The Biddulph Gate in Famagusta, Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, is a ruined structure named after General Sir Robert Biddulph. It is situated within the walled city of Famagusta but is not part of the defensive wall. The gate's current state is that of a ruin.

 

The history of the Biddulph Gate is closely tied to General Sir Robert Biddulph, a British military officer who served in Cyprus during the late 19th century. It is believed that the gate was named in his honor, possibly due to his contributions or association with the region.

 

The exact origins and architectural details of the Biddulph Gate are unclear due to its ruined state. It is possible that the gate had historical significance and functioned as an entry point or passage within the walled city of Famagusta. However, the lack of available information makes it challenging to provide an in-depth account of its original purpose or design.

 

Over time, the Biddulph Gate fell into disrepair and is now in a ruined state. The specific reasons for its deterioration or the events that led to its current condition remain unclear. The gate's ruinous state adds to its historical intrigue and provides a sense of mystery surrounding its past.

 

Despite its ruined state, the Biddulph Gate holds cultural and historical importance as a tangible reminder of Famagusta's past. It serves as a poignant symbol of the city's history and the passage of time.

 

Preservation and restoration efforts may be necessary to protect the Biddulph Gate and prevent further deterioration. These initiatives could focus on stabilizing the structure, conducting archaeological research, and potentially opening it up to visitors as a cultural and historical attraction.

 

In conclusion, the Biddulph Gate in Famagusta, Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, is a ruined structure named after General Sir Robert Biddulph. While its exact origins and original purpose are unclear due to its current state, the gate's association with General Biddulph and its location within the walled city of Famagusta contribute to its historical significance. Efforts to preserve and understand this cultural heritage site may be necessary to ensure its continued appreciation and exploration.

 

General Sir Robert Biddulph, (26 August 1835 – 18 November 1918) was a senior British Army officer. He served as Quartermaster-General to the Forces in 1893, and was then Governor of Gibraltar until 1900.

 

Military career

Educated at Twyford School and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Biddulph was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1853. He served in the Crimean War and was present at the Siege of Sevastopol in 1854. He then served in the Indian Mutiny, and was Brigade Major during the Siege of Lucknow in 1857.

 

In 1871 he was selected to be Assistant Adjutant-General at the War Office and then in 1879 he succeeded Sir Garnet Wolseley as High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief of Cyprus. In 1886, he returned to London to be Inspector-General of Recruiting and two years later became Director-General of Military Education. In 1893 he was briefly Quartermaster-General to the Forces. Later that year he became Governor of Gibraltar, serving as such until 1900. He was Colonel Commandant of Royal Artillery, and was placed on retired pay on 26 August 1902.

 

His final appointment, in 1904, was as Army Purchase Commissioner: in that capacity he abolished the purchase of commissions.

 

He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in the 1899 Birthday Honours. Biddulph's Gate in Famagusta in Cyprus is named after him.

 

Famagusta is a city on the east coast of the de facto state Northern Cyprus. It is located east of Nicosia and possesses the deepest harbour of the island. During the Middle Ages (especially under the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice), Famagusta was the island's most important port city and a gateway to trade with the ports of the Levant, from where the Silk Road merchants carried their goods to Western Europe. The old walled city and parts of the modern city are de facto part of Northern Cyprus as the capital of the Gazimağusa District.

 

The city was known as Arsinoe or Arsinoë (Greek: Ἀρσινόη, Arsinóē) in antiquity, after Ptolemy II of Egypt's sister and wife Arsinoe II.

 

By the 3rd century, the city appears as Ammochostos (Greek: Ἀμμόχωστος or Αμμόχωστος, Ammókhōstos, "Hidden in Sand") in the Stadiasmus Maris Magni.[5] This name is still used in modern Greek with the pronunciation [aˈmːoxostos], while it developed into Latin Fama Augusta, French Famagouste, Italian Famagosta, and English Famagusta during the medieval period. Its informal modern Turkish name Mağusa (Turkish pronunciation: [maˈusa]) came from the same source. Since 1974, it has formally been known to Turkey and Northern Cyprus as Gazimağusa ([ɡaːzimaˈusa]), from the addition of the title gazi, meaning "veteran" or "one who has faught in a holy war".

 

In the early medieval period, the city was also known as New Justiniana (Greek: Νέα Ἰουστινιανία, Néa Ioustinianía) in appreciation for the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, whose wife Theodora was born there.

 

The old town of Famagusta has also been nicknamed "the City of 365 Churches" from the legend that, at its peak, it boasted a church for every day of the year.

 

The city was founded around 274 BC, after the serious damage to Salamis by an earthquake, by Ptolemy II Philadelphus and named "Arsinoe" after his sister.[6] Arsinoe was described as a "fishing town" by Strabo in his Geographica in the first century BC. In essence, Famagusta was the successor of the most famous and most important ancient city of Cyprus, Salamis. According to Greek mythology, Salamis was founded after the end of the Trojan War by Teucros, the son of Telamon and brother of Aedes, from the Greek island of Salamis.

 

The city experienced great prosperity much later, during the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. To honor the city, from which his wife Theodora came, Justinian enriched it with many buildings, while the inhabitants named it New Justiniania to express their gratitude. In AD 647, when the neighboring cities were destroyed by Arab raiding, the inhabitants of these cities moved to Famagusta, as a result of which the city's population increased significantly and the city experienced another boom.

 

Later, when Jerusalem was occupied by the Arabs, the Christian population fled to Famagusta, as a result of which the city became an important Christian center, but also one of the most important commercial centers in the eastern Mediterranean.

 

The turning point for Famagusta was 1192 with the onset of Lusignan rule. It was during this period that Famagusta developed as a fully-fledged town. It increased in importance to the Eastern Mediterranean due to its natural harbour and the walls that protected its inner town. Its population began to increase. This development accelerated in the 13th century as the town became a centre of commerce for both the East and West. An influx of Christian refugees fleeing the downfall of Acre (1291) in Palestine transformed it from a tiny village into one of the richest cities in Christendom.

 

In 1372 the port was seized by Genoa and in 1489 by Venice. This commercial activity turned Famagusta into a place where merchants and ship owners led lives of luxury. By the mid-14th century, Famagusta was said to have the richest citizens in the world. The belief that people's wealth could be measured by the churches they built inspired these merchants to have churches built in varying styles. These churches, which still exist, were the reason Famagusta came to be known as "the district of churches". The development of the town focused on the social lives of the wealthy people and was centred upon the Lusignan palace, the cathedral, the Square and the harbour.

 

In 1570–1571, Famagusta was the last stronghold in Venetian Cyprus to hold out against the Turks under Mustafa Pasha. It resisted a siege of thirteen months and a terrible bombardment, until at last the garrison surrendered. The Ottoman forces had lost 50,000 men, including Mustafa Pasha's son. Although the surrender terms had stipulated that the Venetian forces be allowed to return home, the Venetian commander, Marco Antonio Bragadin, was flayed alive, his lieutenant Tiepolo was hanged, and many other Christians were killed.

 

With the advent of the Ottoman rule, Latins lost their privileged status in Famagusta and were expelled from the city. Greek Cypriots natives were at first allowed to own and buy property in the city, but were banished from the walled city in 1573–74 and had to settle outside in the area that later developed into Varosha. Turkish families from Anatolia were resettled in the walled city but could not fill the buildings that previously hosted a population of 10,000. This caused a drastic decrease in the population of Famagusta. Merchants from Famagusta, who mostly consisted of Latins that had been expelled, resettled in Larnaca and as Larnaca flourished, Famagusta lost its importance as a trade centre. Over time, Varosha developed into a prosperous agricultural town thanks to its location away from the marshes, whilst the walled city remained dilapidated.

 

In the walled city, some buildings were repurposed to serve the interests of the Muslim population: the Cathedral of St. Nicholas was converted to a mosque (now known as Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque), a bazaar was developed, public baths, fountains and a theological school were built to accommodate the inhabitants' needs. Dead end streets, an Ottoman urban characteristic, was imported to the city and a communal spirit developed in which a small number of two-storey houses inhabited by the small upper class co-existed with the widespread one-storey houses.

 

With the British takeover, Famagusta regained its significance as a port and an economic centre and its development was specifically targeted in British plans. As soon as the British took over the island, a Famagusta Development Act was passed that aimed at the reconstruction and redevelopment of the city's streets and dilapidated buildings as well as better hygiene. The port was developed and expanded between 1903 and 1906 and Cyprus Government Railway, with its terminus in Famagusta, started construction in 1904. Whilst Larnaca continued to be used as the main port of the island for some time, after Famagusta's use as a military base in World War I trade significantly shifted to Famagusta. The city outside the walls grew at an accelerated rate, with development being centred around Varosha. Varosha became the administrative centre as the British moved their headquarters and residences there and tourism grew significantly in the last years of the British rule. Pottery and production of citrus and potatoes also significantly grew in the city outside the walls, whilst agriculture within the walled city declined to non-existence.

 

New residential areas were built to accommodate the increasing population towards the end of the British rule,[11] and by 1960, Famagusta was a modern port city extending far beyond Varosha and the walled city.

 

The British period saw a significant demographic shift in the city. In 1881, Christians constituted 60% of the city's population while Muslims were at 40%. By 1960, the Turkish Cypriot population had dropped to 17.5% of the overall population, while the Greek Cypriot population had risen to 70%. The city was also the site for one of the British internment camps for nearly 50,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust trying to emigrate to Palestine.

 

From independence in 1960 to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus of 1974, Famagusta developed toward the south west of Varosha as a well-known entertainment and tourist centre. The contribution of Famagusta to the country's economic activity by 1974 far exceeded its proportional dimensions within the country. Whilst its population was only about 7% of the total of the country, Famagusta by 1974 accounted for over 10% of the total industrial employment and production of Cyprus, concentrating mainly on light industry compatible with its activity as a tourist resort and turning out high-quality products ranging from food, beverages and tobacco to clothing, footwear, plastics, light machinery and transport equipment. It contributed 19.3% of the business units and employed 21.3% of the total number of persons engaged in commerce on the island. It acted as the main tourist destination of Cyprus, hosting 31.5% of the hotels and 45% of Cyprus' total bed capacity. Varosha acted as the main touristic and business quarters.

 

In this period, the urbanisation of Famagusta slowed down and the development of the rural areas accelerated. Therefore, economic growth was shared between the city of Famagusta and the district, which had a balanced agricultural economy, with citrus, potatoes, tobacco and wheat as main products. Famagusta maintained good communications with this hinterland. The city's port remained the island's main seaport and in 1961, it was expanded to double its capacity in order to accommodate the growing volume of exports and imports. The port handled 42.7% of Cypriot exports, 48.6% of imports and 49% of passenger traffic.

 

There has not been an official census since 1960 but the population of the town in 1974 was estimated to be around 39,000 not counting about 12,000–15,000 persons commuting daily from the surrounding villages and suburbs to work in Famagusta. The number of people staying in the city would swell to about 90,000–100,000 during the peak summer tourist period, with the influx of tourists from numerous European countries, mainly Britain, France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. The majority of the city population were Greek Cypriots (26,500), with 8,500 Turkish Cypriots and 4,000 people from other ethnic groups.

 

During the second phase of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus on 14 August 1974 the Mesaoria plain was overrun by Turkish tanks and Famagusta was bombed by Turkish aircraft. It took two days for the Turkish Army to occupy the city, prior to which Famagusta's entire Greek Cypriot population had fled into surrounding fields. As a result of Turkish airstrikes dozens of civilians died, including tourists.

 

Unlike other parts of the Turkish-controlled areas of Cyprus, the Varosha suburb of Famagusta was fenced off by the Turkish army immediately after being captured and remained fenced off until October 2020, when the TRNC reopened some streets to visitors. Some Greek Cypriots who had fled Varosha have been allowed to view the town and journalists have been allowed in.

 

UN Security Council resolution 550 (1984) considers any attempts to settle any part of Famagusta by people other than its inhabitants as inadmissible and calls for the transfer of this area to the administration of the UN. The UN's Security Council resolution 789 (1992) also urges that with a view to the implementation of resolution 550 (1984), the area at present under the control of the United Nations Peace-keeping Force in Cyprus be extended to include Varosha.

 

Famagusta's historic city centre is surrounded by the fortifications of Famagusta, which have a roughly rectangular shape, built mainly by the Venetians in the 15th and 16th centuries, though some sections of the walls have been dated earlier times, as far as 1211.

 

Some important landmarks and visitor attractions in the old city are:

The Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque

The Othello Castle

Palazzo del Provveditore - the Venetian palace of the governor, built on the site of the former Lusignan royal palace

St. Francis' Church

Sinan Pasha Mosque

Church of St. George of the Greeks

Church of St. George of the Latins

Twin Churches

Nestorian Church (of St George the Exiler)

Namık Kemal Dungeon

Agios Ioannis Church

Venetian House

Akkule Masjid

Mustafa Pasha Mosque

Ganchvor monastery

 

In an October 2010 report titled Saving Our Vanishing Heritage, Global Heritage Fund listed Famagusta, a "maritime ancient city of crusader kings", among the 12 sites most "On the Verge" of irreparable loss and destruction, citing insufficient management and development pressures.

 

Famagusta is an important commercial hub of Northern Cyprus. The main economic activities in the city are tourism, education, construction and industrial production. It has a 115-acre free port, which is the most important seaport of Northern Cyprus for travel and commerce. The port is an important source of income and employment for the city, though its volume of trade is restricted by the embargo against Northern Cyprus. Its historical sites, including the walled city, Salamis, the Othello Castle and the St Barnabas Church, as well as the sandy beaches surrounding it make it a tourist attraction; efforts are also underway to make the city more attractive for international congresses. The Eastern Mediterranean University is also an important employer and supplies significant income and activity, as well as opportunities for the construction sector. The university also raises a qualified workforce that stimulates the city's industry and makes communications industry viable. The city has two industrial zones: the Large Industrial Zone and the Little Industrial Zone. The city is also home to a fishing port, but inadequate infrastructure of the port restricts the growth of this sector. The industry in the city has traditionally been concentrated on processing agricultural products.

 

Historically, the port was the primary source of income and employment for the city, especially right after 1974. However, it gradually lost some of its importance to the economy as the share of its employees in the population of Famagusta diminished due to various reasons. However, it still is the primary port for commerce in Northern Cyprus, with more than half of ships that came to Northern Cyprus in 2013 coming to Famagusta. It is the second most popular seaport for passengers, after Kyrenia, with around 20,000 passengers using the port in 2013.

 

The mayor-in-exile of Famagusta is Simos Ioannou. Süleyman Uluçay heads the Turkish Cypriot municipal administration of Famagusta, which remains legal as a communal-based body under the constitutional system of the Republic of Cyprus.

 

Since 1974, Greek Cypriots submitted a number of proposals within the context of bicommunal discussions for the return of Varosha to UN administration, allowing the return of its previous inhabitants, requesting also the opening of Famagusta harbour for use by both communities. Varosha would have been returned to Greek Cypriot control as part of the 2004 Annan Plan but the plan had been rejected by a majority(3/4) of Greek Cypriot voters.

 

The walled city of Famagusta contains many unique buildings. Famagusta has a walled city popular with tourists.

 

Every year, the International Famagusta Art and Culture Festival is organized in Famagusta. Concerts, dance shows and theater plays take place during the festival.

 

A growth in tourism and the city's university have fueled the development of Famagusta's vibrant nightlife. Nightlife in the city is especially active on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights and in the hotter months of the year, starting from April. Larger hotels in the city have casinos that cater to their customers. Salamis Road is an area of Famagusta with a heavy concentration of bars frequented by students and locals.

 

Famagusta's Othello Castle is the setting for Shakespeare's play Othello. The city was also the setting for Victoria Hislop's 2015 novel The Sunrise, and Michael Paraskos's 2016 novel In Search of Sixpence. The city is the birthplace of the eponymous hero of the Renaissance proto-novel Fortunatus.

 

Famagusta was home to many Greek Cypriot sport teams that left the city because of the Turkish invasion and still bear their original names. Most notable football clubs originally from the city are Anorthosis Famagusta FC and Nea Salamis Famagusta FC, both of the Cypriot First Division, which are now based in Larnaca. Usually Anorthosis Famagusta fans are politically right wing where Nea Salamis fans are left wing.

 

Famagusta is represented by Mağusa Türk Gücü in the Turkish Cypriot First Division. Dr. Fazıl Küçük Stadium is the largest football stadium in Famagusta. Many Turkish Cypriot sport teams that left Southern Cyprus because of the Cypriot intercommunal violence are based in Famagusta.

 

Famagusta is represented by DAÜ Sports Club and Magem Sports Club in North Cyprus First Volleyball Division. Gazimağusa Türk Maarif Koleji represents Famagusta in the North Cyprus High School Volleyball League.

 

Famagusta has a modern volleyball stadium called the Mağusa Arena.

 

The Eastern Mediterranean University was founded in the city in 1979. The Istanbul Technical University founded a campus in the city in 2010.

 

The Cyprus College of Art was founded in Famagusta by the Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos in 1969, before moving to Paphos in 1972 after protests from local hoteliers that the presence of art students in the city was putting off holidaymakers.

 

Famagusta has three general hospitals. Gazimağusa Devlet Hastahanesi, a state hospital, is the biggest hospital in city. Gazimağusa Tıp Merkezi and Gazimağusa Yaşam Hastahanesi are private hospitals.

 

Personalities

Saint Barnabas, born and died in Salamis, Famagusta

Chris Achilleos, illustrator of the book versions on the BBC children's series Doctor Who

Beran Bertuğ, former Governor of Famagusta, first Cypriot woman to hold this position

Marios Constantinou, former international Cypriot football midfielder and current manager.

Eleftheria Eleftheriou, Cypriot singer.

Derviş Eroğlu, former President of Northern Cyprus

Alexis Galanos, 7th President of the House of Representatives and Famagusta mayor-in-exile (2006-2019) (Republic of Cyprus)

Xanthos Hadjisoteriou, Cypriot painter

Oz Karahan, political activist, President of the Union of Cypriots

Oktay Kayalp, former Turkish Cypriot Famagusta mayor (Northern Cyprus)

Harry Luke British diplomat

Angelos Misos, former international footballer

Costas Montis was an influential and prolific Greek Cypriot poet, novelist, and playwright born in Famagusta.

Hal Ozsan, actor (Dawson's Creek, Kyle XY)

Dimitris Papadakis, a Greek Cypriot politician, who served as a Member of the European Parliament.

Ṣubḥ-i-Azal, Persian religious leader, lived and died in exile in Famagusta

Touker Suleyman (born Türker Süleyman), British Turkish Cypriot fashion retail entrepreneur, investor and reality television personality.

Alexia Vassiliou, singer, left here as a refugee when the town was invaded.

George Vasiliou, former President of Cyprus

Vamik Volkan, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry

Derviş Zaim, film director

 

Famagusta is twinned with:

İzmir, Turkey (since 1974)

Corfu, Greece (since 1994)

Patras, Greece (since 1994)

Antalya, Turkey (since 1997)

Salamina (city), Greece (since 1998)

Struga, North Macedonia

Athens, Greece (since 2005)

Mersin, Turkey

 

Northern Cyprus, officially the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), is a de facto state that comprises the northeastern portion of the island of Cyprus. It is recognised only by Turkey, and its territory is considered by all other states to be part of the Republic of Cyprus.

 

Northern Cyprus extends from the tip of the Karpass Peninsula in the northeast to Morphou Bay, Cape Kormakitis and its westernmost point, the Kokkina exclave in the west. Its southernmost point is the village of Louroujina. A buffer zone under the control of the United Nations stretches between Northern Cyprus and the rest of the island and divides Nicosia, the island's largest city and capital of both sides.

 

A coup d'état in 1974, performed as part of an attempt to annex the island to Greece, prompted the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. This resulted in the eviction of much of the north's Greek Cypriot population, the flight of Turkish Cypriots from the south, and the partitioning of the island, leading to a unilateral declaration of independence by the north in 1983. Due to its lack of recognition, Northern Cyprus is heavily dependent on Turkey for economic, political and military support.

 

Attempts to reach a solution to the Cyprus dispute have been unsuccessful. The Turkish Army maintains a large force in Northern Cyprus with the support and approval of the TRNC government, while the Republic of Cyprus, the European Union as a whole, and the international community regard it as an occupation force. This military presence has been denounced in several United Nations Security Council resolutions.

 

Northern Cyprus is a semi-presidential, democratic republic with a cultural heritage incorporating various influences and an economy that is dominated by the services sector. The economy has seen growth through the 2000s and 2010s, with the GNP per capita more than tripling in the 2000s, but is held back by an international embargo due to the official closure of the ports in Northern Cyprus by the Republic of Cyprus. The official language is Turkish, with a distinct local dialect being spoken. The vast majority of the population consists of Sunni Muslims, while religious attitudes are mostly moderate and secular. Northern Cyprus is an observer state of ECO and OIC under the name "Turkish Cypriot State", PACE under the name "Turkish Cypriot Community", and Organization of Turkic States with its own name.

 

Several distinct periods of Cypriot intercommunal violence involving the two main ethnic communities, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, marked mid-20th century Cyprus. These included the Cyprus Emergency of 1955–59 during British rule, the post-independence Cyprus crisis of 1963–64, and the Cyprus crisis of 1967. Hostilities culminated in the 1974 de facto division of the island along the Green Line following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The region has been relatively peaceful since then, but the Cyprus dispute has continued, with various attempts to solve it diplomatically having been generally unsuccessful.

 

Cyprus, an island lying in the eastern Mediterranean, hosted a population of Greeks and Turks (four-fifths and one-fifth, respectively), who lived under British rule in the late nineteenth-century and the first half of the twentieth-century. Christian Orthodox Church of Cyprus played a prominent political role among the Greek Cypriot community, a privilege that it acquired during the Ottoman Empire with the employment of the millet system, which gave the archbishop an unofficial ethnarch status.

 

The repeated rejections by the British of Greek Cypriot demands for enosis, union with Greece, led to armed resistance, organised by the National Organization of Cypriot Struggle, or EOKA. EOKA, led by the Greek-Cypriot commander George Grivas, systematically targeted British colonial authorities. One of the effects of EOKA's campaign was to alter the Turkish position from demanding full reincorporation into Turkey to a demand for taksim (partition). EOKA's mission and activities caused a "Cretan syndrome" (see Turkish Resistance Organisation) within the Turkish Cypriot community, as its members feared that they would be forced to leave the island in such a case as had been the case with Cretan Turks. As such, they preferred the continuation of British colonial rule and then taksim, the division of the island. Due to the Turkish Cypriots' support for the British, EOKA's leader, Georgios Grivas, declared them to be enemies. The fact that the Turks were a minority was, according to Nihat Erim, to be addressed by the transfer of thousands of Turks from mainland Turkey so that Greek Cypriots would cease to be the majority. When Erim visited Cyprus as the Turkish representative, he was advised by Field Marshal Sir John Harding, the then Governor of Cyprus, that Turkey should send educated Turks to settle in Cyprus.

 

Turkey actively promoted the idea that on the island of Cyprus two distinctive communities existed, and sidestepped its former claim that "the people of Cyprus were all Turkish subjects". In doing so, Turkey's aim to have self-determination of two to-be equal communities in effect led to de jure partition of the island.[citation needed] This could be justified to the international community against the will of the majority Greek population of the island. Dr. Fazil Küçük in 1954 had already proposed Cyprus be divided in two at the 35° parallel.

 

Lindley Dan, from Notre Dame University, spotted the roots of intercommunal violence to different visions among the two communities of Cyprus (enosis for Greek Cypriots, taksim for Turkish Cypriots). Also, Lindlay wrote that "the merging of church, schools/education, and politics in divisive and nationalistic ways" had played a crucial role in creation of havoc in Cyprus' history. Attalides Michael also pointed to the opposing nationalisms as the cause of the Cyprus problem.

