question, particularly the thesis succinctly expressed in the Baltimore Catechism: Q: Why did God make me? A: To know Him, love Him and serve Him here on Earth and to live happily with Him forever after in heaven. Baltimore Catechism - Wikipedia

What is the nature of this happiness? As a child, I thought it was non-stop playtime, with no classes in between. Later I thought it would be non-stop sex and sensuality, but I had already been taught that that was sinful. But when went I to the monastery, I learnt the Thomistic version which was nowhere near so appealing.

Thomas begins his treatment of the meaning of life by establishing that the ultimate purpose of human existence is happiness (beatitudo). His first step is to assert that properly human activity is always purposeful. Aquinas, Summa: Humanity's last end

He then rules out what he sees as spurious sources of happiness: wealth, honour, fame, power, goods of the body, pleasure, goods of the soul, or, in fact everything created. All these things he considers of no value compared to the beatific vision. Aquinas, Summa: Can any created good be the source of human happiness?

His next step is to explore the nature of happiness. Happiness, he says, is something created in humanity by the uncreated god. It is our supreme perfection. It is an activity of the intellect, rather than the senses, which cannot perceive god. In this life, nevertheless, the senses support the activity of the intellect. In the life to come, when our bodies are resurrected to join our souls, the senses will participate in the happiness perceived by the intellect. He concludes that the human intellect will never be at rest in perfect happiness until it perceives the essence of god. Aquinas, Summa, I II, 3, 8: Does human happiness consist in the vision of the divine essence?

Finally, he asks whether it is possible to attain this happiness. He says yes:

Happiness is the attainment of the perfect good. Whoever, therefore, is capable of the perfect good can attain happiness. Now, that we are capable of the perfect good, is proved both because our intellect can apprehend the universal and perfect good, and because our will can desire it. And therefore we can attain happiness. This can be proved again from the fact that man is capable of seeing god, as stated [above] . . .. Aquinas, Summa: Can we attain happiness?, Aquinas, Summa: Can we see the essence of God?

In the modern world, this theological theory of happiness has lost some of its appeal and we have instead placed our hopes for utopia on business. We might define business as a means of creating value. There are as many different measures of value as there are human desires. The marketing industry is devoted to creating new desires. The business world identifies desires (which may sometimes be needs) and sets out to meet them, by raising the capital necessary to develop, market and distribute the desired product. This world is built upon the root algorithm of survival: profit, the difference between income and expense. The Society of the Spectacle - Wikipedia

Money in the economy is the symmetry or code that couples all trades into a peer layer. The financial networks work by creating money and controlling its flow between all the accounts coupled to the network. These accounts are the interface between the financial network and the world of goods and services.

The most socially important value measured by money are the amounts we will pay to employ one another. While the bulk of transactions in the business world are private deals of one sort or another, statisticians aggregate this information to produce pictures of business networks. This global view is the subject of economics.

One of the most pressing issues revealed by this information is the stark differences in health and freedom between those who control plenty of money and those who have very little. From a broad perspective, most of the political, diplomatic and military turmoil in the world has its source in this dichotomy. The poor struggling to get a fair share; the wealthy using all means including violence to protect their unfair share. Since the wealthy control most means of communication, their entitlement to wealth is deeply embedded in capitalist economic theory. Thomas Piketty: Capital and Ideology

Jesus saves us. Saves us from what? The Catholic history of salvation is built on a social zombies, satan and the original sin. Neither exist, or have ever existed. The Catholic history of salvation is one of the biggest (and mot profictable delusions that have ever infected the human world.

Why has this happened? What can we do to save ourselves from bogus saviours? Th problem is the extraordinary fertility of our creative imaginations. They are the source of art and culture but they must not be allowed to hide reality. To save ourselves, we must couple ourselves to the real god, the god that creates the world we live in. This sounds simple enough. It is the strategy employed by all the other species on Earth. Natural selection is in effect the judgement of the environment on the competence of an individual creature. If it has sufficient luck and skill, it will survive, grow and reproduce, thus passing on a little of its luck and skill to the next generation. Those not so fortunate die without issue.

We were once indistinguishable from what we call wild animals. We lived by the same rules of variation and selection as everybody else. This discipline controlled both our bodies, our behaviour and our discussions with one another and other species about the human condition. Where did we go wrong? In a nutshell, we developed the organization and technology necessary to free ourselves from many of the constraints of divine nature.

This freedom has allowed us, like ignorant children, to crash large portions of the system of the world which supports us. Our newfound freedom has been bought with money and energy.

Money is a convenient way of bargaining toward a deal. Each dealer knows the product, and knows what it is worth to them. It may be a matter of sentiment or capital investment, but the essential point is to assign a number to this value. As the bargaining progresses, the specification of the deal may change, but in the end the dealers will agree on a payment. Property will go one way, value, measured in money, will go the other.

The abstract representation of trade with money has made it possible to study and control the overall flow of value in a human network. This has allowed control of the money system to be gradually concentrated in very few hands, usually governments in one form or another. These hands are sticky, and tend to cream off a lot of the money that passes through them, creating immensely wealthy institutions and individuals. Distribution of wealth - Wikipedia

In the physical universe, fermions are structural particles and bosons are the particles that carry messages between the fermions. When an electron in an atom sends or receives a photon, its state is changed. In effect the atom remembers the photon.

Money and action are coupled in a similar way. In the human sphere, monetary transactions are a small fraction of the overall transactions in the world. We must remember that unpaid domestic work, cooking, cleaning, bring up children and so on comprises about two thirds of all human activity. The payment here is not money, but cultural obligation, friendship, care and love. Domesticity is closely coupled to reality, and nowhere near as dangerous as the uncontrolled activity of money.

The salvation we need is salvation from the corrosive effect of monetization on human relationships and our relationship to the planet. We see a similar problem with energy, the physical analogue of economic cashflow. Large concentrations of energy are inherently dangerous. The whole purpose of the arms industry is to develop ways to concentrate destructive levels of energy on chosen targets. The apogee of this trend is development of thermonuclear weapons which can destroy large cities with a single explosion. All the lesser bombs, shells and guns are designed to do the same on a smaller and more precise scale. All these weapons are made possible by explosive concentrations of money.

In the economic world, governments support themselves by taxing their citizens. Such taxes may be extracted by violence where the taxpayers are being used to pay for things they do not want, like magnificent palaces for heads of state. In a democratically guided government, on the other hand, we expect the taxpayers to have effective control over government spending. A stable political situation must be designed to achieve this control and be transparent enough for citizens to see that it is true.

Money is analogous to energy. We can measure energy and trace its flow through natural systems. The development of stable societies requires that flows of money also be transparent and measurable. The ownership of money conveys no right to hide it any more than the ownership of physical property can be hidden.

Energy is conserved. In a properly functioning monetary system, money is also conserved. We became aware of the conservation of energy when we recognized the relationship of potential to kinetic energy. In the money system, potential is equivalent to debt and kinetic energy to cashflow. We expect the total cashflow in an event to be equivalent to the debt involved.

Taxation, which may be represented by money or kind, is the individual contribution to a community endeavour. In network terms, it may be considered as a contribution to the construction and maintenance of the network. In a network of self-interested agents, each agents expects to get more back from the existence of the network that its contribution to its maintenance. Of course, in an evolutionary world where gaining advantage by subterfuge can be a profitable tactic, every society needs an immune system to protect itself.

On the other hand, we could learn something from our own bodies. From a cellular point of view our bodies practice both universal basic income, supporting all the cooperating cells (which do not necessarily share our genome) and using an immune system to weed out dangerous invaders.

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16: Pain and compassion

The opposite of beatitude is pain. The Catholic Church motivates its followers with two extremes: the unimaginable bliss of heaven and the excruciating pain of hell. It claims to be able to steer us toward heaven and away from hell if we believe what it says and do what it tells us to do.

Catholic ideology claims that pain is the punishment for sin that came into the world when the first people disobeyed god, the Original Sin. This is wrong. From a modern point of view, pain is the signal that something is wrong and the pain that the Catholic Church causes is a consequences of its errors.

Pain is effectively negative feedback, tending to steer us back onto the right track. The pain system in our bodies maintains continual surveillance to detect such errors and motivate their correction. Of course some, like athletes and those escaping imminent death, many choose to continue despite the pain, but they do so in anticipation of a greater good, winning or staying alive. PainAustralia

A large proportion of the world's population drives motor vehicles. Apart from their obvious utility, they are a massive burden on public heath. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.25 million people were killed on the roads in 2015, and between 20 and fifty million sustained non fatal injuries. From one point of view, this is simply fate, but reasonable people would like to reduce this toll to zero. Except in very rare cases, every one of these people is loved by at least one and probably by many people, so that the roads leave millions of people grieving and out of pocket every year. WHO: Global status report on road safety 2015

This task has two dimensions, one related to design, the other to behaviour. So we design our vehicles and roads for safety. And we encourage our drivers, with well designed tests, carrots and sticks, to be skilled, vigilant, well rested, drug free and law abiding. The result, in Australia, is a gradual annual reduction in road trauma on a trend of about 5% per year. Extrapolated to the world, this would mean saving about 60 000 extra lives per year, and a reduction in injuries by about 2 million per year. Australian Government Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics

Similar scientific, engineering and psychological approaches to all the other evils that affect us can yield similar results in the control of violence, disease, industrial and domestic accidents, the misuse of money and all the other evils that our lives are heir to. Unfortunately, many of those in power are more concerned with political control of their people, rather than their health and safety. In short, many governments are enemies of their people, using them for their own purposes rather than serving them.

We can estimate the value of truth by counting the cost of false information. This cost is context dependent. Its minimum is 1, the cost of the routine check of a packet and the cost of retransmission. It has no upper bound, since ultimately a one bit error could be responsible for the thermonuclear destruction of the planet.

