I haven’t seen this since I was a little boy: an Ocean of People flocking at the courtyard that sat around a Cathedral and statues of Saints, of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus are like islands atop crashing waves. To move you got to rub shoulder to shoulder. One can hardly breathe. Don’t get me wrong, I go through this Good Friday ritual procession in Manila but the crowd isn’t like this. At all.
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate crowds?
If I mentioned that as I pan my eyes around, one can notice that there were loads of pretty young women around. That’s digressing, right?
Anyway, so it took awhile but we made our way inside this massive Cathedral, the lights blaze bright. At the end of the massive hall, there stood the Altar, bare. To its side, lines have formed as Men, Women and Children kiss a small statue of the Crucified Jesus.
It isn’t idol worship. Is it?
The status around this massive Cathedral are used as teaching aide. It gives people something tangible to hold on to. It helps a religious people to visualize history like their saints, and the abstract concept of their God.
Some part of me thinks… there are Catholics who don’t see it that way because there is so much more to the Catholic faith than this. There is the lesson and wisdom of service in the washing of the feet, for one.
And another is this NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory snap of a very young and powerful pulsar, (PSR B1509-58):
Cosmic Hand
Faith need not be at odds with Science; the latter is a quest to describe and discover this Universe of myriad possibilities and beauty. This is a universe that Faith believes was made by the hand of God and can be a celebration of that belief. If you happen not to believe, the universe is still a beautiful place, isn’t it? And yet I can not help but wonder that a lot of people will spend this Easter missing that point too.
image credit is:
| Credit | NASA/CXC/SAO/P.Slane, et al. |
| Scale | Image is 19.6 arcmin across |
| Category | Supernovas & Supernova Remnants, Neutron Stars/X-ray Binaries |
| Coordinates (J2000) | RA 15h 13m 55.52s | Dec -59° 08′ 08.8 |
| Constellation | Circinus |
| Observation Date | 12/28/2004-10/18/2005 |
| Observation Time | 52 hours |
| Obs. ID | 5534, 5535, 6116, 6117 |
| Color Code | Red (0.5-1.7 keV); Green (1.7-3.0 keV) ; Blue (3.0-8.0 keV) |
| Instrument | ACIS |
| Distance Estimate | About 17,000 light years |
| Release Date | April 3, 2009 |
Popularity: 1% [?]
coy,
Anyone’s ‘relationship with the Lord is in my view on a most personal.
As man pushes the limirs of science what is proven, I think is not simply
y the immensity of The Realm where the Earth is just a Pale Blue Dot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M
Each of us has his own concept of The Lord.
Thanks for giving me a different glimpe, a brand new glimpse of His Greatness, TRhew Greatness that Science only now allows us to appreciate.
Happy Easter.
happy easter ding! :D
The Catholics and Orthodox kiss icons. The evangelicals kiss the Bible. All are fashioned by human hands.
The pulsar, my dear is an icon too. If you kiss it, is it idolatry?
yes.
from… a religious view point you can always say that this is an example of God’s grace. This is a thing of beauty, a part of His creation. no kissing required, thus no idolatry.
from a scientific point of view, this is an image of a pulsar that is 17,000 light years away. that’s that.
from the point of view of being human without any religious bias, i can say that this image is beautiful.
Let this Hand of God but write out the Ten Commandments of Moses in a stream of supernovae, and I garontee you that all the world will become strictly observing Jehovah’s Witnesses within minutes of the news being flashed on Space dot com. A Quranic verse or two would surely turn us all into muezzins of the One True Faith. Indeed, what if the Hand of God were to trace out in exploding galaxies the menu in the Great Pastafarian Restaurant in the Sky? Would you not yourself be prostrating yourself at the nearest avatar of the Great Spaghetti Monster?
i know right?!
Interesting, DJB. Would you? I wouldnt. I would be very suspicious as my Christian faith isnt predicated on celestial displays or supernovae tap dancing to Te Deum. I dont know. I just dont think the God I believe in would be that immature or un-subtle. It’s just not his style. ;-)
Goodness, Jeg, do each of us have to choose our own God as we pleases?
Yes.
Oh I forgot to add: Choose wisely.