 

By the mid-1950's, the "Cyprus is Turkish" party, movement, and slogan gained force in both Cyprus and Turkey. In a 1954 editorial, Turkish Cypriot leader Dr. Fazil Kuchuk expressed the sentiment that the Turkish youth had grown up with the idea that "as soon as Great Britain leaves the island, it will be taken over by the Turks", and that "Turkey cannot tolerate otherwise". This perspective contributed to the willingness of Turkish Cypriots to align themselves with the British, who started recruiting Turkish Cypriots into the police force that patrolled Cyprus to fight EOKA, a Greek Cypriot nationalist organisation that sought to rid the island of British rule.

 

EOKA targeted colonial authorities, including police, but Georgios Grivas, the leader of EOKA, did not initially wish to open up a new front by fighting Turkish Cypriots and reassured them that EOKA would not harm their people. In 1956, some Turkish Cypriot policemen were killed by EOKA members and this provoked some intercommunal violence in the spring and summer, but these attacks on policemen were not motivated by the fact that they were Turkish Cypriots.

 

However, in January 1957, Grivas changed his policy as his forces in the mountains became increasingly pressured by the British Crown forces. In order to divert the attention of the Crown forces, EOKA members started to target Turkish Cypriot policemen intentionally in the towns, so that Turkish Cypriots would riot against the Greek Cypriots and the security forces would have to be diverted to the towns to restore order. The killing of a Turkish Cypriot policeman on 19 January, when a power station was bombed, and the injury of three others, provoked three days of intercommunal violence in Nicosia. The two communities targeted each other in reprisals, at least one Greek Cypriot was killed and the British Army was deployed in the streets. Greek Cypriot stores were burned and their neighbourhoods attacked. Following the events, the Greek Cypriot leadership spread the propaganda that the riots had merely been an act of Turkish Cypriot aggression. Such events created chaos and drove the communities apart both in Cyprus and in Turkey.

 

On 22 October 1957 Sir Hugh Mackintosh Foot replaced Sir John Harding as the British Governor of Cyprus. Foot suggested five to seven years of self-government before any final decision. His plan rejected both enosis and taksim. The Turkish Cypriot response to this plan was a series of anti-British demonstrations in Nicosia on 27 and 28 January 1958 rejecting the proposed plan because the plan did not include partition. The British then withdrew the plan.

 

In 1957, Black Gang, a Turkish Cypriot pro-taksim paramilitary organisation, was formed to patrol a Turkish Cypriot enclave, the Tahtakale district of Nicosia, against activities of EOKA. The organisation later attempted to grow into a national scale, but failed to gain public support.

 

By 1958, signs of dissatisfaction with the British increased on both sides, with a group of Turkish Cypriots forming Volkan (later renamed to the Turkish Resistance Organisation) paramilitary group to promote partition and the annexation of Cyprus to Turkey as dictated by the Menderes plan. Volkan initially consisted of roughly 100 members, with the stated aim of raising awareness in Turkey of the Cyprus issue and courting military training and support for Turkish Cypriot fighters from the Turkish government.

 

In June 1958, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was expected to propose a plan to resolve the Cyprus issue. In light of the new development, the Turks rioted in Nicosia to promote the idea that Greek and Turkish Cypriots could not live together and therefore any plan that did not include partition would not be viable. This violence was soon followed by bombing, Greek Cypriot deaths and looting of Greek Cypriot-owned shops and houses. Greek and Turkish Cypriots started to flee mixed population villages where they were a minority in search of safety. This was effectively the beginning of the segregation of the two communities. On 7 June 1958, a bomb exploded at the entrance of the Turkish Embassy in Cyprus. Following the bombing, Turkish Cypriots looted Greek Cypriot properties. On 26 June 1984, the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktaş, admitted on British channel ITV that the bomb was placed by the Turks themselves in order to create tension. On 9 January 1995, Rauf Denktaş repeated his claim to the famous Turkish newspaper Milliyet in Turkey.

 

The crisis reached a climax on 12 June 1958, when eight Greeks, out of an armed group of thirty five arrested by soldiers of the Royal Horse Guards on suspicion of preparing an attack on the Turkish quarter of Skylloura, were killed in a suspected attack by Turkish Cypriot locals, near the village of Geunyeli, having been ordered to walk back to their village of Kondemenos.

 

After the EOKA campaign had begun, the British government successfully began to turn the Cyprus issue from a British colonial problem into a Greek-Turkish issue. British diplomacy exerted backstage influence on the Adnan Menderes government, with the aim of making Turkey active in Cyprus. For the British, the attempt had a twofold objective. The EOKA campaign would be silenced as quickly as possible, and Turkish Cypriots would not side with Greek Cypriots against the British colonial claims over the island, which would thus remain under the British. The Turkish Cypriot leadership visited Menderes to discuss the Cyprus issue. When asked how the Turkish Cypriots should respond to the Greek Cypriot claim of enosis, Menderes replied: "You should go to the British foreign minister and request the status quo be prolonged, Cyprus to remain as a British colony". When the Turkish Cypriots visited the British Foreign Secretary and requested for Cyprus to remain a colony, he replied: "You should not be asking for colonialism at this day and age, you should be asking for Cyprus be returned to Turkey, its former owner".

 

As Turkish Cypriots began to look to Turkey for protection, Greek Cypriots soon understood that enosis was extremely unlikely. The Greek Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios III, now set independence for the island as his objective.

 

Britain resolved to solve the dispute by creating an independent Cyprus. In 1959, all involved parties signed the Zurich Agreements: Britain, Turkey, Greece, and the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders, Makarios and Dr. Fazil Kucuk, respectively. The new constitution drew heavily on the ethnic composition of the island. The President would be a Greek Cypriot, and the Vice-President a Turkish Cypriot with an equal veto. The contribution to the public service would be set at a ratio of 70:30, and the Supreme Court would consist of an equal number of judges from both communities as well as an independent judge who was not Greek, Turkish or British. The Zurich Agreements were supplemented by a number of treaties. The Treaty of Guarantee stated that secession or union with any state was forbidden, and that Greece, Turkey and Britain would be given guarantor status to intervene if that was violated. The Treaty of Alliance allowed for two small Greek and Turkish military contingents to be stationed on the island, and the Treaty of Establishment gave Britain sovereignty over two bases in Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

 

On 15 August 1960, the Colony of Cyprus became fully independent as the Republic of Cyprus. The new republic remained within the Commonwealth of Nations.

 

The new constitution brought dissatisfaction to Greek Cypriots, who felt it to be highly unjust for them for historical, demographic and contributional reasons. Although 80% of the island's population were Greek Cypriots and these indigenous people had lived on the island for thousands of years and paid 94% of taxes, the new constitution was giving the 17% of the population that was Turkish Cypriots, who paid 6% of taxes, around 30% of government jobs and 40% of national security jobs.

 

Within three years tensions between the two communities in administrative affairs began to show. In particular disputes over separate municipalities and taxation created a deadlock in government. A constitutional court ruled in 1963 Makarios had failed to uphold article 173 of the constitution which called for the establishment of separate municipalities for Turkish Cypriots. Makarios subsequently declared his intention to ignore the judgement, resulting in the West German judge resigning from his position. Makarios proposed thirteen amendments to the constitution, which would have had the effect of resolving most of the issues in the Greek Cypriot favour. Under the proposals, the President and Vice-President would lose their veto, the separate municipalities as sought after by the Turkish Cypriots would be abandoned, the need for separate majorities by both communities in passing legislation would be discarded and the civil service contribution would be set at actual population ratios (82:18) instead of the slightly higher figure for Turkish Cypriots.

 

The intention behind the amendments has long been called into question. The Akritas plan, written in the height of the constitutional dispute by the Greek Cypriot interior minister Polycarpos Georkadjis, called for the removal of undesirable elements of the constitution so as to allow power-sharing to work. The plan envisaged a swift retaliatory attack on Turkish Cypriot strongholds should Turkish Cypriots resort to violence to resist the measures, stating "In the event of a planned or staged Turkish attack, it is imperative to overcome it by force in the shortest possible time, because if we succeed in gaining command of the situation (in one or two days), no outside, intervention would be either justified or possible." Whether Makarios's proposals were part of the Akritas plan is unclear, however it remains that sentiment towards enosis had not completely disappeared with independence. Makarios described independence as "a step on the road to enosis".[31] Preparations for conflict were not entirely absent from Turkish Cypriots either, with right wing elements still believing taksim (partition) the best safeguard against enosis.

 

Greek Cypriots however believe the amendments were a necessity stemming from a perceived attempt by Turkish Cypriots to frustrate the working of government. Turkish Cypriots saw it as a means to reduce their status within the state from one of co-founder to that of minority, seeing it as a first step towards enosis. The security situation deteriorated rapidly.

 

Main articles: Bloody Christmas (1963) and Battle of Tillyria

An armed conflict was triggered after December 21, 1963, a period remembered by Turkish Cypriots as Bloody Christmas, when a Greek Cypriot policemen that had been called to help deal with a taxi driver refusing officers already on the scene access to check the identification documents of his customers, took out his gun upon arrival and shot and killed the taxi driver and his partner. Eric Solsten summarised the events as follows: "a Greek Cypriot police patrol, ostensibly checking identification documents, stopped a Turkish Cypriot couple on the edge of the Turkish quarter. A hostile crowd gathered, shots were fired, and two Turkish Cypriots were killed."

 

In the morning after the shooting, crowds gathered in protest in Northern Nicosia, likely encouraged by the TMT, without incident. On the evening of the 22nd, gunfire broke out, communication lines to the Turkish neighbourhoods were cut, and the Greek Cypriot police occupied the nearby airport. On the 23rd, a ceasefire was negotiated, but did not hold. Fighting, including automatic weapons fire, between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and militias increased in Nicosia and Larnaca. A force of Greek Cypriot irregulars led by Nikos Sampson entered the Nicosia suburb of Omorphita and engaged in heavy firing on armed, as well as by some accounts unarmed, Turkish Cypriots. The Omorphita clash has been described by Turkish Cypriots as a massacre, while this view has generally not been acknowledged by Greek Cypriots.

 

Further ceasefires were arranged between the two sides, but also failed. By Christmas Eve, the 24th, Britain, Greece, and Turkey had joined talks, with all sides calling for a truce. On Christmas day, Turkish fighter jets overflew Nicosia in a show of support. Finally it was agreed to allow a force of 2,700 British soldiers to help enforce a ceasefire. In the next days, a "buffer zone" was created in Nicosia, and a British officer marked a line on a map with green ink, separating the two sides of the city, which was the beginning of the "Green Line". Fighting continued across the island for the next several weeks.

 

In total 364 Turkish Cypriots and 174 Greek Cypriots were killed during the violence. 25,000 Turkish Cypriots from 103-109 villages fled and were displaced into enclaves and thousands of Turkish Cypriot houses were ransacked or completely destroyed.

 

Contemporary newspapers also reported on the forceful exodus of the Turkish Cypriots from their homes. According to The Times in 1964, threats, shootings and attempts of arson were committed against the Turkish Cypriots to force them out of their homes. The Daily Express wrote that "25,000 Turks have already been forced to leave their homes". The Guardian reported a massacre of Turks at Limassol on 16 February 1964.

 

Turkey had by now readied its fleet and its fighter jets appeared over Nicosia. Turkey was dissuaded from direct involvement by the creation of a United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) in 1964. Despite the negotiated ceasefire in Nicosia, attacks on the Turkish Cypriot persisted, particularly in Limassol. Concerned about the possibility of a Turkish invasion, Makarios undertook the creation of a Greek Cypriot conscript-based army called the "National Guard". A general from Greece took charge of the army, whilst a further 20,000 well-equipped officers and men were smuggled from Greece into Cyprus. Turkey threatened to intervene once more, but was prevented by a strongly worded letter from the American President Lyndon B. Johnson, anxious to avoid a conflict between NATO allies Greece and Turkey at the height of the Cold War.

 

Turkish Cypriots had by now established an important bridgehead at Kokkina, provided with arms, volunteers and materials from Turkey and abroad. Seeing this incursion of foreign weapons and troops as a major threat, the Cypriot government invited George Grivas to return from Greece as commander of the Greek troops on the island and launch a major attack on the bridgehead. Turkey retaliated by dispatching its fighter jets to bomb Greek positions, causing Makarios to threaten an attack on every Turkish Cypriot village on the island if the bombings did not cease. The conflict had now drawn in Greece and Turkey, with both countries amassing troops on their Thracian borders. Efforts at mediation by Dean Acheson, a former U.S. Secretary of State, and UN-appointed mediator Galo Plaza had failed, all the while the division of the two communities becoming more apparent. Greek Cypriot forces were estimated at some 30,000, including the National Guard and the large contingent from Greece. Defending the Turkish Cypriot enclaves was a force of approximately 5,000 irregulars, led by a Turkish colonel, but lacking the equipment and organisation of the Greek forces.

 

The Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1964, U Thant, reported the damage during the conflicts:

 

UNFICYP carried out a detailed survey of all damage to properties throughout the island during the disturbances; it shows that in 109 villages, most of them Turkish-Cypriot or mixed villages, 527 houses have been destroyed while 2,000 others have suffered damage from looting.

 

The situation worsened in 1967, when a military junta overthrew the democratically elected government of Greece, and began applying pressure on Makarios to achieve enosis. Makarios, not wishing to become part of a military dictatorship or trigger a Turkish invasion, began to distance himself from the goal of enosis. This caused tensions with the junta in Greece as well as George Grivas in Cyprus. Grivas's control over the National Guard and Greek contingent was seen as a threat to Makarios's position, who now feared a possible coup.[citation needed] The National Guard and Cyprus Police began patrolling the Turkish Cypriot enclaves of Ayios Theodoros and Kophinou, and on November 15 engaged in heavy fighting with the Turkish Cypriots.

 

By the time of his withdrawal 26 Turkish Cypriots had been killed. Turkey replied with an ultimatum demanding that Grivas be removed from the island, that the troops smuggled from Greece in excess of the limits of the Treaty of Alliance be removed, and that the economic blockades on the Turkish Cypriot enclaves be lifted. Grivas was recalled by the Athens Junta and the 12,000 Greek troops were withdrawn. Makarios now attempted to consolidate his position by reducing the number of National Guard troops, and by creating a paramilitary force loyal to Cypriot independence. In 1968, acknowledging that enosis was now all but impossible, Makarios stated, "A solution by necessity must be sought within the limits of what is feasible which does not always coincide with the limits of what is desirable."

 

After 1967 tensions between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots subsided. Instead, the main source of tension on the island came from factions within the Greek Cypriot community. Although Makarios had effectively abandoned enosis in favour of an 'attainable solution', many others continued to believe that the only legitimate political aspiration for Greek Cypriots was union with Greece.

 

On his arrival, Grivas began by establishing a nationalist paramilitary group known as the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston B or EOKA-B), drawing comparisons with the EOKA struggle for enosis under the British colonial administration of the 1950s.

 

The military junta in Athens saw Makarios as an obstacle. Makarios's failure to disband the National Guard, whose officer class was dominated by mainland Greeks, had meant the junta had practical control over the Cypriot military establishment, leaving Makarios isolated and a vulnerable target.

 

During the first Turkish invasion, Turkish troops invaded Cyprus territory on 20 July 1974, invoking its rights under the Treaty of Guarantee. This expansion of Turkish-occupied zone violated International Law as well as the Charter of the United Nations. Turkish troops managed to capture 3% of the island which was accompanied by the burning of the Turkish Cypriot quarter, as well as the raping and killing of women and children. A temporary cease-fire followed which was mitigated by the UN Security Council. Subsequently, the Greek military Junta collapsed on July 23, 1974, and peace talks commenced in which a democratic government was installed. The Resolution 353 was broken after Turkey attacked a second time and managed to get a hold of 37% of Cyprus territory. The Island of Cyprus was appointed a Buffer Zone by the United Nations, which divided the island into two zones through the 'Green Line' and put an end to the Turkish invasion. Although Turkey announced that the occupied areas of Cyprus to be called the Federated Turkish State in 1975, it is not legitimised on a worldwide political scale. The United Nations called for the international recognition of independence for the Republic of Cyprus in the Security Council Resolution 367.

 

In the years after the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus one can observe a history of failed talks between the two parties. The 1983 declaration of the independent Turkish Republic of Cyprus resulted in a rise of inter-communal tensions and made it increasingly hard to find mutual understanding. With Cyprus' interest of a possible EU membership and a new UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1997 new hopes arose for a fresh start. International involvement from sides of the US and UK, wanting a solution to the Cyprus dispute prior to the EU accession led to political pressures for new talks. The believe that an accession without a solution would threaten Greek-Turkish relations and acknowledge the partition of the island would direct the coming negotiations.

 

Over the course of two years a concrete plan, the Annan plan was formulated. In 2004 the fifth version agreed upon from both sides and with the endorsement of Turkey, US, UK and EU then was presented to the public and was given a referendum in both Cypriot communities to assure the legitimisation of the resolution. The Turkish Cypriots voted with 65% for the plan, however the Greek Cypriots voted with a 76% majority against. The Annan plan contained multiple important topics. Firstly it established a confederation of two separate states called the United Cyprus Republic. Both communities would have autonomous states combined under one unified government. The members of parliament would be chosen according to the percentage in population numbers to ensure a just involvement from both communities. The paper proposed a demilitarisation of the island over the next years. Furthermore it agreed upon a number of 45000 Turkish settlers that could remain on the island. These settlers became a very important issue concerning peace talks. Originally the Turkish government encouraged Turks to settle in Cyprus providing transfer and property, to establish a counterpart to the Greek Cypriot population due to their 1 to 5 minority. With the economic situation many Turkish-Cypriot decided to leave the island, however their departure is made up by incoming Turkish settlers leaving the population ratio between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots stable. However all these points where criticised and as seen in the vote rejected mainly by the Greek Cypriots. These name the dissolution of the „Republic of Cyprus", economic consequences of a reunion and the remaining Turkish settlers as reason. Many claim that the plan was indeed drawing more from Turkish-Cypriot demands then Greek-Cypriot interests. Taking in consideration that the US wanted to keep Turkey as a strategic partner in future Middle Eastern conflicts.

 

A week after the failed referendum the Republic of Cyprus joined the EU. In multiple instances the EU tried to promote trade with Northern Cyprus but without internationally recognised ports this spiked a grand debate. Both side endure their intention of negotiations, however without the prospect of any new compromises or agreements the UN is unwilling to start the process again. Since 2004 negotiations took place in numbers but without any results, both sides are strongly holding on to their position without an agreeable solution in sight that would suit both parties.

We were walking in the same direction, they were a few steps ahead of me. Their hair called out as they walked by a blue wall.

That's when I heard myself calling out: "Excuse me, girls!"

They turned around to face me and I said: "I can't let such an opportunity go by. Your hair and this blue wall match perfectly together!"

They burst into laughter and said they were best friends and did each other hair.

"Are you hairdressers then?", I wondered.

Another wave of big, delightful laughter: "Oh no!"

"I am a coordinator, working at Reaktor," Elle said, "and Eliza is a film director."

"That's interesting," I said, and before the three of us continued to walk together towards our mutual destination--the Comics Festival, I kindly asked Elle to take down her hair for me. I wanted all these bright colours to show.

She gladly did.

 

Elle said that she was quite sad and heartbroken. "That's why I've set up to hang out with Eliza. She made me laugh for the first time in weeks today!"

Elle said that she was not ashamed to be heartbroken every now and then.

"it's part of life and people should be more honest about their sad feelings. No human is always happy or forever sad."

 

"I've studies product Design and such in Hämeenlinna, Swansea and Vantaa so long ago that service design as a concept had not been even invented.

Now I plan stuff and projects and in-house services with an awesome employer.

 

The more tangible aspect of products and design got an even more loved position in my life as my hobbies. I sew, knit, crochet, glue, saw and craft.

 

We've had so far three different workshop studios around

Helsinki where we set up just for the sheer fun of handcrafting with

friends.

The first one had a shared wood work shop, the last one stored tons of plush toy filling.

 

I'd like to see more people realize their best setting, our best self.

For me it was a revelation to realize how I learn things and where I

have learned the most important lessons. For me it didn't happen in

school but in scouts.

 

"To a younger me I'd advice to wait to get to check out Amy Schumer and what she has to say about bangs fitting her younger self! She's nailed time travel. And comedy. And she's nailing feminism along many other awesome people. You'll love it."

 

Amy Shumer, Time Travel: youtu.be/j5DSSjTeJZE

 

Thanks so much, Elle. It was a pleasure to run into you :-)

  

reaktor.com/

 

This is my 352nd submission to The Human Family group.

Visit the group here to see more portraits and stories: www.flickr.com/groups/thehumanfamily.

 

My son has become fascinated with bitcoins, and so I had to get him a tangible one for Xmas. The public key is imprinted visibly on the tamper-evident holographic film, and the private key lies underneath. (Casascius)

 

I too was fascinated by digital cash back in college, and more specifically by the asymmetric mathematical transforms underlying public-key crypto and digital blind signatures.

 

I remembered a technical paper I wrote, but could not find it. A desktop search revealed an essay that I completely forgot, something that I had recovered from my archives of floppy discs (while I still could).

 

It is an article I wrote for the school newspaper in 1994. Ironically, Microsoft Word could not open this ancient Microsoft Word file format, but the free text editors could.

 

What a fun time capsule, below, with some choice naivetés…

 

I am trying to reconstruct what I was thinking. I was arguing that a bulletproof framework for digital cash (and what better testing ground) could be used to secure a digital container for executable code on a rental basis. So the expression of an idea — the specific code, or runtime service — is locked in a secure container. The idea would be to prevent copying instead of punishing after the fact.

 

Micro-currency and micro-code seem like similar exercises in regulating the single use of an issued number.

 

Now that the Bitcoin experiment is underway, do you know of anyone writing about it as an alternative framework for intellectual property (from digital art to code to governance tokens)?

  

IP and Digital Cash

@NORMAL:

Digital Cash and the “Intellectual Property” Oxymoron

By Steve Jurvetson

 

Many of us will soon be working in the information services or technology industries which are currently tangled in a bramble patch of intellectual property law. As the law struggles to find coherency and an internally-consistent logic for intellectual property (IP) protection, digital encryption technologies may provide a better solution — from the perspective of reducing litigation, exploiting the inherent benefits of an information-based business model, and preserving a free economy of ideas.

Bullet-proof digital cash technology, which is now emerging, can provide a protected “cryptographic container” for intellectual expressions, thereby preserving traditional notions of intellectual property that protect specific instantiations of an idea rather than the idea itself. For example, it seems reasonable that Intuit should be able to protect against the widespread duplication of their Quicken software (the expression of an idea), but they should not be able to patent the underlying idea of single-entry bookkeeping. There are strong economic incentives for digital cash to develop and for those techniques to be adapted for IP protection — to create a protected container or expression of an idea. The rapid march of information technology has strained the evolution of IP law, but rather than patching the law, information technology itself may provide a more coherent solution.

 

Information Wants To Be Free

Currently, IP law is enigmatic because it is expanding to a domain for which it was not initially intended. In developing the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson argued that ideas should freely transverse the globe, and that ideas were fundamentally different from material goods. He concluded that “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” The issues surrounding IP come into sharp focus as we shift to being more of an information-based economy.

The use of e-mail and local TV footage helps disseminate information around the globe and can be a force for democracy — as seen in the TV footage from Chechen, the use of modems in Prague during the Velvet Revolution, and the e-mail and TV from Tianammen Square. Even Gorbachev used a video camera to show what was happening after he was kidnapped. What appears to be an inherent force for democracy runs into problems when it becomes the subject of property.

As higher-level programming languages become more like natural languages, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish the idea from the code. Language precedes thought, as Jean-Louis Gassée is fond of saying, and our language is the framework for the formulation and expression of our ideas. Restricting software will increasingly be indistinguishable from restricting freedom of speech.