In short, we have many of the arts necessary to move toward heaven on Earth. On the other hand, the motivation is often absent, often stymied by the greed of well off antisocial individuals who would rather hang onto their wealth rather than pay a reasonable tax rate for good of their fellows. It a the role of theology to provide an ethical foundation for this motivation.

Our pleasure comes from action. Energy is eternal delight, and one of the downsides of ageing is one's decreasing energy. Energy is the rate of action. We are part of a living god, and like god as a whole our greatest pleasure is in contemplation of ourselves, not just in a mirror, but feeling our energy as we move to do things. In the dynamic interior of the divinity where we live, we have evolved to be happy when we are doing something, trying to achieve something, on the way to somewhere. Shimon Edelman: The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life

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17: Can the Catholic Church become truly catholic?

Nobody doubts that the true god is one, although there are many different visions of god reflected in major and minor religions and in individual visions and opinions. The hypothesis outlined in this book is intended, among other things, to restore the unity of god. If god is identical to the Universe, and we all inhabit one Universe, scientific study of the Universe should eventually led us all to same vision of god. Prothero: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter

At present, the Catholic Church cannot be catholic because many of its doctrines contradict reality and so cannot command the assent of reasonable people. It has a number of serious strikes against it. The chief conflicts between the Catholic Church and its human and natural environment have been listed in section 10.13 above.

The Catholic Church likes to think that because it is receiving revelation from an eternal god, is can definitely predict the future. Among theologians, this enterprise is known as eschatology, the study of the end of the world as we know it. Christian Eschatology - Wikipedia

There seems to be no reason to expect the eschatological events predicted by Christianity, any more than we can give credence to life after death or to Heaven and Hell as depicted in the Christian imagination. Now, of course, it is very clear to me that the whole history of salvation is political mythology, developed to support an authoritarian regime which seeks to rule the world. Heaven and hell have been promoted for the sole purpose of political control.

The Church promises an life of eternal bliss to those who do as it tells them. This is blatantly false advertising, and in any other business except religion would be subject to severe censure by authorities enforcing consumer protection legislation. Much of the debate about "religious freedom" revolves around whether or not churches have a right to purvey views that conflict with reality. Since it is very hard to imagine that the more intelligent members of Church management believe that we really do live on after death, the Catholic claim may qualify as the biggest lies ever told. Big lie - Wikipedia, Peter McPhee: As protests roil France, Macron faces a wicked problem — and it could lead to his downfall

The scientific approach to theology more or less demolishes all the details of the Christian History of Salvation except the injunction that we love God and love our neighbour.

From a scientific point of view, the first question to be answered is whether there is to be an end at all. Christians have long been of the persuasion that the end is not that far away. Modern scientific understanding of the Earth and the Sun, however, suggests that barring an unforeseen event like a collision with a large undetected interstellar body, the Earth will be able to sustain life in more or less its present form for another few billion years. This is 10 000 times longer than the present age of our species. The end is far from nigh. In fact it is so far out of sight that we can ignore it. Future of the Earth - Wikipedia

The consequences of the Christian assumption that we all sinners run very deep and puts a very heavy and unnecessary burden on the collective human spirit. This assumption justifies the sadistic and murderous attitude the Church takes to non-believers and effectively creates a social rift between 'believers' and 'non-believers'. We have already noticed that to be branded a sinner is very bad for one's self esteem. It induces feelings of rejection and helplessness. In the case of original sin, the accusation is manifestly unjust. The original sinners, if they ever existed, are thousands of generations in the past.

This rift between 'believers' and 'unbelievers' operates at many levels, from maintaining social isolation and refusing to do business with one another to communal violence and civil war. From our own experience we may understand the motivation for such behaviour is insecurity. If we let them, they are going to take our women, our jobs, our children, our houses and our land, so we must resist. Among the leading preachers of this perverted view of humanity is Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association, who sees in the world around us 'terrorists, home invaders, drug cartels, carjackers, knockout gamers, rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers.' Kamel Daoud: Black in Algeria: You'd better be Muslim, Amy Sullivan: America's New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism

In general there are two ways to sustain oneself: either be productive, or pillage others. Productive populations, which invest their capital in improving their productivity are vulnerable to rapacious populations, which invest their capital in weapons and live by stealing the production of others.

The covenant implied in the hypothesis that Universe is divine is real, and it implements the dictum The Lord helps those who help themselves. We must add the rider: not by helping themselves to other people' property, but by helping themselves to create capital of their own. This covenant arises because we exist within god, not outside it so that our lives are part of the life of god, so that all our experiences are experiences of god.

The beauty of the divine universe is that it has many reliable features. Many things can be predicted. the Sun rises and sets every day (in most places), even if there are clouds. This reliability makes engineering possible, and we take engineering to be the paradigm for self help. To help oneself, one must get one's act together, that is devise a sequence of actions based on reality which will probably yield the desired result: a good crop, a fat lamb or a successful journey.

Every community must avoid falling into the social black hole that can kill it by destroying its complex collective mind. Black holes extinguish all structure, leaving only a surface of discrete elements that have no ordered relationship to one another, the entropy of a black hole. This is equivalent to taking a network and cutting it into little pieces, each no larger than a single quantum of action.

The black hole is the collapse toward absolute dictatorship. We get there by a vicious spiral. A society is most powerful when everybody in it is constructively helping to process the problems continually thrown up by social life, from plumbing to social diplomacy. Such a society has maximum entropy. complexity and stability. It has the maximum computational bandwidth for dealing with emergent problems.

The trouble starts when one part of the network becomes more powerful then another. Power attracts wealth, wealth bolsters power, and we can see this spiral continuing until we arrive at just one person with all the power. The computational bandwidth of the society has been reduced to that of one person, and that person is probably too busy trying to retain power to pay much attention to good management. McNeill: The Pursuit of Power

The Catholic Church focusses all our interest on the life to come. Will we make it into heaven, or are we doomed to Hell? For it, it is the goal that matters, not the game. Living inside god, however, things are different. We are in both heaven and hell now, and the aim of the game is to maximize heaven and minimize hell.

Despite these problems, the Catholic Church is very popular and converting it into a modern respectable corporation will take a lot of variation and selection. We cannot control the variation very well, because it lies in the realm of incomputability, but we can try to influence the criteria for selection. Following ancient tradition, we aim to select according to the will of god. We understand wisdom to be acting as god would act, that is to try to imitate divine providence.

Jesus pointed out that 'by their fruits you shall know them'. Our knowledge of the fruits of divine action comes from the scientific study of the divine world, that is the identification of invariant elements in the divine life. We proceed, therefore, on the assumption that reform in the human world is best managed by learning from the billions of years of divine history which precede our current position in the world.

The language of the Bible reflects the belief that god is outside the world. Here we identify god and the world so we are in god, and can rightfully call ourselves divine.

Most people adapt to the prevailing culture, but there are moments when the defects of that culture come into focus. At present we are seeing the exposure of a very long tradition of male sexual harassment of women an the belief that white people are superior to coloured people. It is not immediately clear why this has happened now, but it may be result of the election of a self-confessed racist 'pussy grabber' to the United States presidency. Another issue getting attention, also associated with the Trump Republican administration, is the recognition that 'neoliberal' trickle down economics is a failure. The US, the richest country in the world, has a very high rate of poverty which can be attributed to successive governments endorsing this economic policy. Poverty in the United States - Wikipedia, Ross Gittins: We might have just seen the end of the age of bizonomics

Such 'cultural shocks' and not easily predictable. They are in effect the result of a development in the spirit of a community 'whose time has come', a sudden and unpredictable change in our collective view of the world. The mathematical theory of catastrophe may help us to understand and deal with these events. In a digital world every event is in effect a catastrophe, a sudden change from a to b. What varies is the size of the change, counted in quanta of action. Catastrophe theory - Wikipedia

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18: The reception of the divine Universe

Catholicism is a version of Christianity, one of the world's major religions. About one fifth of the world's population embrace Catholicism. It has had aspirations since the beginnings to embrace the whole world, as instructed by its founder:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18-20)

This has yet to happen, and although it is big, it is just one of the major religions in the world. Prothero, defending his contention that God is Not One names 8 contenders: Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Judaism and Daoism. To these he adds Atheism, by which he appears to mean none of the above.

It is easy enough to agree that there are many religions in the world, and that they have different conceptions of god, some of which amount, from a Christian point of view, to no god. Nevertheless, if we define god as everything and theology as the theory of everything, there is but one god and every one of the tens or hundreds of thousands of religions in the world, past and present, has a theology, that is a set of stories about their equivalent to god, usually their creator, sustainer and judge. We may guess that one or more sacred languages corresponds to each of these religions. There are thousands of languages in the world at present, and it not easy to guess how many have existed in the millions of years of human history.

We have noted already that the combination of a scientific method leading us to the truth and the unity of the world should have the effect of unifying human knowledge. There are always fringe dwellers, but we can see that on the whole physics, chemistry and biology are unified sciences. Other disciplines like history, linguistics and psychology which deal with more complex subjects contain a larger variety of opinions but even there honest scholarship tends to lead us to lead us toward settled opinions as time goes by.

We understand religion as applied theology in the same sense as medicine is applied biology. Although biology is a unified science, there are an enormous number of medical applications of this knowledge. Analogy to this situation suggests that we should not expect the unification of theology to lead to the the production of one global religion. The effect might in fact be the opposite. Despite its political and bureaucratic efforts to unify itself religiously, Catholicism exists in myriad forms around the word. The freedom inherent in a scientific theology liberated from institutional control can be expected to nurture many more.

We may understand this by comparison with human freedom. The effect of freedom is to enable each of us to follow a trajectory in life which makes us unique. A common theology, founded in a common understanding the divine Universe, is the foundation for a similar flowering of religious response to our boundless world.

Despite its manifest advantages, we can expect the establishment of scientific theology to be an uphill battle. Who would want to believe the hypothesis that the Universe is divine and use it to review their own theological foundations? Maybe very few people, for a number of reasons.

