Crop circles, pyramids, the Ark and the Bible

There is a phenomenon going on on earth that only very few people recognize, and that by itself it highly remarkable. 

Most of us have heard of crop circles, which are intricate works of art that are formed in grain fields, usually by bending areas of grain into patterns, and usually anonymous.



Enthusiasts ascribe these wonderful formations to the handiwork of extraterrestrials, and some go as far as to forward elaborate schemes involving mother-ships, distant galaxies and interstellar councils, or else the moaning and groaning of mother earth, glowing ley lines and vibrating energies that combined produce instances of higher math (with which the observer has to resonate in order ascend into the fifth dimension, and so on).

Take me to your dealer

Mainstream commentators, however, are sure that all of them are man-made. Some feel confident that all these formations can be reproduced by regular humans with regular human skills, while others derive their confidence from reduction and elimination, being equally sure that any movement towards the alternative would constitute the narrow end of the wedge that will separate humanity from its most practical beliefs, which in turn would lead to collective psychosis, anarchy and ultimately collapse and annihilation.

Some farmers are eager to know the perpetrators so that they can sue them for the damage, while others note with hardly suppressed glee that the affected grain was not at all destroyed but remained alive and in a far better condition than the grain that wasn't touched (longer stems, fuller heads; all that).

More to the point, however

But crop circles is not the phenomenon I want to talk about. Imagine that it was you who one day woke up with the idea of placing the whopping double triskelion in a field near Milk Hill in England.

This perfectly executed Catherine Wheel consists of 409 circles of varying sizes, laid out in a pattern that is 240 meters across (yes, that's people in the central circle below).

The whopping Milk Hill Catherine Wheel

How do you get from waking up that one morning to sitting atop Milk Hill at sunrise on 14 August 2001, undiscovered and gloating over you creation?

You would first have to be rather fanatic, that goes without saying. Then you would have to have considerable mathematical skills in addition to knowing that the Celts had a thing for triskelions, and then, for some reason, come up with the desire to make it even more difficult for everybody and create a double one.

You would have to engineer a way to print your design onto the grain, and that would take a trick or two. The greater form would have to be created at once because stamping out the circles consecutively would certainly result in misalignment. The smaller ones might be added later, but still, not a single error is permitted. I've been an engineer for three decades, and I would have to think very long and very hard for a way to pull this off. It takes a rare set of highly developed skills, and I humbly submit that I can't even think of a way to replicate this, let alone come up with it in the first place.

The colossal Oregon Sri Yantra geoglyph and the Nazca Monkey are anonymous. So is the portrait of John Williams that appeared in August 2014, just off the Old Town side of the Branko Bridge in Belgrade, Serbia.

You would probably realize right soon that you would not be able to design the whole process by yourself, let alone execute it. So you would have to recruit others, and that would take yet another trick or two.

Covert operations are nothing new in our world, but to set one up out of the blue without the benefit of an existing organization (such as the military or some secret club that is really secret) or without a formidable incentive (believable threats or lots of money) is nearly undoable. Trying to get your band together would inevitably lead to someone spilling the beans either before or after the operation.

And there's the rub, there is the phenomenon I wanted to talk about. If you were the one who designed the Milk Hill Catherine Wheel, produced it overnight AND kept everything secret, even after all the media coverage, please contact the Abarim Publications Recruitment Center because we would like to hire you.

Mum's the word

Certain companies actually have realized the commercial appeal of crop formations and their monetary injection has produced certain formations that are obviously not extraterrestrial in origin, but why are there groups of people (or aliens) who go to great lengths to anonymously produce great work of art, which won't last beyond the day of the harvest? Or, to expand the scope of the question: what explains the phenomenon of anonymous art in which the anonymity of the artist(s) is part of the final work?

Artists sign their work to be recognized and to be reckoned (and paid) for the entire body of their work. And in case the artist is working on a medium that isn't his or hers (say, graffiti artists who spray paint trains or buildings), they will often sign their work anyway with a signature that is recognizable by the scene but not by the cops. If an artist knows he's doing a one time thing, he might use anonymity as a means to publicity.

Georgia Guide Stones -- anonymous

Take the Georgia Guide Stones for instance, which, had they been commissioned by Ed Koch and erected on Time Square, would have been surely recognized for the pseudo-portentous crap they are. But now that the makers and funders are incisively anonymous, the media was and still is all over them and a disproportional percentage of people have heard of them. 