An economy of ideas and human attention depends on the continuous and free exchange of ideas. Because of the associative nature of memory processes, no idea is detached from others. This begs the question, is intellectual property an oxymoron?

 

Intellectual Property Law is a Patch

John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder (with Mitch Kapor) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that “Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted or expanded to contain digitized expression... Faith in law will not be an effective strategy for high-tech companies. Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”

From its origins in the Industrial Revolution where the invention of tools took on a new importance, patent and copyright law has protected the physical conveyance of an idea, and not the idea itself. The physical expression is like a container for an idea. But with the emerging information superhighway, the “container” is becoming more ethereal, and it is disappearing altogether. Whether it’s e-mail today, or the future goods of the Information Age, the “expressions” of ideas will be voltage conditions darting around the net, very much like thoughts. The fleeting copy of an image in RAM is not very different that the fleeting image on the retina.

The digitization of all forms of information — from books to songs to images to multimedia — detaches information from the physical plane where IP law has always found definition and precedent. Patents cannot be granted for abstract ideas or algorithms, yet courts have recently upheld the patentability of software as long as it is operating a physical machine or causing a physical result. Copyright law is even more of a patch. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 requires that works be fixed in a durable medium, and where an idea and its expression are inseparable, the merger doctrine dictates that the expression cannot be copyrighted. E-mail is not currently copyrightable because it is not a reduction to tangible form. So of course, there is a proposal to amend these copyright provisions. In recent rulings, Lotus won its case that Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet copied elements of Lotus 123’s look and feel, yet Apple lost a similar case versus Microsoft and HP. As Professor Bagley points out in her new text, “It is difficult to reconcile under the total concept and feel test the results in the Apple and Lotus cases.” Given the inconsistencies and economic significance of these issues, it is no surprise that swarms of lawyers are studying to practice in the IP arena.

Back in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates wrote an inflammatory “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in which he alleged that “most of you steal your software ... and should be kicked out of any club meeting you show up at.” He presented the economic argument that piracy prevents proper profit streams and “prevents good software from being written.” Now we have Windows.

But seriously, if we continue to believe that the value of information is based on scarcity, as it is with physical objects, we will continue to patch laws that are contrary to the nature of information, which in many cases increases in value with distribution. Small, fast moving companies (like Netscape and Id) protect their ideas by getting to the marketplace quicker than their larger competitors who base their protection on fear and litigation.

The patent office is woefully understaffed and unable to judge the nuances of software. Comptons was initially granted a patent that covered virtually all multimedia technology. When they tried to collect royalties, Microsoft pushed the Patent Office to overturn the patent. In 1992, Software Advertising Corp received a patent for “displaying and integrating commercial advertisements with computer software.” That’s like patenting the concept of a radio commercial. In 1993, a DEC engineer received a patent on just two lines of machine code commonly used in object-oriented programming. CompuServe announced this month that they plan to collect royalties on the widely used GIF file format for images.

The Patent Office has issued well over 12,000 software patents, and a programmer can unknowingly be in violation of any them. Microsoft had to pay $120MM to STAC in February 1994 for violating their patent on data compression. The penalties can be costly, but so can a patent search. Many of the software patents don’t have the words “computer,” “software,” “program,” or “algorithm” in their abstracts. “Software patents turn every decision you make while writing a program into a legal risk,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the League for Programming Freedom. “They make writing a large program like crossing a minefield. Each step has a small chance of stepping on a patent and blowing you up.” The very notion of seventeen years of patent protection in the fast moving software industry seems absurd. MS-DOS did not exist seventeen years ago.

IP law faces the additional wrinkle of jurisdictional issues. Where has an Internet crime taken place? In the country or state in which the computer server resides? Many nations do not have the same intellectual property laws as the U.S. Even within the U.S., the law can be tough to enforce; for example, a group of music publishers sued CompuServe for the digital distribution of copyrighted music. A complication is that CompuServe has no knowledge of the activity since it occurs in the flood of bits transferring between its subscribers

The tension seen in making digital copies revolves around the issue of property. But unlike the theft of material goods, copying does not deprive the owner of their possessions. With digital piracy, it is less a clear ethical issue of theft, and more an abstract notion that you are undermining the business model of an artist or software developer. The distinction between ethics and laws often revolves around their enforceability. Before copy machines, it was hard to make a book, and so it was obvious and visible if someone was copying your work. In the digital age, copying is lightning fast and difficult to detect. Given ethical ambiguity, convenience, and anonymity, it is no wonder we see a cultural shift with regard to digital ethics.

 

Piracy, Plagiarism and Pilfering

We copy music. We are seldom diligent with our footnotes. We wonder where we’ve seen Strat-man’s PIE and the four slices before. We forward e-mail that may contain text from a copyrighted news publication. The SCBA estimates that 51% of satellite dishes have illegal descramblers. John Perry Barlow estimates that 90% of personal hard drives have some pirated software on them.

Or as last month’s Red Herring editorial points out, “this atmosphere of electronic piracy seems to have in turn spawned a freer attitude than ever toward good old-fashioned plagiarism.” Articles from major publications and WSJ columns appear and circulate widely on the Internet. Computer Pictures magazine replicated a complete article on multimedia databases from New Media magazine, and then publicly apologized.

Music and voice samples are an increasingly common art form, from 2 Live Crew to Negativland to local bands like Voice Farm and Consolidated. Peter Gabriel embraces the shift to repositioned content; “Traditionally, the artist has been the final arbiter of his work. He delivered it and it stood on its own. In the interactive world, artists will also be the suppliers of information and collage material, which people can either accept as is, or manipulate to create their own art. It’s part of the shift from skill-based work to decision-making and editing work.”

But many traditionalists resist the change. Museums are hesitant to embrace digital art because it is impossible to distinguish the original from a copy; according to a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, “The art world is scared to death of this stuff.” The Digital Audio Tape debate also illustrated the paranoia; the music industry first insisted that these DAT recorders had to purposely introduce static into the digital copies they made, and then they settled for an embedded code that limited the number of successive copies that could be made from the a master source.

For a healthier reaction, look at the phenomenally successful business models of Mosaic/Netscape and Id Software, the twisted creator of Doom. Just as McAfee built a business on shareware, Netscape and Id encourage widespread free distribution of their product. But once you want support from Netscape, or the higher levels of the Doom game, then you have to pay. For industries with strong demand-side economies of scale, such as Netscape web browsers or Safe-TCL intelligent agents, the creators have exploited the economies of information distribution. Software products are especially susceptible to increasing returns with scale, as are networking products and most of the information technology industries.

Yet, the Software Publishers Association reports that 1993 worldwide losses to piracy of business application software totaled $7.45 billion. They also estimated that 89% of software units in Korea were counterfeit. And China has 29 factories, some state-owned, that press 75 million pirated CDs per year, largely for export. GATT will impose the U.S. notions of intellectual property on a world that sees the issue very differently.

Clearly there are strong economic incentives to protect intellectual property, and reasonable arguments can be made for software patents and digital copyright, but the complexities of legal enforcement will be outrun and potentially obviated by the relatively rapid developments of another technology, digital cash and cryptography.

 

Digital Cash and the IP Lock

Digital cash is in some ways an extreme example of digital “property” -- since it cannot be copied, it is possessed by one entity at a time, and it is static and non-perishable. If the techniques for protecting against pilferage and piracy work in the domain of cash, then they can be used to “protect” other properties by being embedded in them. If I wanted to copy-protect an “original” work of digital art, digital cash techniques can be used as the “container” to protect intellectual property in the old style. A bullet-proof digital cash scheme would inevitably be adapted by those who stand to gain from the current system. Such as Bill Gates.

Several companies are developing technologies for electronic commerce. On January 12, several High-Tech Club members attended the Cybermania conference on electronic commerce with the CEOs of Intuit, CyberCash, Enter TV and The Lightspan Partnership. According to Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, the motivations for digital cash are anonymity and efficient small-transaction Internet commerce. Anonymity preserves our privacy in the age of increasingly intrusive “database marketing” based on credit card purchase patterns and other personal information. Of course, it also has tax-evasion implications. For Internet commerce, cash is more efficient and easier to use than a credit card for small transactions.

“A lot of people will spend nickels on the Internet,” says Dan Lynch of CyberCash. Banks will soon exchange your current cash for cyber-tokens, or a “bag of bits” which you can spend freely on the Internet. A competitor based in the Netherlands called DigiCash has a Web page with numerous articles on electronic money and fully functional demo of their technology. You can get some free cash from them and spend it at some of their allied vendors.

Digital cash is a compelling technology. Wired magazine calls it the “killer application for electronic networks which will change the global economy.” Handling and fraud costs for the paper money system are growing as digital color copiers and ATMs proliferate. Donald Gleason, President of the Smart Card Enterprise unit of Electronic Payment Services argues that “Cash is a nightmare. It costs money handlers in the U.S. alone approximately $60 billion a year to move the stuff... Bills and coinage will increasingly be replaced by some sort of electronic equivalent.” Even a Citibank VP, Sholom Rosen, agrees that “There are going to be winners and losers, but everybody is going to play.”

The digital cash schemes use a blind digital signature and a central repository to protect against piracy and privacy violations. On the privacy issue, the techniques used have been mathematically proven to be protected against privacy violations. The bank cannot trace how the cash is being used or who is using it. Embedded in these schemes are powerful digital cryptography techniques which have recently been spread in the commercial domain (RSA Data Security is a leader in this field and will be speaking to the High Tech Club on January 19).

To protect against piracy requires some extra work. As soon as I have a digital $5 bill on my Mac hard drive, I will want to make a copy, and I can. (Many companies have busted their picks trying to copy protect files from hackers. It will never work.). The difference is that I can only spend the $5 bill once. The copy is worthless. This is possible because every bill has a unique encrypted identifier. In spending the bill, my computer checks with the centralized repository which verifies that my particular $5 bill is still unspent. Once I spend it, it cannot be spent again. As with many electronic transactions today, the safety of the system depends on the integrity of a centralized computer, or what Dan Lynch calls “the big database in the sky.”

One of the most important limitations of the digital cash techniques is that they are tethered to a transaction between at least three parties — a buyer, seller and central repository. So, to use such a scheme to protect intellectual property, would require networked computers and “live” files that have to dial up and check in with the repository to be operational. There are many compelling applications for this, including voter registration, voting tabulation, and the registration of digital artwork originals.

When I asked Dan Lynch about the use of his technology for intellectual property protection, he agreed that the bits that now represent a $5 bill could be used for any number of things, from medical records to photographs. A digital photograph could hide a digital signature in its low-order bits, and it would be imperceptible to the user. But those bits could be used with a registry of proper image owners, and could be used to prove misappropriation or sampling of the image by others.

Technology author Steven Levy has been researching cryptography for Wired magazine, and he responded to my e-mail questions with the reply “You are on the right track in thinking that crypto can preserve IP. I know of several attempts to forward plans to do so.” Digital cash may provide a “crypto-container” to preserve traditional notions of intellectual property.

The transaction tether limits the short-term applicability of these schemes for software copy protection. They won’t work on an isolated computer. This certainly would slow its adoption for mobile computers since the wireless networking infrastructure is so nascent. But with Windows ’95 bundling network connectivity, soon most computers will be network-ready — at least for the Microsoft network. And now that Bill Gates is acquiring Intuit, instead of dollar bills, we will have Bill dollars.

The transaction tether is also a logistical headache with current slow networks, which may hinder its adoption for mass-market applications. For example, if someone forwards a copyrighted e-mail, the recipient may have to have their computer do the repository check before they could see the text of the e-mail. E-mail is slow enough today, but in the near future, these techniques of verifying IP permissions and paying appropriate royalties in digital cash could be background processes on a preemptive multitasking computer (Windows ’95 or Mac OS System 8). The digital cash schemes are consistent with other trends in software distribution and development — specifically software rental and object-oriented “applets” with nested royalty payments. They are also consistent with the document-centric vision of Open Doc and OLE.

The user of the future would start working on their stationary. When it’s clear they are doing some text entry, the word processor would be downloaded and rented for its current usage. Digital pennies would trickle back to the people who wrote or inspired the various portions of the core program. As you use other software applets, such as a spell-checker, it would be downloaded as needed. By renting applets, or potentially finer-grained software objects, the licensing royalties would be automatically tabulated and exchanged, and software piracy would require heroic efforts. Intellectual property would become precisely that — property in a market economy, under lock by its “creator,” and Bill Gates’ 1975 lament over software piracy may now be addressed 20 years later.

 

--------end of paper-----------

 

2013 & 2021 update: On further reflection, I was focused on executable code (where the runtime requires a cloud connect to authenticate, given the third party element of Digicash. (The blockchain fixed this). Verification has been a pain, but perhaps it's seamless in a web-services future. Cloud apps and digital cash depend on it, so why not the code itself.

 

It could verify the official owner of any unique bundle of pixels, in the sense that you can "own" a sufficiently large number, but not the essence of a work of art or derivative works (what we call NFTs today). Frankly, I'm not sure about non-interactive content in general, like pure video playback. "Fixing" software IP alone would be a big enough accomplishment.

There are times when the winter sun feels just a little unreal. Breaking through the trees without much tangible warmth, thin and pale, only picking up a little colour in those last few minutes before falling. It's a certain kind of limbo that seems to drag. All the snow is old, hard and crystal underfoot, but stubborn to melt. We're not going forward or backward, just lingering right here in the middle. It's a space this abandoned home has learned to occupy well – fully immersed in the final stage of existence. Could be decades still before it all falls down, but rot has ensured no chance of coming back. This is a good place and time to gain some perspective. Spring is tripping its way here, almost imperceptibly. Longer days and signs of change, to find this old structure swallowed under green again.

 

February 15, 2024

Digby County, Nova Scotia

 

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Minolta Instant Pro Polaroid

Image White film

Double Exposure

 

part of the Tangible Project

 

the recipient of this polaroid is Urizen Freaza

 

Boy, did this theme really stump me! Had some ideas, had trouble executing those ideas. Learned I'm a bit more of a perfectionist than I initially believed myself to be. Had lots of fun and all it took was a walk in the cemetery with my mother and brother. This was her idea, so thank you mom and thanks to my brother for being so willing to lug around camera equipment as well as be subjected to my constant "no, that's not right either!" as I pester him with directions on posing and what I want from him.

Every form is built with a model traced for it and reflected in the Divine Mind. There are hierarchies of builders of form, creating a series within tangible degrees, from the highest to the lowest. While the former are shaped under the guidance of the builders, the latter are fashioned by the elementals or nature spirits. Even the lowest stages of form are due to an inner and higher intelligence, regardless of the effect that outside forces may have upon it. From the acorn will grow an oak, and this oak, as a tree, may have many forms, all of which will vary from the other oak trees. All these forms are contained within the acorn, and though the form which the tree will take depends on extraneous circumstances, it exists beforehand in an astral plane before it becomes a phenomenon. However, the noumena germ of the oak exists beyond the astral plane, developing from higher to lower planes, until on the lowest plane it has its last consolidation and development of form. Prior to this stage all form is voidness. The plant, to a certain extent, exhausts itself in the shape-forming force. During its life it goes on constantly adding new forms to itself. First it sends out the root, then the leaf-structure, then the flowers, and so on. Such are the laws of karma as witnessed in the legions of Gaia.

 

denniscordell.zenfolio.com

 

www.elephantjournal.com/2020/12/some-notes-on-nature-spir...

NECA They Live John Nada

Shunamganj, Bangladesh | 2013

Pleaseplease View On Black.

 

Sorry for the wait on this. My plan for this month is to physically integrate text or illustrations into my photos. The point is to experiment with tangible collage techniques; I don't want to fake the text in photoshop.

 

So no posting until I had time to print it, steal a typewriter, and add the text in by hand. I got two copies of each of my shots, thinking that one backup would be enough....but I already wish I had more than two prints to play with. The spacing is really finickie.

 

I don't have a scanner though so I had to photograph the image back in. Not very effective when I'm only shelling out for 4x6 prints. It came out so soft that I ended up integrating it back onto the original digital image. Sorry for the cheating. If I had a scanner you'd get more of a literal product!

We get shy to take the time for what's tangible. From a youth when everything had to be experienced, somehow we come content with second-hand stories. For me, remnants always rise to the occasion. History doesn't have to hold any actual information to forge a connection, but many expect you to settle when names and dates are all on offer. How about tales with neither of those? Can't tell you whose car this was, or where it went, whether adventurous or ordinary journeys. I do know that its last ride was one heck of crash, when someone pushed it down from the now-defunct quarry up top. Now it's in a junkyard with a view of Fales River, couple neighbours for company. Last rusting place with the wonder if anyone who drove behind the wheel is still living. More of my questions are never answered than are, but I'm fine with knowing that maybe some stories are bound to end with me.

 

September 30, 2025

East Tremont, Nova Scotia

 

Year 18, Day 6533 of my daily journal.

 

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Centenary Place was designed and constructed for the purpose of commemorating the centenary of European settlement in Queensland (1824 - 1924). Clearing of the land began in 1924 and the park was formed in 1925. It covers an area of 8,748 square metres and is bounded by Wickham Street, Ann Street, and Gotha Street, Fortitude Valley. The park was one of the last civic projects undertaken by the former Brisbane City Council prior to the formation of the Greater Brisbane Council in 1925. The park has been in continual use by the public since its creation and was extensively refurbished in 1999/2000.

 

Celebrating the centenary of European settlement in Queensland was an important milestone in the state's history, an opportunity to demonstrate how far it had progressed in 100 years. From its beginnings as a penal colony, followed by the arrival of free settlers, separation from New South Wales, Federation, and the First World War, Queensland had experienced many tumultuous events in its first 100 years worthy of commemoration and celebration. The creation of Centenary Place provided the public with a tangible means of doing this.

 

To advance the centenary celebrations, a Centenary Celebrations Committee was formed as was a Centenary Fund. Many fundraising events were held by the Centenary Celebrations Committee and all proceeds from these events were devoted to the Centenary Fund to go towards the provision of centenary memorials, including Centenary Place. Other commemorative memorials and events included the minting of commemorative medals, a statue of John Oxley, the founding of the John Oxley Library which included the purchase of some 6000 books and numerous tree planting ceremonies across Brisbane.

 

The Catholic Church took great interest in the development of Centenary Place, sensing an opportunity to promote their vision of a new cathedral and envisaging the site as the forecourt for the proposed Holy Name Cathedral, a massive 'Renaissance basilica' that was to occupy the block bounded by Gotha, Ann, Gipps, and Wickham Streets. Although the park was designed by Henry Moore, the Parks Superintendent for Council, given the layout, which is still intact, includes a central path originally designed to lead to the proposed cathedral entrance, it is possible that Archbishop Duhig and the cathedral architect, John F. Hennessy, contributed to the design.

 

The Council began clearing existing buildings from the site in 1924 and Centenary Place was formed in 1925. Other features were added at later dates with the drawings for the podium, archway, and tramways office dated 1928. Centenary Place was designed by Moore who was also responsible for designing New Farm Park and Newstead Park. He employed a formal design with defined layouts, planted garden beds, grassed areas, low sandstone retaining walls, and curved paths. The garden includes mature specimens of poinciana (Delonix regia), Canary Island date palms (Phoenix canariensis), Queen palms (Syagrus romanzoffiana), wine palms (Butia capitata), and fig trees including, weeping figs (Ficus benjamina) and white figs (Ficus virens). In 1947 Harry Oakman, the Council Parks & Gardens Director, planned additional garden beds along the walks in the fig and poinciana avenues. These proposals were largely in place by 1950.

 

The original design of the park specifically allocated space to accommodate a statue of Thomas Joseph Byrnes, former Premier of Queensland and the first Queensland-born premier. The statue, by renowned sculptor, Sir Bertram Mackennal, is believed to be one of Brisbane's earliest and was originally erected at Petrie Bight, at the junction of Wickham and Boundary Streets in 1902. When the park was completed in 1925, it was moved from Petrie Bight to its new location.

 

A statue of the Scottish bard, Robert Burns, was proposed for Brisbane as early as 1888 when the President of the Burns Club, Alderman Galloway, contacted the President of the Queensland Scottish Association, Sir Thomas McIlwraith, to suggest their organisations combined forces and funds to commission the statue. However, the Scottish community had to wait many years before seeing their dream realised as it was not until 1929 that a statue of Robert Burns was commissioned by the Brisbane Caledonian Society and Burns Club and installed on a pedestal provided by the Council. Traditionally, statues of Robert Burns are placed so that the poet's back is turned on the church. The statue of Burns in the park has been positioned in accordance to this tradition and had the Holy Name Cathedral been built, the poet's back would have been turned on it. The statue of Burns has served as a focal point for gatherings and events, such as the Burns Night, for the Scottish community of Brisbane since its installation in the park.

 

From 1962 to the mid-1970s, Centenary Place was Brisbane's designated people's forum or speaker's corner. Sunday afternoons became a regular event in Brisbane with hundreds of people turning up to hear speakers holding forth on all manner of issues including speakers campaigning for Aboriginal rights in the 1960s and 1970s. After the people's forum ceased at Centenary Place, the people of Brisbane had to wait until 1990 before a new location was officially made available by the Brisbane City Council at King George Square.

 

Over the years the park has undergone numerous changes. In 1938, a tram waiting shelter was built onto the Wickham Street side of the archway podium and tramways office. The park also featured two air raid shelters, one each on the Ann and Wickham Street frontages. Similar shelters were constructed at many inner-city sites in the early 1940s as part of Queensland's wartime defences. In 1961, the Council prepared plans to convert the Wickham Street air raid shelter into a toilet block. These were evidently demolished by the time the Council planned the construction of a new toilet block in 1973. This entailed the demolition of the remaining air raid shelter on Ann Street. In 1977 the park was extended towards Wickham Street at the entry podium area and the edge trimmed around Gotha Street. The park underwent extensive refurbishment in 1999 - 2000 carried out by Belt Collins Landscape Architects which restored the original formality of the park.

 

Source: Queensland Heritage Register.

There something about this image that just screams strength to me. Part of it is the confidence that is portrayed by my subject, Merle. He looks comfortable which was no easy feat, it being about 32 degrees when we photographed. Maybe it's the large and beautiful trees that surround him in the near distance and just slightly out of focus. It could be the hint of sun and flare coming into the frame that seems as if it's about to burst through the trees, but instead gives just the perfect amount of glow to his jacket, cheek and hair. Mostly it's the way those brown eyes just look into the lens. Merle looks confident, strong, close, tangible. Man I love photography! Especially when I get to photograph during the best light the day has to offer! This was lit with a large Octa camera right and feathered in front. Bit the heavy lifting is done by mother nature! Man she kicked ass in this portrait!

The fog is an illusion—

A master of disguise,

Which hides the tangible

Before our very eyes.

But when the fog has lifted

Everything’s still there,

And the tangible

Only seemed to’ve disappeared.

In the early morning

Or late at night,

The fog descends

Upon various sites.

It gives an air of mystery

That has long prevailed.

Dangerously intriguing

Is the fog’s foggy veil.

A scene I photographed early this morning and processed immediately.

Today is a very special day for the French, of course, after a horrible period for their fine Country.

For me there has been a tangible change in the atmosphere among the French people I know personally because of recent events.

Plus I must not forget - it is my wife's Birthday today.

Something or nothing?

There are only two alternatives, something or nothing? Existence or non-existence?

Existence is a fact!

We know something exists (the physical universe),

but why?

Two questions arise …why is there something rather than nothing?

And where did that something come from?

Obviously, something cannot arise from nothing, no sane person would entertain such an impossible concept. However, an incredible fantasy that the universe created itself from nothing, has been proposed by some, high profile atheists, and presented to the public as though it is science. A sort of ‘theory of everything’ that purports to eliminate a creator.

 

For example, the campaigning, militant atheist Lawrence Krauss has written a book which claims the universe can come from nothing, ‘A Universe from Nothing’.

