Saturday, May 29, 2010

It's hot

At my house in Minneapolis, it's 104 in the sun and 90 in the shade.
There is a place hotter than this.
Let's stay out of it!

Friday, May 28, 2010

Father Kelly needs education

I got this from The Catholic Caveman --

Stating that “Catholics can become fanatical about one form of the Body of Christ in the bread of the Eucharist as the REAL presence of Christ,” Father Michael Kelly, the Jesuit CEO of the Asian Catholic news agency UCA News, criticized the doctrine of transubstantiation in a May 24 column.In his column-- a critique of the new, more accurate liturgical translations that reflect the content and dignity of the original Latin-- Father Kelly writes:

"Regrettably, all too frequently, the only Presence focused on is Christ’s presence in the elements of bread and wine. Inadequately described as the change of the 'substance' (not the 'accidents') of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist carries the intellectual baggage of a physics no one accepts. Aristotelian physics makes such nice, however implausible and now unintelligible, distinctions. They are meaningless in the post-Newtonian world of quantum physics, which is the scientific context we live in today."

I left the following comment, which Caveman was kind enough to print (I have amended it a little bit for here):

I have just finished reading The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, in which he talks about relativity, quantum theory, the uncertainty principle, subatomic physics, the big bang, and other such topics.The conclusions I reached are:

1, it could validly be said that the universe is the result of one infinite and eternal thought;

2, these topics do not affect everyday objects and actions at the human scale[1]. Aristotelian and Newtonian physics are still valid for ordinary use;

3, the transcendent truths revealed by God in Scripture, and by our Lord Jesus Christ, are outside the physical realm;

4, so what physics we use is totally irrelevant to Christian truth, in the sense that physics cannot disprove revelation or theology;

5, God has infinite energy, so by "e=mc^2" we can see that m=e/c^2, and it doesn't matter how big the universe is, because e is infinite;

6, Christ's Passion, Death, and Resurrection are most certainly events at the human scale, in every sense of the word!

The good father should read more physics, and of course his catechism.

[1] Relativity does in fact have some effect on things at the human scale, but the effects are (almost?) always too small to be perceptible, and seldom even capable of being measured.

I have to add that there's no essential difference that I could ever see between the "Big Bang" theory and the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Interesting Quote

I found this in a very interesting book about World War II: World War II; Opposing Viewpoints, William Dudley, Ed. American History Series. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1997. Emphases mine.

"It is of the utmost importance that the people of this country, with the best information in the world, think things through. The most dangerous enemies of American peace are those who, without well-rounded information on the whole broad subject of the past, the present, and the future, undertake to speak with assumed authority, to talk in terms of glittering generalities, to give to the nation assurances or prophesies which are of little present or future value."

September 3, 1939; fireside chat by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt