Why I believe in God

Our good friend Neil Degrasse Tyson,
always charming, not always without fallacy

Once upon a time, people believed that the earth was flat, and although enlightened moderns now heartily laugh at that idea, many embrace with equal ignorance the idea that the universe is a sphere. It isn't, of course.

It takes some getting used to, but the universe has four dimensions.

According to the accepted scientific model, it started out as a very small dot but then expanded. That's often thought of as something exploding, but that's really not what's going on.

The universe has no outside, so it can't get any bigger, and in stead of exploding, the universe is imploding.

On the grapevine

Imagine being duct-taped to the ceiling of an elevator shaft, and the carriage is parked all the way up, an inch from your nose. Now imagine that the carriage starts to move down and away from you.









You'll see the top of the carriage getting smaller and smaller, while the outside of the elevator shaft isn't changing. You'll see space being formed between you and the top of the carriage, but you don't see the shaft getting any wider.

Here's the crux: when you look at a star, you are looking down a long shaft to the top of an elevator carriage (the star).

Please let that sink it: a star does not simply sit in flat space, it curves space so that you are looking down a long chute, and the star sits at the bottom of that chute.

When there are two stars relatively close together, space will be curved in a bit of a fork. The two stars will have a joined main chute but each star will sit at the bottom of their own end, kind of like a tree branch that branches in two at the end.

Light from a star travels up its chute into open space, precisely like the juices within a tree branch do.

Stars that run out of nuclear fuel collapse under their own gravity and form a black hole (as it's romantically called).

Black holes sit at the bottom of enormous chutes but you can't see them because they radiate no light. They are surrounded by a so-called event horizon that does allow energy to travel from space into the hole but not the other way around (Hawking Radiation, in case you're wondering, doesn't violate the horizon).



All this energy stacks up at the singularity at the heart of the black hole, and because of relativity, time inside the black hole stands still relative to the rest of the universe. That means that any hypothetical observer inside the black hole would see the rest of the universe unfold in the blink of an eye. Or in other words: all about the universe outside the black hole is instantaneously projected upon the black hole's central singularity like a slide on a screen.

Galaxies of black holes are precisely like clusters of grapes, with pits that contain all the genetic information of the entire vine. And the blossoms from which grapes grow are precisely like stars. We can't judge what the outside of space looks, but inside it looks precisely like the inside of a grapevine.

"Let me sing now for my well-Beloved, a song of my Beloved concerning His vineyard..." ( Isaiah 5:1)
Ian C Whitworth photography

People have long wondered why life produces the shapes it does. In less enlightened times people thought that it all happened by blind accident and that we might as well have evolved into bricks. Now, with the help of science, we can understand that life evolves toward a kind of biological equivalent of maximum entropy.

Life does not evolve as away from an explosion, it grows towards an attractor. It tries to imitate what brought it forth in the same sense in which a roulette ball "tries" to roll off the ledge and onto the spinning number crown below. Simply because that takes less energy.

Once upon a time

When people talk about the evolution of the universe beginning with the Big Bang, they usually take you back in time, from the universe's present size to when it was smaller, and smaller and smaller, until you finally end up in the singularity from which everything came.

But looking at the change of the size of something is only interesting when something is added to that something; when it actually grows (like money on a bank account). The universe isn't growing in that sense; it doesn't get bigger because something gets added.

All the energy that is now part of the universe has been part of the universe since the beginning. Going back in time has no influence on the amount of energy you see, and even when you hit the singularity, all the energy is still there and isn't going to just disappear.

There you have it: the universe is shaped like a condom

I'm pretty sure that my audience consists largely of theists, which is why I'd like to stress that my objections against the Hot Big Bang Inflation Model aren't religious. My covenant is with the truth and my objective mind sees a universe of only phase transitions and no spontaneous generation. If on our trek back in time all energy compacts into a point of such unimaginable qualities, a point of such rage and withdrawal that nothing (including space and time) can exist, and then, somehow stops being just that, it should transform into something and not simply vanish into the howling absence of anything.