Anyone who is silly enough to spend money on a book which makes such a wild, impossible claim, soon realises that Krauss’s ‘nothing’ is not nothing at all, but an exercise in ‘smoke and mirrors’. His ‘nothing’ involves the pre-existence of natural law and quantum effects- gravity, energy and quantum particles (matter and antimatter).

Krauss’s ‘nothing’ turns out to be just part and parcel of the existing universe. He confuses ‘space’, which is an integral part of the existing universe, with the ‘nothing’ he claims preceded the universe.

In other words, he is claiming that some properties of the universe existed before the universe, and those properties (regarded as 'nothing' by him) brought the universe into being.

So, Krauss's proposition is; that a natural, temporal, contingent, existing thing can be regarded as an infinite, non-contingent ‘nothing’, which gave rise to all other natural, temporal, contingent things. It is like saying; an effect (without a cause) is the first cause of all other effects.

 

Another well, publicised example of the universe allegedly being able to arise from nothing was that presented by the late Professor Stephen Hawking, and summed up in a single sentence:

“Because there is a law, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”

 

It is not intelligent, sensible or scientific to believe that everything created itself from nothing.

In a genuine state of infinite and eternal nothingness, nothing exists and nothing happens - EVER.

Nothing means absolutely ‘nothing’. Nothing tangible and no physical laws, no information, not even abstract things, like mathematics. If no thing exists there can be no numbers or anything based on numbers.

 

Furthermore, you don’t need to be a genius, or a scientist, to understand that something CANNOT create itself.

Put simply, it is self-evident that - to create itself, a thing would have to pre-exist its own creation to carry out the act of creating itself. In which case, it already exists in some form.

And, if anything at all exists, i.e. in this example ‘gravity’, it cannot be called 'nothing'.

Furthermore, ‘gravity’ cannot be a creative agent, it is merely an inherent property of matter – it is obvious that a property of something cannot create that which it is a property of. And also, How can something pre-exist that which it is a property of? Thus, we are obliged to conclude that nonsense remains nonsense, even when presented by highly regarded scientists.

“Fallacies remain fallacies, even when they become fashionable.” GK Chesterton.

 

Such nonsensical propositions are vain attempts to undermine the well, established, law of cause and effect (the dominant principle of classical physics), which is fatal to all atheist ideology.

Incredibly, Hawking's so-called replacement for God completely ignores this law of cause and effect which applies to ALL temporal (natural) entities, without exception.

Therefore, Stephen Hawking's natural, 'theory of everything' which he summed up in a single sentence can, similarly, be debunked in a single sentence:

Because there is a law of cause and effect, the universe can't and won't create itself from nothing.

 

"something can come from nothing" says Richard Dawkins

In this video clip: the militant, atheist, Richard Dawkins tries to define 'nothing' as 'something' and is shocked when the audience sensibly reacts with laughter.

youtu.be/b6H9XirkhZY

 

The Law of Cause and Effect tells us that a cause has to be adequate for the effect it produces. In other words, an effect CANNOT be greater than its cause or causes.

It makes sense, even to a child, that something CANNOT give what it doesn't possess, or give more than it possesses.

THE ESSENCE OF AN EFFECT IS COMMENSURATE WITH ITS CAUSE.

IF THE CAUSE IS 'NOTHING' - THE EFFECT IS NOTHING.

NO CAUSE = NO EFFECT!

 

It is foolish to look within nature (physical evidence) for an explanation of the origin of nature, i.e. the contingent, finite, physical universe.

There is not anything within the contingent, temporal, finite universe capable of bringing the universe into being.

Sed contra, the temporal universe cannot contain within itself the cause of its own existence. To look for non-contingency within the contingent, or non-temporal within the temporal, is counter-intuitive

The question of why there is something rather than nothing can only be answered by looking to the infinite, which relies on nothing outside itself for its existence.

 

The role of religion?

Once we admit the obvious fact that the universe cannot arise of its own accord from nothing (nothing will remain as nothing - forever), the only alternative is that ‘something’ has always existed – an infinite ‘something’. For anything to happen, such as the origin of the universe, the infinite something, cannot just exist in a state of eternal, passive inactivity, it must be capable of positive activity.

If we examine the characteristics, powers, qualities and attributes which exist now, we must conclude that the ‘something’, that has always existed, must have amazing (godlike) powers to be able to produce all the wonderful qualities we see in the universe, including: information, natural laws, life, intelligence, consciousness, etc.

If the effect (I.e. the universe) is wonderful and amazing, the original cause of it MUST be wonderful and amazing.

This means we need to believe in some sort of ‘godlike entity’. The only question remaining is - which god?

Is the godlike entity a supernatural creator, or simply nature or natural forces as atheists claim?

Seeking an answer to that question is the essential role of (rational) religion which, in harmony with scientific principles and the laws of nature, utilises logic and reason, rather than relying entirely on blind faith.

 

Why God MUST exist ...

There are only two states of being (existence) – temporal and infinite. That. which has a beginning, is ‘temporal’. That which has no beginning is ‘infinite’.

Everything that exists must be one or the other.

The temporal (unlike the infinite) is not autonomous or non-contingent, it essentially relies on something else for its beginning (its cause) and its continued existence.

The universe and all natural things are temporal. Hence, they ALL require a cause or causes.

They could NOT exist without a cause to bring them into being. This is a FACT accepted by science, and enshrined in the Law of Cause and Effect.

The Law of Cause and Effect tells us that every, natural effect requires a cause. And that - an effect cannot be greater than its cause/s.

This is a fundamental principle, essential to the scientific method.

“All natural science is based on the hypothesis of the complete causal connection of all events” Dr Albert Einstein. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Hebrew University and Princeton University Press p.183

No temporal effect can be greater than (superior to) the sum-total of its cause or causes

It is obvious that - something cannot give what it doesn’t possess.

A temporal entity can be a subsidiary cause of another temporal entity, but cannot be the initial (first) cause of the entire, temporal realm - which includes ALL natural effects and entities. The first cause of everything temporal must be infinite.

 

Consider this simple chain of causes and effects:

A causes B

B causes C

C causes D

D causes E

‘A, B, C & D’ are all causes and may all look similar, but they are not, there is an enormous and crucial difference between them. Causes B, C & D are fundamentally different from cause A.

Why?

Because A is the very first cause and thus had no previous cause. It exists without a cause. It doesn’t rely on anything else for its existence, it is completely independent of causes - while B, C, D & E would not exist without A. They are all entirely dependent on A.

Causes; B, C & D are also effects, whereas A is not an effect, only a cause.

So, we can say that the first cause ‘A’ is both self-existent and necessary. It is necessary because the rest of the chain of causes and effects could not exist without it.

We also must say that the subsequent causes and effects B, C, D and E are all contingent. That is; they are not self-existent, they all depend entirely on other causes to exist. We can also say that A is eternally self-existent, i.e. it has always existed, it had no beginning.

Why?

Because if A came into being at some point, there must have been something other than itself that brought it into being … which would mean A was not the first cause (A could not create A) … the something that brought A into being would be the first cause. In which case, A would be contingent and no different from B, C, D & E. We can also say that A is adequate to produce all the properties of B, C, D & E.

Why?

Well, in the case of E, we can see that it relies entirely on D for its existence. E can in no way be superior to D, because D had to contain within itself everything necessary to produce E.

The same applies to D, it cannot be superior to C. Furthermore, neither E or D can be superior to C, because both rely on C for their existence, and C had to contain everything necessary to produce D & E.

Likewise, with B, which is wholly responsible for the existence of C, D & E.

As they all depend on A for their existence and all their properties, abilities and potentials, none can be superior to A, whether singly or combined. A had to contain everything necessary to produce B, C, D & E including all their properties, abilities and potentials.

Thus, we deduce that; nothing in the universe can be superior in any way to the very first cause of the universe, because the whole universe, and all material things that exist, depend entirely on the abilities and properties of the first cause to produce them.

Conclusion …

A first cause must be uncaused, must have always existed, and cannot be in any way inferior to all subsequent causes and effects. In other words, the first cause of the universe must be eternally, self-existent and omnipotent (greater than everything that exists). No natural entity can have those attributes, that is why a Supernatural, Creator God MUST exist.

 

Entropy

The initial (first) cause of the temporal realm had to be something non-temporal (uncaused), i.e. something infinite.

The word ‘temporal’ is derived from tempus, Latin for time. - All temporal things are subject to time - and, as well as having a beginning in time, natural things can also expect to naturally degenerate, with the passage of time, towards a decline in energy potential, function, order and existence. The material universe is slowly in decline and dying.

The natural realm is not just temporal, but also temporary (finite). Science acknowledges this in the Second Law of Thermodynamics (law of entropy).

As all natural things are temporal, we know that the initial (first), infinite cause of everything temporal cannot be a natural agent or entity.

The infinite, first cause of everything natural can also be regarded as ‘supernatural’, in the sense that it is not subject to natural laws that are intrinsic only to natural things, which it caused.

This fact is verified by science, in the First Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that there is no ‘natural’ means by which matter/energy can be created.

However, as the first cause existed before the natural realm (which is subject to natural laws, without exception), the issue of the first cause being exempt from natural laws (supernatural) is not something extraordinary or magical. It is the original and normal default state of the infinite.

If the material universe itself was infinite, entropy wouldn’t exist. Entropy is a characteristic only of natural entities.

The infinite cannot be subject to entropy, it does not deteriorate, it remains the same forever.

 

Therefore, we know that the material universe, as a temporal entity, had to have a beginning and, being subject to entropy, will have an end.

That which existed before the universe, as an original cause of everything material, had to be infinite, because you cannot have an infinite chain of temporal (material) events. The temporal can only exist if it is sustained by the infinite.

As all natural entities are temporal, the (infinite) first cause could not possibly be a natural entity.

So, the Second Law of Thermodynamics supports and confirms the only logical conclusion we can reach from the Law of Cause and Effect, that a natural, first cause is impossible, according to science.

This is fatal to the atheist ideology of naturalism because it means there is no alternative to an infinite, supernatural, first cause (a Creator God).

 

The Bible explains that the universe was created perfect, without the effects of entropy such as decay, corruption and degeneration. It was sustained in such a state of perfection by an infinite God, until the sin of humankind (exercised by free choice) corrupted the physical creation, undermining its perfection and resulting in physical death and universal entropy ...

Scripture: Romans 8:18–25

"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

 

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24

God did not make death,

nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.

For he fashioned all things that they might have being;

and the creatures of the world are wholesome,

and there is not a destructive drug among them

nor any domain of the netherworld on earth,

for justice is undying.

For God formed man to be imperishable;

the image of his own nature he made him.

But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world,

and they who belong to his company experience it.

 

Can there be multiple infinite, first causes? It is evident that there can be only one ‘infinite’ entity. If, for example, there are two infinite entities, neither could have its own, unique properties.

Why?

Because, unless they possessed identical properties, neither would be infinite. However, if they both possessed the very same properties, there would be no distinction between them, they would be identical and thus a single entity.

To put it another way …

God, as an infinite being, can only be a single entity, if He was not, and there was another infinite being, the properties which were pertinent to the other infinite being would be a limitation on His infinite character, and vice versa. So, neither entity would be infinite.

 

Creation - an act of will?

For an infinite cause to produce a temporal effect, such as the universe, an active character and an act of will must be involved. If the first cause was just a blind, mechanistic, natural thing, the universe would just be a continuation of the infinite nature of the first cause, not temporal (subject to time). For example, if the nature of water in infinite time was to be frozen, it would continue its frozen nature infinitely. There must be an active agent involved.

Time applies to the temporal, not the infinite. The infinite is omnipresent, it always was, it always is, and it always will be. It is the “Alpha and the Omega” as the Bible explains.

Jesus claimed to be omnipresent, when referred to Himself as “I am”. He was revealing that His spirit was the infinite, Divine spirit (the infinite, first cause of everything temporal).

Therefore, what we know about the characteristics of this supernatural entity, are as follows:

The single, supernatural entity:

1. Has always existed, has no cause, and is not subject to time. (is infinite, eternally self-existent, autonomous and non-contingent).

2. Is the first, original and deliberate cause of everything temporal (including the universe and every natural entity and effect).

3. Cannot be, in any way, inferior to any temporal or natural thing that exists.

In simple terms, this means that the single, infinite, supernatural, first cause of everything that exists in the temporal realm, has the capability of creating everything that exists, and cannot be inferior in any powers and attributes to anything that exists. This is the entity we recognise as the creator God.

The Bible tells us that we were made in the image of this God. This is logical, because it is obvious we cannot be superior to this God (an effect cannot be greater than its cause).

So, all our qualities and attributes must be possessed by the God in whose image we were made.

All our attributes come from the creator, or supernatural, first cause.

Remember, the logic that something cannot give what it doesn’t possess.

We have life. Thus, our creator must be alive.

We are intelligent. Thus, our creator must be intelligent.

We are conscious. Thus, our creator must be conscious.

We can love. Thus, our creator must love.

We understand justice. Thus, our creator must be just, etc. etc.

Therefore, we can logically discern the character and attributes of the creator from what is seen in His creation.

This FACT - that an effect cannot be greater than its cause/s, is recognised as a basic principle of science, and is it crucial to understanding the nature and attributes of the first cause.

It means nothing in the universe that exists, resulting from the action of the first cause, can be in anyway superior to the first cause. We must conclude that, at least, some attributes of the first cause can be seen in the universe.

For the origin of all our attributes, and those of all the temporal realm, we must look to their source - the infinite first cause - God.

 

Atheists frequently ask; how can we possibly know what God is like?

The Bible (which is inspired by God) tells us many things about the character of God, but regardless of scripture, the universe itself gives us some evidence of God’s nature.

For example: can the properties of human beings, in any way, be superior to the first cause?

To suggest they are, would be to violate the scientific principle that an effect cannot be greater than its cause.

All the powers, properties, qualities and attributes we observe in the universe, including all human qualities, must be also evident in the first cause.

If there is life in the universe, the first cause must have life.

If there is intelligence in the universe the first cause must have intelligence.

The same applies to consciousness, skill, design, purpose, justice, love, beauty, forgiveness, mercy etc.

Therefore, we must conclude that the eternally, self-existent, non-natural (supernatural), first cause, has life, is conscious, has intelligence and created the temporal as an act of will.

We know, from the law of cause and effect, that the first cause cannot possibly be any of the natural processes frequently proposed by atheists, such as: the so-called, big bang explosion, singularity or quantum mechanics.

They are all temporal, moreover, it is obvious that none of them are adequate to produce the effect. They are all grossly inferior to the result.

 

To sum up:

Using impeccable logic and reason, supported by our understanding of established, natural, physical laws (which apply to everything of a natural, temporal nature) acknowledged by science, humans have been able to discover the existence of a single, infinite, supernatural, living, intelligent, loving and just creator God.

God discovered, not invented!

Contrary to a narrative perpetuated by atheists, a personal, creator God is not just a “human invention”, and He is certainly not a backward thinking substitute for reason or science, but rather, the reality of His existence and character is an enlightened, human discovery, based on unimpeachable logic, reason, rationality, natural laws and scientific understanding.

 

The real character of atheism unmasked.

Is belief in God just superstitious, backward thinking, suitable only for the uneducated or scientific illiterates, as atheists would have us believe?

Stephen Hawking is widely acknowledged as the best brain in modern atheism, his natural explanation for the origin of the universe "Because there is a law, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing" was claimed by some, to have made belief in a creator God redundant. This is an atheistic, natural, creation myth, summed up in a single sentence. A sentence which is possibly the most bizarre and contradictory sentence in the history of science.

 

When we realise what atheists actually believe, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that it is atheism, not monotheism, which is a throwback to an unenlightened period in human history. It is a throwback to a time when Mother Nature or other natural or material, temporal entities and idols were regarded by some as having autonomous, godlike, creative powers –

“the universe can and will create itself from nothing”

The discredited concept of worshipping nature itself (naturalism) or various material things (Sun, Moon, idols etc.) as some sort of autonomous, non-contingent, creative, or self-creative agents, used to be called paganism. Now it has been re-invented as 21st century atheism ...

The truth about modern atheism is it is just pagan naturalist beliefs repackaged.

“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.” - G.K. Chesterton.

 

God’s power.

Everything that exists is dependent on the original and ultimate cause (God) for its origin, continued existence and operation.

This means God affords everything all the power it needs to function. Everything operates only with God’s power. We couldn’t even lift a little finger, if the power to do so was not permitted by God.

What caused God?

Ever since the 18th century, atheist philosophers such as David Hume, Bertrand Russell etc. have attempted to debunk the logical evidence for a creator God, as the infinite, first cause and creator of the universe.

The basic premise of their argument is that a long chain of causes and effects, going back in time, did not necessarily require a beginning (no first cause, but rather an infinite regress). And that, if every effect requires an adequate cause (as the Law of Cause and Effect states), then God (a first cause) could no more exist without a cause, than anything else.

This latter point is summed up in the what many atheists regard as the killer question:

“What caused God then?”

This question wasn’t sensible in the 18th century, and is not sensible today, but incredibly, many atheists still think it is a good argument against the Law of Cause and Effect and continue to use it.

As explained previously, the Law of Cause and Effect applies to all temporal entities.

Temporal entities have a beginning, and therefore need a cause. They are all contingent and dependent on a cause or causes for their beginning and existence, without exception.

It is obvious to any sensible person that the very first cause, because it is FIRST, had nothing preceding it.

First means 'first', it doesn’t mean second or third. If we could go back far enough with a chain of causes and effects, however long the chain, at some stage we must reach an ultimate beginning, i.e. the cause which is first, having no previous cause. This first cause must have always existed with no beginning. It is essentially self-existent from an infinite past and for an infinite future. It must be completely autonomous and non-contingent, not relying on any cause or anything else for its existence. Not temporal, but infinite.

So, the answer to the question is that - God was not caused, only temporal entities (such as ALL natural things) essentially require a cause.

God is the eternally, self-existent, ultimate, non-contingent, supernatural, first. infinite cause of everything temporal.

As explained earlier, the first cause could not be a natural entity, it had to be supernatural, as ALL natural entities are temporal and contingent (they all require causes).

 

Is the atheist, infinite regress argument sensible?

This is the argument against the need for a first cause of the universe. The proposition is that; a long chain of natural causes and effects, going back in time, did not necessarily require a beginning (an infinite regress). This proposition is nonsensical.

Why?

It is self-evident that you cannot have a chain of temporal effects going backwards in time, forever. It is the inherent nature of all temporal things to have a beginning. Likewise, for a long chain of temporal causes and effects, there must be a beginning at some point in time. Contingent things do not become non-contingent, simply by being in a long chain.

Temporal + temporal can never equal infinite.

Moreover, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that everything physical is subject to entropy.

Therefore, it is an absurd notion that there could be a long chain of temporal elements in which, although every individual link in the chain requires a beginning, the complete chain does not. And, although every individual link in the chain is subject to the law of entropy, the chain as a whole is not, and is miraculously unaffected by the effects of entropy, throughout an infinite past, which would have caused its demise.

 

What about the idea that infinite regress is acceptable in maths?

Maths is a type of information - and information, like truth, is not purely physical.

It can require physical media to make it tangible, but while the physical media is always subject to entropy, information is not. 1+1 = 2 will always be true, it is unaffected by time, or even whether there are any humans left to do mathematical calculations.

Jesus said; Heaven and Earth may pass away, but my words will go on forever. Jesus is pointing out that truth and information are unaffected by entropy.

For example: historical truths, such as the fact that Henry VIII had six wives, will always be true. Time cannot erode or change that truth. Even if all human records of this truth were destroyed, it would never cease to be true.

As the Christian, apologist Peter Keeft has made clear, maths is entirely dependent on a positive integer, i.e. the number one. Without this positive integer, no maths is possible. 2 is 2 ones, 3 is 3 ones, etc.

The concept of the number one also exists as a characteristic of the one, infinite, first cause. - God is one. - God embodies that positive integer (number one/first cause), essential for the operation of maths. Without the number one, there could be no number two or three, etc. etc. There could be no positive numbers, no negative numbers and no fractions.

The fact that an infinite ‘first’ cause exists, means that number one is bound to exist. In a state of eternal and infinite nothingness, there would be no information and no numbers and nothing would be ‘first’. So, like everything else, maths is made possible only by the existence of the one, infinite, first cause (God).

 

The Law of Cause and Effect

"Dominant Principle of Classical Physics

Chance Events? Nothing happens by chance! Classical Science, which dominated studies

of the physical universe before the Twentieth Century, generally held an opinion that

there are no events that happen by chance. For many centuries, it seemed obvious that

all things were caused by something physical or mental. This idea was expressed by

Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460-377 B.C.): “Every natural event has a natural cause.” [1, p.

12].

History of the Concept of Cause and Effect. The concept of order maintained by the law

of cause and effect is a scientific principle with a history traceable through Hebrew,

Babylonian, Greek, and modern civilizations.

Hebrew Concept of Causality. Certain Hebrews acknowledged the role of causality in the

universe before the Babylonians and Greeks. These Hebrews denied chance and its offspring

chaos:

That they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting

That there is none besides Me;

I am the LORD, and there is no other;

I form the light and create darkness,

I make peace and create calamity;

I, the LORD, do all these things.…

Shall the clay say to him who forms it, “What are you making?”

Or shall your handiwork say, “He has no hands”?…"

 

FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE

The Law of Cause and Effect. Dominant Principle of Classical Physics. David L. Bergman and Glen C. Collins

www.commonsensescience.net/pdf/articles/law_of_cause_and_...

 

"The Big Bang's Failed Predictions and Failures to Predict: (Updated Aug 3, 2017.) As documented below, trust in the big bang's predictive ability has been misplaced when compared to the actual astronomical observations that were made, in large part, in hopes of affirming the theory."

kgov.com/big-bang-predictions

   

---- Matera (Italy), beginning of October, 2019 -----

    

---- Matera (Italia), inizio d’ottobre, 2019 -----

  

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click to activate the icon of slideshow: the small triangle inscribed in the small rectangle, at the top right, in the photostream;

 

clicca sulla piccola icona per attivare lo slideshow: sulla facciata principale del photostream, in alto a destra c'è un piccolo rettangolo (rappresenta il monitor) con dentro un piccolo triangolo nero;

 

Qi Bo's photos on Fluidr

  

Qi Bo's photos on Flickriver

  

Qi Bo's photos on Flickr Hive Mind

  

www.fotografidigitali.it/gallery/2726/opere-italiane-segn...

  

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A trip to…Matera: it is an Italian city of Basilicata, its origins are very ancient, remote; Matera is characterized by the so-called "Sassi", they are a complex of districts consisting of Houses-Caves dug into the rock; in the past these houses-caves were evacuated (in 1952) by order of the then government, to prevent the Sassi from being a tangible manifestation of a poor and backward southern Italy, with the simultaneous construction of districts made up of new houses. Currently things have changed, the Sassi have been rediscovered and enhanced, they host B & Bs, restaurants, museums, exhibition halls in which to find exhibitions of modern art, and, thanks to their rediscovery, the Sassi have been recognized by UNESCO, heritage of humanity, and moreover, Matera has also been elected Capital of Culture of 2019.

The Sassi of Matera are therefore districts that constitute the oldest part of the city, there is the Sasso Barisano, there is the Sasso Caveoso, which are separated from each other by a Big Rock on which there is the "Civita", which is the central part of the old city, on top of which is the cathedral and noble palaces. In ancient times the inhabitants of the Sassi, exploiting the friability of the calcareous rock, created a complex system for conveying water into canals, which led to a network of cisterns, thus water, a precious element for those lands, immediately became available.

The Patron Saint of Matera is the Our Lady of Bruna, whose denomination has uncertain origins (there are various theories), I have photographed Her icon, visible in the Mother Church, and the Her statue with the Little Jesus in Her arms, which is carried in procession. The Sassi, due to their landscape features, were very often chosen to set a large number of films, just to mention a few, "the roaring years" by Luigi Zampa, "the Gospel according to Matthew" by Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Christ stopped at Eboli" by Francesco Rosi," the Passion of Christ" by Mel Gibson.