First, the hypothesis flies in the face of about five thousand years of tradition deeply entrenched in Western culture. Most of the gods we have ever dreamt up are mysterious and invisible, beyond our understanding. Perhaps it is better that way. Christianity tells us that we will see the sheer beauty of god only after we are dead, not before. Our hypothesis suggests that if you understand what we are saying you are looking at god now. Appreciating this vision requires a major change of attitude to the so called "material" world.

Second, science is deeply political because it is both disruptive and expensive. This book has taken me 50 years to write. If someone was paying me it would have cost them millions. The science of climate change commits us to radical changes in our production and consumption of energy. Environmental science points to huge changes in our extractive industries, agriculture, fisheries, and forestry. Health science suggests that the burden of disease can be radically reduced by changes in diet and behaviour. All the sciences have implications for the way we do things, and many old assets are likely to be stranded as a result. Theology is more political than most since it is predominantly under the control of ancient institutions which rely on obsolete intellectual capital which has been stranded by modern scientific development must be written off.

Third, of the old religions of the world grew up in the era of monarchy. The Catholic Church, the starting point for this essay, remains an absolute monarchy. Through its Judaic foundations, it has inherited the doctrine of the divine right of kings that entered our religious sphere through Moses. You might remember that Moses climbed Mount Sinai to meet Yahweh. There, according to Moses' story, Yahweh gave him the laws which his people were to obey and Moses conveyed the laws to the people. Like many a monarch, ancient and modern, he then killed those who did not accept his sovereignty. He believed he had a God given mandate to murder anybody who stood in the way of his regime.

We speak of political movements, which mean political views which attract significant numbers of people. These views are primarily states of mind, but they are often put in writing to document what the movement is about, or what they think it should be about. Political movements are part of the dynamics of the human society. Often, as in the case of Karl Marx's book Das Kapital, a movement is started by a document. In the case of Christianity, it seems that the movement was quite strong before the documentation began to emerge. Most date the first Gospel literature to no earlier than 50 BCE, nearly 20 years after Jesus was murdered.

All in all, the prognosis for this rather messy book does not seem very good. But, with luck and the internet, it may turn out to become a strong attractor which will revolutionize theology and make me very happy. I wish.

(Revised 22 December 2020)

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Further reading

Books

Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Crown Business 2012 "Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail." —George Akerlof, Nobel laureate in economics, 2001   Amazon   back

Ashby, W Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen 1956, 1964 'This book is intended to provide [an introduction to cybernetics]. It starts from common-place and well understood concepts, and proceeds step by step to show how these concepts can be made exact, and how they can be developed until they lead into such subjects as feedback, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, noise and other cybernetic topics.'  Amazon   back

Augustine, Saint, and Edmond Hill (Introduction, translation and notes), and John E Rotelle (editor), The Trinity, New City Press 399-419, 1991 Written 399 - 419: De Trinitate is a radical restatement, defence and development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Augustine's book has served as a foundation for most subsequent work, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas.   Amazon   back

Brown, Kevin, Reflections on Relativity, Lulu.com 2018 ' "Reflections on Relativity" is a comprehensive presentation of the classical, special, and general theories of relativity, including in-depth historical perspectives, showing how the relativity principle has repeatedly inspired advances in our understanding of the physical world.'  Amazon   back

Crotty (2012), Robert, Three Revolutions: Three Drastic Changes in Interpreting the Bible, ATF Press 2012 ' The author describes the drastic changes or revolutions that have occurred in the interpretation of the Bible during his own lifetime. . . . The first revolution was the introduction of the historical-critical approach. The Bible was interpreted as historical in a broad sense, not in all its details. In a Roman university the author later found that this broad historical verification of the Bible became more and more problematic. The second revolution is described as the Bible as Literature methodology. This approach puts aside history and examines the Bible as a clever and subtle literary document which has controlled religious belief and practice but cannot be substantiated as historical fact. There was a third revolution. Within the secular university scene, the author became involved in the study of anthropology and sociology. Judaism and Christianity were seen as religions amongst other religions; their sacred writings were seen as sacred writings alongside others. . . . '  Amazon   back

Crotty (2017), Robert, The Christian Survivor: How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors, Springer 2017 ' The book puts the current interest in historical Jesus research into a proper historical context, highlighting Gnosticism’s lasting influence on early Christianity and making the provocative claim that nearly all Christian Churches are in some way descended from Roman Christianity. Breaking with the accepted wisdom of Christianity’s origins, the revised history it puts forward challenges the assumptions of Church and secular historians, biblical critics and general readers alike, with profound repercussions for scholarship, belief and practice. About the Author Robert Brian Crotty is the Emeritus Professor of Religion and Education at the University of South Australia. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge University. Professor Crotty was educated in Australia, Rome and Jerusalem. He has research degrees in Ancient History, Education, Christian Theology and Biblical Studies. He is an Élève Titulaire of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. In Rome and Jerusalem, he studied under some of the great scholars of early Christianity, including Ignace de la Potterie, Marie-Émile Boismard and Pierre Benoit and studied Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Syriac in order to further his intimate understanding of biblical texts. He has authored or edited some 33 books, multiple book chapters and journal articles in the areas of Theology, Biblical Studies and World Religions.'  Amazon   back

Denzinger, Henricus, and Adolphus Schoenmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, Herder 1963 Introduction: 'Dubium non est quin praeter s. Scripturam cuique theologo summe desiderandus sit etiam liber manualis quo contineantur edicta Magisterii ecclesiastici eaque saltem maioris momenti, et quo ope variorim indicum quaerenti aperiantur eorum materiae.' (3) 'There is no doubt that in addition to holy Scripture, every theologian also needs a handbook which contains at least the more important edicts of the Magisterium of the Church, indexed in a way which makes them easy to find.' back

Edelman, Shimon, The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Basic books 2012 Jacket: ' "The ancient injunction to 'Know thyself' gets a lively update in Shimon Edelman's eclectic examination of 'knowing' and 'self' through the lens of twenty-first century cognitive science. Its human to wander thoughtfully through real and imaginary landscapes, learning as we go—this is happiness, embodied in Edelman's witty odyssey, which provokes the very pleasures it describes.' Dan Lloyd, Brownell Professor of Philosophy, Trinity College  Amazon   back

Feynman (1965), Richard, The Character of Physical Law, Penguin Press 1992 ' Collecting legendary lectures from freewheeling scientific genius Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law is the perfect example of Feynman's gift for making complex subjects accessible and entertaining. Here Richard Feynman gives his own unique take on the puzzles and problems that lie at the heart of physics, from Newton's Law of Gravitation to mathematics as the supreme language of nature, from the mind-boggling question of whether time can go backwards to the exciting search for new scientific laws.'   Amazon   back

Frazer, James, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Penguin Books 1996 Preface: "The primary aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession of the priesthood of Diana at Aricia. ...' 'Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he himself was slain by a stronger or a craftier.' [p 1]   Amazon   back

Heath, Thomas Little, Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (volume 1, I-II), Dover 1956 'This is the definitive edition of one of the very greatest classics of all time - the full Euclid, not an abridgement. Utilizing the text established by Heiberg, Sir Thomas Heath encompasses almost 2500 years of mathematical and historical study upon Euclid.'  Amazon   back

Jisheng, Yang, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012 'An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women and children starved to death during China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as the “three years of natural disaster.” As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang lays the deaths at the feet of China’s totalitarian Communist system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.'  Amazon   back

Macmillan, Margaret, War: How Conflict Shaped Us, Profile Books 2020 ' In War, Professor Margaret MacMillan explores the deep links between society and war and the questions they raise. We learn when war began - whether among early homo sapiens or later, as we began to organise ourselves into tribes and settle in communities. We see the ways in which war reflects changing societies and how war has brought change - for better and worse. Economies, science, technology, medicine, culture: all are instrumental in war and have been shaped by it - without conflict it we might not have had penicillin, female emancipation, radar or rockets. Throughout history, writers, artists, film-makers, playwrights, and composers have been inspired by war - whether to condemn, exalt or simply puzzle about it. If we are never to be rid of war, how should we think about it and what does that mean for peace?  Amazon   back

McGregor, Richard, The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, Harper 2010 Amazon editorial review: From Publishers Weekly 'McGregor, a journalist at the Financial Times, begins his revelatory and scrupulously reported book with a provocative comparison between China's Communist Party and the Vatican for their shared cultures of secrecy, pervasive influence, and impenetrability. The author pulls back the curtain on the Party to consider its influence over the industrial economy, military, and local governments. McGregor describes a system operating on a Leninist blueprint and deeply at odds with Western standards of management and transparency. Corruption and the tension between decentralization and national control are recurring themes--and are highlighted in the Party™s handling of the disturbing Sanlu case, in which thousands of babies were poisoned by contaminated milk powder. McGregor makes a clear and convincing case that the 1989 backlash against the Party, inexorable globalization, and technological innovations in communication have made it incumbent on the Party to evolve, and this smart, authoritative book provides valuable insight into how it has--and has not--met the challenge. ' Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.  Amazon   back

McNeill, William H, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since AD 1000, Basil Blackwell 1983 Jacket: 'In this global history of war, from antiquity to the atomic age, WMcN traces the history of lethal technology, showing that the crucial factor on military success has nearly always been superior weaponry. He examines the motivation of warring people through the ages, the development of war-related industries, and the personalities of great warriors and leaders.'  Amazon   back

Miles, Jack, God: A Biography, Vintage Books 1996 Jacket: 'Jack Miles's remarkable work examines the hero of the Old Testament . . . from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. . . . We see God torn by conflicting urges. To his own sorrow, he is by turns destructive and creative, vain and modest, subtle and naive, ruthless and tender, lawful and lawless, powerful yet powerless, omniscient and blind.'  Amazon   back

Nielsen, Michael A, and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2000 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002.  Amazon   back