You mean some Gods are made in UK, some made in China?
Haha. Actually you can even make your own if you want. Other people have, why not you?
the universe isn’t “pre-determined”. it is probabilistic.
does it really look like a hand? parang 4 na dalari lang.
happy easter everybody!
LOL. yeah. still, it looks like a hand ;)
Hand ni Mickey Mouse.
i’m enjoying your responses! :D
I don’t get it…. why isn’t why you described precisely, Idolatry?
oops.
why isn’t what you described precisely, Idolatry?
samalamig,
see blacksharma’s response ;)
I was referring to the scene at the cathedral. That’s idolatry, isn’t it?
Kissing miraculous statues?
Not just any idols but white pointy-nosed idols at that.
Look no further to where Filipinos get their negative self-image, I say! :)
imho the simplest answer is yes.
I wonder what the good folks who labored for 20 years to make the Chandra xray observatory a reality would think of their work being utilized as an expression of religious idolatry or an occasion for beatific visions — to be hijacked for such purposes!
It irks me whenever the popular press discovers some magnificent new idea or discovery and perverts it into something utterly unconnected or irrelevant.
The details of this pulsar, one of the most energetic yet found, are infinitely more interesting than any Hand of God pulp optical illusion.
cocoy, maybe that nasa snap was the big bang, and God just wants to show us a flash back of how he did it to convince the non-believers like me. am I convinced? no, not yet.
Not meaning to be persnickety but the Big Bang didnt occur anywhere. There was no anywhere yet at that ‘time’. The entire universe is where the big bang ‘occurred’.
Happy Easter, Jeg, and all!
Not being persnickety either, Jeg, but, I was saying it was a flash back, not the orig, with a sprinkling of special effects, you know, even God could be high tech too, heheh.
Bert,
Put it this way, if you look up the sky any single day (don’t forget to wear protective eye gear), that sunlight is 8 minutes old. It takes 8 minutes for sunlight to leave the sun and reach Earth.
So if our Sun ever goes nova, it will be an 8 minute wait until all life on Earth is extinguished.
the pulsar is 17,000 lightyears away. That means that image occurred roughly 17,000 years ago. humans, according to recent science left Africa roughly 150,000 years ago. And if you want to put a bit of religion in it, Jesus was crucified roughly 2,000 years ago.
we’re but a blink of an eye in the grand cosmic scheme of things.
coy,
must have taken God too long to finally decide what do.
Bert, ssshh! don’t talk too loudly! feminists might use your comment to justify that God is a woman.
Haven’t they already?
Personally, I have always believed that such things as giving so much importance to the statue of Sto. Nino in Cebu is a form of such idolatry.. When people go to The Basilica and wipe their handkerchiefs on the glass encasing A Sto. Nino figure, I often wonder how it even all started.. and why one wouldn’t just pray directly to the source..
Even though I am a Catholic, I do not practice the acts that Filipinos would say define a Catholic Filipino.
It is my personal belief that has always sustained me, and no amount of ritual will ever get in the way of that.. whether that obstacle is a priest, the pope, or our very own culture…
Cocoy, the reason why there will always be people that will miss the beauty of either the “Hand of God” or the “science” of it all, is that, to put it plainly, there are just some people who do not seek beauty but seek the opposite. It is these that seek the extremist road and the end goal of carnage..
Honestly, I smile at the thought that a greater being thought it would be fun to make such a form, but then again, to believe that would also make me want to believe that the potato chip I just ate really did have the image of Christ.. and yes, God Almighty thought it ever important to plaster an image of divinity on an object instead of illuminating mankind of its own failures of caring for one another..
Just my thought on this post, thank you for the reflection… Happy Easter!
happy easter nick!
You have interesting view about the “veneration of images.” I understand that there is a great deal of work in educating the people that the church has to do. The Catholic Church is often accused by the protestants of committing idolatry because of the religious images. Unfortunately there are people doing the same thing yet they claim to be ‘catholics’. As far as I understand, the veneration of the religious images is not to give too much importance to the statue itself but the statue represents the person to whom we address our prayer. It is actually to the ‘main source’ tha we address our prayers with the aid of the statue of the Sto.Nino. Images are meant to help us to understand the greater reality that it represents. A real catholic, having this concept in mind would not think that the veneration of the statue of the Sto.Nino is a form of idolatry.