But most of the crop circles are made by people who don't claim them as their productions, and history has shown that their mere appearance serve the sole purpose of fueling the greater discussion on who were are, where we're going and whether we are alone in the universe.

Sure, some of us find that whole discussion a waste of time, but would those people engineer elaborate pranks just to watch hapless others go alien-crazy over that? There's no good reason to exclude this from the whole pallet of reasons of why people make crop circles, but I'd like to propose that the creating of crop circles ties not into humanity's inherent desire to deceive, but rather in our inherent desire to make wise.

Whichever ancient wisdom tradition we look at, they all consist of several separate exercises or disciplines. Most traditions value scientific examinations of the observable world and subsequent data retention and transmission, but most also value prayer or meditation and periods of rest. The Semitic wisdom traditions additionally utilized a technique that probably also had an entertainment value, namely the posing of riddles, and a Hebrew riddle was not a silly question the audience had to guess the answer of but a problem of which the answer had to be worked out by means of logic and reason (Judges 14, 1 Kings 10:1). The Hebrew word for riddle is hida, which is possibly related to the verb hadad, which means to be sharp, keen or swift. 

The various religions of our earth have managed to whittle the ancient wisdom traditions down to a skeleton, like a rock band that slipped further and further away from its original purpose and kept losing its founding members to the wish to go solo. Science has always been a major part of theology, but when religion began to dictate what's true or not, science broke away and pursued its whopping solo-career. Mystery, on the other hand, broke away from religion but never made it much further than silly game shows and TV quizzes. Some writers speak of a "God-shaped hole" in people who don't believe, but I'm sure it's not that simple. I'm guessing that mankind has a natural need for mystery; to be in awe of the unimaginable or to be flabbergasted by the inexplicable.

I bet that religion's failure to provide mankind with proper mystery is the reason that groups of people go out into fields and painstakingly create phenomenally mysterious images without damaging a farmer's crop.

The ear-deafening silence

Everybody knows that the Ark of the Covenant has gone missing some time after king Solomon placed it in the Temple, and over the years a generous plethora of theories have been proposed to explain its disappearance. But what theorists rarely recognize is the distinctive silence of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the fate of the Ark. This silence is so loud even, that observant readers of the Bible recognize it as an actual character of the story.

In other words: the very fact that no Hebrew author (save for perhaps the author of 2 Maccabees) spends a single word discussing the fate of the Ark, which was the reason why the Temple was built and the very item that kept Israel together, very strongly suggests that the disappearance of the Ark was part of its proper function. Nothing unexpected happened to the Ark, and it's not "lost" at all. 

And what about the great pyramids of Giza? Their origin and ultimate purpose is much debated, but why does no ancient Egyptian text talk about the actual building of them or purpose they might have? The Egyptians were great masons, but why is there not a single carving anywhere on these mysterious monuments that would make them a little less mysterious? The only answer, again, is that their mystery is part of their function. Whatever they might have been for in the ancient past, their function now is that we ponder them and subsequently doubt whatever theory is presently peddled as truth. It's almost as if these monuments are monuments to the gift of doubt, because doubt leads to renewal and renewal leads to truth. 

In recent years, a slowly growing body of scholars is advocating the idea that the Bible isn't what we always thought it was. It doesn't work they way we figured, nor does it tell the story we shoehorned into it. The familiar titles of the Books of the Bible aren't part of them and were mostly added later, and only recently have scholars mustered up the courage to admit that we have no idea who wrote the Bible, or even when or where. This leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the Bible came to pass via a hugely complex process that probably involved hundreds (thousands?) of poets, scientists, scribes, compilers, editors, redactors and proof readers. This is highly remarkable by itself, but what is even more so is that this process is nowhere referred to in the Bible, and its complexity has only in recent times been recognized.

So who wrote the Bible, built the pyramids, hid the Ark and created the crop circles? Well, here at Abarim Publications we believe that humans did all of it, but we also believe that these humans were either specifically or else generally inspired by greater forces than the usual selfish claim to fame.

And whether these greater forces are mother-ships, fifth dimensions or the angels of the Most High God, well as the prophet formerly known as Isaiah says: "Come now, and let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18).

Come now, and let us reason together" -- Isaiah 1:18

Why Nobel Prize winners are so often Jewish

So why is such a disproportionally large portion of Nobel Prize laureates Jewish?