In my wanderings among the Sassi, I met many Street Artists, among them the artist Benedict Popescu, I also met a very nice Capuchin friar with a passion for photography, some sweet girls, Koreans, Beneventans and of Matera.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------

Una gita a…..Matera: essa è una città italiana della Basilicata, le sue origini sono antichissime, remote; Matera è caratterizzata dai cosiddetti “Sassi”, sono un complesso di rioni costituiti da Case-Grotte scavate nella roccia; queste Case-Grotte in passato furono evacuate (nel 1952) per ordine dell’allora governo, per impedire che i Sassi potessero essere una manifestazione tangibile di una Italia meridionale povera ed arretrata, con la contemporanea realizzazione di rioni costituiti da case nuove. Attualmente le cose sono cambiate, i Sassi sono stati riscoperti e valorizzati, essi ospitano B&B, ristoranti, musei, sale espositive nelle quali trovare anche mostre di arte moderna, e, grazie alla loro riscoperta, i Sassi sono stati riconosciuti dall’UNESCO, patrimonio dell’umanità, ed inoltre, Matera è stata anche eletta Capitale della cultura del 2019.

I Sassi di Matera sono quindi rioni che costituiscono la parte più antica della città, c’è il Sasso Barisano, c’è il Sasso Caveoso, i quali sono separati tra di loro da una rocca sulla quale c’è la Civita, che è la parte centrale della città vecchia, sulla cui sommità si trova la cattedrale ed i palazzi nobiliari. In epoche remote gli abitanti dei Sassi, sfruttando la friabilità della roccia calcarea, si ingegnarono nel realizzare un complesso sistema di convogliamento delle acque in canali, che conducevano in una rete di cisterne, in tal modo l’acqua, elemnto preziosissimo per quelle terre, diveniva immediatamente disponibile.

La Santa Patrona di Matera è la Madonna della Bruna, la cui denominazione ha origini incerte (vi sono varie teorie), io ho fotografato sia la sua icona, visibile nella chiesa Madre, sia la statua con in braccio il Bambinello, che viene portata in processione. I Sassi, per le loro caratteristiche paesaggistiche, sono stati molto spesso scelti per ambientare numerosissimi film, solo per ricordarne alcuni, “gli anni ruggenti” di Luigi Zampa, “il Vangelo secondo Matteo” di Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli” di Francesco Rosi, “la Passione di Cristo” di Mel Gibson.

Nel mio peregrinare tra i Sassi, ho incontrato molti Artisti di Strada, tra essi l’artista Benedict Popescu, credo unico nel suo genere, ho incontrato inoltre, un gentilissimo frate cappuccino con la passione della fotografia, delle dolcissime ragazze, Coreane, Beneventane e di Matera.

 

   

---- Matera (Italy), beginning of October, 2019 -----

    

---- Matera (Italia), inizio d’ottobre, 2019 -----

  

..........................................................................

    

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

click to activate the icon of slideshow: the small triangle inscribed in the small rectangle, at the top right, in the photostream;

 

clicca sulla piccola icona per attivare lo slideshow: sulla facciata principale del photostream, in alto a destra c'è un piccolo rettangolo (rappresenta il monitor) con dentro un piccolo triangolo nero;

 

Qi Bo's photos on Fluidr

  

Qi Bo's photos on Flickriver

  

Qi Bo's photos on Flickr Hive Mind

  

www.fotografidigitali.it/gallery/2726/opere-italiane-segn...

  

-------------------------------------------------------------------

-----------------------------------------

A trip to…Matera: it is an Italian city of Basilicata, its origins are very ancient, remote; Matera is characterized by the so-called "Sassi", they are a complex of districts consisting of Houses-Caves dug into the rock; in the past these houses-caves were evacuated (in 1952) by order of the then government, to prevent the Sassi from being a tangible manifestation of a poor and backward southern Italy, with the simultaneous construction of districts made up of new houses. Currently things have changed, the Sassi have been rediscovered and enhanced, they host B & Bs, restaurants, museums, exhibition halls in which to find exhibitions of modern art, and, thanks to their rediscovery, the Sassi have been recognized by UNESCO, heritage of humanity, and moreover, Matera has also been elected Capital of Culture of 2019.

The Sassi of Matera are therefore districts that constitute the oldest part of the city, there is the Sasso Barisano, there is the Sasso Caveoso, which are separated from each other by a Big Rock on which there is the "Civita", which is the central part of the old city, on top of which is the cathedral and noble palaces. In ancient times the inhabitants of the Sassi, exploiting the friability of the calcareous rock, created a complex system for conveying water into canals, which led to a network of cisterns, thus water, a precious element for those lands, immediately became available.

The Patron Saint of Matera is the Our Lady of Bruna, whose denomination has uncertain origins (there are various theories), I have photographed Her icon, visible in the Mother Church, and the Her statue with the Little Jesus in Her arms, which is carried in procession. The Sassi, due to their landscape features, were very often chosen to set a large number of films, just to mention a few, "the roaring years" by Luigi Zampa, "the Gospel according to Matthew" by Pier Paolo Pasolini, "Christ stopped at Eboli" by Francesco Rosi," the Passion of Christ" by Mel Gibson.

In my wanderings among the Sassi, I met many Street Artists, among them the artist Benedict Popescu, I also met a very nice Capuchin friar with a passion for photography, some sweet girls, Koreans, Beneventans and of Matera.

 

-----------------------------------------------------------

Una gita a…..Matera: essa è una città italiana della Basilicata, le sue origini sono antichissime, remote; Matera è caratterizzata dai cosiddetti “Sassi”, sono un complesso di rioni costituiti da Case-Grotte scavate nella roccia; queste Case-Grotte in passato furono evacuate (nel 1952) per ordine dell’allora governo, per impedire che i Sassi potessero essere una manifestazione tangibile di una Italia meridionale povera ed arretrata, con la contemporanea realizzazione di rioni costituiti da case nuove. Attualmente le cose sono cambiate, i Sassi sono stati riscoperti e valorizzati, essi ospitano B&B, ristoranti, musei, sale espositive nelle quali trovare anche mostre di arte moderna, e, grazie alla loro riscoperta, i Sassi sono stati riconosciuti dall’UNESCO, patrimonio dell’umanità, ed inoltre, Matera è stata anche eletta Capitale della cultura del 2019.

I Sassi di Matera sono quindi rioni che costituiscono la parte più antica della città, c’è il Sasso Barisano, c’è il Sasso Caveoso, i quali sono separati tra di loro da una rocca sulla quale c’è la Civita, che è la parte centrale della città vecchia, sulla cui sommità si trova la cattedrale ed i palazzi nobiliari. In epoche remote gli abitanti dei Sassi, sfruttando la friabilità della roccia calcarea, si ingegnarono nel realizzare un complesso sistema di convogliamento delle acque in canali, che conducevano in una rete di cisterne, in tal modo l’acqua, elemnto preziosissimo per quelle terre, diveniva immediatamente disponibile.

La Santa Patrona di Matera è la Madonna della Bruna, la cui denominazione ha origini incerte (vi sono varie teorie), io ho fotografato sia la sua icona, visibile nella chiesa Madre, sia la statua con in braccio il Bambinello, che viene portata in processione. I Sassi, per le loro caratteristiche paesaggistiche, sono stati molto spesso scelti per ambientare numerosissimi film, solo per ricordarne alcuni, “gli anni ruggenti” di Luigi Zampa, “il Vangelo secondo Matteo” di Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli” di Francesco Rosi, “la Passione di Cristo” di Mel Gibson.

Nel mio peregrinare tra i Sassi, ho incontrato molti Artisti di Strada, tra essi l’artista Benedict Popescu, credo unico nel suo genere, ho incontrato inoltre, un gentilissimo frate cappuccino con la passione della fotografia, delle dolcissime ragazze, Coreane, Beneventane e di Matera.

 

SandScape is a tangible interface for designing and understanding landscapes through a variety of computational simulations using sand. Users view these simulations as they are projected on the surface of a sand model that represents the terrain. The users can choose from a variety of different simulations that highlight either the height, slope, contours, shadows, drainage or aspect of the landscape model.

 

Interested in Sandscape? Come and see it at the Ars Electronica Center.

 

Fotocredit: Ars Electronica / Martin Hieslmair

For Macromondays New Years resolutions. essence Explore#91 for a nanosecond ;-)

I feel that more of my photographs deserve the right to be printed. I am also needing to re connect with drawing, it is a skill I have not visited for a long time. If I am to try my hand at tattooing I need to be fluent with a pencil once again.

 

Behind every beautiful thing, there's always a story of pain. - Cristina Valladares

 

I spent some time thinking about the term "tortured artist" this morning. Whether you're talking about photographers, painters, musicians, or writers, it does seem like some of the most breathtakingly beautiful work stems from a dark place full of pain, heartache or uncertainty. That's not to say there isn't beautiful art inspired by happiness as well, but I think that perhaps we are more drawn to the painfully inspired pieces because the artists are giving us the means of expressing our own pain.

 

Not everybody knows how to deal with pain. Actually, I think most of us are stumbling blindly in the dark when we're hurt. But for whatever reason, as artists, we are compelled to pour that emotion into our chosen creative outlet. It's healthy, really, if you ask me. (You didn't, but I'm sharing anyway.)

 

I know that for me, when I compose a photograph during my darkest hours, it feels like I'm freeing a bit of that pain and letting it fly away from me. I'm lightening my load by releasing it through photography or writing. I don't think that artists feel more deeply than others, I just think that there's something unique in us that compells us to release our emotions in a more tangible form. And I think the reason that these pain-inspired masterpieces are typically more universally appealing is that by releasing our own pain, we are giving others the means of releasing theirs as well.

 

Never underestimate that feeling you get when you read a chapter in a book, look at a photograph or a painting, hear the lyrics of a song and think "Yes. That, exactly. That is how I feel."

 

The beauty of art is that it captures universal emotions and makes us feel a bit less alone.

 

100 Quotes Project

40x30 in.

 

Oil & acrylic on traditional canvas

 

To purchase original please contact ajeffries101958@yahoo.com

 

Prints, etc. are available at www.redbubble.com/people/atj1958 and www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/52481-alan-taylor-je...

 

Thanks for taking the time to look at my work.

 

Super Shooter

ID-UV

Red Filter

part of the Tangible Project

the recipient of this polaroid (and a shark's tooth) is Penny .

 

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning.”

 

There should have been some warning given to me. Some old man of the sea to say, “No child, don’t pick anything up off that beach. Once you do, you become theirs, thusly marked by what things you hold like treasure in your hands.”

 

There was no old man of the sea. No lifeguard further down to shout warnings of terrible beasts in the deep cutting through the frothing surf. Is it strange to think back and realize that there were no boats out there that morning? Not even a single fisherman on the shore casting out for a chance at momentary greatness by landing something of memorable size or having the fight of his life?

 

I did not think it strange then but I do now. But then, am I not a thought now too? A memory of someone’s or a warning tale to be told as the children tug at their mother’s hand and gesturing wildly to something on the shoreline that holds their interest just as the mother tries to tell them to watch the sea, always watch the sea…

 

I stopped watching the sea but the sea still watched me as I bent to the shore and took from it little treasures that I thought were meant for me - a broken sand dollar, a piece of coral, and the greatest prize of all - a shark’s small tooth. Should I have wondered then when I found the next tooth and the one after that where this would all end? The teeth were left there for me to follow like a little trail and I followed, taking each one and pocketing them until I had six or seven and showed the sea my own toothy grin of triumph and strangely, gratitude.

 

That’s how they lure you in - with sea treasures and your own dreams. They prefer the dreamers and the loners, and the ones who feel the sea in their blood like the pounding surf after a storm. I thought his smile was far too fierce and his eyes too black - he was one of the storied shark people that I thought I had made up in my mind, but here he was and he was real. I had found his teeth he said and he wanted them back.

 

All I had to do was give them back and I was free but I couldn’t move my hand. I was afraid the slightest movement would undo the spell and I would die. Instead, I found my hand in his and the sandpaper feel of it against mine sent chills down my spine but I followed him into the sea and all I saw was red.

 

Remember this: be careful what you take from the beach.

{85 mm: ƒ/5.6 | 1/400 s | ISO 320 | manual White Balance | manual exposure | manual focus | vertical crop}

  

Be-Still-52 week 11 - Kim Klassen photography class

 

More informations about processing on my Blog

escara-fotoprojekte.blogspot.ch/search/label/Be_Still_52

A breathtaking confluence of the tangible and ethereal. The woman, surrounded by nature's splendor, holds in her hand the beautiful conundrum of dandelion umbrellas, urging us to imagine, dream, and dance along.

actually we have winter here in austria. The trees have shed their autumn dress already. Only a few leaves can still be found on the trees. By the strong winds and the rain we have no indian summer. That is why it remains the most beautiful dream for a autumn impression with a magnificent deciduous trees. But to capture the remains can also be quite attractive. For this view I was originally performed by the background. The sleek high tree trunks stand before the shady slope and draws a line pattern on it. Somehow I could not put this scene as the main subject, but with the leafy branch before it makes itself quite well. The leaves flames from the backlight and works very good in contrast with the blue shady background. The focus on the closest detail on the branches gives a tangible feeling infront of the blurred ambiance .

 

Location: Balzers - Liechtenstein

Date: 14th November 2012

Camera: Nikon D700

Lens: MF Nikorr 50 f1,4

Exposure: 1250

Aperture: f/2

An abstract reflection of a hawthorn bush.

don't dig holes in thin air.

Tangible and virtual worlds mix.

The transient beauty of the coast is intricately intertwined with the captivating patterns that emerge in the sand, crafted by the relentless forces of wind and wave. These natural sculptors shape the shoreline, leaving behind ephemeral masterpieces.

 

As the tides ebb and flow, they orchestrate a delicate dance with the sand. With each advancing wave, the water gently caresses the shore, carrying particles of sand along its journey. As the wave recedes, it relinquishes its cargo, depositing the grains in a meticulous arrangement. This cyclical process, repeated countless times, creates intricate patterns that stretch along the coastline.

 

The patterns left behind by the retreating tide mimic the ebb and flow of life itself. Swirling ripples, reminiscent of a miniature desert landscape, emerge as the water recedes, their graceful curves and undulating lines transforming the beach into a living work of art. The patterns are at once orderly and chaotic, with intricate geometrical formations intermingling with whimsical curves and asymmetrical shapes.

 

The wind, a silent artist in its own right, adds its touch to the sculpting process. As it sweeps across the coast, it whispers secrets to the sand, coaxing it to dance in its invisible embrace. The wind's gentle touch lifts fine particles from the beach, carrying them aloft in an intricate ballet. It sculpts the sand into delicate ripples, resembling the soft undulations of fabric.

 

The interplay between the wind and the tide results in an ever-changing landscape. The patterns shift and evolve, shaped by the combined forces of these elemental sculptors. Ripples become miniature mountains, rising and falling in a transient topography that mirrors the larger contours of the surrounding coast. Each gust of wind and every advancing or receding wave leaves its mark, etching new patterns and erasing old ones, in an eternal cycle of creation and destruction.

 

These ephemeral patterns serve as a reminder of the impermanence of existence and the transient nature of beauty, as each passing moment alters the landscape, erasing what once was and creating something new. The sands become a canvas for the symphony of time, a tangible reflection of the ever-changing nature of our lives.

 

The beauty of these fleeting patterns lies not only in their visual allure but also in the emotions they evoke. They inspire a sense of wonder and awe, inviting us to pause and appreciate the intricate designs that nature creates with such effortless grace. The patterns speak of the interconnectedness of all things, the harmonious interplay between the elements, and the constant flux that defines our existence.

 

In these patterns of nature, we find a profound lesson: that life, like the shifting sands, is ever-changing, and that true beauty lies not in permanence but in the appreciation of the fleeting moments that grace our journey.

 

www.f22digital.com

This is the story of how I came to know and accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. It is a story of God’s faithfulness to an unworthy and unfaithful young man. It is a story of the Holy Spirit patiently and lovingly changing my mind and heart and arranging circumstances to lead me to Christ so I can be saved.

 

Introduction

 

My name is Fadi and I was born in late 1982 in Baghdad, Iraq, but I grew up in Kirkuk, a city about 240km north of Baghdad. My grandfather was Syriac Orthodox but my father was raised as a Roman Catholic because my grandmother, the one who cared about religion, was a Roman Catholic so she raised him and us--my sister and I--as Roman Catholics. My mother’s family is also Roman Catholic.

 

In Iraq a person’s religion is part of their identification documents. Because of this a lot of people would be known by a certain faith even though they do not believe in it or practice it. A lot of Christians in Iraq are what I call devoted to their denominations, but as far as born-again is concerned I do not recall knowing anyone who was born-again. I also do not recall anyone ever teaching salvation is by faith in Jesus’ death on the Cross through God’s grace. Simply put, there was no Gospel: there was no good news because there was no message of salvation. And because there was no message of salvation people did not get saved and there were no born-again Christians. I also do not recall any teachings about the Holy Spirit; the only time I heard of the Holy Spirit is when we said “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. I actually thought the Holy Spirit was an invisible force; I did not understand that the Holy Spirit is a person of the triune God!

 

Feeling Detached

 

My ethnical background is Chaldean. Chaldeans are an ethnical group of a minority Christian community in Iraq. However, I never felt like I was a Chaldean. The main reason has to do with the fact I do not speak Aramaic—the mother tongue of Chaldeans. I never learnt Aramaic because my family does not speak it either; we speak Arabic (the official language of Iraq). That is why I always felt an outcast in Sunday school, and my Muslim friends often asked me, “How can you be Christian if you do not speak Aramaic?” So since my childhood I never felt like I belonged to any group: I did not feel like I was a Chaldeans, a Roman Catholic, or an Iraqi. I simply could not associate myself with any group whether ethnic, religious, or political. I simply saw myself as a human and that was good enough for me.

 

This detachment from certain groups was negative socially as I could not relate to any group of people and I always saw myself as an outsider; therefore, I did not feel compelled to join any cause or group activity.

 

Feelings of Inferiority

 

I was a very shy and sensitive child and I never felt comfortable in social settings. Here is something that happened that set the course for my life. I have never told this story to anyone but I believe it is important to understand who I was before coming to Christ:

 

On my fifth or sixth birthday party my cousin bought me a set of army vehicles and GI Joes as a gift and I loved it. I was playing with the toys and the house was full of people and everybody was having fun socializing and eating. When my mom saw me playing with the toys she told my aunt (her older sister), “Why did you burden yourself? You shouldn’t have gone through the trouble and spent the money and buy a gift.” I was confused: I did not know if I had done something wrong by accepting and enjoying the gift and if I should return it or what—after all I was only five years old! And I was not a street-smart child—I was very naive and innocent. Of course my mom was saying a typical thing in the Middle East: she was not trying to minimize my importance to her or the importance of my birthday. (And I am sure countless mothers have said something similar in front of their children.) But I was a very sensitive child and to my 5 years old brain I interpreted her words as saying: I am not important; I had done something bad; I am not worthy; I am causing people trouble and costing them money--I am a burden.

 

You would think such a small insignificant incident would not have a long lasting effect, but ever since that day I always felt like I was a burden, always felt guilty, unworthy and stupid. So I shied away from people even more, and became nervous in social settings. And of course, the less social I became the less self-confident I became and started having really low self-esteem and self-image. However, out of all the negative feelings I have about myself the worst is the feeling of being stupid. I am not sure why I feel stupid sometimes but the feeling comes suddenly and so powerfully it is literally paralysing.

 

To make things worse as I became a teenager I started gaining weight and I developed trichotillomania which caused my already low self-confidence to plummet even more, and I became even more withdrawn from people and detached from my surroundings. It is such a vicious cycle: the more anti-social I became the lower my self-confidence became, and the lower my self-confidence became the more anti-social I became; the less social I became the worse my trichotillomania habit got, and the worse my trichotillomania habit got the less social I became! I felt like I was standing in a hole and digging myself deeper in.

 

Obedient but Stubborn

 

I was a good and obedient kid so I rarely gave my parents hard time and I was never the rebellious type. I remember overhearing my mom telling our neighbour that she would have more children if she could guarantee they will be like me. I always listened and respected authority so that made me a good student on top of the fact I always studied really hard. I was very peaceful and a peacemaker. I avoided conflict and I was fair: for me or against me. I always tried to look at things objectively which made my friends trust me. I enjoyed telling jokes but I also was a deep thinker. I was quite liked and respected by my peers. Somehow everybody seemed to know me.

 

I was very stubborn: I would not listen to anyone if I believed they were wrong. I had to be convinced and it was not always easy. My family used to joke that if doctors looked inside my head they would not find a brain but a rock--I was that stubborn! But I was never stubborn for the trivial things in life--I was only stubborn if I disagreed on things that mattered. I was never the follower type even though I never liked being a leader. I was not impressed by popular opinions and never tried to chase after the latest trends. For some reason what the world had to offer did not impress me—I wanted more from life than materialistic things and passing pleasures. I was not tempted to try things that I believed were wrong: to me wrong was wrong whether I am permitted to do it or not.

 

I was a good storyteller and communicated my thoughts well but I almost never shared my inner feelings with anyone—I kept everything on the inside and dealt with it by myself. I loved to help and could empathize with others. I was always attracted to the meek and outcast than the proud and popular. I love to comfort others and encourage them. I was cautious and had a heightened sense of danger. There are a couple of instances when God by His grace warned me beforehand to avoid—if I had went along with others to these two places I would have been hurt really bad. The young liked my company and the adults trusted me. I was the kind of a boy where the neighbourhood girls could give me a friendly smile without having to worry about me interpreting it the wrong way.

 

Even though I was smart, worked hard, punctual, and a perfectionist I still lacked confidence: I did not believe I was worthy or capable of succeeding.

 

God Is Real

 

In the 1980s Diego Maradona, the captain of the Argentina soccer team, was the biggest soccer star, especially after the 1986 FIFA World Cup where he single-handedly lead Argentina to win the title defeating West Germany in the final. So he was my hero because soccer is the most popular sport in Iraq. In the 1990 FIFA World Cup final it was Argentina versus Germany again and Argentina lost 1-0 because of a last minute penalty kick. Maradona, my hero, cried and so I was going to cry too (don’t forget I was only 7 years old at the time!) but I did not want my family to see me crying so I ran upstairs. (Because Iraq’s summer is hot and often times there was no electricity, a lot of people sleep on the rooftops. It is easy to set up beds on the roof since the houses have flat roofs with brick walls.) It was night time and I threw myself on my bed crying—it was very quiet because people were still watching the FIFA World Cup event. I bitterly asked God why He let Maradona lose--as a child I didn’t know any better! Then I got tired of crying so I just laid on my back on the bed and looked up: the sky was dark and full of stars. I could hear distance noises from the TVs but it was quiet where I was. I kept looking at the sky and kind of forgot about Maradona’s loss because it was such a peaceful sight. Then it suddenly became a fearful sight: I was lying on a bed that is sitting on a roof with nothing tangible attaching me to earth which itself was floating in a vast and dark universe! That is when I understood that there is a God: a God had designed and created the heavens and the earth. Until then I was told that God existed but on that night I understood that He existed.

 

Who was He? I did not know but I knew He existed and He was great.

 

Doubts, Disappointments, and Rebellion

 

My dad was a devoted Catholic and he was an altar boy as a child but after two wars and the economic sanctions under a ruthless dictator he started to doubt his faith. So after the Gulf War, when I finally got to spend some time with him and know him, he imparted his doubts onto me. I was still young, in my early teens, so I was easily impressible and so I embraced his doubts as mine. On top of my new doubts I was becoming very disappointed with the Roman Catholic denomination for many reasons.