Orwell, George Orwell, and Erich Fromm (Afterword), Thomas Pynchon (Foreword), Nineteen Eighty Four, Plume 2003 'Novel by George Orwell, published in 1949 as a warning about the menaces of totalitarianism. The novel is set in an imaginary future world that is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book's hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of these states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity. Orwell's warning of the dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's title and many of its coinages, such as NEWSPEAK, became bywords for modern political abuses.' -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature  Amazon   back

Packard, Vance, The Hidden Persuaders, Pelican/Penguin Books 1957-1974 ' It is staggering that a book published in 1957 should remain so relevant, vibrant and important over 5 decades later. This is the story of how the consumer society was created by motivating the public to desire, consume and replace what they probably don't need and didn't know that they wanted. All the techniques described continue to be used to manipulate the public and drive an economy based on consumption, built in obsolescence and fad. This should be essential reading for all young people in secondary school. However, unfortunately, the power of the persuaders is so great and our will, mine included, so weak that even knowing we are being manipulated for other's profit we continue to fall for it over and over again. Bob Barr  Amazon   back

Piketty, Thomas, Capital and Ideology, Harvard University Press 2020 ' Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity. Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new "participatory" socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.  Amazon   back

Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Viking Adult 2011 Amazon book description: 'A provocative history of violence—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Stuff of Thought and The Blank Slate Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.'  Amazon   back

Popper, Karl Raimund, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Routledge 1992 Jacket: 'A striking picture of the logical character of scientific discovery is presented here ... Science is presented as ... the attempt to find a coherent theory of the world composed of bold conjectures and disciplines by penetrating criticism.'  Amazon   back

Prothero, Stephen, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter, HarperOne 2010 'Introduction: . . . The world's religious rivals do converge when it comes to ethics, but they diverge sharply on doctrine, ritual, mythology, experience and law. These differences may not matter to mystics of philosophers of religion, but they matter to ordinary religious people.'  Amazon   back

Quiggin, John, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us, Princeton University Press 2010 Amazon Product Description 'In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land. The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism--the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these ideas, but they still live on in the minds of many--members of the public, commentators, politicians, economists, and even those charged with cleaning up the mess. In Zombie Economics, John Quiggin explains how these dead ideas still walk among us--and why we must find a way to kill them once and for all if we are to avoid an even bigger financial crisis in the future. Zombie Economics takes the reader through the origins, consequences, and implosion of a system of ideas whose time has come and gone. These beliefs--that deregulation had conquered the financial cycle, that markets were always the best judge of value, that policies designed to benefit the rich made everyone better off--brought us to the brink of disaster once before, and their persistent hold on many threatens to do so again. Because these ideas will never die unless there is an alternative, Zombie Economics also looks ahead at what could replace market liberalism, arguing that a simple return to traditional Keynesian economics and the politics of the welfare state will not be enough--either to kill dead ideas, or prevent future crises.'  Amazon   back

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Divine Milieu, Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2001 ' "The volume includes a scholarly and most helpful Foreword by Jesuit scholar Thomas M. King, who outlines the life of Teilhard de Chardin and helps the reader to understand the context in which The Divine Milieu was written. He writes of a Jesuit priest whose work did not sit easily with the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the early twentieth century. He portrays a man in some spiritual turmoil, living through events of great magnitude, who is seeking to make sense of all that is around him and of his own reaction to those events. The Divine Milieu was not written for those who were comfortable in their Catholic faith, but for the doubters and waverers – those for whom classical expressions of religious faith had long lost their meaning. I commend this volume.” —Rev. Adrian Burdon, Religion and Theology'  Amazon   back

Teilhard de Chardin (1965), Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins 1965 Sir Julian Huxley, Introduction: 'We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of the Phenomenon of Man.'   Amazon   back

Tyerman, Christopher, The World of the Crusades, Yale UP 2019 ' Throughout the Middle Ages crusading was justified by religious ideology, but the resulting military campaigns were fueled by concrete objectives: land, resources, power, reputation. Crusaders amassed possessions of all sorts, from castles to reliquaries. Campaigns required material funds and equipment, while conquests produced bureaucracies, taxation, economic exploitation, and commercial regulation. Wealth sustained the Crusades while material objects, from weaponry and military technology to carpentry and shipping, conditioned them. This lavishly illustrated volume considers the material trappings of crusading wars and the objects that memorialized them, in architecture, sculpture, jewelry, painting, and manuscripts. Christopher Tyerman's incorporation of the physical and visual remains of crusading enriches our understanding of how the crusaders themselves articulated their mission, how they viewed their place in the world, and how they related to the cultures they derived from and preyed upon..'  Amazon   back

Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...'  Amazon   back

Walker, Geoffrey de Q, The Rule of Law: Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Melbourne University Press 1988 Jacket: 'The author argues that the survival of any useful rule of law model is currently threatened by distortions in the adjudication process, by perversion of law enforcement (by fabrication of evidence and other means), by the excessive production of new legislation with its degrading effect on long-term legal certainty and on long-standing safeguards, and by legal theories that are hostile to the very concept of rule of law. In practice these trends have produced a great number of legal failures from which we must learn.'  Amazon   back

Links

AASB, Australian Accounting Standards Board, 'Mission: Develop, issue and maintain principles-based Australian accounting and external reporting standards that meet user needs and enhance external reporting consistency and quality. Contribute to the development of a singe set of accounting and external reporting standards for world-wide use.' back

Ad Gentes (Vatican II), Decree on the Mission Activity of the Church, 'Divinely sent to the nations of the world to be unto them "a universal sacrament of salvation," the Church, driven by the inner necessity of her own catholicity, and obeying the mandate of her Founder (cf. Mark 16:16), strives ever to proclaim the Gospel to all men. The Apostles themselves, on whom the Church was founded, following in the footsteps of Christ, "preached the word of truth and begot churches." It is the duty of their successors to make this task endure "so that the word of God may run and be glorified (2 Thess. 3:1) and the kingdom of God be proclaimed and established throughout the world.' back

Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 'The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by some finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable of a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. . . . ' back

Amy Sullivan, America's New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism, 'Yet the students around me agreed unreservedly with Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association, who was seen in the film asserting that “in the world around us, there are terrorists, home invaders, drug cartels, carjackers, knockout gamers, rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers.” This worldview is familiar to anyone who has spent time watching Fox News, where every day viewers are confronted with threats to their way of life.' back

Andy Coghlan, Consumerism is 'eating the future', 'We’re a gloomy lot, with many of us insisting that there’s nothing we can do personally about global warming, or that the human race is over-running the planet like a plague. But according to leading ecologists speaking this week in Albuquerque at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, few of us realise that the main cause of the current environmental crisis is human nature. More specifically, all we’re doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available, just like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all the nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.' back

Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa, Evangelical fundamentalism and Catholic integralism: a surprising ecumenism, 'Pastor Rousas John Rushdoony (1916-2001) is the father of so-called “Christian reconstructionism” (or “dominionist theology”) that had a great influence on the theopolitical vision of Christian fundamentalism. . . . Rushdoony’s doctrine maintains a theocratic necessity: submit the state to the Bible with a logic that is no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism. At heart, the narrative of terror shapes the world-views of jihadists and the new crusaders and is imbibed from wells that are not too far apart. We must not forget that the theopolitics spread by Isis is based on the same cult of an apocalypse that needs to be brought about as soon as possible. So, it is not just accidental that George W. Bush was seen as a “great crusader” by Osama bin Laden.' back

Aquinas, I, 22, 3, Does God have immediate providence over everything?, 'I answer that, Two things belong to providence -- namely, the type of the order of things foreordained towards an end; and the execution of this order, which is called government. As regards the first of these, God has immediate providence over everything, because He has in His intellect the types of everything, even the smallest; and whatsoever causes He assigns to certain effects, He gives them the power to produce those effects.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I II, 2, 8, Does man's happiness consist in the vision of the divine essence?, 'Respondeo dicendum quod impossibile est beatitudinem hominis esse in aliquo bono creato. Beatitudo enim est bonum perfectum, quod totaliter quietat appetitum, alioquin non esset ultimus finis, si adhuc restaret aliquid appetendum. Obiectum autem voluntatis, quae est appetitus humanus, est universale bonum; sicut obiectum intellectus est universale verum. Ex quo patet quod nihil potest quietare voluntatem hominis, nisi bonum universale. Quod non invenitur in aliquo creato, sed solum in Deo, quia omnis creatura habet bonitatem participatam. Unde solus Deus voluntatem hominis implere potest; secundum quod dicitur in Psalmo CII, qui replet in bonis desiderium tuum. In solo igitur Deo beatitudo hominis consistit. back

Aquinas, Summa, I II, 3, 8, Does human happiness consist in the vision of the divine essence?, 'If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than "that He is"; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I II, 5, 1, Can we attain happiness?, 'Happiness is the attainment of the perfect good. Whoever, therefore, is capable of the perfect pood can attain happiness. Now, that we are capable of the perfect ood, is proved both because our intellect can apprehend the universal and perfect good, and because our will can desire it. And therefore we can attain happiness. This can be proved again from the fact that man is capable of seeing God, as stated in I, 12, 1 . . . ' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, II, 1, Man's last end, 'I answer that, Of actions done by man those alone are properly called "human," which are proper to man as man. Now man differs from irrational animals in this, that he is master of his actions. Wherefore those actions alone are properly called human, of which man is master. . . . But the object of the will is the end and the good. Therefore all human actions must be for an end.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, II, 2, 8, Is any created good the source of human happiness?, 'I answer that, It is impossible for any created good to constitute man's happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired. Now the object of the will, i.e. of man's appetite, is the universal good; just as the object of the intellect is the universal true. Hence it is evident that naught can lull man's will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone;' back

Aquinas, Summa: I, 12, 1, Can we see the essence of God?, 'Therefore some who considered this, held that no created intellect can see the essence of God. This opinion, however, is not tenable. For as the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of his intellect; if we suppose that the created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else beside God; which is opposed to faith.' back