The universe today is as far removed from zipping spontaneously out of existence as when we would go back in time, and the whole trek back is a mere smoke screen. Packing all energy in one point doesn't make the universe more likely to disappear. To a universe in which energy conservation is a primary law, "nothing" is a very big word, and I dare say that the myth of spontaneous generation is right up there with alchemy, the ethereal universe and the Trinitarian dogma.

The hypothesis that the universe expands can be readily verified with a big telescope. But the notion that the universe came into existence out of nothing is blasphemy against common sense.

Sure, gravity is negative energy while the strongelectroweak force is positive and that neatly cancels things out, but then in reverse: why would "nothing" spontaneously beget an enormous amount of energy? Why that, and in that specific form? People worry about intelligent design, but I would like to know where the rawest of raw material came from, and what determined what its many baffling and precisely calibrated qualities would be and what it could be turned into and how and why.

Or in the hallowed words of Stephen Hawking:

"What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?"

Chicken or egg?

Time is a tricky thing, and up until Einstein people figured that the whole of the universe sat within time like an island in a river.

But since Einstein we know that within the universe there exist situations at which time stops (namely inside the extreme gravity fields of black holes, whilst traveling at the speed of light, whilst waiting for one's beer to be served), which means that time sits within the universe in stead of the other way around.

The universe is the river and time is the island. The universe did not start at some point in time; time started at some point in the universe.

Time, essentially, has to do with data preservation. Without it, you can't have a past, present and future. To preserve data, you need particles that follow certain rules and that in some way relate to each other, and since particles arose within the universe, time did too. But not all causality is a function of time, or else time itself could not arise "for some reason" within the universe, and the universe could not even have started from whatever preceded it.

In other words: only when the universe produced particles that could bind into atoms (that's called matter-radiation decoupling), time and space as we know it commenced. Prior to that there was a kind of proto-causality during which the universe was not transparent and had no events going on inside of it.

If anything, that process reminds me not of spontaneous generation but of sexual progeneration. That, you see, happens all the time, all over the place, and according to the same very precise and fundamental principle:

Parturition is a fundamental principle of creation
(and Biblical too: think Exodus out of Egypt)

There are two main lessons to be learned from all this. First: the biggest tree may start out as the smallest seed, but that smallest seed has always contained the whole and complete genetic information to bring about the mature tree entirely. Size, you see, doesn't matter; what matters is the seed-part (Matthew 13:31-32, 17:20).

To seeds, its the information that matters. It must be complete or else it doesn't work, and when it works, the information doesn't change, grow or evolve. All that evolves or grows is the situation in which that information happens to be. It's the result of the information that changes over time, not the information itself. The information contains the change, just like the universe contains time. Not the other way around.

Secondly, everything that has a parent begins its life with its own future adult form fully represented within, and that adult form must closely resemble the parent. What I'm saying is that the Creator is not only the cause of the universe (what everybody is always so hung up about), He is much more significantly the spitting image of what the universe must eventually turn into.

We are not accidentally evolving away from bacteria, we are deliberately growing toward divinity. That means that relatively novel biological principles, such as sexual reproduction, should be expected to closer resemble both the evolutionary attractor and the creative principle.

The implied duality, in which one precedes the other, does not exist; the chicken is the egg

We are persons because our Parent is. We are  conscious and concerned because He is conscious and concerned. Consciousness -- and particularly social consciousness, or rather the consciousness of society as a collective entity -- is not some accidental icing on the cake of the material universe but rather the fruit that the tree was programmed to bring forth from since before it was a seed.

I would bet that there are levels of primitivity beyond the Grand Unification, and that the energetic singularity from which the universe is proposed to have sprang will be shown to have arisen out of the confluence of countless parental agents. I bet that the singularity came about out of a structure that closely resembles our black-hole filled universe.

I bet that some day, personal and social consciousness will be shown to be like gravity in that it arises as the culmination of the countless proto-consciousnesses of all separate cells of one's body. And that these in turn derive from a fundamental quality of atoms. (My God, I never thought I would sound like Deepak, but there it is.)

Decades before gravity waves were shown to exist, Abarim Publications made the prediction that rotating black holes make a Chladni pattern of gravity waves, that acts as the null of the universe. Atoms would want to settle according to that null, and hence form DNA, after the Word of God that has existed from before the beginning.

That Word of which the ancients spoke is living information, and He exists in the realm in which our Parent exists, before there is anywhere else to exist -- so do the math (John 1). He existed before all thing, He is the image of our Parent, and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17).

I personally love watching interviews with eloquent and intelligent Atheists, because the competition never ceases to inspire me. But all the time I hear people like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins say that Atheism isn't dogma and that they would gladly believe in something that would make more sense. Well, I am not dogmatic either and I would surely be an Atheist if this chicken model wouldn't be much more consistent and plenary. And more fun too.

Why evil is not the opposite of good (as per Zarathustra)

It doesn't happen often but on occasion I get mildly peeved by the ease with which even reasonably well-informed folks violate the most basic tenets of Biblical theology. One of these is the issue of polarity, or in simpler terms: of good and evil.

The root of good & evil

Much of the Old Testament was compiled and redacted from very old sources and traditions during the Babylonian exile. That means that the Old Testament is as much a respectful commentary on the reigning theology of Babylon as the gospels are of the dominant Greco-Roman schools of thought (the New Testament authors reviewed Greek Homerian and Stoic notions with reserved favor but treated the Romans like bananas).

The Old Testament emerged from a basin of Zarathustrianism (or Zoroastrianism), and Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) is the celebrated inventor of monotheism.

That is to say: Zarathustra overthrew indigenous pantheism in favor of a system that involved one sole supreme deity who was still aided and thwarted by a lot of forces, spirits and demons. One very important idea of Zarathustra, which has managed to pervade popular understanding of reality, is that the cosmos is the stage upon which forces of good battle forces of evil in an eternal struggle. To Zarathustra, these forces were polar opposites and approximately of equal strength.

Zarathustra promoted the still hugely popular bi-polar reality model of good versus evil

Zarathustra's idea's were certainly brilliant, but his idea of the eternal battle between good and evil was one hundred percent at odds with the Hebrew idea of how things worked. Zarathustra thought he lived in a bi-polar reality, but the Hebrews were pretty sure that reality was mono-polar. Particularly the prophet Isaiah had very little patience with the bi-polar reality model of his northern neighbors, as he roared:

I AM YAHWEH! And there is no other! Besides Me there is no god! I will equip you, even though you don't know Me, so that folks may know from dawn to dusk that there is no one beside Me. 

I am Yahweh, and there is no other. The One forming light and creating darkness; causing good (Hebr: tob) and creating evil (Hebr: ra'). I am Yahweh, who does all these things (Isaiah 45:5-6).

Satan (and here we go) is a created creature who lives within the same created universe as we do, and he has to obey the same natural laws of God, whether he likes to or not. And he can only get to people who fail to align themselves with the laws of nature, who are like the weak and ailing of a herd upon which predators focus.

Satan has no grip on 'healthy' people who follow God's law to the last minute detail (if that were possible). Satan can only try people the way an engineer test-runs an engine, and can only apply negative effects when the people fail in their designed function.

Darkness and light relate relate in a journey, not a battle

We are on a journey. We came from somewhere and we're going somewhere. The Creator made creation with a specific end-result in mind, and when folks dart off into literally a dead end, God issues a correction. This correction is understandably experienced as a negative to the correctee, but the unforeseen alternative is infinitely worse.

When the Lord's angel stood in front of Balaam, He became satan to him (in the sense that God was performing satan's function of opposing, not in the sense that the two are the same one - Numbers 22:22) and when Saul needed a swift kick in the head, God sent him an evil spirit (1 Samuel 16:14).

Similarly, the Mosaic Law was not issued as a code of conduct that had to be followed, but rather an explanation of why the doodoo was hitting the fan. Contrary to popular belief, the Law was not something that had to be kept, but rather something that had to be transcended.

The Law is like a blue print that builders need to finish their building. When the building is finished, the blueprint has become obsolete because it's now manifested in the building. Likewise when the Law states "you will not kill" it states that at some point in the future (a) we won't be doing any killing, and (b) this rule has become obsolete by fulfillment.

The purpose of the Law was to point out failure (Romans 7:7), which was also the job of satan (namely that of public accuser or prosecutor). Jesus obviously fulfilled the Law (Matthew 5:17), and with that He put both satan and the Law out of a job.

painting by Les Bryant

Just read Creation!

But even to people who lack the Scriptural versatility of a six year old, simply looking at creation will tell the observer that we're living in a mono-polar reality and not a bi-polar one.

Darkness is not the opposite of light but the absence of it, and the difference is not subtle. 

Darkness is the absence of light, not the presence of something else. When we switch on the light in a dark room, nothing leaves and nothing is replaced.

Light is substantial and consists of energy. Darkness is not substantial, and it doesn't consists of anything. Darkness is emptiness. It can not be made to go away; it can only be filled and only by light. Light can fill darkness but darkness can not fill light.

Light has a source. Darkness has no source. Light can carry information. Darkness can't. Light travels and can go into a certain direction. Darkness doesn't consist of anything and can not travel. Light consists of colors. Darkness has no shades.

Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It consists of unpolarized energy and as such is the source of all matter in the universe. Hence it existed before all things and since electromagnetism holds electrons to atomic nuclei and atoms together in molecules, it literally holds all things together (John 8:12, Colossians 1:16-17).

Light is the engine behind all chemical and most physical processes, including life. At light speed, time freezes and all distances become zero, which means that the speed of light is not a speed (there are no seconds or meters at light speed) but rather the edge of the universe!

Darkness is the absence of light, not the opposite of it, just like ignorance is the absence of wisdom, and not the presence of something else. To build something, one needs knowledge. To tear something down, one needs no knowledge. To love someone, one needs to know someone. It takes no knowledge to hate someone.

Evil is ONLY the absence of good, and good is the ultimate objective of the universe and the ultimate destination of everything in it: a finished building, a completed knowledge, and a perfected love.

Be excellent in what is good, have no idea about evil (Romans 16:19).

The pyramids, the Ark and the case for cold fusion

Perhaps I've been an engineer too long, or perhaps not long enough, but when I look at the description of the Temple of YHWH built by Solomon and the Phoenicians, I see a device of some sort (and read our article on the Menorah for a look at the Menorah as machine).

It is of course miraculously daft to forward the idea that the ancient Hebrews had high technology, if it weren't for guys like Christopher Dunn who proposed the same about the pyramids of Giza. More specifically, Dunn proposes that the pyramids are simple too accurately built to have served solely as burial tombs.



Accuracy such as employed at Giza is only required when volatile processes need to be contained and controlled. The pyramids would have looked indistinguishably similar if they had been built with far less precision, and hence during far less man hours of labor and planning, and hence for a fraction of the cost.

Had the pyramids been tombs or even any other kind of monument, they would have been riddled with texts and recognizable imagery. But now that they are sterile and barren, it seems warranted to conclude that they were not monuments at all:



Dunn proposes that the pyramids were meant to be power plants, but stops there. As an engineer, he feels that he should only take measurements and discuss possible applications, but refrain from guessing how the pyramids would fit into Egypt's society at large, and how they would have served this society. Here at Abarim Publications we're engineers too, but in stead of looking at the pyramids, we look at the Bible, and as such have a lot more to go on.

Engineering the Bible

A defining characteristic of the Bible that is often swept under the rug of formal religion is that the Bible speaks of one God for everybody, which can not be represented by anything stationary, and which desires to be known by men. The God of Israel is not to be approached via esoteric rituals and stubborn entreaty but via respectful curiosity and inquisition; not through blind obedience but through learning. The Lord is to be worshiped in truth, and His works and therefore His character can be learned about by studying nature (Romans 1:20). In other words: Yahwism is much more like science in the modern sense of the word than like religion.