Jews comprise 0.2% of the world's population and 2% of the American population. Yet 22% of Nobel Prize recipients world-wide have been Jews and 36% of all US recipients were Jews. Women score even better: 33% and 50% of women recipients, worldwide and American respectively, were Jews.

Jews are not inherently more intelligent than non-Jews (and intelligence is only a factor of success in science) and conspiracy theories aside, there shouldn't be any reason why Jews do better science. Or should there...?

Shalom

An often neglected requirement of good stewardship is an understanding of what's going on. In my nearly three decades as a professional engineer, I've seen great numbers of well-willing morons destroy things simply because their actions were sanctioned by a complete lack of applicable knowledge.

Here at Abarim Publications we understand that good stewardship of the earth goes hand in hand with a proper scientific knowledge of Creation. Even theology should be permeated by the principles of natural law, since no less than the very character and attributes of the Creator are manifested in nature (Romans 1:20).

Paul speaks twice of the renewing of one's mind (Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:23) and although that's often explained to mean that a renewed mind is a pious and unquestioning mind, but there's no real reason to conclude that a new mind isn't one that resonates with the rings of creation. Here at Abarim Publications we're pretty sure that where an old mind is riddled with superstitious nonsense, a renewed mind is a scientific mind.

At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus addressed His disciples and "opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45). Since creation and revelation are God's two witnesses, the two should (1) work the same way, and (2) explain each other, and that's where the Nobel Prizes come in.

People who have been exposed since early childhood to the fabric and workings of Biblical Scriptures have in effect been exposed to the very workings of creation. They have more familiarity with it and thus a slight advantage over people who find themselves looking at wholly new things.

Just like a child that grows up in a household of violin players might some day have a demonstrable advantage in piano class, so does a Jewish kid who's been steeped in Hebrew Scriptures have an measurable advantage in the scientific arena over people who grew up watching Barney the Dinosaur and MacGyver.

In case you haven't seen Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, you really should. And if you thought that Close Encounters was about people having telepathic hunches about spaceships, you really should watch it again. Steven Spielberg is one of those Jewish story tellers and particularly his earlier work is deeply steeped in natural and Torahic principles.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Exodus 19:16-17)

The Hebrew word for light is 'or and the word for lamp is nahar. Those two words don't look much alike transliterated into Latin script but in Hebrew they are so similar that one could pass for a conjugated form of the other so that the word for lamp literally means 'lighting' in the sense of 'illuminating'.

Calling a lamp an illuminator isn't such a big deal, but the deal gets a whole lot bigger when we look at the regular Hebrew word for river: nahar, which is identical to the word for lamp. This noun comes from the identical verb nahar, which means to flow. The regular Hebrew word for Nile is ye'or, which also comes from the word for light, 'or, and means something like 'it shall illuminate'.

Guess who

Imagine being six years old, and hearing the old stories. Wouldn't you wonder why rivers would be known by a word that also means lamp or illuminator? Why is the word that describes the flowing of water the same as the word that describes what light does?

Most ancient cultures sprung up around rivers, so the link between a river and a tribe's central fire may seem obvious apart from the paradox of calling water after a word for fire (in the old world, all light came either from flames or celestial bodies). But still, on the mental desktop of a Hebrew six year old, the icon for river was the same as the icon for lamp, whether intentional or not.

Light, we know now, travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometer per second, which is geek-speak for saying that light is either there or it isn't and you don't see it coming or going. It's too fast; you can't see it move. Light does not visibly travel, and the fact that it travels should not have been known to the ancients. It's therefor a mystery why the Hebrews would associate light with water, but this association is both anti-intuitive and spot on.

What nobody in the ancient world was supposed to know is that light propagates, that it is substantial and obeys the laws of gravity, precisely like water. As Max Planck spectacularly discovered in the early 1900's, light, like water, is not as continuous as it seems but consists of droplets called photons. But light, like water, also comes in waves.

There is absolutely no intuitive connection between matter and light, but everybody now knows that matter is polarized light. Yet the Hebrews calmly maintained that dry land arises from water (Genesis 1:9). The fundamental natural force of electromagnetism is carried by photons, and this same force is what keeps atoms together. That means that light indeed comes before all things, and indeed holds all things together (Colossians 1:17).

Imagine being a six year old, reviewing all these things. And then ending up working in some dusty patent office, wondering why your life is slipping away like sand through stretched fingers. And then you wonder if there isn't more to reality than meets the eye. And then you remember that in Hebrew the word for eye, 'ayin, is the same as the word for fountain.

Wouldn't that make you glad that you never heard of MacGyver?

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:

Hanging out at the Abarim Publications campus

Our friends love to hang out at the Abarim Publications campus

The other day my evening was pleasantly graced by the arrival of two friends, who had separately found their way to the Abarim Publications headquarters, unbetwixt of the other's being there. My two friends know each other but they don't like each other all that wholeheartedly.

Friend A is preciously sweet but not too clever, whereas Friend B is not the dullest knife in the drawer but also not very friendly at times. We ended up sitting side by side on the porch, with me in the middle.


"Why do spiders do that?" said Friend A, pointing at a spider's web (I'm honestly not making this up).
"To catch flies with," I said, while to the left of me Friend B hardly suppressed a derogatory guffaw.
"It's beautiful, though, isn't it?" I said to Friend A, who was slowly developing an expression of full-spectral disappointment. "You should see it in the early morning when the dew still sticks to it. We all have to eat, but spiders break out the good china, so to speak."

Friend A took a sip from her tea, then let her eyes wander up to the stars. Soon she had forgotten about the spiders and remarked how beautiful the stars looked.


"They are the biggest things you have ever seen," I said. "Each of them is bigger than the whole earth."
  "Really?" said Friend A but in a tone that suggested I hadn't convinced her at all. To the left of me Friend B took a deep breath but before she could say something I turned to her and said: "Many people don't realize that a star is really only the visible part of a much larger entity. The other part is...?"

Friend B gave no reply.

"And many people believe that the universe is a large sphere, which is precisely the same as thinking that the earth is flat. Because the shape of the universe resembles most a...?"

Friend B again gave no reply and turned her gaze towards the indistinct darkness ahead of us, and I quietly hoped I had been able to illustrate that no matter how smart one is, there are always people smarter, while there is no supersession in the niceness department.

After a few minutes of quiet contemplation, Friend A wanted to know if I had seen clips of an anti-West demonstration that had erupted in some place somewhere earlier that day, and augmented her inquiry by saying, "Why do they hate us so much?"


Apparently, Friend B wasn't yet ready to form a response, so I said, "It's awful to be hated, isn't it?"
"But why?" said Friend A.

And I said, "Maybe they think we took something from them. And gave them crap in return. Or maybe bad people are stirring up folks who aren't mature enough to make up their own mind, and claim their own rightful piece of the pie."

Before Friend A could say something or I could add something, Friend B jumped up and screamed, "Spiders make webs because Jesus told them so! And stars are big because they sing Jesus' praises! And evildoers hate us because THEY DON'T KNOW JESUS!!!" And off she ran, leaving me with Friend A in a world to be inherited by children.

After a while of silence, Friend A said slowly, "Sometimes it's easier to love your enemies than to love your friends."

And I said "Amen", even though that's not my custom.

Certainty is a futile virtue

Possibly the most disastrous event in Biblical history was the destruction of the Temple of YHWH in 70 AD. The Temple had been sacked, looted or destroyed many times before, but everybody knew that from the destruction of 70 AD there was no turning back. It's even quite justifiable to state that early Christianity was in fact classical Judaism trying to deal with the loss of the Temple.

Relief from the Arch of Titus in Rome, which commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD

Perhaps up to the third century AD, Christianity was not separate from the many forms of Judaism but one of them, namely a Judaism that saw the destruction of the Temple as part of the greater pattern of redemption and something that needed to be incorporated into proper theology.

Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again four decades before the Temple was destroyed, and Paul had been a formidable religious and political force long before Titus marched upon Jerusalem. Paul was so important, even, that he was tried by at least one Jewish king, two Roman governors, and was finally transported to Rome to be dealt with by Caesar himself, which demonstrates that Paul was no small figure in any sense.

But the gospel as literary genre most likely originated just prior to the destruction, and the four gospels that we have in our Bibles clearly stem from right after, and use that tremendously traumatic event as centerpiece of their message.

The other day a dear friend of mine dropped by and told me that he and his wife had bought a house somewhere far away. They'll retire sometime next year. We sat on the porch and looked out over the world, and in the distance we could see a small gathering of young men, some playing soccer and some others engaged in a heated discussion that involved a lot of shouting and gesturing.