 

When I was 12 years old I enrolled in Sunday school in the summer break to be prepared for my first communion. They seated me in the front and paired me with this beautiful girl who was my age. There was a boy named Emmanuel who was trouble (he was always up to no good) and they had seated him in the back. As usual I kept my distance from troublesome kids and minded my own business. I did not talk much anyway especially to the girls because I was very shy. We rehearsed everything and everything was going according to plan. On the day of the first communion a nun came and kind of escorted me by the shoulders all the way to the back of the column and gave Emmanuel my spot at the front. I did not know why and, as usual, I did not protest. Not long after I found out the reason: Emmanuel’s uncle was a deacon, so when his parents saw their son standing in the back of the line they asked his uncle to move Emmanuel to the front to stand next to the beautiful girl.

 

I was not disappointed with Emmanuel, after all he was just a boy like me, or his parents, after all they are just ordinary people, but I was very disappointed with the nun and his uncle the deacon for showing favouritism. There were other incidents that disappointed me. One time in Christmas mass I was sick with the flu and I had asthma so I got up to go outside to catch my breath and go to the washroom. As I opened the side door a priest was walking in so he asked me where I was going, so I explained to him that I was sick and needed some fresh air and he said, “You liar! You probably want to skip mass to hang out with the bad kids!” I was taken back by his comment, first because he accused me of lying which is something I did not do and hated, second he had no reason to assume I was a liar, and third I did my best to avoid bad crowds. I was very disappointed by how unclean the priest’s heart was.

 

Even though I became more and more disappointed with the Catholic denomination, I actually stayed a very devoted Catholic: I would still pray to the saints and follow the Catholic decrees. Instead, I started crumpling against God, doubted the Bible and especially disliked the Lord Jesus Christ to the point of disliking my name because Fadi means “Saviour” in Arabic! I had two dear friends, Ayad and Furat, who used to always try to restore my faith: they reasoned with me and quoted scripture but nothing helped. I was too stubborn to listen, too blind to see, and too self-righteous to believe—I had made up my mind that God was wrong and I was right, He was the bad guy and I was the good guy. I believed in Him, I just did not like Him!

 

Not by Works

 

Around the time of my first communion, my grandmother read the story of Joseph son of Jacob to my sister and me. I was very impressed by Joseph and set him as my role-model (until today) and I became more interested in spirituality, the Bible, and the Christian faith. In summer time I started going to church every morning and confessing my sins until the priest told me to stop confessing my sins every day! I started reading Catholic prayer books and did the Sacred Heart of Jesus month and the Immaculate Heart of Mary month readings and prayers. I reciting those shorts Catholic prayers such as “Holy Mary, pray for us” all the time. I felt peace when I did those religious tasks and felt closer to God.

 

One Sunday school they were giving New Testaments away so I took one (even though we had half a dozen Bibles at home) just because it had an orange cover and I love the colour orange! Having nothing to do in Iraq’s hot summer afternoons and excited about my orange-cover Bible I started reading the New Testament. A couple of weeks later I asked my grandmother, “What do I have to do to go to heaven?” And she gave me the classic Middle Eastern answer, “When you die God will weigh your good words versus your bad works. If your good works are more than your bad works then you go to heaven. And if your bad works are more than your good works then you go to hell.” That sounded fair to me so I made up my mind that next morning I would be the best righteous Fadi I could be!

 

The next morning I woke up early because lazy was “bad works”. I helped my sister with cleaning and resisted to rush to the streets to play with my friends, because helping and self-control were “good works”! I prayed my morning prayer and read some Catholic prayer book. I was obedient to my sister and did not give her hard time (probably the hardest thing to resist doing!) I also pushed all evil thoughts away from my mind and asked for forgiveness right away from any evil thought. Everything was going according to plan but by noon I was getting exhausted; a sinful human living a righteous life is as exhausting as if I had tried to live as a pig—it was contrary to my nature so it was a spiritual fight every second of it! But I still “prevailed” until the afternoon when the doorbell rang.

 

I looked from the kitchen window and saw it was a beggar boy; it was common for beggars in Iraq to go house to house asking for money or food especially in the years of the economic sanctions. Of course on that day I had to outgive myself so I took double the amount of money I usually gave and went outside. It was very sunny and bright and it was hot. I tiptoed so I would not burn my feet because the ground was very hot. I gave the boy the money and quickly looked through the door to see if my friends were outside or not. They were not so I headed back inside.

 

As I entered the hallway I realized I could not see anything because my eyes had not adjusted yet to the darkness so I thought to myself “Be careful, you don’t want to hit your little toe against the stairwell!” So I slowed my steps down and still could see very little and that is when a verse from the Bible I had read few days ago flashed through my mind. It was Luke 17:7-10:

 

“Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”

 

And just like that it occurred me: all my “good” works are not credited to me as righteousness! So I knew then that salvation is not attained by works because good works is my duty! However, I still did not know how to go to heaven!

 

After that day I stopped trying to live a righteous life by obeying man-made strict religious laws. I was angry that I was given wrong information about how to go to heaven—there is no scale of good versus bad works! And how could my grandmother a devoted Catholic for over 70 years not know that? So I started paying more attention at mass and realized there is no message of how to go to heaven. Most of the time the priest made little sense and talked about things that were irrelevant to my daily life. To make it worse most of the mass rituals were carried out either in Latin or Aramaic and I did not understand either! Also, it seemed that the priest answer to all life problems was: “God wants to test your patience!” Why did this happen to me? “God wants to test your patience!” Why did God say this in the Bible? “You shouldn’t question God. God wants to test your patience!” What does this mean? “God wants to test your patience!”

 

So I vowed after that day to never trust anyone with any spiritual teaching: I was going to test the faiths to see which one, if any, has any validity. If I found a faith that had any authority to its teachings then I would accept it as the truth and follow it. I did not mind people lying to me or misleading me in trivial matters, but going to hell was serious business—I wanted to know where I went after I died!

 

The Reality of Death

 

(Warning: This section is graphic so reader discretion is advised!)

 

If you live in Iraq you cannot ignore death. Growing up in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war I occasionally saw taxis driving by with Iraq flag-covered coffins on top. That did not scare me as it was a common sight. However, three incidents occurred that made me understand that death is real, it is a serious problem, and it is inevitable.

 

The first incident happened while watching TV at dinner time: the news showed two Iraqi soldiers captured by the Iranians. The first soldier was shot on the spot which kind of fazed me because I was about 7 or 8 years old and had never seen a person killed before, but the second soldier had his hands tied to two Jeeps. One of his arms was severed when the two vehicles moved apart, and he was shot afterwards. I was in shock because I had not known before that humans can be so evil and can inflict such violence and pain on another human. I thought people died peacefully in their sleep!

 

The second incident happened in 1991 during the Kurdish uprising right after the Gulf War; I was 8 years old. After Iraq’s loss in the Gulf War the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south were convinced that the Iraqi army was weakened to the point where they can overthrow Saddam Hussein. So the Kurds advanced south toward Baghdad and in the process took control of the city I lived in, Kirkuk. However, a couple of weeks after retreating the army advanced into the city to regain control. One day in the battle between the Iraqi army and the Kurd rebels (known as Peshmerga) I went up to the roof of our house without my mom’s knowledge to see an army helicopter firing its weapons. I did not know at the time that weapons were horrible—I thought weapons were “cool”. There were no deaths in our neighbourhood so I did not give thought to the consequences of war. Not long after the firefight started the army took Kirkuk back and for few days everybody was scared and the streets were quite empty. It was an unusually quiet time for a city that just went through the turmoil of mass looting and a civil war.

 

Few days after the army recaptured Kirkuk, our neighbour--who lived across the street from our house--wanted to go see his daughter’s family who lived in Arafa (a mostly Christian neighbourhood on the outskirt of Kirkuk) to check on them because there were no phone lines and he was worried about them. His name was Matta (which means Matthew in Arabic) and he was an older man in his 60s or 70s, but because the government car he drove was stolen during the looting he asked if he can fill our car with gas to go see his daughter. My mom agreed (my dad was not home because he had to join the army) and her and I went with him. The streets were quiet but as soon as we reached the main road I saw two bodies covered in blankets. I was taken back by the view of two dead bodies lying on the side walk of the city’s main road. I had been through that street many times, and I never thought I would one day see dead bodies lying on the side walk!

 

After Matta checked on his family we drove back and a checkpoint was set up at a roundabout so we stopped. As Matta talked to the soldier I looked to my left outside the car window to see a dead young Kurd in the centre of the roundabout. He was may be in his late 20s or early 30s. He had a dark curly hair and dark skin and had facial hair. I do not know how long he was dead for but he was not dead for long even though the blood running from his body was kind of thick and dry. I mostly remember the flies flying in and around his face—and I think this image imprinted this incident in my memory. Because I thought, “How helpless is a dead person? He can’t even shoo away a fly from his face? Is this how I will end up?” The answer was “yes”—that is the fate of all human beings. Death is our biggest problem.

 

I was 8 years old then so I was not ready to see that but I understood then what death was, and I had never understood what death means before then. I knew when people died they were buried but I did not understand that death is ugly and tragic. For some reason, I kept trying to figure out who the dead young Kurd looked like then I realized he did not look like anyone I had known—he was a unique human being and his death was a loss not only to his loved ones but to humanity as a whole. I also understood that death is an ugly problem every human has to face. I realized when people die they do not just disappear as in action movies—in one scene they are killed and in the next scene they are gone. Death is real, ugly, tragic, and inevitable. I believe that incident trigger me to think about life’s meaning, searching for God, and know my place in the universe. But most importantly I really wanted to know what happens to me after death! I wanted to know if there was something more after life, or a corpse is all I was going to end up as!

 

The third incident I definitely was not ready for. I was may be 9 or 10 years old when they showed on the news images of the Amiriyah shelter bombing which happened during the Gulf War. The shelter was located in the Amiriyah neighbourhood and it was bombed by two “smart bombs”: the first bomb cut through the 3m of reinforce concrete while the second one went through the hole made by the first bomb. Over 400 civilians, mostly women and children, died. The images shown on TV were graphic: amputated and charred bodies of mothers and children fused together; human skin stuck on walls; burned corpses of screaming victims.

 

Again I was in shocked of the graphic violence of the incident and I was scared. At night I could not sleep because images of the dead kept flashing in my mind—images of their faces and corpses haunted me. And it was winter time so my mom would turn the electric heater from the evening until morning to warm up the bed room during the night, but I was too scared to uncover myself because of the images of the dead. I could not have a good night sleep because it was too hot to sleep and I was too scared to come out from underneath the blanket! As usual, I never shared my struggles and feelings with anyone. This went on for a couple of months until summer.

 

After that summer I was never again scared of the dark or death, but death became a reality of life that I could not ignore. Death has its way of maturing a person: you never live life the same after taking death into consideration. So many things and dreams become unimportant and so many things and dreams become important if you only keep in mind that you will die. So knowing who God is, who I am to Him, why He created me, and where I am heading after death became very important topics to me.

 

A Precious Gift

 

Around the age of 14 I started to become lonely because as teenagers all my close friends (aged 13 to 17) were interested in doing teenager things but I was never interested in joining them. Suddenly they stopped playing sports and decided to go downtown to chase after girls, which I wanted no part in. They spent time, energy, and money to look their best and buy the latest fashion to impress girls, which did not appeal to me. The summer break and fall of when I was 14 was very depressing; I was alone and the fall weather was gloomy and cloudy with no sun. I spent a lot of time thinking about life and asking: it can’t be that a great God exists but He is not interested in me! It makes no sense for Him to create me and create all those amazing and beneficial things for me then forgets me! There must be more to life than chasing girls and getting the latest in fashion! I know I am going to die but what am I supposed to do with my life in the meantime? And how do I go to heaven?

 

We only had one complete Bible in our house which belonged to my grandmother and it was a really old book; the other Bibles we had were only the New Testament. My sister wanted to read the Old Testament so she asked our neighbour and my friend, Furat, to get her one. (For some reason the Old Testament was not easily acquired at that time, may be because Iraq is a predominantly Muslim country and the Old Testament is all about God’s chosen people—the nation of Israel.) Furat was active in the church and had many friends so he was able to get a hold of a new copy of the complete Bible. He refused to get paid back for the price of the book (even though 400 dinars at the time was a lot of money)—he said it was a gift. For some reason my sister did not read the Old Testament so I took ownership of it. I started reading it starting with Genesis and I was amazed by it: here was an account of earth and human history from Adam, the first man, to 2,000 years ago! I remember sharing with two of my younger Muslim friends about how amazing the Bible was and they listened, but few weeks later we left Iraq to Jordan.

 

I cried a lot on the way to Jordan: I missed my home, my friends, my neighbours, and my country. Until that moment in my life Iraq is all I had known. We did not have the Internet so all things I did and knew were Iraqi things done the Iraqi way! We settled in Amman the capitol of Jordan and started our immigration papers to come to Canada where the rest of my mother’s family is. Few months later my aunt’s family joined us in Amman (they were the last family we had in Iraq) to do their immigration papers to go to Sweden where my cousin lives; it was my aunt (my mom’s oldest sister), her husband (who is also my dad’s uncle), and my two cousins. Being the insecure and shy kid I was meant I made no friends in Jordan, and being bitter toward the church meant I did not even go to church with my family. I would watch them take the stairs down to the main road (Amman is built on mountains so there are long stairs wherever you go) but I could never bring myself to go with them. Also, my insecurities and low confidence prevented me from meeting new people and made me feel very uncomfortable in social settings.

 

I simply stayed home and read the Old Testament for hours every day; I would read over a dozen of chapters every day. I was amazed by the God of the Old Testament and I wanted to become a Jewish Rabbi because I had found the true God! My uncle told me, “Israel has borders with Jordan. It’s not that far if you are serious about becoming a Rabbi!” I liked the God of the Old Testament but I still did not like Jesus Christ; I guess it was Satan’s last efforts to prevent me from getting saved.

 

Also, because I spent a lot of time by myself I started to realize that my mind and thoughts were always changing (which is a common thing for any human especially a teenager), but I was not reaching a point of knowing. I tried to explain life and live by following rules I had learnt from experiences but my experiences always changed and I always changed so my rules changed and I was again at the start point: Why did this happen? How should I respond to this situation? Is this action right or wrong? I did not know the answers to these questions and more. I was frustrated because my life events had no clear purpose or pattern I could understand and follow. Every time I looked back at myself from a month ago I realized I had yet again changed in no certain direction—I just randomly changed. This pattern of continuous random change scared me: how will I know to make the right decisions in the future if my thoughts keep changing? How will I choose the correct career and wife if I do not know who I am and what I am looking for! It is like trying to measure a length using a ruler that is always changing! Experiences, feelings, opinions and beliefs were not good enough for me: I wanted to know, I wanted truth!

 

Wrong Attitude

 

While I was getting all this information about God and how He works from reading the Old Testament, I still had the wrong attitude toward God. One day my sister came back from church and told me how it was wrong to pray to the saint and that was a shocking thing to say to a “devoted” Roman Catholic! I was upset with her words and told her, “How can you say we should not pray to the Virgin Mary?!” As far as I was concerned, what she was saying was sacrilegious! It is sad how I liked Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the other “saints”, but I did not like the Lord Jesus Christ Himself!

 

One evening in Amman, our neighbour--an Iraqi Catholic named Emad--came to visit us. He was in his 30s and was sitting at the table looking outside the window while I was sitting on a mattress on the floor (we did not have much in Jordan). I was making my case against God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Bible—mostly doubts I had heard my dad say (I was not that original!) I kept going on and on but he rarely looked at me and he did not seem fazed by my arguments against God. When I finally finished talking he looked at me and said in a scoffing manner, “So you are telling me that you know better than the Son of God?” WOW! That was all I needed to hear!

 

First, I shut my mouth because I realized I was “arguing” with a man twice my age which is a shameful thing to do in the Middle East. Second, and most importantly my spirit was quieted because I realized there is a huge problem with my belief system: how could I say that I believe God is great and all-knowing and all-powerful yet claim to know more than Him? How could I trust His knowledge if I knew more than Him? What’s the point of following God if I am smarter than Him? Why would He gives us truth in some things while mislead us in other things? Jesus Chris is the Son of God—I am not fighting against a man but God Himself!

 

So two things happened that evening: first, I started liking Jesus Christ because I finally understood He deserved the respect I gave the God of the Old Testament because He is the Son of God; second, I stopped questioning God’s Word to prove I am right and God is wrong, and started asking God to explain to me His Word. There is a big difference between the two: questioning comes with the wrong attitude of fighting against God, while asking comes with the right attitude of desiring to know God. On that day I humbled myself and gave God the respect He deserves—I laid down my arrogance and self-centeredness.

 

So far God had arranged my circumstances and changed me to know He is real, give me enough discernment to know we are not saved by works, gave me time to think about life and death and what happens after death, have knowledge of His Word (especially the Old Testament which I was not familiar with before), quieted my spirit and humbled me, but I still did not know what is the next step. The big questions were always: How do I go to heaven? What does all this mean to me?

 

Three Books, One Message

 

My aunt’s family had a Syrian neighbour who was Christian (born-again or not, I do not know) and his immigration papers came to Sweden so he took his family and stuff and immigrated to Sweden but left some things behind. One of the things he left behind were six books (two copies of three books) written by Josh McDowell titled: Evidence That Demands A Verdict, More Than A Carpenter, and Jesus: A Biblical Defense of His Deity. My uncle took one of each copy and gave me the other, so I started reading those books. It all made sense because I had just finished reading the Old Testament and knew the prophecies about Jesus—I finally understood who the Gospel writers were quoting! But I still needed something more to be convinced, more than good arguments and a testimony—I wanted tangible evidence. So what really made an impact on me are these three points:

 

1) Prophecies. Prophecies are very important because a lot of people can write “holy” books but what prove their authority are prophecies because no one knows the future but God. And this was not one prophecy or two, but hundreds that all came true in one person--the person of Jesus Christ! And they were not some random prophecies that did not have anything to do with each other. No, they were all parts of one plane: God’s plan to save mankind from sin and hell through the death of His Son Jesus Christ. The strange part is that they were written by different men in different places from different times, so how could all these prophecies agree on the message and make so much sense unless they were inspired by God!

 

Prophecies also give witness to Jesus Christ. So many religions were started by one person with no witnesses to His authority; Jewish law required at least two witness for a trial otherwise it would be one person’s word versus another person’s word. By what authority does a person start a religion? Self-righteousness? One’s own words? Who is to back him up? That is why some religions started by the sword: if people were not convinced by evidence they were persuaded by fear. But that is not how it is with Jesus Christ (apart from His miracles and the Father witnessing to Him) those prophecies witness to Him as the promised coming Saviour. And He did not need to harm anyone for people to follow Him.

 

2) The character, life, and death of Jesus Christ and His followers. Nothing made sense: why would His disciples die for Him? He did not give them money, fame, or earthly power, or allowed them to have carnal desires, or anything of that nature. On the contrary, they lived difficult lives full of hunger, chased, persecuted, put on trials and executed but still refused to deny Him as their Lord! And Why would He or they die for a lie? Were they crazy or delusional? They did not sound like it! Unless, they saw something supernatural in the person of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is real. Nothing else could explain to me their lives. Jesus Christ definitely was not crazy for how can a crazy man teach such noble things? And He definitely was not lying for how can a liar—a sinner--perform miracles?

 

3) How bizarre is Christianity comparing to all other world religions! Seriously, have you thought about how difficult it is for a dozen of men who lived in different times and places to conspire to write about the same God with the same salvation plan? And what an unlikely story for one person to come up with, yet they all had to agree on the following:

 

a. God is three Persons in One. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

b. The Son of God became a human. That is God in His entire glory and greatness manifest Himself as a human child.

c. The Son of God is born of a virgin! (Do you see now how bizarre it is for a man to come up with this story?)

d. He is born in a manger. He leads a simple and poor life, often times persecuted. (Remember, we are not talking about some monk here, we are talking about God Himself taking a form of a meek human being!)

e. He was a miracle worker to the likes of nobody! He opened the eyes of the blind, raised the dead, and walked on water.

f. Salvation is not by human works but by faith in the Son of God, that is: believing God’s Son died for your sins. (When was the last time you heard of a religion that teaches salvation is not by human good works?) All world religions teach: we must reach up to God—humanly it makes sense! While Christianity teaches that God reached down to us!

g. Not only the Son of God dies but He rose from the dead!

h. His followers will be indwelt by the Holy Spirit who will live the life of Christ through them!

 

And the list goes on and on—such an unlikely story to be written and die for! I do not know about you but if I made my own religion it would not sound something like this! It would be a simple “do good, go to heaven; do bad, go to hell”. Love those who love you (who teaches to love their enemies and expects large followers?) There is one god made up of one person (so much easier to be accepted than three persons make one God!) And enjoy life on earth as much as you can (power, fame, comfort, all kind of pleasures) because I know the there is no god and no heaven or hell—I made them up!

 

Christianity’s unusual doctrine and events are not made for the sake of making it a “strange” religion. Each one of these doctrines and events had a purpose and was designed this way. There is a reason for the virgin birth. There is a reason for the death on the cross. There is a reason why the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead. There is a reason the Son of God had to die and not somebody else. There is a reason why we cannot gain righteousness by works. And the list goes on and on: everything has a purpose to fulfill God’s divine plan to save mankind.

 

A lot of religions have very noble and admirable teachings but they still lack authority. You see the problem is that truth is truth: it is not about how much I like it, whether I accept it or not, or I agree with it or not. Jesus Chris is the truth and I could not avoid this fact.

 

Saved at Last

 

One day I was laying on a straw carpet close to a window in the afternoon and the sun rays were shinning on me and I was reading the last chapter of the last of the three books. At the end of the book, the author Josh McDowell wrote his own testimony of coming to Christ and his struggle to forgive his old drunkard father prior to coming to Christ. He asked if the reader wanted to give their lives to Jesus Christ and there was a short prayer (also known as the sinner’s prayer) and I desperately needed this 3- 4 years spiritual crisis to be over with because I had made up my mind that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour and I need to surrender my life to Him. So I prayed asking God to forgive my sins because I was a sinner and I accepted the death of His Son, Jesus Christ, on the Cross as payment for my sins, and I invited the Holy Spirit into my heart to change me into the likeness of Jesus Christ. For the first two days I was the happiest I had ever been--I felt like I was floating on air; as if the weight of the world was taken off my shoulders!

 

I did not know what happened to me but I knew few things right away: I was happy and worry free; I had peace and joy; and I started to see things differently. Suddenly I started to know good from evil and it stayed that way--the next day, next week, or next month--the good did not become evil and evil become good. I grew in my knowledge of the truth but the truth never changed.

 

A couple of months later we immigrated to Canada. In Canada, I still did not know what had just happened to me, and if there were other people out there who had gone through the same experience of salvation. Because I still did not go to church and did not socialize with others, I had no idea what was going on and so I kept praying the sinner’s prayer every day to remind myself that I was saved by faith through God’s grace and not by works. Not long after coming to Canada (may be a year or so) I was watching TV on a Sunday evening when I came across the InTouch program by Dr. Charles Stanley. That is when I understood what happened and I gradually grew in my Christian faith and still growing. One Sunday while I was listening to Charles Stanley on TV my uncle asked me, “Do you really believe in this nonsense?” I simply answered, “Yes, I do.” My uncle’s words and attitude reminded me of myself, not long ago, before coming to Christ: I also was an enemy of Christ, but God in His grace not only sent His Son to die for my sins but also sent the Holy Spirit to draw me to Him so I believe and be saved.

 

Giving up my Roman Catholic identity was a much harder battle. I still prayed to the Virgin Mary for three years, mainly out of habit, after coming to Christ. Until one day when I realized it was idolatry and had no spiritual value.

