Over last weekend, we watched the movie Knowing. It’s with Nicholas Cage and a very good movie. Thumper pointed out the beautiful music used in the beginning of the movie – it’s Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. A beautiful piece. Then the special effects in the movie were fantastic – very realistic! It was a very entertaining movie.
Knowing isn’t a movie to watch with your kids, but a very good one to watch with friends or your spouse. It is a interesting topic that stems around a series of numbers, written down five decades ago, which predict world disasters and list the exact number of casualties. Amazingly, all predictions turned out to be true for the last 50 years, and Nicholas Cage finds out that the last prediction on the list says “Everybody Else” – as in “all human beings”. Brrr… I am not going to give you too many details and spoil it for you if you haven’t seen the movie yet. I will tell you though that it deals with the Apocalypse.
After the movie, Thumper and I discussed it but he has been suffering with a cold this past week and wasn’t into any deep debate about the end of the world. So we went to sleep but I woke early wondering about something my mother in-law had said.
What do you believe?
My mother-in-law once told me that the Bible was a fantastic book of fairy tales. She is inclined to believe more in the Cosmos – she is very spiritual, but she has her very own belief which isn’t dictated by Catholicism. I think it is an interesting concept of what her choice to believe is.
Let’s assume for now that the original writings in the Bible were authentic. The question then is whether or not they were translated correctly. I will try to keep away from the idea that they were disrupted with some sort of intent.
The Apocalypse
The term “Apocalypse” is often used to describe a world disaster on the account of the “Revelation”. It is a cataclysm (such as the Flood or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah), in which the forces of good permanently triumph over the forces of evil. Apocalyptic religious writings are regarded as a distinct branch of literature. The Book of Revelation is considered by some to be one of the most controversial books of the New Testament, and was written over 1,900 years ago. It mentions many diverse interpretations of the various names and events. The book does predict an end to the world soon, yet no specific date is mentioned.
The Bible’s sacred scriptures were in procession and translated by the Catholic Church. Yet there are several religions and variations due to individual and cultural believes. Taken a step further, the question arises if the translation could have been faltered to raise influence and convince people to become followers and believers of the Church. As a method of rounding up the sheep. As a means to gain control over the people.
I was raised to attend mass regularly. Still, I don’t see how not attending mass makes me any less of a Catholic or any less of a believer. I believe in a higher power, but what gets to me is the perceived necessity to be a follower of a single human being, the so-called chosen one to represent us all before God. You know who. I don’t want to be a part of the flock at another church in another city. That sounds too much like sheeple to me. I believe that God is everywhere, not just in a church. I don’t need to be represented. I thank Him personally for all his creations and for each and every day.
Being raised a Catholic, I was questioned about my loyalties to the church in a discussion about the book and movie by Daniel Brown, The Da Vinci Code. I watched and enjoyed the movie with Tom Hanks very much and have to say the book was even better than the movie.
A topic that is most often connected to this is Astronomy.
Astronomy
Astronomy is one of the world’s oldest sciences. Astronomy and celestial mechanics is the measurement of the positions of celestial objects. Accurate knowledge of the positions of the Sun and the Moon, planets and stars, has been essential in celestial navigation and have been written and passed down throughout our history. Astronomy is used to predict seasonal changes, when to plant crops, to predict the tide, and how long each cycle lasts.
Careful measurement of the positions of the planets has led to a solid understanding of gravitational effects, and an ability to determine past and future positions of the planets with great accuracy, a field known as celestial mechanics.
Sir Issac Newton
Issac Newton
This is just a short story of facts on Sir Issac. We have all heard the story of how he discovered gravity, but what I want to empathize on are his studies on the laws of motion and universal gravitation. These were two of so many of Newton’s contributions. He once said,
Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.
In 1685, King James II asked Trinity College to award degrees to students whose religious beliefs agreed with his own. When Newton and eight other teachers refused to comply, they were brought before the High Court on trumped-up charges. Luckily, it was then determined that these awards were unearned and the charges were rightfully dismissed.
Newton loved God and believed in God’s word. In his study named A Historical Account Of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, he looked for hidden messages in the Bible but couldn’t find any. His study was based on Biblical hermeneutics; he studied the Bible in search of encrypted messages. This was called Bible Code.
Bible Code
This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.
In April 1705, Queen Anne knighted Newton during a royal visit to Trinity College. It was rumored that the knighthood was motivated by political considerations connected with the Parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton’s scientific work or services as Master of the Mint.
Nostradamus
Of course before Newton, there was Nostradamus, who was born in 1503. Nostradamus too based his published predictions on astrology. This is the assessment of the meaning of the position of the planets and stars. Essentially, astrology interprets and reads context into something, often times something that is not in the very least related to the kosmos.
Nostradamus was criticized by his fellow astrologers of the time for incompetence, and for assuming that the comparison of future planetary configurations with those accompanying known past events could predict what would happen in the future. Today, it is suggested that most of his predictions were based mainly on the Bible.
Nostradamus wrote the book The Prophecies, in which he made world event predictions. This book is said to have been misunderstood or translated incorrectly (just like some think of the Bible) – it has been in publication since 1555.
One last name on the topic that you might recognize is Galileo.
Galileo
Galileo is know for his discovery of the four brightest moons of Jupiter in 1609, and documented their orbits about that planet. I’m sure you know that it was Galileo who threw over the Catholic Church’s geocentric dogma. Of course, he was prosecuted by the Church for his blasphemy. Galileo escaped serious punishment only by maintaining that his astronomy was a work of mathematics, not one of natural philosophy (physics), and therefore purely abstract.
Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe once said,
Superstition is the poetry of life. Both invent imaginary beings. Both sense the strangest connections between real, tangible elements an interplay of sympathies and antipathies.
Poetry, having put on these shackles of its free accord, strips them off readily enough, time and again. Superstition, on the other hand, can be compared to magic fetters that draw tighter and tighter the more one struggles. Even the most enlightened epoch is not proof against superstition. But when it asserts itself in dark ages man’s clouded mind at once reaches out for the impossible; it tries to exert power on the realm of spirits, across the distance, and upon the course of future events. Thus a wonderfully rich world takes shape, surrounded by an aura of fog.
Superstition does no harm to the poet, because he can turn his half-delusions to advantage in a variety of ways.
Albert Einstein said,
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand, rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his mind and his eyes are closed.
The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has given rise to religion. To know that what is the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive form — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.
A few weeks back, I wrote about Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Human Needs. I’m a great admirer of Maslow. He believed there was a growing interest among all people to establish a world philosophy in physical and social science. Physical being natural science, the “body”, and religion the “spirit”. He called his thesis From Religions, Values, Peak-Experiences.
Abraham Maslow once said,
The very beginning, the intrinsic core, the essence, the universal nucleus of every known high religion has been the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer. The high religions call themselves ‘revealed religions’ and each of them tends to rest its validity, its function, and its right to exist on the codification and the communication of this original mystic experience of revelation from the lonely prophet to the mass of human beings in general.
I believe in God the Creator, but I also believe in science. I also believe many of the world disasters have been caused by mankind’s hand or by natural events. God created this universe and all living things in it. I believe when one person dies, it is so another one can be born. I believe astronomy has substantial influence in the biosphere and environmentalism. I believe astrology is not only misunderstood but often abused and, simply put, made up.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you believe we are destined for an Apocalypse? Do you think the Bible could have been misinterpreted and the translation off? Do you believe in astronomy and the cosmos? What is your take on astrology?
You know i had loved the moved…expecially the end. New beginnings always stir me up. Considering i am at the juncture of one myself.
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