"Isn't it wonderful to be old?" said my friend, and I could only agree (even though technically I'm about half-old). I remembered being twenty and making it out of adolescence wildly confused about myself and angry with the world, until I found one single certainty (I don't even remember what it was, but perhaps something like: I think therefore I am).

I clung to that certainty as if it were a small island in an ocean of trouble, and all I set my mind to was to find another one. I fought everybody who disagreed with my certainty and shoved it down the throat of whoever came my way and who was still in the throes of ignorance.

I found my second certainty, and placed it on top the first. Then I found a third, and a fourth, and I built myself the tower of what would become my temple of certainty. It was grand, golden and indestructible. I was envied, admired and quoted galore. And it came to ruin.

One particular Saturday night a good few years back, I was standing outside in the garden, looking at the stars, basking in the glow of my convictions,when  a "voice" came to me.

The voice asked me one single question (and no, I won't divulge that question), but I couldn't answer it. I wasn't that I couldn't come up with the factual answer to a complicated inquiry, or even the result of some too difficult mathematical problem. Not at all. In fact, I saw the answer to the question very clearly in my minds eye. The answer was: 50-50.

With a mind-blowing shock, I realized that my entire temple was set on a foundation that could not support it. I learned that Saturday night that all certainty is an illusion, and that my temple had been a temple for me, not to God, and subsequently it came crashing down.

I entered into a psychotic episode that completely incapacitated me for weeks and lingered for years after. It's really quite a miracle that I didn't utterly lose my mind or kill myself during that period. My brain went into a reboot phase and was reformatted and decertainized.

I expected madness and death on the other end but much to my surprise something completely different started to happen. I'm not going to bother the reader with approximations and metaphors, because if the reader hasn't survived the destruction of his or her own temple, the reader is incapable of getting it. And if the reader has, then he or she needs no further explanation.

My friend has those weird eyes that don't move when they look at you and make you nervous if you have something to hide. They are (how shall I put it?) "entirely open". It's the most wonderful feeling to be able to look into eyes like that and feel no shame at all.

How Beer ties into the Promise of Salvation

For eons mainstream historians have tried to make us believe that humanity made the transition from being hunter-gatherers to living in agricultural and urban societies, because of such mundane considerations as religion or people's desire to huddle up and be safe. A recent revolution has changed all that. Now we know the real reason for the agricultural revolution: beer!

Yes folks, people domesticated barley and brew beer millennia before they baked bread, and beer has saved humanity more than once since (watch the riveting and wonderfully entertaining documentary below if you don't believe it).

But if beer was such an important catalyst in human development, why is beer not mentioned in the Bible? It's generally accepted that the agricultural revolution is described in the late Patriarchal cycle, specifically when Jacob began to build booths for his cattle (Genesis 33:17). But where's the beer (not counting the names He-Brew and Beer-sheba for argument sake)?

The answer may very well lie in the word nazid, which comes from the verb zud, meaning to boil. Our word occurs six times in the Bible, divided over a mere three scenes:

(1) The prophet Haggai describes a complete meal in Haggai 2:12, which contains our word but no beer (which in antiquity would be a part of any well balanced meal).

(2) The prophet Elisha was called to the rescue when during a famine some prophets had concocted a brew (nazid) from unknown ingredients, and it was awful. Elisha ordered the men to add some qemah, and what that is we don't know but it has to do with a grain product, usually translated with meal or flour but that's just a guess. And the brew was fine! Could qemah have been hop?

(3) But most revealing is the use of our word nazid in the story of Esau (the hunter and man of the field) and Jacob (the home boy). One day Esau came home from hunting and found Jacob stirring some nazid (Genesis 25:27-34). Esau famously traded his birth right for some of it, and when father Isaac was about to dispense his blessings, he blessed Jacob who brought him a dish made from domesticated goat-kid and had little blessing left for Esau and his fresh kill (Genesis 27).

And as a footnote: it's generally assumed that Jacob tricked Isaac into blessing him, but that's patently untrue. Isaac was blind and Jacob's visual disguise would hardly have made much difference to Isaac. In his letter to the Hebrews, Paul wrote that Isaac knew very well what he was doing, and blessed his sons according to his understanding of the things to come (Hebrews 11:20).

And beer? Besides securing Jacob's blessing and Israel's future, beer brought people together and caused society.

