David Custis Kimball - blog

It’s Palm Sunday, today & riding an ass into town might just reveal similar significance

Theology, History, Humor

It’s Palm Sunday, the day Jesus was received into Jerusalem as a messiah, in anticipation of his ‘Last Supper’, aka Passover celebration.  It was a week of contradictions, oppositions, conflict, and another ‘messiah’ on his quest to ‘save’ the Jews from enslavement from Rome …, but it wasn’t really enslavement … rather government, oppressive in taxes, rules and obedience.

Perhaps the Romans felt that the conquered Jews were easier left with their ‘freedom’ of religion as they exploited the local economy by financing and building the third Temple which was used to attract 100,000 people during the Passover week to a town, Jerusalem of usually 50,000 persons.

Jesus’s group, rather than sleeping in a ‘garden’ actually stayed in a cave which was used in normal times as a place to squeeze olives into olive oil … ‘Gethsemane’ means ‘olive press’. (History channel… and Via del la Rosa was different … much harsher.)

On a seemingly different subject, the donkey, used by Jesus, was a favorite of mine growing up. Ours was named ‘Davy Crockett’ and used to ride and when our horse, BoJet, was ridden nearby, Davy would buck and we had a Rodeo going on, and not too far to fall either. One late spring night, horses got out and attacked a nearby golf course, putting extra holes in greens, etc., which caused police to be called out en masse. One cop insisted on holding on to Davy, when Bojet was running; mistake, as Davy dragged him several muddy yard lines, also ethusiastically barked at by our dear friends Bugle, a beagle of extraordinary voice.  He was taken to jail as a ‘Provocatuer’ and bailed out the next day.

Then there is is statue of the donkey, Brighty, in the lobby of the Lodge at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. He carried water for 30 years and helped Teddy Roosevelt hunt mountain lions in the park.  He is bronze, and sitting on his own ass, signifying the ‘wisdom’ to know when to stop, aka ‘stubbornness’.

This stubbornness persisted in my dad in his early days on the farm in NH, where he had a donkey, in Davy Crockett, and in an unsuccessful gift of a donkey gift to my brother’s eldest son on his 12th birthday. My brother living on an intercoastal gated community; no barn, but a 3 car garage. In 1972, a picture of Davy, my Mom and Dad, inspired a Christmas card, with the greeting, ‘And Many Happy Returns’.  (Nixon had just been elected.)

Beyond the symbol of humility and sacrifice, that the donkey represents, are two movies of Einstein, ‘Einstein and Eddington’, where Eddington, a Quaker, stubbornly persisted to prove that Einstein’s General Relativity theory correctly accounted for the orbit of Mercury, and proved it in 1919 in an expedition to Africa to record a full solar eclipse.  Einstein defeated Newton in modeling the cosmos, and many wish to rip Einstein’s theology away from him. Check out a clip with Max Planck, too. He didn’t seem too inhibited by the Commandment’s threats of adultery, as his idea of a ‘personal’ god seemed to be too egocentric as it regards the individual.  I often have this dialectic confusion of god struggling with ‘omniscience vs. omnipotence’.  Even the ‘dark flow’ which is dragging over 1500 galaxy clusters toward  a point some 46 billion light years away at over 2 million miles per hour, still doesn’t seem to affect me, and this has been going on millions and billions of years ago.  Is it still occurring?  Then omniscience, where dark matter, super cold, could be a BEC where it can laser away anything within its structure, electron, neutron, proton… to organic DNA ….(nothing stopping it),  and being in a stable state billions of years may have organized into a certain logically oriented being, who ‘decides’ when, where, how, and why to act, or like a neuron in our nervous system, is but one potential action that is induced by another or several others … a relay … a splitter  or a direct encoder to store some series of parallel information (space-time events) for future use.

Here is another film, of a supposed Einstein (Newton-slayer), who has defied, yet glorified fact over opinion, prejudice and unreasoned conflict.   Try not to be offended by the German language; afterall it was the language of Einstein’s youth an major works.

Further stubborn theism of Einstein is: “ I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.  Albert Einstein

So the risky sexual behavior of the priest does affect him as it would any other; personal, physically accidental, or environmental spacetime events are not personally selective … as a rule … That goes to the priest dying of HIV because he was forced from a normal sexlife, decides to resort to the abnormal (abnormal is defined as producing nothing for which the act was invented, by God… say as a reward for risking your and your partner risking her life to bring a new being into the world).  Pure pleasure, like Opium, Heroin, LSD, and other drugs are dangerous as upsetting to the ‘orderly harmony’, and so considered hedonistic.  Is this sin, to break with the ‘orderly harmony’, perhaps yes.  Is a meteor striking the earth at 40,000 mph, plunging all living beings on Earth into a frozen planet for thousands of years, after fire has had its way with organic material? Is that ‘orderly harmony’, or a god’s hedonistic delight in pyrotechnics?  These are questions that rightly we are not equipped to judge.

We are equipped to engineer ‘orderly’ structures to maintain life, to repel an meteor (perhaps), and to notice that say on the bottom of the ocean, next to the hot vents, life will go on as if nothing happened, as oxygen, heat and nutrients will be freshly supplied to the now thriving lifeforms hovering around those vents… many in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

Prayer’s an exception, which might just get some attention; no promises, but vibrate those strings of cosmic ‘orderly harmony’.