Aquinas, Summa: I, 9, 1, Is god is altogether immutable?, 'I answer that, from what precedes, it is shown that God is altogether immutable. First, because it was shown above that there is some first being, whom we call God; and that this first being must be pure act, without the admixture of any potentiality, for the reason that, absolutely, potentiality is posterior to act. Now everything which is in any way changed, is in some way in potentiality. Hence it is evident that it is impossible for God to be in any way changeable. . . . ' back

Aristotle, The Internet Classics Archive | Politics by Aristotle, 'Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good. . . . Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.' back

Arrow's impossibility theorem - Wikipedia, Arrow's impossibility theorem - Wikipedia, the free encylopedia, 'In social choice theory, Arrow's impossibility theorem, the general possibility theorem or Arrow's paradox is an impossibility theorem stating that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a pre-specified set of criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. The theorem is often cited in discussions of voting theory as it is further interpreted by the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem.' back

Ascension of Jesus - Wikipedia, Ascension of Jesus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Ascension of Jesus (anglicized from the Vulgate Latin Acts 1:9-11 section title: Ascensio Iesu) is the departure of Christ from Earth into the presence of God.[1] The well-known narrative in Acts 1 takes place 40 days after the Resurrection: Jesus, in the company of the disciples, is taken up in their sight after warning them to remain in Jerusalem until the coming of the Holy Spirit; as he ascends a cloud hides him from their view, and two men in white appear to tell them that he will return "in the same way you have seen him go into heaven." ' back

Australian Government Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics, Road Trauma Australia—Annual Summaries, 'This annual bulletin contains calendar year counts of fatal road crashes and road crash deaths. It also includes rates of deaths per population, per registered vehicle and per vehicle kilometre travelled. Data are sourced from the road traffic or police authorities in each jurisdiction, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and BITRE.' back

Big Bang - Wikipedia, Big Bang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in its present continuously expanding state. According to the most recent measurements and observations, this original state existed approximately 13.7 billion years ago, which is considered the age of the Universe and the time the Big Bang occurred. ' back

Big lie - Wikipedia, Big lie - Wikipedia, the free enyclopedia, 'A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Hitler asserted the technique was used by Jews to unfairly blame Germany's loss in World War I on German Army officer Erich Ludendorff.' back

Biosphere - Wikipedia, Biosphere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The biosphere (from Greek βίος bíos "life" and σφαῖρα sphaira "sphere") also known as the ecosphere (from Greek οἶκος oîkos "environment" and σφαῖρα), is the worldwide sum of all ecosystems. The two joined words are "bio" and "sphere". It can also be termed as the zone of life on Earth, a closed system (apart from solar and cosmic radiation and heat from the interior of the Earth), and largely self-regulating.' back

Canonization - Wikipedia, Canonization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Canonization is the act by which a Christian church declares that a person who has died was a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the "canon", or list, of recognized saints. Originally, persons were recognized as saints without any formal process. Later, different processes were developed, such as those used today in the Anglican Communion, Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church.' back

Cartesian coordinate system - Wikipedia, Cartesian coordinate system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' A Cartesian coordinate system is a coordinate system that specifies each point uniquely in a plane by a set of numerical coordinates, which are the signed distances to the point from two fixed perpendicular directed lines, measured in the same unit of length. Each reference line is called a coordinate axis or just axis (plural axes) of the system, and the point where they meet is its origin, at ordered pair (0, 0).' back

Catastrophe theory - Wikipedia, Catastrophe theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry. . . . Small changes in certain parameters of a nonlinear system can cause equilibria to appear or disappear, or to change from attracting to repelling and vice versa, leading to large and sudden changes of the behaviour of the system. However, examined in a larger parameter space, catastrophe theory reveals that such bifurcation points tend to occur as part of well-defined qualitative geometrical structures.' back

Catholic Catechism c1, a1, p6, Created "in the image of God", ' 355 "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." Man occupies a unique place in creation: (I) he is "in the image of God"; (II) in his own nature he unites the spiritual and material worlds; (III) he is created "male and female"; (IV) God established him in his friendship. . . . 356 Of all visible creatures only man is "able to know and love his creator". He is "the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake", and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God's own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity: . . . ' back

Catholic Catechism p1, s2, c1, a1, p6, II. Body and soul, but truly one, '366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.' back

Catholic Catechism p1, s2, c1, a1, p6, IV. Man in paradise, 376 By the radiance of this grace all dimensions of man's life were confirmed. As long as he remained in the divine intimacy, man would not have to suffer or die.The inner harmony of the human person, the harmony between man and woman, and finally the harmony between the first couple and all creation, comprised the state called "original justice".' back

Catholic Catechism p1, s2, c1, a1, p7, III. Original sin, 405 Although it is proper to each individual, original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence. Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.' back

Catholic Catechism p1, s2, c1, a1, p7 , III: Original Sin, '400 The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject "to its bondage to decay". Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will "return to the ground", for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history.' back

Catholic Catechism P1, s2, c3, a12, I believe in Life Everlasting, '1021 Death puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ. The New Testament speaks of judgment primarily in its aspect of the final encounter with Christ in his second coming, but also repeatedly affirms that each will be rewarded immediately after death in accordance with his works and faith. The parable of the poor man Lazarus and the words of Christ on the cross to the good thief, as well as other New Testament texts speak of a final destiny of the soul--a destiny which can be different for some and for others.' back

Catholic Catechism p1, s2, c3, a9, p1, II. The Church's origin, foundation and mission, '769 "The Church . . . will receive its perfection only in the glory of heaven," at the time of Christ's glorious return. Until that day, "the Church progresses on her pilgrimage amidst this world's persecutions and God's consolations." Here below she knows that she is in exile far from the Lord, and longs for the full coming of the Kingdom, when she will "be united in glory with her king." The Church, and through her the world, will not be perfected in glory without great trials. Only then will "all the just from the time of Adam, 'from Abel, the just one, to the last of the elect,' . . . be gathered together in the universal Church in the Father's presence." ' back

Catholic Catechism p2, s2, c1, a1, VII The grace of baptism, '1263 By Baptism all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins, as well as all punishment for sin. In those who have been reborn nothing remains that would impede their entry into the Kingdom of God, neither Adam's sin, nor personal sin, nor the consequences of sin, the gravest of which is separation from God. back

Catholic Catechism p2, s2, c1, a3, The Sacrament of the Eucharist, '1322 The holy Eucharist completes Christian initiation. Those who have been raised to the dignity of the royal priesthood by Baptism and configured more deeply to Christ by Confirmation participate with the whole community in the Lord's own sacrifice by means of the Eucharist. 1323 "At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his Body and Blood. This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again, and so to entrust to his beloved Spouse, the Church, a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet 'in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.'" ' back

Catholic Catechism p2, s2, c1, a3, The presence of Christ by the power of his word and the Holy Spirit, '1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: "Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation." . back

Catholic Catechism p2, s2, c2, a4, Excommunication, '1463 Certain particularly grave sins incur excommunication, the most severe ecclesiastical penalty, which impedes the reception of the sacraments and the exercise of certain ecclesiastical acts, and for which absolution consequently cannot be granted, according to canon law, except by the Pope, the bishop of the place or priests authorized by them. In danger of death any priest, even if deprived of faculties for hearing confessions, can absolve from every sin and excommunication.' back

Catholic Catechism p2, s2, c3, a7, Marriage under the regime of sin, '1607 According to faith the disorder we notice so painfully does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin. As a break with God, the first sin had for its first consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman. Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations;96 their mutual attraction, the Creator's own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust;97 and the beautiful vocation of man and woman to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work.' back

Catholic Catechism p3, s2, c1, a1, 1. You shall worship the Lord your God and only him shall you serve, '2089 Incredulity is the neglect of revealed truth or the willful refusal to assent to it. "Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same; apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith; schism is the refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him." back

Charles J. T. Talar, "The Synthesis of all Heresies" - 100 Years On, Theological Studies 68 3 pp 491-414 'The condemnation of Roman Catholic Modernism in 1907 was a traumatic event—in the dual sense that it reflected the traumatic impact of intellectual and political modernity on the Church, and in that it induced a climate of repressive reaction that affected Catholic scholarship for decades thereafter. The issues raised by the Modernists form an integral part of the trajectory of 20th-century theology.' back

Christian Eschatology - Wikipedia, Christian Eschatology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Broadly speaking, Christian eschatology is the study concerned with the ultimate destiny of the individual soul and the entire created order, based primarily upon biblical texts within the Old and New Testament. Christian eschatology looks to study and discuss matters such as death and the afterlife, Heaven and Hell, the second coming Jesus, the resurrection of the dead, the rapture, the tribulation, millennialism, the end of the world, the Last Judgment, and the New Heaven and New Earth in the world to come. ' back

Code of Canon Law 333, The Roman Pontiff, ' Can. 333 §1. By virtue of his office, the Roman Pontiff not only possesses power over the universal Church but also obtains the primacy of ordinary power over all particular churches and groups of them. Moreover, this primacy strengthens and protects the proper, ordinary, and immediate power which bishops possess in the particular churches entrusted to their care. §2. In fulfilling the office of supreme pastor of the Church, the Roman Pontiff is always joined in communion with the other bishops and with the universal Church. He nevertheless has the right, according to the needs of the Church, to determine the manner, whether personal or collegial, of exercising this office. §3. No appeal or recourse is permitted against a sentence or decree of the Roman Pontiff.' back

Code of Hammurabi - Wikipedia, Code of Hammurabi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code, dating to ca. 1700 BC (short chronology). It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world. The sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a human-sized stone stele and various clay tablets. The Code consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" (lex talionis) as graded depending on social status, of slave versus free man.' back

Complete set of commuting observables - Wikipedia, Complete set of commuting observables - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In quantum mechanics, a complete set of commuting observables (CSCO) is a set of commuting operators whose eigenvalues completely specify the state of a system.' back