The burning of the library at Alexandria in 391 AD

Most people agree that thanks largely to the Romans, the culminated knowledge of the ancient world was destroyed, but when people think of ancient knowledge, they mostly think of flowery philosophies and artsy fartsy stuff. But no, over the last few decades, archeology has unearthed enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the ancients had developped technologies that we simply can't imagine.

We obviously should diligently guard our natural tendency to couple our enthusiasm with our own ability to imagine things, and come up with far-fetched fiction that the ancients might have been able to make reality: time-travel, interstellar travel, you name it, or rather: please don't. That same approach has damaged the field of theology at large almost beyond reasonable repair, and it serves no purpose other than to distort and destroy.

Humanity has lost knowledge; Graham Hancock even calls us a species with amnesia, but perhaps our amnesia is not total. Throughout time there has been a tradition of believing that somehow certain elements could be turned into other elements. That process (or technology) was called Alchemy, and had to do with a device known as the Philosopher's Stone. The wisest people of modern times up until Isaac Newton have been searching for it. Where did we get that belief? Did we really make it up, or do we somehow collectively "remember" that it's bloody well doable; we've just forgotten how!

Alchemy and Fusion

Good news: modern scientists have figured out how to do it, and now it's called Fusion (in stead of Alchemy). You witness fusion every day because sunlight is a result of fusion. In the core of the sun, every four hydrogen atoms are mushed together to make one helium atom, and this is how:

A hydrogen atom consists of (1) one proton (that's the atom's nucleus), (2) one electron zipping around the nucleus, and (3) a force field that holds the electron tied to the nucleus.

The Alchemist, in Search of the Philosopher's Stone
Joseph Wright

During fusion, of two hydrogen atoms, the electron gets hammered into the proton, to produce two neutrons, which then get hammered together with the other two hydrogen atoms.

The result is one helium atom which consists of (1) two protons and two neutrons, forming the atom's core, (2) two free electrons zipping around the nucleus, and (3) two force fields to hold the two electrons tied to the nucleus.

The difference between four hydrogen atoms and one helium atom is two force fields. You needed four force fields to keep four hydrogen atoms together, but you only need two for one helium atom.

The two force fields that are no longer needed, wiggle their way out of the sun and become the sunlight that we see.

The bad news: this kind of fusion goes against the laws of thermodynamics, and it takes colossal amounts of energy to get it going in the first place. Hydrogen atoms don't want to get mushed together to form neutrons, and they certainly don't want to huddle up with two more to form one helium atom. In order to perform atomic fusion, you need a monstrous amount of energy and no scruples against doing something to atoms that they themselves don't want to do.

Once you got four hydrogen atoms hammered together, they won't be able to break loose again, unless they somehow acquire energy equal to two little force fields they lost. You can even continue hammering atoms together to form heavier atoms (1 hydrogen atom + one helium atom = one lithium atom + 1 free force field) and distract more and more energy. When you reach iron (26 protons, neutrons, electrons and force fields), the game is up because in order to make heavier elements (like copper, which is number 27) you would have to insert energy in stead of getting it out of the deal.

Elements heavier than iron are produced in events called super novae, and if you can manage to break these heavier elements apart into lighter elements, you would win energy. That process is called Fission, and it's the operating principle of atomic bombs and nuclear power plants.

In other words: alchemy is perfectly possible, but the way we have it today it requires an initial investment of energy that makes the whole thing expensive, cumbersome and dangerous. The Philosopher's Stone we managed to build is too large to be of any use. There's barely enough food in the world to feed the beast.

Stone cold fusion

The original Philosopher's Stone was the size of a poodle. It's working principle was a mysterious process that in our day and age is colloquially known as Cold Fusion, which is a process which the scientific world generally deems impossible. But is it?

