Tetherd Cow Ahead

In case you were wondering, faithful Acowlytes, Prophet Peter Popoff still regularly communicates with me, albeit in a conversation that is fairly one-sided. He still hasn’t managed ever to respond to my questions, and one must consider that the silence after my last heartfelt offering has been decidedly chilly.

Previously, as you will recall, I had gotten a little excited that I am the only one who has made any money out of our exchange, but evidently my crowing has come to Prophet Pete’s attention. Today I received a missive in which he asks for his money back again:

Of course, that’s never going to happen, especially when he goes on to tell me that he ‘must do something very spiritual and private’ with the money. I think we all have a pretty good idea what kinds of things Prophet Pete does in the apse when no-one is around.

I am making quite a collection of Peter Popoff paraphernalia though, including, not before time, the elusive Dead Sea Salt, which arrived a few weeks back.

Prophet Pete must have known how much I’d been anticipating it – he couldn’t stop himself from scrawling his excitement on the front of the envelope:

Indeed, it excited someone in the post office too, because before it arrived in my letterbox the letter had quite obviously been opened and then sticky-taped closed again:

And lest you think it was a mistake, and the letter was ‘opened in error’, a second envelope inside the first one (Prophet Pete is very fond of a little envelope-in-envelope action) was opened also:

But the Dead Sea Salt was still in there, so I can only assume that the snoop didn’t truly understand the value of the contents. ((Either that, or they stole the winning lottery ticket that Prophet Pete had thoughtfully enclosed…))

I’ve added the little salty baggy to my expanding Prophet Peter Popoff portmanteau, along with some other recent acquisitions – a golden Disk of Healing, another ten thousand dollar note, a piece of blue cloth (I can’t remember what the hell that was supposed to be), Aaron’s Rod (a toothpick in a little cotton bag), and one of Jesus’ sandals (funny, all that Bible verse and not one mention that Jesus had paper footwear).

I am confident that soon I will have enough to open the world’s first Prophet Peter Popoff museum! Admission charge will be 2c.

Swine Flu is sweeping the globe,* so with the plague upon us, all the Christian wack-jobs are elbowing furiously for positions at the front of the queue for the End Times Spectacular. The folks at Rapture Ready are no exception. If you’ve never visited Rapture Ready, you should. I’ve trawled around it several times and it’s so completely unhinged that I’m still not entirely convinced that it’s not a giant leg pull.

Aside from interminable lists of things that presage The End (including Swine Flu of course)†, there are answers to questions such as What happens to members of non-Christian faiths in the event of the Rapture? (kiss your ass goodbye, Heathen), Is it okay for a man to dress like a woman? (what do you think, pervert?) and Do we all get the same rewards in Heaven? (of course not you sucker).

There’s also the Who will you spend Eternity with? comparison test. Predictably enough, Satan is not recommended. But quite disturbingly, if you decide (after reading about ‘pain so great you’ll be gnashing your teeth for all eternity’), that you don’t want to spend forever with Old Nick, and you click on the link at the bottom of all the dire warnings To see what the requirements are for following Jesus, you get catapaulted into Rapture Ready limbo with an ‘Oh great, now you’ve done it. You’re complete lost’ (sic) error.

Rather offputting if you’ve just seen the error of your ways and opted for a speedy conversion before the rain of frogs starts. I like to think that there’s way more truth in it, though, than the Rapture Ready site creators ever intended…

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*Hyperbole for effect. Why should the newspapers have a monopoly on sensationalism?

†Well that’s a sure bet – if they just keep on shovelling enough crap in there, inevitably there will come a time where they can say ‘See? We told you so!’

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Tetherd Cow Ahead Presents: The Baffling Bible
Episode #5: Leviticus 20:13

*It’s AOK if one of the parties is an Angel.

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Thanks for the fodder King Willy!

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This man is Bernard d’Espagnat. He has a brain the size of a planet. In his extraordinary career, he has worked with other people with brains the size of planets, including Louis de Broglie, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr.*

D’Espagnat has just been awarded the 2009 Templeton Prize, which, in the words of the Templeton Foundation, is bestowed on a recipient for ‘progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities’, and carries with it a useful £1 million in pocket money.

M. d’Espagnat was given the prize this year for his work in quantum physics, and in particular for his assertions that ‘reality’ (whatever that is) can never be truly known by us in any meaningful sense. Crucially, in regard to the Templeton Prize, his conclusions about what he has discovered in his research veer towards the metaphysical.

From New Scientist:

‘Unlike classical physics,’ d’Espagnat explains, ‘quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled.’

D’Espagnat subscribes to the third view and hypothesizes a ‘‘veiled reality’ that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly’. A veiled reality that encompasses what he refers to as a ‘Being’ and ‘a great, hypercosmic God’.

All things considered, I’m happy that the Templeton Foundation is spending their (evidently) vast fortunes in this way (let’s face it – the money could be going to Creationists). John Templeton, the founder of the organization, was the kind of religious person of whom we need many more. As a practising Presbyterian Christian he asked a question that all believers of religion should ask:

Why shouldn’t I try to learn more? Why shouldn’t I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn’t I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more.

Indeed.

It puzzles me, however, that M. d’Espagnat, genius that he indisputably is, seems unable to grasp what is apparently too much of a subtlety of his ‘veiled’ reality; if it exists why must it imply the existence of his hypercosmic God, rather than infer instead that our human brains (planet-size or otherwise) may simply not be capable of understanding the true nature of things? This, to me, seems to be a far likelier explanation than the unsupported jump to the notion of a mysterious and inscrutable creator.†

Perplexingly, d’Espagnat himself seems to be within stepping distance of the same conclusion. He said, on receipt of the prize:

I feel myself deeply in accordance with the Templeton Foundation’s great, guiding idea that science does shed light (on spirituality). In my view it does so mainly by rendering unbelievable an intellectual construction claiming to yield access to the ultimate ground of things with the sole use of the simple, somewhat trivial notions everybody has.

It would appear, then, that he is merely replacing a simple (or trivial) faith in God with a complicated one built on the scaffold of a type of physics and mathematics that very few people understand. Sure, it’s not the thunder-and-lightning enemy-smiting God of the Evangelical Christians/Muslims/Hebrews, but it comes from exactly the same irrational place; the hubris of humans and our belief that the Universe revolves around us.

It seems, then, that in this realm we’ve not really made many advances since Copernicus after all.

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*If those names don’t mean anything to you, they should. They are among the brightest and most insightful scientists we have ever known.

†Which, in any case, is a completely simplistic and futile supposition – as I’ve said elsewhere: if you want to make that assessment, then you may as well suppose that you, your world and all your memories were created by that God yesterday, fully formed and intact – how would you ever know? It’s the same kind of intellectual pursuit. From there, a raft of fanciful worlds become possible and reality unravels like ball of wool in the paws of a kitten.

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