Craig Stirling, Fifty Years of Tax Cuts for Rich Didn't Trickle Down, Study Says, ' Tax cuts for rich people breed inequality without providing much of a boon to anyone else, according to a study of the advanced world that could add to the case for the wealthy to bear more of the cost of the coronavirus pandemic. The paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, found that such measures over the last 50 years only really benefited the individuals who were directly affected, and did little to promote jobs or growth. “Policy makers shouldn’t worry that raising taxes on the rich to fund the financial costs of the pandemic will harm their economies,” Hope said in an interview.' back

Daneil Baldino, The security benefits of warrantless surveillance, 'In January 2014, an extensive survey of unclassified cases by the non-partisan New America Foundation reinforced this. It showed that the mass collection of phone metadata had no “discernible impact” in thwarting acts of terrorism, with negligible national security outcomes.' . . . A majority of legislative discussions about the value of NSA programs have been highly secretive. The Senate Intelligence Committee lists 56 hearings in 2013, with only three open to the public. The House Intelligence Committee has had fewer than ten open hearings in 2015.' back

David Patrikarakos, There will be no justice for Flight MH17 until we contain Rusia's financial power, 'The MH17 tragedy illustrates two things: first, an increasingly aggressive Russia is becoming more of a problem not less. While the world has turned its eyes from the Ukraine conflict, it continues to rage. Second, that we in the west, especially Britain – with a City of London that Russia uses to launder its dirty money – are complicit. According to Ben Judah, author of the Kleptocracy Curse: “Two powerful trends meet in London: the rise of the offshore financial system and the rise of globalised authoritarians.” ' back

Distribution of wealth - Wikipedia, Distribution of wealth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The distribution of wealth is a comparison of the wealth of various members or groups in a society. It shows one aspect of economic inequality or economic heterogeneity. The distribution of wealth differs from the income distribution in that it looks at the economic distribution of ownership of the assets in a society, rather than the current income of members of that society. According to the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, "the world distribution of wealth is much more unequal than that of income." ' back

Divine right of kings - Wikipedia, Divine right of kings - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The divine right of kings is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm, including (in the view of some, especially in Protestant countries) the Church. According to this doctrine, since only God can judge an unjust king, the king can do no wrong. The doctrine implies that any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act.' back

Douglas O. Linder, Trial of Galileo Galilei, 'In the 1633 trial of Galileo Galilei, two worlds come into cosmic conflict. Galileo's world of science and humanism collides with the world of Scholasticism and absolutism that held power in the Catholic Church. The result is a tragedy that marks both the end of Galileo's liberty and the end of the Italian Renaissance.' back

Due process - Wikipedia, Due process - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Due process is the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person. Due process balances the power of law of the land and protects the individual person from it. When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due process violation, which offends the rule of law.' back

Engineering disasters - Wikipedia, Engineering disasters - Wikipedia, the free encyclopdia, 'In the field of engineering, the importance of safety is emphasized. Learning from past engineering failures and infamous disasters such as the Challenger explosion brings the sense of reality to what can happen when appropriate safety precautions are not taken. Safety tests such as tensile testing, finite element analysis (FEA), and failure theories help provide information to design engineers about what maximum forces and stresses can be applied to a certain region of a design. These precautionary measures help prevent failures due to overloading and deformation.' back

English versions of the Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, English versions of the Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Nicene Creed, composed in part and adopted at the First Council of Nicaea (325) and revised with additions by the First Council of Constantinople (381), is a creed that summarizes the orthodox faith of the Christian Church and is used in the liturgy of most Christian Churches. This article endeavours to give the text and context of English-language translations.' back

Excommunication - Wikipedia, Excommunication - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Excommunication is an institutional act of religious censure used to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or to restrict certain rights within it, in particular receiving of the sacraments. The term is often historically used to refer specifically to Catholic excommunications from the Catholic Church, but it is also used more generally to refer to similar types of institutional religious exclusionary practices and shunning among other religious groups.' back

Financial crisis - Wikipedia, Financial crisis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and many recessions coincided with these panics. Other situations that are often called financial crises include stock market crashes and the bursting of other financial bubbles, currency crises, and sovereign defaults.' back

First Vatican Council, IV: Concerning the Infallible Teaching of the Roman Pontiff, ' . . . we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.' back

Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, a fixed point theorem is a result saying that a function F will have at least one fixed point (a point x for which F(x) = x), under some conditions on F that can be stated in general terms. Results of this kind are amongst the most generally useful in mathematics. The Banach fixed point theorem gives a general criterion guaranteeing that, if it is satisfied, the procedure of iterating a function yields a fixed point. By contrast, the Brouwer fixed point theorem is a non-constructive result: it says that any continuous function from the closed unit ball in n-dimensional Euclidean space to itself must have a fixed point, but it doesn't describe how to find the fixed point (See also Sperner's lemma).' back

Future of the Earth - Wikipedia, Future of the Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The biological and geological future of the Earth can be extrapolated based upon the estimated effects of several long-term influences. These include the chemistry at the Earth's surface, the rate of cooling of the planet's interior, the gravitational interactions with other objects in the Solar System, and a steady increase in the Sun's luminosity.' back

Genesis, Genesis, from the Holy Bible, King James Version, '1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.' back

George Rennie, Is America a 'failing state'? How a superpower has been brought to the brink, ' After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a sense history had ended, and that the United States represented a supreme endpoint. Today, the US is not dominant, it is in crisis: convulsed by riots and protest, riven by a virus that has galloped away from those charged with overseeing it, and heading into a presidential election led by a man that has possibly divided the nation like no other before him. Using the most common metrics available to political scientists, there are signs the United States is failing.' back

Geosphere - Wikipedia, Geosphere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The geosphere may be taken as the collective name for the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, and the atmosphere.' back

Government - Wikipedia, Government - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, often a state.[1] In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, administration, and judiciary. Government is a means by which state policies are enforced, as well as a mechanism for determining the policy.' back

Historicity of the Bible - Wikipedia, Historicity of the Bible - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Many fields of study span the Bible and history, such fields range from archeology and astronomy to linguistics and comparative literature. Scholars also examine the historical context of Bible passages, the importance ascribed to events by the authors, and the contrast between the descriptions of these events and other historical evidence. Archaeological discoveries since the 19th century are open to interpretation, but broadly speaking they lend support to few of the Old Testament's historical narratives and offer evidence to challenge others.' back

History of Palestine - Wikipedia, History of Palestine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Strategically situated between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, Palestine has a tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. Palestine has been controlled by several independent kingdoms and great powers, including Ancient Egypt, Persia, Alexander the Great and his successors, the Roman Empire, several Muslim dynasties, and the Crusaders.' back

History of religions - Wikipedia, History of religions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The history of religion refers to the written record of human religious experiences and ideas. This period of religious history begins with the invention of writing about 5,200 years ago (3200 BCE). The prehistory of religion relates to a study of religious beliefs that existed prior to the advent of written records.' back

History of the United States Constitution - Wikipedia, History of the United States Constitution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, back

Baltimore Catechism - Wikipedia, Baltimore Catechism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Council of Baltimore, or simply the Baltimore Catechism, is the official national catechism for children in the United States. It was the standard Catholic religion school text in the United States from 1885 to the late 1960s.' back

Leviathan (book) - Wikipedia, Leviathan (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil—commonly referred to as Leviathan—is a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in 1651 (revised Latin edition 1668). Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.' back

The Society of the Spectacle - Wikipedia, The Society of the Spectacle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Society of the Spectacle (French: La société du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which he develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered an important text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.' back

John Paul II, Fides et Ratio: On the relationship between faith and reason , para 2: 'The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be. From the moment when, through the Paschal Mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life, the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).' back

John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 22 May 1994, '4. Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgement is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.' back

John Paull II, Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum, '3. The Doctrinal Value of the Text The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I approved 25 June last and the publication of which I today order by virtue of my Apostolic Authority, is a statement of the Church's faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church's Magisterium. I declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion.' back

John, 14:16-17, The Spirit of truth, 'And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.' back

Jonathan Malesic, A Burnt-Out Case, 'What I experienced—and what I see, admittedly somewhat anachronistically, in the final days of Thomas Aquinas—is burnout. We toss around that term imprecisely, applying it to languorous teens, drug addicts, and Graham Greene characters. But psychologists who study the phenomenon have a definition for it. Burnout is a response to the chronic stress of work, manifested in exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of inefficacy.' back

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Angelo Amato, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons , '11. The Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself. The Sovereign Pontiff John Paul II, in the Audience of March 28, 2003, approved the present Considerations, adopted in the Ordinary Session of this Congregation, and ordered their publication.' back

Juliette Kennedy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Kurt Gödel, 'In his philosophical work Gödel formulated and defended mathematical Platonism, the view that mathematics is a descriptive science, or alternatively the view that the concept of mathematical truth is objective. On the basis of that viewpoint he laid the foundation for the program of conceptual analysis within set theory (see below). He adhered to Hilbert's “original rationalistic conception” in mathematics (as he called it); and he was prophetic in anticipating and emphasizing the importance of large cardinals in set theory before their importance became clear. back

Kamel Daoud, Black in Algeria: You'd Better Be Muslim, 'Many black migrants, including those who are not Muslim, are deploying symbols of Islam to appeal to Algerians’ sense of charity. Why? Because poverty helps decode culture better than reflection does, and migrants, lacking shelter and food, are quick to realize that in Algeria there often is no empathy between human beings, only empathy between people of the same religion.' back

Kathleen McPhillips, Church's moral failure on trial at the Royal Commission, 'It is the long-held view of Cardinal George Pell and other senior Catholic officials that the sexual abuse crisis is an issue primarily about the moral failure of individual priests and not related to church culture itself. In other words, the church institution cannot be held responsible for the evil of individual priests.' back

Kathleen McPhillips, Review: Spotlight's revealing story of child abuse in my home town - and maybe yours, Updated February 29, 2016: It won Best Picture at this year’s Oscars – but I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t seen the critically acclaimed film Spotlight yet. In a summer dominated by the return of Star Wars, who wants to watch a movie about Boston journalists exposing the Catholic Church for decades of child abuse and cover ups? Includes the lists run at the end of the movie of towns in which child abuse has been detected.' back