Beer kept the ancients healthy by producing the 20th century wonder of antibiotics naturally. Beer caused the American Revolution and was responsible for a pre-computer Internet.

Because of beer, people invented refrigeration and machines that replaced child labor.

So next time you pop a cold one, proclaim of the immortal words of John Nash: I have respect for beer!

Cheers!

Oh, and watch this cheerful and most excellent documentary on How Beer Saved The World:

Game of Thrones, the Bible and JUDGED

There is quite a bit of brouhaha going on in Christian circles about Game of Thrones being too violent, and, worse, too nude! But what a nonsense. The only thing Game of Thrones has and the Bible doesn't is an imp (not counting Paul and Zaccheus).

"The imp" Tyrion Lannister, in the foreground directly below the M of Game

In fact, I think we should start lobbying for a a brand new Bible TV series that for once isn't peopled by piously smiling Caucasian Colgate models but actually by the characters that appear in the Bible. We could call it JUDGED, and make it the bloodiest and nudest series ever to air on prime time! I bet we could get a Emmy for the Paradise episode alone.

Think of all the blood and boobs we could show in the antediluvian episode - move over Darren Aronofsky!

David with the head of Goliath
M. Caravaggio

The one on the Book of Judges would be a two-parter, of course, with weeks of teasers that warn folks to put their kids to bed before it airs. It would have extra emphasis on the destruction of the cities of the plain and the atrocities committed at Gibeah.

Ah, just imagine watching Abimelech deal with Shechem, or Jephthah with his daughter. And need we mention the virgin heist at Shiloh? We think not...

For the much anticipated incest special, we could casually mention that Sarah was Abraham's half-sister, before moving on to Lot who impregnated his daughters and Judah who impregnated his daughter in law. David's son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar, and speaking of rape, we would have to squeeze Shechem's rape of Dinah in there too somewhere, followed by Levi and Simeon's excellently bloody revenge.

Bathsheba's toilet
C.C. van Haarlem

We could do a snazzy Lydia Bixby crossover thing when we execute the five sons of Merab. The stories of Isaac and Rebekah and of David and Bathsheba would cater to the voyeuristic minority among our projected audience, and if we do it tasteful, we could certainly move the boundaries of allowable porn when we have a go at the Song of Solomon.

The New Testament episode(s) would have to center on the Roman occupation, although we could turn the Lazarus cycle and the resurrected thousands upon Jesus' death into a zombie apocalypse kind of thing.

Gibson set the standard for torture-porn crucifixion-fiction and lest we look like a rip off, perhaps we could go into the theological ramifications of Jesus' death. That could give JUDGED the disturbing psychotic edge that Games hardly has.

Matthew 27:52-54

And just imagine the horror, the bottomless horror we could whip up for the show's grand finale: JUDGED - JUDGEMENT DAY.

I'd warn the producers to stay away from the silly medieval image of little red fire devils poking naked people with pitchforks. That image went out with the flat earth and our target audience is obviously beyond that.

In stead we could follow some John Doe as he notices his every day world becoming bleaker and bleaker until one day he finds himself (screaming, of course) adrift in an unbound darkness with no features whatsoever and no one around and even void of the hope to ever meet someone or something.

There won't be anything to catch his bearings on. His memories will be indistinguishable from his imaginations. He will slowly loose faith in reality, and no longer be sure that the world has ever existed. He might be a creature produced by some random process, that began to imagine things and so ended up on a make-believe planet with make-believe friends and family. He might have made it all up. He might not be human, but there's no light to check the shape of his body. And he could be making up his sense of touch too.

And as the camera zooms out, we hear poor John Doe screaming hysterical screams, as he gets smaller and smaller in a silent blackness that won't even provide him with the assurance that he himself exists.

Wow. There won't be a globe golden enough...

Google and Jubilee

One of the key stipulations of the Torah, namely the Sabbath Year and Year of Jubilee, are no longer observed in our modern world, or are they? A closer look at the most successful company in human history might surprise you.

Google in Hebrew letters

Everybody knows about Sabbath, the seventh day of the week upon which people were not to do any work, but rest. This day of Sabbath is still with us, and was even expanded from one day to two days of rest, what we call the weekend.

But what our modern world doesn't observe is the Sabbath year, which was a period of one year every seven years during which arable lands were given rest (Exodus 23:10-11; Leviticus 25:1-7), slaves were emancipated (Exodus 21:2-4) and debts were remitted (Deuteronomy 15:1).

The seventh Sabbath Year was known as the Year of Jubilee, during which additionally all property rights regarding fields reverted (Leviticus 25:8-55 and 27:16-33).

The key feature of Sabbath and Jubilee is quickly overlooked but it's nothing other than the suspension of obligation. That's sounds wonderfully anarchistic but it comes down to a huge liberation of human endeavor from the demands of commerce and sustenance.

Most people are creative in some way or other, and periods of time, from a day to a whole year, not having to do what someone else or some situation dictates (basically living off the fat of the land), automatically produces an enormous quantity of unrestrained human interaction: stronger family bonds and doubtlessly baby booms in the year after the Sabbath year, but also new ideas, new technology and science, and new literature and music. In fact, our word school comes from the Greek word skhoie, meaning leisure.

Hard work and doing what you're told may have given us our wealth, but occasional freedom and time to pursue the inclinations of the heart is what has given our world its flavor. And guess what, the Hebrew word Jubilee has nothing to do with being jubilant (which derives from the Latin iubilo, meaning to shout for joy); it comes from the Hebrew verb yabal, which to flow forth or produce. Neither Sabbath nor Jubilee has anything to do with laziness and inertia; both designate periods of increased production of what people naturally seek to bring forth.

Sabbath & Jubilee

In the wake of the industrial revolution, leaders began to turn the human work force into a machine, which ultimately led to the world wars and the great depression in between. After the second world war came the various liberation movements (of blacks, women and youth and as general protest against the human machine, which basically meant that the West became liberated, and the East was conquered and turned into the machine) but the reinvention of the Jubilee principle did not occur until Google turned the business world upside down.

Life at the Google campus

In stead of chaining their employees to their desks and making them do whatever bosses told them to do, Googlists were gently nudged in a desired direction but also instructed to devote twenty percent of their time to not boss-regulated projects.

The main Google campus in California has more than a dozen restaurants where employees can eat whatever they want, without having to pay for it. There are game rooms, massage parlors and parks to stroll in.

Religious leaders often want their followers to believe that obedience to God is the same as obedience to what they say God wants. But the opposite is true. Within the confines of certain ground rules (don't steal, don't murder; all that) being obedient to God equals being free to follow the desires of your heart. Religious leaders will then want you to believe that if people could just follow their hearts, the whole world would spiral into a lawless killing zone, but again the opposite is true.

Watch this flick

As researchers such as Harvard's psychologist Steven Pinker have discovered, there is a clear correlation between a reduction of rulery (specifically religious governance, I'm sort of half-happy to say) and an increase in morality.

In the last forty years, the rate of rape has declined by 80% in the US (while reportings have gone up!). The rate of domestic abuse and child abuse has gone down, as have mistreatments of minority groups and animals. Wars and deaths by wars have plummeted over the last few decades world wide.

The traffic light on the busy intersection near the Abarim Publications campus went bust the other day. It's always a death defying experience to run across the street in the 2.5 second the lights give you to make the transition, because whoever is given a green light will take it by force, and no matter what cripple or distracted Scripture Theorist in is their way, they will tear down the street with ridiculous speeds.

But now that the lights were out, people carefully waited their fair turn, and equally carefully rolled on when they were given a chance by the others. I was able to cross the street in a perfectly normal and relaxed pace, without anyone trying to kill me or even honk at me. That was a good day, until someone turned the lights back on and the blood thirst recommenced.

Apparently, we've collectively reached such a level of responsibility that a relaxation of rules leads to better behavior in stead of worse. Our world is still so highly competitive because we're all scared of falling behind and being left out, but all the signs indicate that if we would just relax the laws of commerce (making goods and services more readily available at reduced costs or even gratis), people would still continue to produce the necessities of life and in addition produce much more of the stuff that makes life worth living in the first place.

Google on, y'all!

The Google corporate slogan

How power works

Obviously, any person who attains any governmental or military position, automatically believes in human authority and the justice of one guy ruling over the next one. People like that generally fall into two categories:

The Materialists

The Materialists, in the Bible portrayed as the Saducees, deny that anything exists outside the observable, and thus exclude the existence of angels, spirits, God and obviously any form of resurrection. Materialists see the belief in the non-material world as poison to society and will try to eradicate it.