The other thing that I would like to point out is, one cannot claim to be a catholic and just continue to live based on his own personal beliefs. There is no such thing as “subjective catholicism.” There is a discipline of thought that is very common among the people nowadays and it is pretty much based on subjectivism and relativism. These are not new actually. It would be dangerous if people would start to think that things are relative and things are based on personal interpretation and judgment. This is more dangerous when applied to one’s faith and morality. With relativism and subjectivism, one can judge good as evil and evil as good because one’s judgment is based on personal preference rather than objective standards. Imagine a world without objective standard and everything is relative and subjective!
To be a real catholic is to be a part of the community of the faithful,the Church, and that includes the pope, bishops, priests and the laity. The pope, the bishops, the priests, are people entrusted with the obligation to teach the faith and to protect it from error or wrong judgment.
The real scientific significance of PULSARS is with regards to the SEARCH FOR EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE. Their existence proves that not everything which emits electromagnetic radiation in the universe at some precisely repeated pulse rate (like every 1.5 milliseconds) can be interpreted to come from little green men civilizations operating advanced machinery of some kind. These pulsating stars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with large magnetic fields beaming radiation at us from billions of miles away, much as an alien rock n roll radio station would.
Now of course, if we found AM/FM modulation mixed in with the radio signals from the Hand of God….
My idea of eternal life is quite simple.
In an infinite universe over infinite time, everything — even the most unlikely events — WILL happen and happen an infinite number of times. So most likely there will be an infinite number of times that atoms will come together to form our likenesses and an infinite number of times that the sequence by which our synapses fire at this very moment will happen again, thus repeating the very experiences that transpire at this very moment an infinite number of times.
I get to be ME an infinite number of times for all eternity! :D
that’s deterministic. science has proven our existence is probabilistic. you van’t be you a number of infinite times. thank goodness!
yeah, there’s a version of reality where benign0 is not an a-hole.
@CVJ
really?
i want to go to there!
(30 rock reference)
If the concept of any religious faith helps you in your life. Then cling to the faith. At least, you have something to cling to, in the uncertainty of our times.
We respect any person’s concept of God. Any religion we respect.
However, on the real perspective. The Planet Earth is just one small
Planet in this large universe. We have our Galaxy. Our Galaxy is just
one of the billion of Galaxies in the universe. Do you think that we
are just the Planet that has life in this universe? There are millions of planets like the Planet Earth in this universe like us.
On the concept of God. Which we violently disagree:
You go to a Quantum Physicist. Ask him to describe Energy. He will tell you:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Is always is, it was, has been
and always will be. Moving out of form or in form.
You go to a Religious Theologian. As him to describe God. He will tell you:
God cannot be created or destroyed. Always is, always was. Has been,
and always will be.
If you look on everything. From the mass of the universe to the fingers of your hand. Everything is made of Energy. Take your finger.
Put it in the most powerful microscope. You will see atoms moving
with energy.
Your finger consists of flesh. See deeper, it is made of cells. See more deeper. It is made of molecules. Then, atoms. The more deeper.
It is Energy. Which is the life of our universe.
Funny I never saw it a a “cosmic hand” until told. I must have been trained as a good scientist!
science kills metaphors.
Hahahaha. Very good Benign0. You’ve been listening to, or reading, that nice young man, Brian Greene expounding upon the Multiverse theory and superstrings. Quite a fascinating branch of modern cosmology and it appears you actually understood most of it, or most what I understand of it.
But be careful you don’t fall into any mental traps such as the one that Bencard has fallen into regarding “Infinity”. It is a concept, like dividing by zero, that can produce strange logical conclusions which are actually wrong upon closer examination.
For example that there are infinitely many copies of me posting this exact comment to you all over Reality is a charming idea that would teach people a great deal about statistics and probability. But it does rest on the notion that there NOT an infinite number of atoms in and infinite Universe.