Kinling Lo, Academics 'need freedom to speak' for China to become an ideological powerhouse, ' While not made public, Chinese academic institutions have always had strict rules for their staff going on overseas trips, but frustrations have been intensified by the turbulent relations between the US and its allies and China in recent years. “Now we [are only allowed to] go overseas for five days. For example, if we go to the US for five days, the trip already takes two days of travel, and we only have three days to work. Passing the deadline would result in disciplinary action,” she said, quoting the experience of a CCIEE staff member who had to cut her itinerary from three locations to two while in the US for one of the think tank’s own seminars. “Can a management system like this undergo some transformation?” ' back

Liar paradox - Wikipedia, Liar paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In philosophy and logic, the classical liar paradox or liar's paradox is the statement of a liar who states that she/he is lying: for instance "I am lying" or "everything I say is false". If he/she is indeed lying, he/she is telling the truth, which means he/she is lying... In "this sentence is a lie" the paradox is strengthened in order to make it amenable to more rigorous logical analysis. It is still generally called the "liar paradox" although abstraction is made precisely from the liar himself. Trying to assign to this statement, the strengthened liar, a classical binary truth value leads to a contradiction. If "this sentence is false" is true, then the sentence is false, but then if "this sentence is false" is false, then the sentence is true, and so on.' back

Little Englander - Wikipedia, Little Englander - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, '"Little Englander" is a pejorative term for British nationalists, English nationalists, or English people who are described as xenophobic or overly nationalistic and are accused of being "ignorant" and "boorish". It is sometimes applied to opponents of globalism, multilateralism and internationalism, such as those who are against UK membership with the European Union.' back

Lumen Gentium (Vatican II), Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 'THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH 1. Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, to bring the light of Christ to all men, a light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church. Since the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race, it desires now to unfold more fully to the faithful of the Church and to the whole world its own inner nature and universal mission.' back

Magna Carta - Wikipedia, Magna Carta - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Magna Carta Libertatum . . . is a charter agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons.' back

Malthusianism - Wikipedia, Malthusianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Malthusianism is a school of ideas derived from the political/economic thought of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, as laid out in his 1798 writings, An Essay on the Principle of Population, which describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply was expected to be arithmetical.' back

Matthew 28: 18-20, 'All power is given to me [Jesus] . . . , '18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” ' back

Matthew 5:1-12, The beatitudes, 'The Beatitudes “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, or they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart,f or they will see God Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you. back

Matthew Carney, Activists smuggling films and music on USB sticks in the secret information war for the minds of North Koreans, 'His weapon is not a bomb or a covert spying device, but a bundle of USB sticks strapped to a tyre tube and loaded with South Korean pop music and films. This is the frontline in a secret information war for the minds of North Koreans. Those waging it believe it will be more effective than economic sanctions or military action.' back

Matthew Jordan, In a post-truth election, clicks trump facts, 'We know from studies of how anti-vaccination myths spread that each time a telegenic spokesperson repeats a lie – even in a segment designed to correct it – it becomes more familiar to audiences. Paradoxically, because people tend to equate familiarization with truth, the more a lie is called out for being a lie, the more difficult it becomes to parse from the truth. Digital media platforms exacerbate this problem because revenue models incentivize clicks over truth. In digital capitalism attention has been monetized. The more outrageous the statement, the more clicks it generates.' back

Matthew Weaver, 'Horrible spike' in hate crime linked to the Brexit vote, Mt police say, 'Monitoring presented at the hearing by the London mayor’s evidence and insight team showed a 16% increase in hate crime in the 12 months to August. It also showed that in the 38 days after the referendum there were more than 2,300 recorded race-hate offences in London, compared with 1,400 in the 38 days before the vote.' back

Mazin Sidhamed, Trump's election led to 'barrage of hate' report finds, 'The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has counted 867 hate incidents in the 10 days after the US election, a report released Tuesday found, a phenomenon it partly blamed on the rhetoric of Donald Trump. The advocacy group collected reports of incidents from media outlets and its own #ReportHate page. SPLC said it was not able to confirm all reports but believed the number of actual incidents was far higher, as according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics most hate crimes go unreported.' back

Narcissus (Mythology) - Wikipedia, Narcissus (Mythology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who was known for his beauty. . . .Narcissus was excessively proud of his own handsomeness, rejecting others' advances because he thought only someone as beautiful as himself should pursue him, causing some to take their own lives to prove their devotion to his striking beauty. In most versions of his legend, he did finally meet someone he thought was good enough for him – himself, by way of his reflection in a pool of water. Usually, he is said to have wasted away longing to be with his mirror self, but in other stories he kills himself upon realizing he cannot have his own reflection as a lover. Either way, he dies, and in his place sprouts a flower bearing his name.' back

New Soviet man - Wikipedia, New Soviet man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The New Soviet man or New Soviet person (Russian: новый советский человек; novy sovetsky chelovek), as postulated by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was an archetype of a person with certain qualities that were said to be emerging as dominant among all citizens of the Soviet Union, irrespective of the country's cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, creating a single Soviet people, Soviet nation. back

Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Nicene Creed (Greek: Σύμβολον τῆς Νίκαιας, Latin: Symbolum Nicaenum) is the profession of faith or creed that is most widely used in Christian liturgy. It forms the mainstream definition of Christianity for most Christians. It is called Nicene because, in its original form, it was adopted in the city of Nicaea (present day Iznik in Turkey) by the first ecumenical council, which met there in the year 325. The Nicene Creed has been normative for the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion, and the great majority of Protestant denominations.' back

Noosphere - Wikipedia, Noosphere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The noosphere . . . is the sphere of human thought.The word derives from the Greek νοῦς (nous "mind") and σφαῖρα (sphaira "sphere"), in lexical analogy to "atmosphere" and "biosphere". It was introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 in his Cosmogenesis.' back

NYTimes Editorial Board, A Historic Tax Heist, 'With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days.' back

PainAustralia, PainAustralia, 'Access to Pain Management - a Fundamental Human Right As part of the 13th World Congress on Pain in Montreal and the world’s first International Pain Summit, hosted by the International Association for the Study of Pain in September 2010, delegates from 129 countries supported a Declaration that Access to Pain Management is a Fundamental Human Right. Painaustralia was a foundation supporter of the Declaration which calls for access to effective pain management to eliminate avoidable suffering of people throughout the world.' back

Paul Krugman, Voodoo Too: The GOP Addiction to Financial Regulation, 'Why has financial deregulation been, literally, such a bust? There are multiple, interacting reasons, all of which are well studied at this point. Banking is inherently vulnerable to self-fulfilling panic; if you guard against panic with explicit or implicit guarantees, you create moral hazard which must be contained via regulation. Beyond that, finance is an area where the risks of fraud, of scammers exploiting the limits of consumer understanding and rationality, are especially high. Very few people are in a position to assess the fine print of financial contracts, and the most deceptive, risky deals are sold to those least able to make that assessment.' back

Peer review - Wikipedia, Peer review - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers). It constitutes a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards of quality, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication.' back

Pentecost - Wikipedia, Pentecost - Wikipedia, the free ecyclopedia, 'The Christian holiday of Pentecost (Ancient Greek: Πεντηκοστή [ἡμέρα], Pentēkostē [hēmera], "the fiftieth [day]") is celebrated 50 days from Easter Sunday, counting inclusive of Easter Sunday itself, ie. 49 days or 7 weeks after Easter Sunday. Therefore it always occurs on a Sunday. It is also the tenth day after Ascension Thursday, which itself is 40 days from Easter, counting inclusive of Easter Sunday itself.' back

Peter McPhee, As protests roil France, Macron faces a wicked problem — and it could lead to his downfall, ' In 1789, French revolutionaries sought to capture their twin aspirations of religious tolerance and freedom of speech in articles 10 and 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. “No man may be harassed for his opinions, even religious ones”, they insisted, while asserting that “the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man”. Should these natural rights be curtailed in any way? Yes, of course: as article 4 stipulates, they would be limited to “ensure the enjoyment of the same rights for other members of society”. As to how this would be achieved, “only the law may determine these limits”. Therein lay the problem. Since “the law” would be made by national legislatures, these limits would always be instrumental — that is, made by elected politicians working within a social and political context. That is Macron’s wicked problem today.' back

Pius X: On the doctrines of the modernists, Pascendi dominici gregis, '2. That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church's open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear. We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.' back

Politics of North Korea - Wikipedia, Politics of North Korea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'North Korea's political system is built upon the principle of centralization. While the North Korean constitution formally guarantees protection of human rights, in practice there are severe limits on freedom of expression, and the government closely supervises the lives of North Korean citizens. The constitution defines North Korea as "a dictatorship of people's democracy"[3] under the leadership of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), which is given legal supremacy over other political parties.' back

Politics of Thailand - Wikipedia, Politics of Thailand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Until 22 May 2014 the politics of Thailand were conducted within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, whereby the prime minister is the head of government and a hereditary monarch is head of state. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislative branches. Since the coup d'état of 22 May 2014, the 2007 constitution was revoked, and Thailand has been under the rule of a military organization called National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), which has taken control of the national administration.' back

Pope Francis (Encyclical), Laudato Si': On care of our common home, '1. “LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”. 2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.' back

Pope Francis (Exhoration), Amoris Laetitia: The joy of love, "1. The Joy of Love experienced by families is also the joy of the Church. As the Synod Fathers noted, for all the many signs of crisis in the institution of marriage, “the desire to marry and form a family remains vibrant, especially among young people, and this is an inspiration to the Church”. As a response to that desire, “the Christian proclamation on the family is good news indeed”.' back

Pope Paul VI, Inter Insigniores: On the question of admission of women to the ministerial priesthood, '. . . in execution of a mandate received from the Holy Father and echoing the declaration which he himself made in his letter of 30 November 1975, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith judges it necessary to recall that the Church, in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination.' back