 

The work God had done in my life in the last 15 years and His love and faithfulness are more than I can include here. The testimony you read here is just the beginning because I could write about His love forever.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Final Words

 

Here I would to discuss issues that are related to my testimony but I did not include them in the testimony because I did not want to disturb the flow of the story.

 

The Birthday Incident

 

I had forgotten about the birthday incident, but about two years ago I prayed, “Lord, why do I hate my birthday? Why don’t I celebrate it like everybody else? Why don’t I like receiving gifts? Why do I always feel guilty and as if I am a burden on others?” A couple of weeks after I prayed that prayer I remembered the birthday incident—it all makes sense now. God has been faithful in every single way. He has been faithful in trying to heal my heart and emotional scars.

 

Salvation Is God’s Work

 

Salvation is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Bible says, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day.” (John 6:44) I did not come to Christ through my own intelligence or effort—my testimony is a testimony of God’s faithfulness. When I did not understand He exists and He is great, He showed me His amazing creation. When I did not know where my life was headed, He showed me the reality of death. When I was busy, He provided me with a quiet time and the opportunity to read. When I did not understand who the Lord Jesus Christ is, He gave me the Old Testament to read and understand that Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah. When I had doubts, He gave me books that answered my questions. When I had the wrong heart attitude, He humbled me. When I was too shy to go to church, He reached me through books. When I fought against Him, He was patient because He saw my ignorance and confusion and lovingly led me to become His child. (Romans 2:4)

 

I would love to tell you that I was this genius kid who had this great spiritual discernment and understood God’s mind! But it was not like this at all! God saw my confusion, took me to a place and a time and patiently waited for me to open my eyes and see, then He did the same thing over and over again until I reached a point where I was ready to accept His Son, Jesus Christ, as my Lord and Saviour! How much more shall I say about God’s goodness and faithfulness?

 

Everything happened to me was God’s divine work to bring me to Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ. It was not my self-effort—I simply responded to His moves and when I did not He waited and used other methods to reach me. None of the things I mentioned in my testimony can be considered “miraculous”, actually a doubting person can simply look at these events as mere coincidences. However, so many things happen around us are God’s divine work and design but we cease to see them as such—we brushed them off as coincidence. Even painful events God can use for our good. There were many instances before I came to Christ where God worked in my life—not because I was His child but because He wanted to lead me to Himself to become His child.

 

The sinner’s prayer does not save anyone—the “sinner’s prayer” can simply express the desires of those who are ready to be born-again. Simply asking someone to read the “sinner’s prayer” will do no good if the Holy Spirit has not led that person to the point in their lives where they are ready to repent of their sins and turn to Christ as their only hope of salvation. Also, saying the “sinner’s prayer” is not a proof that someone is saved; the Bible says that the fruit of the Spirit--that is, us abiding in Christ so the Holy Spirit can live Christ’ life through us--is the proof that we are saved.

 

“And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.” (Ephesians 1:13)

 

None of that “I prayed the sinner’s prayer” or “I felt Goosebumps” is evidence of our salvation. If you have to keep rededicating your life to Christ then maybe you do not want to be part of Christ—may be you are not saved, may be you are not a child of God. I am not saying the sinner’s prayer does not work: what I am saying is that it only works for those who the Holy Spirit has prepared to be born-again.

 

The Bible says, “Very truly I [Jesus Christ] tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3) And in verse 6 it says, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

 

Why did our Lord use the birth experience to explain the born-again experience? Because being born-again is the work of the Spirit—it is not your work and it is not someone else’s work. Others can help the Spirit (just like a doctor and nurses help a pregnant woman), but it is the Spirit who has to do the work (just like it is the mother who has to give birth). And just like there is a nine month period of time for a child to be ready to be born, so there is also a preparation period for our sinful hearts to turn to and accept Christ. A person does not come out of a strip club for a smoke, then you ask him if he wants to go to heaven (who doesn’t?) then ask him to read the sinner’s prayer if he wants to go to heaven, then he goes back to the strip club and does so for the rest of his life and then you declare him to be born-again! It does not work this way!

 

Remember, it is not your work to save someone else. Often times you are only one link in the process of leading someone to Christ. Do not be discouraged or dishearten if you do not see the fruit of your labour right away; after all, sinners are not rejecting you—they are rejecting Jesus Christ.

 

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” (John 15:18)

 

I thank the Lord that by His grace and mercy He kept giving me chances to come to Him after rebelling against Him for years. Just like He never gave up on me, we should never give up on another person who is so blinded by Satan that he or she cannot see the truth of God’s Word.

 

The hymn “At Calvary” perfectly explains my salvation experience.

 

Peace Through Works

 

Believe it or not, I actually had peace before I came to Christ! It was not permanent and it was not fulfilling. It was peace acquired through doing good works and following decrees; it was peace tied to my performance, feelings, and circumstances. I had peace if I read the Catholic prayer books or read the Immaculate Heart of Mary devotional book. It was a momentary peace tied to my works. The Lord Jesus Christ does not say we will not have peace in this world but that the peace He gives us is different than the world’s peace.

 

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (John 14:27)

 

Of course this worldly and work-based peace is very damaging because it deceives us into thinking that we can acquire more peace if we do more good works. So we end up becoming more religious and busier trying to please God all the while we are heading straight to hell. The peace I have now is not based on me or my circumstances—the peace I have now is based on God’s Word. I live by faith knowing that I am saved only because Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, paid for my sins on the cross. Nothing can take this away from me. Worldly peace is a counterfeit trying to mimic true peace which is the fruit of the Holy Spirit through abiding in Christ, but it will never be able to withstand trials and the test of time.

 

Satan will give you his version of peace--actually he will give you anything--to keep you away from Christ. The worldly peace I had was misleading: it misled me into believing I could have peace apart from Christ, and it misled me into thinking I could approach God my way.

 

Approaching God

 

The problem we have is not that we do not know God, but that God does not know us! If I went to the White House asking to see the president of the United States telling the guards that I knew him, will the guards let me in? Of course not! For me to get in the guards have to first verify if the president knows me! We have not separated ourselves from God; no, He separated Himself from us! He is the one who banished Adam and Even from the Garden of Eden—they did not leave voluntary! He is the one who has problem with sin because He is the Holy and Righteous one; we are sinners—sin is what we do, we love it!

 

If I am a man who wants to ask a lady’s hand in marriage then I have to meet her requirements and the requirements of her parents. Why is that? Because I am the one who wants to marry her and so I have to measure up to her expectations of being a godly husband and father and a leader and protector of the family. Therefore, I cannot approach her my way—I cannot offer what I want to offer. No, I have to approach her the way she expects and offers her what she wants! It is the same thing when we approach God: we have to approach Him the way He says is acceptable to Him and that is through His Son Jesus Christ.

 

In all religions God forgives by forgetting; that is, God’s mercy is not balanced by His justice. His justice book is not balanced—it does not add up to zero! Our sins are somehow forgiven but are not paid for! In Christianity God forgives by placing the punishment for sin on His Son Jesus Christ. His justice and requirement punishment for sin, namely death, is balanced by the death of His Son. God’s holiness, justice, mercy, and love are all satisfied. His justice book is balanced because Jesus paid it all!

 

In all religions God is holy and hates sin but He is not so holy and hates sin to the degree where He can’t just forget about it! If you do a bit of this and that and ask for forgiveness then He is merciful and will just forgive you! But in Christianity God is so holy and hates sin so much that there is no way He is just forgetting about it—justice must be served and the punishment for sin is death! He is infinitely holy and we are infinitely sinful, therefore, we are infinitely separated from Him. But He is also infinitely merciful and loving and to save us He sent His only begotten Son, the sinless Jesus Christ, to die for our sins. This way His justice is satisfied because sin’s death punishment is satisfied through the Cross, and the infinite gap between sinful man and holy God is spanned. It is not only spanned but God came to live inside man through the person of the Holy Spirit!

 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

 

“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23)

 

“…the Spirit of truth...lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:17)

 

Not Blind Faith

 

I do not like the phrase “blind faith”. I actually had not heard of this phrase until I came to Canada! I do not like the phrase because I do not agree with it. To agree with it is to say that God is unwise, unreasonable, and scared!

 

God knows that there are many beliefs and religions out there, so if He did not give us enough evidence of who He is and His plan then we would not be able to discern which prophet is sent from Him and which is not! Which faith is true and which is not! They all cannot be true because they have conflicting teachings! All gods cannot be the One true God! It would be unwise of Him not to give us evidence of His truth when He knows we could easily follow the wrong faiths. And it would be unreasonable of Him to not to give us reasonable proofs of His identity and will and still expect us to know Him and obey Him! Unless He is scared that we find out He is not real! May be He is keeping us at bay because He does not want us to discover the reality that He does not exist! Growing up in the Roman Catholic denomination I had a feeling that God was very insecure, so you can imagine my shock when I read Malachi 3:10 in the Old Testament, “Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty!

 

The reason I am bringing this up is that our faith should not be a blind faith—it must be built on a foundation. Sometimes in life when we go through trials and pain we have to preserve through faith—you may call it “blind” faith—but how do you know the Bible is God’s Word? I will go back to the three points that convinced me of the authority of the Bible and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

 

Suppose I told you, “Our friend Chris will come in a rental car” and he shows up in a rental car, what would the first thing you would ask? It would be, “How did you know?” Why? Because you know that the chances of me guessing accurately on that day Chris will show up in a rental car are very slim. Now suppose I also said, “Christ will show up in a yellow shirt” and he does, now you know that I did not simply guess but I knew these things! It is the same with prophecies: they are God’s way of wanting us to know who is sent by Him and who is not because we know that no one knows the future but Him—it is not blind faith if you know!

 

For the sake of the argument, let us assume that Jesus Christ had planned to fulfill some prophecies to impersonate the coming Messiah, namely: to die on the cross. How did he manage to plan the prophecies concerning His birth? Let us assume His disciples lied in the gospels about Him fulfilling His birth prophecies. Why would they die for a lie? Not only they would have died for a lie, but they gained nothing a human would want in return: long comfortable life, wealth, power and fame. They received none of that! Jesus Christ promised them two things: eternal life and persecution! Eternal life they could not see but persecution was very much real! To make their story even more bizarre they were not only following but also worshipping who in public opinion was a convicted and executed criminal! When was the last time the idea of worshiping an executed criminal appealed to you? Exactly! They saw and experienced someone very real--the Son of God and the Holy Spirit—to give up everything including their lives for this God!

 

Personal testimony is good but I wanted to base my faith on more than stories. I am sorry to word it this way, I am not trying to dismiss testimonies—they are the work of God—otherwise I would not have written my testimony. But I understood that people are emotional creatures and anything could change us, I knew that first hand because my thoughts were always changing. If someone told you his testimony of how boxing changed his life, how he was a street kid but now he has a purpose and stays away from bad influence, does this make boxing a religion or his trainer a prophet? Of course not! Testimonies are good to strengthen our faith, but not to base our faith on them because for every Christian testimony I can bring you a testimony of someone of a different religion. God wants us to know!

 

Why Christ?

 

I often asked myself: Why did I doubt the Bible? And why did I hate the Lord Jesus Christ? If I was disappointed with the Roman Catholic denomination, then why did I not hate being a Roman Catholic? If I was disappointed with the priest who called me a liar, then why did I not hate him? If I was disappointed with the nun who moved me to the last row at my first communion, then why did I not hate her? If the teachings and decrees of the Roman Catholic denomination did not make sense to me, then why did I not hate those teachings? Why did I not hate Moses, or King David, or Elijah, or the apostle Paul? If I had doubts, why did I not doubt God’s existence? Why did I not doubt the teachings of the Roman Catholic denomination? Why did I instead hate the person of Jesus Christ and doubt God’s Word?

 

The answer is simple: Satan blinded me and focused my doubts on God’s Word and turned my disappointments as hatred toward the Lord Jesus Christ because Satan knew that God’s Word can lead me to Jesus Christ who can save me. Satan did not care if I was a devoted Roman Catholic or not. Satan did not care if I believed in God, a god, or gods. The Bible says, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that--and shudder.” (James 2:19)

 

These things do not save me! What saves us from our sins is faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and His death on the Cross as payment for our sins. How do we come to this knowledge? Through God’s Word! And that is why Satan is willing to give us everything else but knowledge of God’s Word and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

 

Death

 

When I came to Canada at the age of 15 I was surprised that Canadians live as if they are not going to die: they live only for this world and for now.

 

The objective is not to focus on death--death is only a gateway--but to focus on our lives after death. Not long ago my 11 years old nephew told me about all those things he wants to accomplish when he grows up—things the world is concerned with—and how he would retire as a rich old man. So I asked him, “And then?” He thought about it for a second then answered, “I guess I die.” I asked him again, “And then?” And he looked baffled because he had thought of everything except death and he definitely did not think about eternity. He made the classical error of seeing death as an end when in reality it is the beginning. Satan distracts us with so many present worldly things just so we do not plan for eternal heavenly glory!

 

If we remember every morning that one day we will die then we will be more focused spiritually and make decisions with eternity in mind. Praying, giving, serving, forgiving, and loving will become our priority.

 

The Difference

 

So how am I different now than before coming to Christ? Well, I am saved now and have the Holy Spirit and God is working in me, through me, and in my life. But also God addressed my problems.

 

Do I still have trichotillomania? Yes, I do. It is not as bad as before and I have learned not to focus on it. Satan wants us to focus on our problems—whether big or small—but the Lord has taught me to focus on Him so I do not miss His plan for my life. Do I still have low self-confidence? Yes, I do. However, I have learned to be confident in the Lord. Before I could not make decisions because I had no self-confidence and no other source of confidence, but now I have the Lord as my source of confidence. The good part is that I am always drawing closer to Him because I know I will not be able to function and make important decisions without Him; this way I also know those decisions will be blessed because their source was Him. Do I still feel anxious in a crowd? Yes, but now I can have courage in Him. Just like He replaced my low self-confidence with His sufficient confidence, He also replaced my anxiety with His sufficient courage.

 

Am I still shy and feel awkward in social settings? Yes. But I learned that God can use us different ways: maybe I do not have what it takes to stand in front of a crowd and talk, but I can write! Not everyone comes to faith by hearing—some, like me, come to faith by reading! God does not see my shyness as a problem, after all He created me and He knows I am an introvert. Personality traits are not a sin: being funny versus serious is not a sin, being an introvert versus extrovert is not a sin, being talkative versus quiet is not a sin, excelling in math versus the arts is not a sin! He created every one of us to be unique, to fulfill a certain purpose in His plan to preach the gospel to the lost. Sin is a problem, shyness is not—not once did the Holy Spirit convict me of my shyness as being a sin! He did not solve my shyness problem because to Him it is not a problem.

 

Do I still feel guilty over past sins and do I still feel stupid? Yes, sometimes I do. Satan would bring something silly that happened in my childhood to mind to make me feel guilty or stupid, and the Holy Spirit would always remind me that I am forgiven by the blood of Jesus Christ and I have a new identity in Him. Those feelings and thoughts do not hinder me: I can confront them now with God’s truth and quickly move on. As many times as Satan attacks me I keep reminding myself that the war has been won 2,000 years ago at Calvary and Satan is just trying to win a pity battle here and there. There is nothing Satan can do to send me to Hell, but he sure will try to make me ineffective for God’s Kingdom.

 

Am I still searching for the truth? No, I found Him who is the truth. Does a runner keep running after reaching the finish line? Of course not! Before coming to Christ my thoughts were always changing: my thoughts were going in random circles toward no clear end. But now my thoughts are growing and being build up to know more of His truth. While I am still learning and growing, the knowledge the Holy Spirit taught me is not obsolete, on the contrary He is building my current knowledge on the previous lesson He taught me. My thoughts and knowledge are growing toward more of His truth; these are not some baseless thoughts with my ever-changing experiences as their reference. No, these are God’s truths written in His Word and carried out in my life.

 

The hymn “It Is Well with My Soul” best describes my Christian walk.

 

Lastly but Not Least

 

I am still friends with Ayad and Furat. In fact, they both now live in Toronto as I do! It is strange how 20 years ago they preached to me but now I preach to them the Good News of salvation by faith alone!

 

One day in Amman a tailor lady told my mom, “Why isn’t your son enrolled in school here? You don’t know how long you will stay in Jordan. Don’t waste his youth—let him continue his education here!” I often reflect back on those words: how many of us, with good intentions, give similar advice? Imagine if I had gone to school for that one year we spent in Jordan: imagine how busy I would have been, imagine how little time I would have had to read God’s Word, reflect on it, and read those evangelical books. Often times we try to help others but in reality we are interfering with God’s work. Give God the space and time to do His work—trust Him. He has never ever let me down. I was delayed a year in high school, so what? I gained eternal life instead! Do not rush God’s work; not everyone has to graduate from high school at the age of 18, go to university and graduate at the age of 22, find an office job and get married at the age of 26!

 

I will leave you with Proverbs 3:5-6:

 

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.”

 

(Toronto, ON; winter 2015.)

 

We live in a world that begs for perfection. An ideal that is so tangible, that even the greatest linguistic scholars would prefer to study the meaning of love than tackle this futile topic.

The funny thing is, if I was to tell you that perfectionism was a disease, you'd laugh and tell me that it is either a half cocked idea for attention or an elitist copout.

I disagree with both of the aforementioned. Here's why:

What if there was an illness that stopped you getting out of bed because you you were afraid you weren't going to be good enough?

What if every time you picked up a paint brush, you put it back down?

What if you could never finish a piece of art because you simply didn't know which move to make?

What's if every relationship you were ever in failed because you tried to be the best possible person, FOR the other person?

    

These symptoms could be put on laziness, obsessiveness or many of the levels of psychotic delusions that are floating around.

Think again.

Imagine you couldn't get out of bed because of the stereotypical perspective of the world around you didn't include your body image, size or job description?

Imagine you picked up the brush and put it back down, because you were afraid that you would never complete it the way you saw it in your head?

What's if you were building a piece of furniture, and you couldn't finish it, because you were so afraid of the last piece that was being put in place was not right, and you had no way of making it right?

What if you were constantly fucking up in a relationship and never knowing why, even though you thought you were doing the best you could?

    

These are all symptoms of perfectionism.

    

We are human, we are not perfect, yet the society that we live in has an idea that we climb a certain threshold, like a checkpoint in a video game we become inexcusable for the past levels errors, if we should happen to make them in our current environment.

    

This is fucked up.

The desire for perfect is futile, because, who are you being perfect for? Whose idealism are you striving for?

How is John Banks, living in suburbia, shooting weddings for a multitude of clientele constantly booked?

He believes in his shit.

He believes in his work.

    

Imagine if you could change the whole idea of failing, into the new thought "fear of being perfect"?

Imagine if it was the erroneous thought that had somehow bord it's way into your head and manifested itself into a fear, constantly changing and altering your present mindset.

    

Imagine saying to yourself "I didn't fuck up, I just feared I couldn't do it perfectly and that scared me".

    

This is the real story.

    

We are all so very capable of so very much, but the thing is, there is only a few elements of the social spectrum that are accepted as the norm. At the moment.

You think Van Gough gave a fuck about his popularity? Because that's all that perfectionism is… a desire for popularity.

    

You want your product to be good and in this age, well liked? So you perfect it.

I wanna say, fuck that shit in the ass.

    

Too much is going un noticed and un done because the perfectionist ideals out there.

The perfectionists are setting the standards and the perfectionists aren't releasing the goods.

That's fucked up.

    

This needs to change.

    

This weeks 52, exhibits the way I see the world, or at least want to. My initial idea was to place one splash image, the one, second from the last. The crown of splashes.

The thing is, whilst I was doing this, set up on a 200X150mm X 2 sheet of melamine with a speed gun and a turkey baster strapped to a clothing rack, I realised JUST HOW MUCH FUN IT WAS.

My idea of capturing the perfect went out the window and became an adventure of capturing the moment. As many times as I could.

    

It's not worth being perfect. There is nothing to strive for if you are.

     

The only tangible souvenir I got from Montpellier is this poster of the saint. Although it doesn't look very flattering, its the oldest known painting of San Roque, circa 13th century.

EXPLORE # 75 ~ 200th Explore Photo

 

A scopion-mimic jumping spider found at the La Mesa Ecopark.. This photo was sitting in my computer since February 20, 2009 and I almost forgot about this. Thanks Tedt for the help at the Ecopark.

 

White background is the lid of a bucket of KFC fried chicken and used by Tedt as a flash diffuser. It works !! I have one too.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfzplPIrzjY

   

These ships are really amazing. There was a tangible connection to the past when walking the decks of these ships, especially the trans-oceanic ones.

 

I was exploring the San Francisco Maritime Museum on labor day with my wife and decided to test out the New Portra 400 film with the 500 C/M handheld (with the flash-grip - without the flash - and a prism finder). I also mistakenly scanned this at 100MegaPix. The results astounded me. This Film is SHARP! (and my scanner is better than I thought it was). The Wide-angle 50mm Distagon lens is not the sharpest in my collection, but this shot and scan shows it is much better than I thought it was. I was attempting hyperfocal but I slightly missed the focus as foreground objects seem a little sharper than background objects (yet I *still* see a hint of the vertical wires on the distant bridge).

 

Kodak (new) Portra 400 - C-41

SEKONIC L-778 DUAL SPOT F METER (shot @ 400ASA)

Hasselblad B60 POLARIZER

(Exposure Unrecorded - spot-metered through the filter)

Hasselblad 500 C/M w/50mm f4 Zeiss Distagon CF T*

Epson PERFECTION V750-M PRO SCANNER

(20110906_SFmaritimeMus_Portra400new_03193001)

National Cathederal, Washington, DC

 

"I Can Only Imagine" Mercy Me & London Symphony Orchestra

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_OB7d-B1Vw sublime :)

 

For those of us who have sent loved ones on ahead, we can only imagine what a son or daughter, father or mother now experience.

 

“No eye has ever seen or no ear has ever heard or no mind has ever thought of the wonderful things God has made ready for those who love Him.” God has shown these things to us through His Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit Who looks into all things, even the secrets of God, and shows them to us. (1 Corinthians 2: 9-10)

 

Yet the promise of eternity is everywhere - in a smile, an affirmation, a summer walk in a forest. IMHO, heaven will be a place where concepts of righteousness, peace and joy take tangible forms in pure bejeweled light, and music of praise and glory.

For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of

righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17)

 

And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal... The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass. I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. (Revelation 21: 10,11, 21, 22)

 

New set: "Heavenly Light" www.flickr.com/photos/karl_wolfgang/sets/72157632241574749/

At the amusement park, it seems everything spins or moves. There is the tangible spinning object, for example, this ride. And then there is the metaphorical, the carnival barker and the spin of his solicitations and viewpoint to persuade me.

 

I think of just how elusive finding the true fixed "objective" spot is. It turns out that what looks like the fixed is not really fixed. For example, the fixed rail that I grasp onto slowly shifts as the dirt moves and the tectonic plates slide. That plate sits is on the earth, which rotates on its axis at roughly a thousand miles an hour. And the earth in turn, spins around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour. Oh, and our star? It also rotates in its orbit around the Milky Way galaxy as it moves.

 

There is a whole lot of spinning and moving going on. Everything has spin, even down to the electrons spinning in their probability shells around their atom's nucleus.

 

My head spins just thinking about it as my feet stay firmly planted on these stairs in front of this spinning ride on terra firma.

 

It seems for now about the only thing I can do to escape is find a spin zone that is more to my liking. I think I will go home, plop down on my big reclining chair, and turn on Bill O'Reilly's no-spin zone news editorial for some comfort.

The tangible signs of the Chase Line electrification are now showing, with the erection of the masts well advanced. The down side is that clear shots of the line are disappearing at an equally fast rate, with the showing Class 170 No. 170632 departing from Bloxwich on 9th June 2018 while forming the West Midlands Railway 2K59 1042 Birmingham New Street - Rugeley Trent Valley serviced. The original Bloxwich station, which closed in 1965, was positioned beyond the background bridges and closer to the centre of the town. The new station opened in 1989 and is better located for the large housing estates that were built in the surrounding area during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Copyright Photograph John Whitehouse - all rights reserved

Canon 40d - 24-70 L USM

Something or nothing?