In 1989, Fleischmann and Pons famously reported excess energy emanating from an installation that involved so-called "heavy water". Their findings caused an enormous riot, not because it might have worked but because if it had worked it would have engaged a hitherto unknown natural principle. And much worse: this principle promised unlimited and freely available energy for all.

Fleischmann and Pons' nifty Cold Fusion wasn't disproved (beyond the observation that our presently know laws of physics don't support it), it was yelled off the table by hysteric, and may we add: heavily funded, Hot Fusion researchers and their oily backers.

Here at Abarim Publications we are neither physicists nor heavily funded, so our scope grows misty in that direction. But in the direction we are skilled to look (namely Biblical Scriptures), things look suspiciously bright for the cold fusion camp.

On the font-page of our main website, we've already suggested that under specific circumstances, atoms can be persuaded to cluster together to form molecules the size and complexity of DNA. Now we'd like to postulate that cold fusion is possible when atoms are somehow "persuaded" to huddle together into heavier elements and voluntarily release their energy. We don't have complicated mathematics to back all this up, but we do have compelling textual evidence.

The pyramids of Giza are mysterious for more than one reason, and one of these is that no mention exists anywhere in the substantial Egyptian records about them being built. It appears therefore that the pyramids outdate Egypt's recorded history (several other hypothesis point at the same conclusions, but these escape the scope of this article).

If we deem the obsession of our own recent ancestors with alchemy, a mere interest in something that would be nice if it worked is simply not potent enough to explain it. Something similar could be said about the obsession of the ancient Egyptians with the sun. What was it about the sun that was so compelling that it outshone all other elements and tributaries of life and being alive, and became the prime object of national obsession? The usual explanations of religious fervor simply don't cut it (and never have, if you ask me), and I'm sure that both the obsession with the sun and that with transmutation of elements came from the same source: the lost knowledge of cold fusion.

Water, water everywhere

One of the reasons why some researchers believe that at least the sphinx of Giza is a lot older than is generally supposed comes from the patterns of erosion on the statue itself and the basin it sits in.

Robert M. Schock, a geologist at Boston University concluded that these patterns came from centuries of accumulative water damage. Rainfall substantial enough to have caused this did not occur in Egypt after about 4000 BC, and we know that from archaeological and geological examinations of the environment there.

 But what is the water that damaged the sphinx and made the dessert bloom wasn't caused by rainfall in the conventional sense?

These days it's common knowledge that the designs and functions of the tabernacle, which Moses built from heavenly patterns that he was shown on the mountain (Exodus 25:9, 25:40, Numbers 8:4, Hebrews 8:5), and the Ark of the Covenant were to some extend also known in Egypt.

The function of the Ark was (1) to be a receptacle for the Law, and (2) to be a seat for the Lord and a place where man could meet Him. What strikes about the Ark is that it somehow was associated with a pillar of smoke and fire, known as the Shekinah. Perhaps I've been an engineer too long, or not long enough, but when I hear of fire and smoke I automatically think in terms of energy and fuel.

I don't want to sound disrespectful or un-spiritual, but if the Lord forms a column of smoke and fire, He essentially brings things together that produce the effect. Better yet: if the Lord wants us to observe creation in order to know Him better, He would stay very far away from so-called super-natural events, that is: events brought about by reasons other than natural laws, known or not.

In still other words: if the Lord wants to be known by the things He's made, He wants us to think about the Shekinah in terms of physics and chemistry, and not stay away from investigating it because it would be too holy. The pillar was observable, so the principles that brought it about are observable too.

An artist's rendering of the Shekinah

The pillar of smoke and fire represented the presence of the Lord, and showed up directly after Israel's departure from Egypt (Exodus 13). This happened before the Law was received (Exodus 19), which happened before the Ark was constructed (Exodus 25). The Ark was deposited in the tabernacle and the tabernacle became the temple. When the Ark was placed into the temple's Holy of Holies, the glory of the Lord returned and the place was filled with so much smoke that the priests had to get out of the building (2 Chronicles 5:13-14). To me that looks like someone pushed the on-button.