Poverty in the United States - Wikipedia, Poverty in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, In 2015, 13.5% (43.1 million) of Americans lived in poverty. Starting in the 1930s, relative poverty rates have consistently exceeded those of other wealthy nations.' back

Propaganda during the Reformation - Wikipedia, Propaganda during the Reformation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Propaganda during the Reformation, helped by the spread of the printing press throughout Europe and in particular within Germany, caused new ideas, thoughts, and doctrine to be made available to the public in ways that had never been seen before the sixteenth century. The printing press was invented in approximately 1450 and quickly spread to other major cities around Europe; by the time the Reformation was underway in 1517 there were printing centers in over 200 of the major European cities.' back

Ray Norris, The world's oldest story? Astronomers say global myth about 'seven sisters' may reach back 100 000 years, ' In the northern sky in December is a beautiful cluster of stars known as the Pleiades, or the “seven sisters”. Look carefully and you will probably count six stars. So why do we say there are seven of them? Many cultures around the world refer to the Pleiades as “seven sisters”, and also tell quite similar stories about them. After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back 100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different.' back

Ross Gittins, We might have just seen the end of the age of bizonomics, 'But the way the government has been forced by public opinion to abandon its attempt to protect the banks is a sign of much deeper public disaffection with the long-dominant "neoliberal" doctrine – formerly accepted by both sides of politics – that governments should do as little as possible to prevent businesses doing just as they see fit.' back

Rule of Law - Wikipedia, Rule of Law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The rule of law is the legal principle that law should govern a nation, as opposed to being governed by arbitrary decisions of individual government officials. It primarily refers to the influence and authority of law within society, particularly as a constraint upon behavior, including behavior of government officials.[2] The phrase can be traced back to 16th century England, and it was popularized in the 19th century by British jurist A. V. Dicey. The concept was familiar to ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, who wrote "Law should govern".' back

Russel Shorto, The Irish Affliction, 'Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one — wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures — has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009 of two lengthy, damning reports — detailing thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings, spanning Ireland’s entire history as an independent country, and the efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than the victims — with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests in public and demands that the government and society disentangle themselves from the church.' back

Salvation History - Wikipedia, Salvation History - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Salvation History (German Heilsgeschichte) seeks to understand the personal redemptive activity of God within human history to effect his eternal saving intentions. The salvation history approach was adopted and deployed by Christians, beginning with Paul in his epistles. . . . In the context of Christian theology, this approach reads the books of the Bible as a continuous history. It understands events such as the fall at the beginning of history (Book of Genesis), the covenants established between God and Noah, Abraham, and Moses, the establishment of David's dynasty in the holy city of Jerusalem, etc., as seminal moments in the history of humankind and its relationship to God, namely, as necessary events preparing for the salvation of all by Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. ' back

Sam Levin and Lois Beckett, US gun violence spawns new epidemic: conspiracu theorists harassing victims, 'Mike Cronk was sitting half-naked on a street corner, hands covered in blood, when the TV news reporter approached. The 48-year-old, who had used his shirt to try to plug a bullet wound in his friend’s chest, recounted in a live interview how a young man he did not know had just died in his arms. Cronk’s story of surviving the worst mass shooting in modern US history went viral, but many people online weren’t calling him a hero. On YouTube, dozens of videos, viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, claimed Cronk was an actor hired to play the part of a victim in the Las Vegas mass shooting on 1 October.' back

Samuel Alexander, Limits to growth: policies to steer the economy away from disaster, 'If the rich nations in the world keep growing their economies by 2% each year and by 2050 the poorest nations catch up, the global economy of more than 9 billion people will be around 15 times larger than it is now, in terms of gross domestic product (GDP). If the global economy then grows by 3% to the end of the century, it will be 60 times larger than now.' back

Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on the Church solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Pope John Paul VI on November 21, 1964. back

Shannon N. Kile and Hans M. Kristensen (SIPRI Fact Sheet), Trends in World Nuclear Forces, 2017 , 'SIPRI’s annual nuclear forces data shows that while the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world continues to decline, all of the nuclear weapon-possessing states are maintaining and modernizing their nuclear arsenals. At the start of 2017 nine states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea)—possessed approximately 4150 operationally deployed nuclear weapons (see table 1). If all nuclear weapons are counted, these states together possessed a total of approximately 14 935 nuclear weapons compared with approximately 15 395 in early 2016.' back

SIPRI , SIPRI Yearbook 2015: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, 'THE SIPRI YEARBOOK SIPRI Yearbook 2015 presents a combination of original data in areas such as world military expenditure, international arms transfers, arms production, nuclear forces, armed conflicts and multilateral peace operations with state-of-the-art analysis of important aspects of arms control, peace and international security. The SIPRI Yearbook, which was first published in1969, is written by both SIPRI researchers and invited outside experts.This booklet summarizes the contents of SIPRI Yearbook 2015 and gives samples of the data and analysis that it contains.' back

Social contract - Wikipedia, Social contract - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In political philosophy the social contract' or political contract" is a theory or model, originating during the Age of Enlightenment, that typically addresses the questions of the origin of society and the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler or magistrate (or to the decision of a majority), in exchange for protection of their remaining rights. The question of the relation between natural and legal rights, therefore, is often an aspect of social contract theory. The Social Contract, created by Jean Jacques Rousseau was a book about government reforms and how it should change to suit the people instead of the government.' back

Spotlight (film) - Wikipedia, Spotlight (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Spotlight is a 2015 American biographical drama film directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer. The film follows The Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States, and its investigation into cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Roman Catholic priests.' back

Structure of the Earth - Wikipedia, Structure of the Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The interior structure of the Earth is layered in spherical shells: an outer silicate solid crust, a highly viscous mantle, a liquid outer core that is much less viscous than the mantle, and a solid inner core. Scientific understanding of the internal structure of the Earth is based on observations of topography and bathymetry, observations of rock in outcrop, samples brought to the surface from greater depths by volcanoes or volcanic activity, analysis of the seismic waves that pass through the Earth, measurements of the gravitational and magnetic fields of the Earth, and experiments with crystalline solids at pressures and temperatures characteristic of the Earth's deep interior.' back

Thomas Aquinas, My writing seems like straw to me, 'All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.' Remarks on being requested to resume writing, after a mystical experience while saying mass on or around 6 December 1273, as quoted in A Taste of Water : Christianity through Taoist-Buddhist Eyes (1990) by Chwen Jiuan Agnes Lee and Thomas G. Hand back

Torah - Wikipedia, Torah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Torah (. . . "Instruction, Teaching"), or the Pentateuch . . . , is the central reference of the religious Judaic tradition. It has a range of meanings. It can most specifically mean the first five books of the twenty-four books of the Tanakh, and it usually includes the rabbinic commentaries. The term Torah means instruction and offers a way of life for those who follow it; it can mean the continued narrative from Genesis to the end of the Tanakh, and it can even mean the totality of Jewish teaching, culture and practice.' back

Transubstantiation - Wikipedia, Transubstantiation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Transubstantiation (in Latin, transsubstantiatio, in Greek μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, the change of substance by which the bread and the wine offered in the sacrifice of the sacrament of the Eucharist during the Mass, become, in reality, the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. . . . All that is accessible to the senses (the outward appearances – species in Latin) remains unchanged.' back

United Nations, Official UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Home Page, 'The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) (French) (Spanish) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected.'' back

Vale of tears - Wikipedia, Vale of tears - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The phrase vale of tears (Latin vallis lacrimarum) is a Christian phrase referring to the tribulations of life that Christian doctrine says are left behind only when one leaves the world and enters Heaven. The term "valley of tears" is also used sometimes.' back

Vatican I, Pope Pius X: Pastor Aeternus, Chapter IV: On the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff . . . 9. Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the Christian people, with the approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable. So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema. back

Werner Herzog, Chauvet Cave: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, ' For over 20,000 years, Chauvet Cave has been completely sealed off by a fallen rock face, its crystalencrusted interior as large as a football field and strewn with the petrified remains of giant ice age mammals. In 1994, scientists discovered the caverns and found hundreds of pristine paintings within. Spectacular artwork dating back over 30,000 years (almost twice as old as any previous finds) to a time when Neanderthals still roamed the earth and cave bears, mammoths, and ice age lions were the dominant populations of Europe. Since then, only a few people have been allowed access into Chauvet Cave, and the true scope of its contents had largely gone unfelt - until Werner Herzog managed to gain access. Filming in 3D, Herzog captures the wonder and beauty of one of the most awe-inspiring sites on earth, all the while musing in his inimitable fashion about its original inhabitants, the birth of art, and the curious people surrounding the caves today.' back

William Shrubb (Rule of Law Institute of Australia), Jury directions and a 'reasonable doubt', 'The presumption of innocence is an important part of any fair criminal justice system under the rule of law. The clearest way we protect the presumption of innocence in our system is through the high standard of proof placed on the prosecution in a criminal trial: that they must prove the case against the accused “beyond reasonable doubt”.' back

World Health Organization, Global status report on road safety 2015, 'About 1.25 million people die each year on the world's roads and between 20 and 50 million sustain non-fatal injuries. Young adults aged between 15 and 44 years account for 59% of global road traffic deaths. This fact file presents data from the Global status report on road safety 2013. This is the second broad assessment of the road safety situation and provides the baseline for the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020.' back

Zero-energy universe - Wikipedia, Zero-energy universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The zero-energy universe hypothesis proposes that the total amount of energy in the universe is exactly zero: its amount of positive energy in the form of matter is exactly canceled out by its negative energy in the form of gravity. . . . The zero-energy universe theory originated in 1973, when Edward Tryon proposed in the journal Nature that the universe emerged from a large-scale quantum fluctuation of vacuum energy, resulting in its positive mass-energy being exactly balanced by its negative gravitational potential energy.' back