Our good friend Richard Dawkins

Examples of this form of government are Marxism (Mao, Stalin), the European Union, and science-based models (to which we hastily add that science is a wonderful tool as long as it does not overrule or illegitimate other considerations, such as art-based leanings; here at Abarim Publications we love science).

The Vicarians

The Vicarians, in the Bible portrayed as the Pharisees, deny that the belief of most people in anything is detrimental. The Vicarians will try to harness whatever beliefs of whichever people into elaborate religions and associated power structures, of which the top ruler represents the object of people's belief on earth.

Our good friend Pope Francis

Examples of this kind of government are of course Roman Imperialism (which explains the functioning of people like Annas and Ananias) and its greatest admirer: Fascism, as well as most forms of formal Christianity and Islam (and subsets such as the USA and various Arabic nations).

We  hastily add that these are nevertheless all wonderful endeavors with friendly accommodating people. Here at Abarim Publications we aim to be Good Neighbors to all these regimes.

The main objective of these factions is the same: to rule humanity and to hammer it into an efficient, well-oiled machine. Their most dominant symbol is either the sun or the moon, and their most lethal enemy, what they hate and fear most, is anyone who is contrary, non-compliant, or trouble-making: disturbers of their manufactured peace, so to speak.

To them, disturbers are all the same, but to the actual trouble-makers there is a great difference, namely between:

Destroyers

Or people who seek to destroy whatever exists, and that for non-constructive reasons. Among these are people with rare mental disorders, vandals and very rare forms of satanism (because most "satanism" today is of the second order, and designed to counter modern forms of Pharisaism).

Bravehearts

Our good friend William Wallace

Bravehearts are folks who want to achieve a world in which the individual is free from any restriction, free to do whatever he/she wants, including beating up someone who's in their way.

This non-government is based on survival of the fittest, and among these we may count anarchists and nationalists (those who apply anarchy to the individual that is their nation).

The Celts and Germanians appear to have had developed cultures of a very high degree of sophistication across enormous realms based on these ideas, which existed until Rome sacked them.

Israel originally attempted this form of existence, but they wouldn't stop fighting among themselves, and the nation elected to switch to centralized, Pharisaic rule (although the term was obviously invented much later than the time of 1 Samuel 8).

Hodosites

Hodosites (from the Greek word hodos, meaning way, road or path) are people who insist that humans are natural creatures, who function best collectively according to same natural laws that run them individually. Without central rule and with only personal autonomy, bees and ants build huge societies. Imagine what humans might accomplish if we'd just stop telling others what to do.

Our good friends the bees

The society these Hodosites envision is based entirely on an individual's adherence to the only code all individuals can agree on, namely those aforementioned natural laws (Matthew 23:10, 1 Corinthians 15:24).

These folks see humanity as a self-correcting system, in which the whole will always reflect the ultimate. Any insurrection comes from suppression, and should be corrected on both ends (which is also the key to the cure of cancer, by the way).

In a human individual, this code is DNA. In the human collective, this code is the Scriptures, which is a collection of writings that have stood the test of time not because powerful people wanted it so, but because the turning of the human world made these particular writings float to the top.

An individual whose cells don't properly form or interpret DNA will develop cancer, in the same way that that a society whose individuals think they know better than the Scriptures will develop any of the above and will inevitably disintegrate.

The only way to figure out how the Scriptures work is to cross reference them against the scientific record (Romans 1:20), and we're far from getting there.

Today we don't even understand the Bible, let alone see any possible seamless connection between the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas and other Scriptures mankind has been endowed with (John 21:25). But it's either that, or extinction. Either humanity will fall in sync with creation or else creation will annihilate humanity like the plague we are. And when we get there, it will be the beginning of a whole new and quite spectacular thing.

Among the proponents of this view we can count Jesus the Nazarene and people like Nicodemus and Paul, who started out as Pharisees but who later became devoted to the Way, as it's called (John 14:6, Acts 9:2, 22:4).

Much alike these two famous figures, there are a great many people among all above categories who are in fact devoted to the Way and don't know it because they've never heard of it, thanks to the efforts of Pharisaism and Sadduceeism to cloud and oppress it. But now you know better.

Our best friend: DNA (Deuteronomy 30:11-14, Jeremiah 31:33, Luke 17:21, Romans 2:15, Hebrews 10:16)