In a sense Greene’s argument is circular: if the Universe is infinite then “anything can happen” statistically speaking. Thus ANY strange arrangement of the particles and forces of the Universe can happen…including the mind boggling ones he describes…like an infinite number of Benign0′s waggin his finger at us…
But an infinite number of Benign0′s would have to wait an infinite amount of time to savor his multiple personalities, and there would of course be an infinite number of DJBs there to joust with them.
It still hold, Dean.
If there are an infinite number of atoms, there’d still be an infinite number of finite subsets within that infinite set. Within each such subset the finite set of atoms in there can replicate events and combinations within said subset infinitely.
I do not know if I understood it correctly but if there are multiverses and there could be an infinite number of me roaming around those many universes, how come I am conscious of only one me right now? If there are other “me” in other realms, they could not be “me” because I do not experience their consciousness being mine. How’s that?
Same dilemma as the whole idea of being ‘teleported’.
The most viable process of teleportation is to store all information about you in a transkitter which then beams this information to a receiver that then reconstitutes another ‘you’ based on the information received. The original you is then destroyed.
The question is, is the teleported ‘you’ still you?
“transmitter” pala.
Do I have fat fingers??
if that were possible, i wonder if all your memories would be transfered too…
Haha. That’s where the Multiverse and Superstring theory belong: Science fiction.
Why the need for infinite universes? Why not Two-niverse, or Fourteen-niverse?
jeg,
for all the things we do know now… there is still a lot of things we don’t understand. at the turn of the 19th century, physicists everywhere thought that we’ve explained everything. That Physics was at an end. Then came a guy named Albert Einstein with his photoelectric effect and his General and Special Theory of relativity. There were lots of other great discoveries too… Curie, X-rays, Quantum Mechanics and boom— suddenly scientists everywhere knew shit.
For all we know Multiverse and Superstring is waiting for an Albert Einstein, for the human race to gain insight into what’s next. And for all we know the multiverse and superstring could be a deadend or maybe a stepping stone into understanding the universe.
My point is this: science is a discovery, a way to describe the universe. We stand on the shoulder of giants like Einstein and other scientists who contribute day in and day out in understanding our universe. It is through their eyes we gain insight into our universe.
Our understanding of the universe around us is as complete as a baby understanding what he sees, what he feels. We’re like babies that can’t even coherently /say/ anything yet, but babbling in awe.
Andun na ako, cocoy. Im a science fan. What I object to is scientists who behave as if string theory and the multiverse is fact and not conjecture. It’s annoying. To say nothing of misleading.
If that were a cosmic hand, it looks great!
“Same dilemma as the whole idea of being ‘teleported’.”
Heheh, from ‘Faith’ to “Star Trek”.
bert,
actually teleportation already works. sort of. some guys were able to move a photon of light from one point to another.
like i said, for me, there is no dilemma.
Yet another case of the Catholic obsession with pareidolia.
The concept of infinity, time and space only a creator if one exist could have the mathematical and all the applications able to explain this idea. I have a picture in my head and it's a nerd guy trying to explain to an ant how computer works. Out of desperation being a resident for over thirty years in this god loving somehow forsaken country I wish there is a portal that I could find so I can get out of here.
Write your comment here…
I like to go to hell. Hell is where people are naked. That's where pantyless Brittney is naked all year round with her buddy, Paris. So are the valley porn queens. So does Marilyn Monroe and all the hotties out there. So does women who lied that they don't like sex.
But I'm pre-destined to go to heaven. Because I practice celibacy. I look at sex as procreation not recreation. I find sex messy, unhealthy and totally not hygeinic. I'm pure. Therefore, I go to heaven in as much as I like to go to hell.
Belated Bad Friday!
No offfense, how does one determine that being celbate paves a way to heaven. You can fast on Sunday, or pray with your rosaries a million times on your broken knees and still would not gurantee a passage to heaven. Ultimately you are going to be judged based on your heart and your deed as a Christian, meaning how did you treat other people specially who tried to reach out. Did you fulfill your purpose in life that is given to you by our God.
Alingkepweng, before when religion started they marketed the road to heaven as simple. "Believe in me". "Those who believe in me will live on forever". Now it's getting complex. Conditions getting plenty.
This religion belittles peoples mind.
No offense also but whose mind are we talking about.