There are only two alternatives, something or nothing. Existence or non-existence?

Existence is a fact!

We know something exists (the physical universe),

but why?

Two questions arise …why is there something rather than nothing?

And where did that something come from?

Obviously, something cannot arise from nothing, no sane person would entertain such an impossible concept. However, an incredible fantasy that the universe created itself from nothing, is being proposed by some, high profile atheists, and presented to the public as though it is science. A sort of ‘theory of everything’ that purports to eliminate a creator. For example, the campaigning, militant atheist Lawrence Krauss has written a book which claims the universe can come from nothing, ‘A Universe from Nothing’. Anyone who is silly enough to spend money on a book which makes such a wild, impossible claim, soon realises that Krauss’s ‘nothing’ is not nothing at all, but an exercise in ‘smoke and mirrors’. His ‘nothing’ involves the pre-existence of certain, natural laws and quantum effects.

A well, publicised example of the universe allegedly being able to arise from nothing was one presented by Professor Stephen Hawking, and summed up in a single sentence:

“Because there is a law, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”

 

It is not intelligent, sensible or scientific to believe that everything created itself from nothing.

In a state of infinite and eternal nothingness, nothing exists and nothing happens - EVER.

Nothing means absolutely ‘nothing’. Nothing tangible and no physical laws, no information, not even abstract things, like mathematics. If nothing exists there can be no numbers or anything based on numbers.

 

Furthermore, you don’t need to be a genius, or a scientist, to understand that something CANNOT create itself.

Put simply, it is self-evident that - to create itself, a thing would have to pre-exist its own creation to carry out the act of creating itself. In which case, it already exists.

And, if anything at all exists, i.e. in this example ‘gravity’, it cannot be called 'nothing'.

Furthermore, ‘gravity’ cannot be a creative agent, it is merely an inherent property of matter – it is obvious that a property of something cannot create that which it is a property of. And also, How can something pre-exist that which it is a property of? Thus, we are obliged to conclude that nonsense remains nonsense, even when presented by highly regarded scientists.

“Fallacies remain fallacies, even when they become fashionable.” GK Chesterton.

 

Such nonsensical propositions are vain attempts to undermine the well, established, law of cause and effect, which is fatal to atheist ideology.

Incredibly, Hawking's so-called replacement for God completely ignores this law of cause and effect, which applies to ALL temporal (natural) entities, without exception.

Therefore, Stephen Hawking's natural, 'theory of everything' which he summed up in a single sentence can, similarly, be debunked in a single sentence:

Because there is a law of cause and effect, the universe can't and won't create itself from nothing.

 

Religion?

Once we admit the obvious fact that the universe cannot arise of its own accord from nothing (nothing will remain nothing forever), the only alternative is that ‘something’ has always existed – an infinite ‘something’. For anything to happen, such as the origin of the universe, the infinite something, cannot just exist in a state of eternal, passive inactivity, it must be capable of positive activity.

If we examine the characteristics, powers, qualities and attributes which exist now, we must conclude that the ‘something’, that has always existed, must have amazing (godlike) powers to be able to produce all the wonderful qualities we see in the universe, including: information, natural laws, life, intelligence, consciousness, etc.

This means we need to believe in some sort of ‘godlike entity’. The only remaining question is - which god?

Is the godlike entity a creator, or simply nature or natural forces as atheists claim? Seeking an answer to that question is the essential role of religion, which essentially utilises logic and reason, rather than just relying on blind faith.

 

Why God MUST exist ...

There are only two states of being (existence) – temporal and infinite. That. which has a beginning, is ‘temporal’. That which has no beginning is ‘infinite’.

Everything that exists must be one or the other.

The temporal (unlike the infinite) is not autonomous or non-contingent, it essentially relies on something else for its beginning (its cause) and its continued existence.

The universe and all natural things are temporal. Hence, they ALL require a cause or causes.

They could NOT exist without a cause to bring them into being. This is a FACT accepted by science, and enshrined in the Law of Cause and Effect.

The Law of Cause and Effect tells us that every, natural effect requires a cause. And that - an effect cannot be greater than its cause/s.

This is a fundamental principle, essential to the scientific method.

“All natural science is based on the hypothesis of the complete causal connection of all events” Dr Albert Einstein. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Hebrew University and Princeton University Press p.183

No temporal effect can be greater than (superior to) the sum-total of its cause or causes

It is obvious that - something cannot give what it doesn’t possess.

A temporal entity can be a subsidiary cause of another temporal entity, but cannot be the initial (first) cause of the entire, temporal realm - which includes ALL natural effects and entities.

Consider this simple chain of causes and effects:

A causes B

B causes C

C causes D

D causes E

‘A, B, C & D’ are all causes and may all look similar, but they are not, there is an enormous and crucial difference between them. Causes B, C & D are fundamentally different from cause A.

Why?

Because A is the very first cause and thus had no previous cause. It exists without a cause. It doesn’t rely on anything else for its existence, it is completely independent of causes - while B, C & D would not exist without A. They are entirely dependent on A.

Causes; B, C & D are also effects, whereas A is not an effect, only a cause.

So, we can say that the first cause ‘A’ is both self-existent and necessary. It is necessary because the rest of the chain of causes and effects could not exist without it.

We also must say that the subsequent causes and effects B, C, D and E are all contingent. That is; they are not self-existent, they all depend entirely on other causes to exist. We can also say that A is eternally self-existent, i.e. it has always existed, it had no beginning.

Why?

Because if A came into being at some point, there must have been something other than itself that brought it into being … which would mean A was not the first cause (A could not create A) … the something that brought A into being would be the first cause. In which case, A would be contingent and no different from B, C, D & E. We can also say that A is adequate to produce all the properties of B, C, D & E.

Why?

Well, in the case of E, we can see that it relies entirely on D for its existence. E can in no way be superior to D, because D had to contain within itself everything necessary to produce E.

The same applies to D, it cannot be superior to C. Furthermore, neither E or D can be superior to C, because both rely on C for their existence, and C had to contain everything necessary to produce D & E.

Likewise, with B, which is wholly responsible for the existence of C, D & E.

As they all depend on A for their existence and all their properties, abilities and potentials, none can be superior to A, whether singly or combined. A had to contain everything necessary to produce B, C, D & E including all their properties, abilities and potentials.

Thus, we deduce that; nothing in the universe can be superior in any way to the very first cause of the universe, because the whole universe, and all material things that exist, depend entirely on the abilities and properties of the first cause to produce them.

Conclusion …

A first cause must be uncaused, must have always existed, and cannot be in any way inferior to all subsequent causes and effects. In other words, the first cause of the universe must be eternally, self-existent and omnipotent (greater than everything that exists). No natural entity can have those attributes, that is why a Supernatural, Creator God MUST exist.

 

Entropy

The initial (first) cause of the temporal realm had to be something non-temporal (uncaused), i.e. something infinite.

The word ‘temporal’ is derived from tempus, Latin for time. - All temporal things are subject to time - and, as well as having a beginning in time, natural things can also expect to naturally degenerate, with the passage of time, towards a decline in function, order and existence. The material universe is slowly in decline and dying.

The natural realm is not just temporal, but also temporary (finite). Science acknowledges this with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (law of entropy).

As all natural things are temporal, we know that the initial (first), infinite cause of everything temporal cannot be a natural agent or entity.

The infinite, first cause of everything natural can also be regarded as ‘supernatural’, in the sense that it is not subject to natural laws that are intrinsic only to natural things, which it caused.

This fact is verified by science, in the First Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that there is no ‘natural’ means by which matter/energy can be created.

However, as the first cause existed before the natural realm (which is subject to natural laws, without exception), the issue of the first cause being exempt from natural laws (supernatural) is not something extraordinary or magical. It is the original and normal default state of the infinite.

If the material universe was infinite, entropy wouldn’t exist. Entropy is a characteristic only of natural entities.

The infinite cannot be subject to entropy, it does not deteriorate, it remains the same forever.

Entropy can apply only to temporal, natural entities.

Therefore, we know that the material universe, as a temporal entity, had to have a beginning and, being subject to entropy, will have an end.

That which existed before the universe, as an original cause of everything material, had to be infinite, because you cannot have an infinite chain of temporal (material) events. The temporal can only exist if it is sustained by the infinite.

As all natural entities are temporal, the (infinite) first cause could not possibly be a natural entity.

So, the Second Law of Thermodynamics supports and confirms the only logical conclusion we can reach from the Law of Cause and Effect, that a natural, first cause is impossible, according to science.

This is fatal to the atheist ideology of naturalism because it means there is no alternative to an infinite, supernatural, first cause (a Creator God).

The Bible explains that the universe was created perfect, without the effects of entropy such as decay, corruption and degeneration. It was the sin of humankind that corrupted the physical creation, resulting in physical death and universal entropy ...

Scripture: Romans 8:18–25

"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

Can there be multiple infinite, first causes? It is evident that there can be only one ‘infinite’ entity. If, for example, there are two infinite entities, neither could have its own, unique properties.

Why?

Because, unless they possessed identical properties, neither would be infinite. However, if they both possessed the very same properties, there would be no distinction between them, they would be identical and thus a single entity.

To put it another way …

God, as an infinite being, can only be a single entity, if He was not, and there was another infinite being, the properties which were pertinent to the other infinite being would be a limitation on His infinite character, and vice versa. So, neither entity would be infinite.

 

Creation - an act of will?

For an infinite cause to produce a temporal effect, such as the universe, an active character and an act of will must be involved. If the first cause was just a blind, mechanistic, natural thing, the universe would just be a continuation of the infinite nature of the first cause, not temporal (subject to time). For example, if the nature of water in infinite time was to be frozen, it would continue its frozen nature infinitely. There must be an active agent involved.

Time applies to the temporal, not the infinite. The infinite is omnipresent, it always was, it always is, and it always will be. It is the “Alpha and the Omega” as the Bible explains.

Jesus claimed to be omnipresent, when referred to Himself as “I am”. He was revealing that His spirit was the infinite, Divine spirit (the infinite, first cause of everything temporal).

Therefore, what we know about the characteristics of this supernatural entity, are as follows:

The single, supernatural entity:

1. Has always existed, has no cause, and is not subject to time. (is infinite, eternally self-existent, autonomous and non-contingent).

2. Is the first, original and deliberate cause of everything temporal (including the universe and every natural entity and effect).

3. Cannot be, in any way, inferior to any temporal or natural thing that exists.

In simple terms, this means that the single, infinite, supernatural, first cause of everything that exists in the temporal realm, has the capability of creating everything that exists, and cannot be inferior in any powers and attributes to anything that exists. This is the entity we recognise as the creator God.

The Bible tells us that we were made in the image of this God. This is logical because it is obvious, we cannot be superior to this God (an effect cannot be greater than its cause).

So, all our qualities and attributes must be possessed by the God in whose image we were made.

All our attributes come from the creator, or supernatural, first cause.

Remember, the logic that something cannot give what it doesn’t possess.

We have life. Thus, our creator must be alive.

We are intelligent. Thus, our creator must be intelligent.

We are conscious. Thus, our creator must be conscious.

We can love. Thus, our creator must love.

We understand justice. Thus, our creator must be just, etc. etc.

Therefore, we can logically discern the character and attributes of the creator from what is seen in His creation.

This FACT - that an effect cannot be greater than its cause/s, is recognised as a basic principle of science, and is it crucial to understanding the nature and attributes of the first cause.

It means nothing in the universe that exists, resulting from the action of the first cause, can be in anyway superior to the first cause. We must conclude that, at least, some attributes of the first cause can be seen in the universe.

Atheists frequently ask how can we possibly know what God is like?

The Bible (which is inspired by God) tells us many things about the character of God, but regardless of scripture, the universe itself gives us evidence of God’s nature.

For example: can the properties of human beings, in any way, be superior to the first cause?

To suggest they are, would be to violate the scientific principle that an effect cannot be greater than its cause.

All the powers, properties, qualities and attributes we observe in the universe, including all human qualities, must be also evident in the first cause.

If there is life in the universe, the first cause must have life.

If there is intelligence in the universe the first cause must have intelligence.

The same applies to consciousness, skill, design, purpose, justice, love, beauty, forgiveness, mercy etc.

Therefore, we must conclude that the eternally, self-existent, non-natural (supernatural), first cause, has life, is conscious, has intelligence and created the temporal as an act of will.

We know, from the law of cause and effect, that the first cause cannot possibly be any of the natural processes frequently proposed by atheists, such as: the so-called, big bang explosion, singularity or quantum mechanics.

They are all temporal, moreover, it is obvious that none of them are adequate to produce the effect. They are all grossly inferior to the result.

 

To sum up:

Using impeccable logic and reason, supported by our understanding of established, natural, physical laws (which apply to everything of a natural, temporal nature) acknowledged by science, humans have been able to discover the existence of a single, infinite, supernatural, living, intelligent, loving and just creator God.

God discovered, not invented!

Contrary to the narrative perpetuated by atheists, a personal, creator God is not a “human invention”, and He is certainly not a backward substitute for reason or science, but rather, He is an enlightened, human discovery, based on unimpeachable logic, reason, rationality, natural laws and scientific understanding.

The real character of atheism unmasked.

Is belief in God just superstitious, backward thinking, suitable only for the uneducated or scientific illiterates, as atheists would have us believe?

Stephen Hawking is widely acknowledged as the best brain in modern atheism, his natural explanation for the origin of the universe "Because there is a law, such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing" was claimed by some, to have made belief in a creator God redundant. This is an atheistic, natural, creation story, summed up in a single sentence.

When we realise what atheists actually believe, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that it is atheism, not monotheism, which is a throwback to an unenlightened period in human history. It is a throwback to a time when Mother Nature or other natural or material, temporal entities were regarded by some as having autonomous, godlike, creative powers –

“the universe can and will create itself from nothing”

The discredited concept of worshipping nature itself (naturalism) or various material things (Sun, Moon, idols etc.) as some sort of autonomous, non-contingent, creative, or self-creative agents, used to be called paganism. Now it has been re-invented as 21st century atheism ...

The truth about modern atheism is it is just pagan naturalist beliefs repackaged.

“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.” - G.K. Chesterton.

 

God’s power.

Everything that exists is dependent on the original and ultimate cause (God) for its origin, continued existence and operation.

This means God affords everything all the power it needs to function. Everything operates only with God’s power. We couldn’t even lift a little finger, if the power to do so was not permitted by God.

What caused God?

Ever since the 18th century, atheist philosophers such as David Hume, Bertrand Russell etc. have attempted to debunk the logical evidence for a creator God, as the infinite, first cause and creator of the universe.

The basic premise of their argument is that a long chain of causes and effects, going back in time, did not necessarily require a beginning (no first cause, but rather an infinite regress). And that, if every effect requires an adequate cause (as the Law of Cause and Effect states), then God (a first cause) could no more exist without a cause, than anything else.

This latter point is summed up in the what many atheists regard as the killer question:

“What caused God then?”

This question wasn’t sensible in the 18th century, and is not sensible today, but incredibly, many atheists still think it is a good argument against the Law of Cause and Effect and continue to use it.

As explained previously, the Law of Cause and Effect applies to all temporal entities.

Temporal entities have a beginning, and therefore need a cause. They are all contingent and dependent on a cause or causes for their beginning and existence, without exception.

It is obvious to any sensible person that the very first cause, because it is FIRST, had nothing preceding it.

First means 'first', it doesn’t mean second or third. If we could go back far enough with a chain of causes and effects, however long the chain, at some stage we must reach an ultimate beginning, i.e. the cause which is first, having no previous cause. This first cause must have always existed with no beginning. It is essentially self-existent from an infinite past and for an infinite future. It must be completely autonomous and non-contingent, not relying on any cause or anything else for its existence. Not temporal, but infinite.

So, the answer to the question is that - God was not caused, only temporal entities (such as ALL natural things) essentially require a cause.

God is the eternally, self-existent, ultimate, non-contingent, supernatural, first. infinite cause of everything temporal.

As explained earlier, the first cause could not be a natural entity, it had to be supernatural, as ALL natural entities are temporal and contingent (they all require causes).

Is the atheist, infinite regress argument sensible?

This is the argument against the need for a first cause of the universe. The proposition is that; a long chain of natural causes and effects, going back in time, did not necessarily require a beginning (an infinite regress). This proposition is nonsensical.

Why?

It is self-evident that you cannot have a chain of temporal effects going backwards in time, forever. It is the inherent nature of all temporal things to have a beginning. Likewise, for a long chain of temporal causes and effects, there must be a beginning at some point in time. Contingent things do not become non-contingent, simply by being in a long chain.

Temporal + temporal can never equal infinite.

Moreover, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that everything physical is subject to entropy.

Therefore, it is an absurd notion that there could be a long chain of temporal elements in which, although every individual link in the chain requires a beginning, the complete chain does not. And, although every individual link in the chain is subject to the law of entropy, the chain as a whole is not, and is miraculously unaffected by the effects of entropy, throughout an infinite past, which would have caused its demise.

What about the idea that infinite regress is acceptable in maths?

Maths is a type of information - and information, like truth, is not purely physical.

It can require physical media to make it tangible, but while the physical media is always subject to entropy, information is not. 1+1 = 2 will always be true, it is unaffected by time, or even whether there are any humans left to do mathematical calculations.

Jesus said; Heaven and Earth may pass away, but my words will go on forever. Jesus is pointing out that truth and information are unaffected by entropy.

For example: historical truths, such as the fact that Henry VIII had six wives, will always be true. Time cannot erode or change that truth. Even if all human records of this truth were destroyed, it would never cease to be true.

As the Christian, apologist Peter Keeft has made clear, maths is entirely dependent on a positive integer, i.e. the number one. Without this positive integer, no maths is possible. 2 is 2 ones, 3 is 3 ones, etc.

The concept of the number one also exists as a characteristic of the one, infinite, first cause. - God is one. - God embodies that positive integer (number one/first cause), essential for the operation of maths. Without the number one, there could be no number two or three, etc. etc. There could be no positive numbers, no negative numbers and no fractions.

The fact that an infinite ‘first’ cause exists, means that number one is bound to exist. In a state of eternal and infinite nothingness, there would be no information and no numbers and nothing would be ‘first’. So, like everything else, maths is made possible only by the existence of the one, infinite, first cause (God).

 

The Law of Cause and Effect

Dominant Principle of Classical Physics

Chance Events? Nothing happens by chance! Classical Science, which dominated studies

of the physical universe before the Twentieth Century, generally held an opinion that

there are no events that happen by chance. For many centuries, it seemed obvious that

all things were caused by something physical or mental. This idea was expressed by

Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460-377 B.C.): “Every natural event has a natural cause.” [1, p.

12].

History of the Concept of Cause and Effect. The concept of order maintained by the law

of cause and effect is a scientific principle with a history traceable through Hebrew,

Babylonian, Greek, and modern civilizations.

Hebrew Concept of Causality. Certain Hebrews acknowledged the role of causality in the

universe before the Babylonians and Greeks. These Hebrews denied chance and its offspring

chaos:

That they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting

That there is none besides Me;

I am the LORD, and there is no other;

I form the light and create darkness,

I make peace and create calamity;

I, the LORD, do all these things.…

Shall the clay say to him who forms it, “What are you making?”

Or shall your handiwork say, “He has no hands”?…

 

FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE

The Law of Cause and Effect. Dominant Principle of Classical Physics. David L. Bergman and Glen C. Collins

www.thewarfareismental.net/b/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/b...

 

"The Big Bang's Failed Predictions and Failures to Predict: (Updated Aug 3, 2017.) As documented below, trust in the big bang's predictive ability has been misplaced when compared to the actual astronomical observations that were made, in large part, in hopes of affirming the theory."

kgov.com/big-bang-predictions

Editor’s Note: There are a myriad of tangible benefits resulting from research and technology demonstrations performed aboard the International Space Station. Throughout the months ahead, we will release stories from the updated “International Space Station Benefits for Humanity” book to highlight the ways in which the station impacts life on Earth. The current Veggie investigation on station provides lighting and nutrient supply for a space garden, which may also supply fresh food for crew members on the orbiting laboratory and on future long-duration missions like the Journey to Mars. This and previous plant growth studies, like the one below, help create technology to enable NASA exploration to the planets beyond while improving plant growth methods on Earth.

 

Some of the most important tasks in space biology include the creation of reliable and effectively functioning life support systems, and providing sustaining food sources for crew members. For long-term interplanetary spaceflights and planetary bases, the human life support system and food production has to be based on regenerating the living environment from life support products through physical/chemical and biological processes. Greenhouses will most likely be designed for the cultivation of vegetables, primarily greens and herbs. However, in order to implement these plans, plants must grow, develop, and reproduce in spaceflight with cultivation productivity similar to Earth. To address this need, a series of 17 Rasteniya experiments were conducted from 2002-2011 using the Lada greenhouse on the Russian segment of the International Space Station.

 

Credits: NASA

 

Read full article:

www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/russian_...

 

More about space station research:

www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/index.html

 

Flickr Album: Space Station Research Affects Lives:

www.flickr.com/photos/nasamarshall/sets/72157634178107799/

 

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These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...

 

Whole Brittany is ripe with old, gracefully decaying buildings, but Mont Saint-Michel is really saturated with the signs of ancient times.

The Allure Simulation

 

Our simulation is intricately interwoven into numerous corporate metaverses. As our tangible world gradually fades into a vibrant digital realm, our avatars transform codes of understanding between the boundaries of reality and fantasy. This immersion into an all-encompassing space was envisioned as a new avenue for humankind to revolutionize and speed up productivity. It is where "presence" is the currency of the "You-Me-Us" techno-wonderland.

 

The bright and glimmering shimmer entices us away from practical considerations. The forging towards unsustainable progress and unrealised opportunities is smashing our collective identity into smaller and smaller bytes. You-Me-Us scattering throughout ever-expanding simulations. As physical beings, we observe these expansions as they continuously update and learn. We are captivated by their shining allure so that we can push aside what we once held dear.

 

Blogger

www.jjfbbennett.com/2023/06/golden-fixation-nugget-of-lea...

 

JJFBbennett Art Directory

jjfbbennett.taplink.ws/

 

Contemporary Positional Video Art and Socio-Fictional Writings

 

It is about being creative and innovative with knowledge

www.jjfbbennett.com

  

TELSTAR LOGISTICS UNVEILS MODEL 442 SHAREHOLDER VALUE GENERATOR

New Device Converts Nebulous Energy into Tangible Results

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

SIERRA NEVADAS, Calif., 03-MAY-2006 Telstar Logistics is proud to announce the successful completion and deployment of the Model 442 Shareholder Value Generator, an event which marks the beginning of a new and more exciting era of production.

 

Installed underground in a remote mountain facility, Model 442 leverages innovations in Terrestrial Infiltration, Marine Buoyancy, and Aerospace Propulsion developed by Telstar Logistics while delivering our best-of-breed services.

 

Designed to provide stable, seamless solutions in any environment, the Shareholder Value Generator converts hybrid media energy into robust and scalable output. The impactful results quickly pay off where it matters most -- on the customer's bottom line.

 

"Telstar Logistics is the only company poised to deliver a product that customers can actually use," said Steve Jurvetson, senior test pilot for Telstar Logistics Aerospace Systems. "With the Model 442, organizations can easily increase production of an existing application without changing the application and still maintain high levels of performance."

 

Patents pending. NSFW. Batteries sold separately.

 

About Telstar Logistics

Telstar Logistics is a leading provider of integrated services via Land, Air, Sea, and Space. For more information about Telstar Logistics, its products, and its history, visit our Investor Relations page.

 

"It's tangible, it's solid, it's beautiful. It's artistic, from my standpoint..."

Donald Trump

 

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