A natural process always consists of things going in, things being done, and things coming out. We know that the "things going in" consisted of enormous amounts of animals and vegetation, but it's not clear if these were actual organisms or rather another way of saying "food for humans" (1 Kings 8:63-64). What the "things being done" were precisely isn't clear, but it had to do with fire coming from heaven (2 Chronicles 7:1). What the "things coming out" were is even more obscure. Apart from it being a great blessing, we have no idea what the temple did apart from being spectacular.

Another instance of fire coming down from heaven and consuming a bull, happened when the prophet Elijah taunted the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18). Now note that the Giza complex was a lot larger than Solomon's temple complex, and that Elijah's altar was a lot smaller than the temple. It is as if these accounts also indicate that whatever it was, we were already forgetting about it. Another key to what was going on, however, is that Elijah battled the Baal priests in the middle of a period of drought (1 Kings 17:1). Immediately after Elijah's victory over the Baal priests, which consisted of the Lord sending fire from heaven, the rains came (1 Kings 18:41-46).

Streams of Living Water

The temple was destroyed by the Babylonians but several visionaries saw a time in which it would be built again, and in a way that would exceed its former glory. The prophet Ezekiel saw a vision of the new temple, and noted among other things that water flowed from it (Ezekiel 47:8).


Likewise the prophet Zechariah foresaw a time at which "living" water would flow from Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:8). John the Revelator even went so far as to speak of the River of Life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, with the Tree of Life on its either shore, yielding fruits of every kind and leaves to heal the nations (Revelation 22:1-2).

But in John's world there are no temples in the conventional sense (Revelation 21:22). The River of Life comes from a Living Temple, namely from a collective of people that are united into one mind and without being coerced (John 7:38, 1 Peter 2:5; the "things going in" being the blood and body of the Lamb).

Throughout the ages, political leaders have tried to pummel their realms into shape by force, and the sun has spectacularly persisted as preferred emblem to those endeavors. The Romans worshiped Sol Invictus, the invisible sun, and modern Christianity is unfortunately much more based on the Solar cult than on the Bible (read for more details our article on the name Nazarene).

Obedience to God is perpendicularly opposite to obedience to formal doctrine and clerical structures. Obedience to God equals freedom of the individual (of course within certain restrictions such as don't kill, don't steel, et cetera), and freedom of the individual is a nightmare to any totalitarian leader. Josephus wrote that during any of the three week-long Judaic feasts, three million people would converge onto Jerusalem. Then realize that the entire Roman empire contained 300 million people -- meaning that three times a year, one percent of the population would abandon positions of servitude and production to go party in the homeland -- and you can figure out why Rome's battle with the Jews was about more than religious bickering.

The final conclusion of all this (and where's my drum roll?) is that totalitarian coercion is the social equivalent of Hot Fusion -- and don't delude yourself into believing that we're presently living in a democracy, because we're not. The social equivalent of Cold Fusion is, well, whatever it is that makes the Body of Christ tick -- and don't delude yourself again; most churches today are wholly similar to the congregations devoted to Baal in Elijah's days. Enthusiasm, fervor and even certainty and faith are no signs of being right, see 1 Kings 18:28-29. Instead, no effect is a sure sign of being wrong.

The Body of Christ consists of people that are measurably different from the majority of humans, and can certainly be found not only within Christianity. From what we can learn from nuclear physics, these people are typically not focused on personal gain of any kind. That means that most of them are neither rich nor famous, and probably not very popular either. They are not organized in any formal way, there are no symbols or emblems nor mailing lists or membership cards and there are no leaders and bosses. They probably don't have many friends, but they are connected to humanity in a way that defies further explanation. You'll know it when you are one, and you won't ever be able to comprehend it when you are not.

But, don't be dismayed. In stead watch this riveting little documentary on cold fusion:




Or this one, which is more up to date but slightly more technical and a bit more angry: