CHRISTMAS -TAKE TWO

 

I'll bet few of you know that this year Christmas comes on Tuesday, 7 January.  This is good news if you can't wait for Thursday, 25 December 2025. I am, of course, speaking of the  “original" Christmas, the one 200 million Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate, 13 days after Catholics and Protestants make merry. Now, as to why there are two Christmases, well, that has to do with the way theology seems to have been invented specifically to start arguments.

The first successful calendar that we know of was adopted over 6,500 ago by the 18 amalgamated city-states we know as the Sumerians. Being farmers they started their year in the spring, with each of their months beginning with sunset on the night of the new moon. This lunar calendar proved so popular it was adopted with slight modifications by everybody, including a small group of highland Semitic sheep herders known to themselves as the Yehudi – modern English translation being “the Jews”.

The Jewish spring was marked by the birthing of their sheep, what they called the Pesach. Fourteen days into the first Hebrew month of Nisan, at the full moon, they drained the blood of one of their first born kids. That's a baby sheep. The body was then burned, the rising smoke being offered up as a sacrifice to their god Elohim or Yahweh, to ensure he would keep them in milk, wool and lamb chops for the coming year. But, just about the same time as the invention of the calendar, the flocks of many of these Hebrews started dying.

Maybe it was disease and maybe a drought, but these Jewish bands were reduced to seeking work around the Egyptian settlements in the Nile river delta, where they were forced to exchange their Sumerian lunar calendar for an Egyptian solar one, and their mutton for bread. And the first Egyptian bread grain which ripened each spring, about the Nisan full moon, was barley. Now, barley doesn't rise well with yeast. This meant that every spring, when the stockpiles of wheat and rye grains ran short, the Jews were reduced to eating the hard, flat, unleavened barley bread. After leaving Egypt, or, as the religious fanatics described it, “escaping”, the spring Pesach was relabeled the Passover Festival.

Over the next  couple of millennial the Jews established a homeland called Israel, where they were  attacked by the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittites, and eventually the Romans. Every new conqueror forced the Hebrews to adopt some of their culture and calendar. 

And as is common with occupied people, the common folk dreamed of a messiah or Christ, who would save them from their oppressors, foreign and Jewish. Over time this produced a seemingly endless stream of messiah candidates. Most were loonies, but a few were dangerous enough that the upper crust Jewish Pharisees felt forced to eliminate them. And it was because of those few that before we got two Christmases, we got two Pesach-es – later renamed Easter.

See, the Romans, who were occupying Israel in the first century, had just stitched together a combination solar and lunar calendar championed by Julius Caesar and enacted on The Kalend, or the first morning of the new month of January, 47 B.C.E.  By Roman law all debts and taxes were paid on the Kalends of each month, including the Temple Tax the Jews paid so they would be excused from sacrificing to the Roman gods.

This Temple Tax was paid to the Roman Governor in the capital of Jerusalem, a city of between 60 and 70,000 people. During Passover, the city had to accommodate another 5 to 10,000 pilgrims in town to sacrifice at their temple. This produced a lot of taxable income for everybody, but with a crowd that large, you were guaranteed at least one Christ-wanna-be a year. 

Which is why, the Christian holy book could be very specific about the date when the most successful Christ, Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross. He was killed, theologians now figure, about 3:00pm on Friday in the 33^rd year of the common era,   or about 3 hours before the start of Passover that year.  Except killing this Christ only added to the Pharisse's problems.

These Christians kept insisting their dead guy was The Christ sent to reform Judaism which pissed off the Pharisee, who  saw no reason to reform a religion they were running.   Also, all reformers made the Romans nervous, which pissed off the Pharisee even more. A decade after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jewish King Agrippa beheaded the cult's new leader, Jesus' brother, James. 

The next leader, also named James but called "The Just" to separate him from James the dead,  tried to avoid giving the Pharisee any reason to cut off any more heads by strictly obeying Mosaic law for 20 years. However, the Pharisee eventually decided to kill James the Just anyway. So they threw him off the Temple roof. And when that didn't kill him, they had him beaten to death.

But there were other, even more disruptive zealots around, and in the year 66 C.E., bad Roman government and all these revolutionaries set off the First Jewish war, which lead to the Kitos War and then the Bar Kokhba revolt, which ended in 136 C.E. 

This 80 years of violence so pissed off the Romans they destroyed the Jewish temple, then burned and sacked the entire city of Jerusalem, and then outlawed Judaism entirely. The only way for Christianity to survive this Roman repression was to form their own religion, adopting the Julian calendar and inventing a new theology they called Christianity as they went along.

As figured by Professor Rodney Stark, of Baylor College, devotees of Christianity surpassed the “symbolically weighty figure” of 100,000 worshipers attending a hundred or so churches about the year 200 C.E., or 70 years after the last Jewish revolt. And yet, already, their new theology was starting to encounter problems. 

In the year 189 C.E., Rome, received a new bishop, or elder of this new quasi-Jewish church. We know him only by the name of Victor, and that he came from North Africa -  perhaps he was a Berber. We can assume Victor was devout, but we know he also was combative and arrogant. First, he had started calling himself “the Pope”. And secondly, was the way he tried to handle the Quarterdecimani debate.

In plain English, it was “The 14” - as in the 14^th day of Nissan, i.e. the date of Passover. Less than fifty years after the death of Jesus, Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, reminded his fellow Christians that the Paesch was a life giving festival well before it became the Jewish Passover. 

This made 16 Nisson - the second day after Passover – the perfect day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which meant the common folk still had to know when Passover started. And Polycarp had been personally trained by the Apostle John, who had personally known both the living and the resurrected Jesus.  So, he ought to know when Jesus died and rose from the dead -at least to within a day or two.

But Victor and most western Bishops wanted to disconnect Christianity from Passover. Too Jewish, you know. That meant converting Jesus ben Joseph into a gentile, like the majority of the new Christian recruits. This was why the Sabbath was moved from the Jewish Friday at sunset and all day Saturday – the end of the week – to Sunday – the beginning of the week. And by using the Julian calendar, which most gentiles were familiar with, they could reenact the mystical Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday, every year. And that was something the “floating” Jewish Passover, which could come on any day of the week, and was favored by the eastern Christians, could not do.

So far, settling such theological issues had followed the example of the Pauline Epistles. The bishops exchanged letters arguing their case, until they were close to agreement. They then held conferences, called synods, which endorsed the new dogma. But bishops still within the Byzantine Empire, who spoke and read Greek, felt as qualified to determine dogma as the upstart Latin speakers from Rome. 

But Pope Victor, a Latin speaker,  now abruptly warned that any Christians who did not sever the direct connection between Passover and Easter would be excommunicated - thrown out of the church and denied Jesus' forgiveness.

Immediately a missive arrived from the proud Bishop of Ephesus. This was a large, wealthy city, so when Bishop Polycrates spoke, other Christians paid attention. He reminded Victor that many respected church leaders celebrated Easter on 16 Nisson, like, “...Philip, one of the twelve apostles....(and) John, who was both a witness and a teacher...and Polycarp in Smyrna...” and the seven bishops in his own family. Polycrates warned Victor. “ I...am not frightened by terrifying words.”  In other words, don't even think about excommunicating me.

Another dissent arrived from the Bishop of Lyon, France. Irenaeus was a Greek who had a strong record opposing “Judaizing” the new faith, which gave him street cred in this argument. Irenaeus cautioned Victor against asserting dominance, because that might start a civil war within the Church. Finally, Victor backed down. 

So,  for the next 800 years, everybody agreed to disagree on the date for Easter and about the power of one Bishop, whatever he called himself, to dictate to other Bishops. The eastern church read their liturgy in Greek, the Romans in Latin. And this divided church survived the fall of the western Roman empire and the rise of Islam, until 1053 C.E., when another hot head was elevated to Pope.

In that year, “Pope” Leo IX went nuclear on a small group of Greek Orthodox churches in southern Italy. Leo ordered them to either “conform” to the Latin Easter or close their doors. 

In Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of the local churches, Micheal I Cerularius, retaliated by dropping the same bomb on the Latin churches in his city.  And his city was far bigger than Rome.

The following year, 1054, Cardinal Humbert, led a Papal delegation to Constantinople to insist that Micheal reopen the Latin churches and acknowledge Leo IV as the supreme leader of the “Catholic”, meaning unified, church.

Oddly enough, Micheal said no.  Whereupon, everybody in sight excommunicated everybody else in sight. This exchange of “Ex” bombs escalated until it widened into the Great Schism, which has divided Christianity ever since. The two sides stopped talking to each other. The Latin churches continue to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the Paesch full moon, while the Greek Churches mark Christ's rising from the dead three days after Passover, whatever the day of the week that fell on.

A final bit of confusion was added in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new and refined calendar, which cut that year by 10 days. Initially it was recognized only in Catholic states. Protestant Britain did not make the switch until 1752, by which time the difference between the Julian and the newer Gregorian calendars had grown to 11 days. Russian, being Eastern Orthodox  did not accept the change until the revolution, in 1918, by which time the shift was 13 days. They were followed later by most secular governments.

But the Greek Orthodox Church, still pissed off about the Great Schism, have remained on the Julian calendar. Which is why we have two Easters, and why the Eastern Orthodox Christmas comes on  25 December, Julian Calendar, but also falls on 6 January, under the Gregorian calendar – 13 days later. Which gives us two Christmases.  Just remember that St. Nicolas, the inspiration for Santa Claus,  was a Bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

The Jews, of course, have stubbornly stuck to their own clock, insisting the year 2024 is actually the year 5785.  But that....is a story for another time.

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GREED KILLS

 

I am assured by fundamentalist Christians that six thousand years ago God created the world in six days. Of course, six thousand years ago a day was the shortest period of time humans could measure accurately. And the mystical number six is also the number of sides to the electromagnetic spaces or cells which give cell phones their name. 

Within each 10 square mile cell surrounding every tower, 832 separate frequencies are used, two frequencies for every individual phone conversation. For the last half century the preferred method for defining these frequencies, the time between each electromagnetic wave crest, has been to hit a ball of 10 million pure cesium atoms (#55 on the periodic table) with a focused beam of  microwaves. 

The cesium then releases electrons, each with a new wave crest 9 billion, 192 million, 631 thousand 770 times every second. And the cesium  will dependably maintain that exact frequency  of wave crests - and your cell phone conversations and web connections -  it is estimated -  for about 20 million years.  

The only problem is that cesium is a rare earth metal. And Cesium is so it eager to combine with oxygen that on contact  with water (H2O) it instantly steals water's single oxygen atom, thereby generating enough heat to visibly explode it's now free hydrogen atoms like a mini-Hindenburg. Given a little time cesium will even dissolve glass to steal its oxygen. Cesium is only stable in nature in a rare rock called Pegmatite (above), and 82 % of all the cesium rich Pegmatite known to exist on earth has been found in one place, beneath a single narrow lake along the Bird River in Manitoba, Canada, a land unknown in 1656, to the Archbishop of Ireland.

In retrospect the Irish primate James Ussher (above) seems an unlikely source for 300 years of dogmatic intellectual stagnation. In life he spent most of his time and energy as a purveyor of political compromises. Ussher's “Annales veteris testamenti” (Annals of the Old Testament), published in 1650, displayed his hobby and love of dusty manuscripts, esoteric minutiae and ancient languages. As an academic it was his judgment the world began after sunset on Sunday 23 October, 4004 B.C. He was using the best evidence available at the time, and disagreed about the date of  creation with his friend, the Oxford mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, by just four years.

Bernic Lake is about 60 miles northeast of Winnipeg, just beyond the western edge of the Canadian Shield. But on this spot two and a half billion years ago, Precambrian rains fell upon sterile volcanic basalt of the shield, chemically altering and eroding the rock into the world wide ocean, laying down oxygen poor sediments called Greenstone belts. 

These belts (once rounded pillow lava, mashed flat and reheated) were buried and heated, compressed and folded at least three times, beginning with the advent of plate tectonics, until eventually batholiths of a new rock, granite, rose and intruded into the Green stones at depth, meaning without oxygen and very hot.

About 2.67 billion years ago, at a batholith about 15 miles due west of today's small community of Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, cracks in the Greenstone were injected with chemically rich waters from the granite, concentrating a potpourri of rare earth metals, lithium, beryllium, tantalum and cesium.

Sir Isaac Newton's modern fame is as the discoverer of gravity, the inventor of calculus and optics and his three Laws of Motion. When praised by his contemporaries Newton explained he stood on the shoulders of geniuses. But the great economist John Maynard Keynes also called Newton “the last of the magicians.” 

Newton devoted most of his time and effort to alchemy, and his search for the Philosopher's Stone, which would magically turn lead into gold. Newton was no more and no less a fool, than Bishop Ussher. But both were men were of their age, and they lacked the technology to more precisely measure the world they lived in. But they both wanted to do better.  Neither of them thought human knowledge should stop where they were, and neither thought God approved of ignorance.

The Bird River of Manitoba (above) flows through the largest remaining, seemingly eternal, boreal forest on earth. It is an awe inspiring terrain, but capable of supporting only two humans per square mile.

However, since 1929 some 60 families in Lac du Bonnet have depended upon the Cabot Corporation's Tanco mine (above) to earn a living.  Since the middle of the 1990's, each year's 30,000 kilograms of cesium extracted from the great rock rooms carved out beneath Bernic Lake, have been destined to lubricate and cool oil drilling equipment world wide, in the form of caesium formate. 

The tiny fraction used in atomic clocks would never economically justify keeping the mine open. But there is enough profitable cesium under Bernic Lake to last another ten years. If the mine does not swallow the lake first.

At room temperature a single atom of cesium has 55 electrons in six orbits around its nucleus - two in the first level, eight in the second, eighteen in both the third and fourth, eight in the fifth and a lone single electron on the outside or valance level. 

It is the valance electron that emits energy at a specific frequency when excited by microwaves, as was first predicted in 1945 by Professor Isidor Rabi (above) from Columbia University. With all due respect to Professor Rabi, he was not smarter than Newton, but as both men would agree,  Rabbi was standing on Newton's shoulders, who, you remember, said he, also, was standing on the shoulders of those who came before.  Seven years after Professor Rabi made his calculations, the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) built the first cesium atomic clock. They kept perfecting and miniaturizing the design until about 1968, when they established the highest standard of measurement ever achieved - until recently

Until 1989 cesium sold for less than $5 a gram (above). Then came the invention of cesium formate, a slurry that was liquid enough to lubricate drilling bits, and heavy enough to improve drill efficiency and to carry broken rock back up the bore hole, while enduring the temperatures and pressures found thousands of feet underground at the point of a spinning drill bit.  

By 1998 the price of 99% pure cesium was over $60 a gram. It was then that Cabot decided to maximize profits by extracting even the ore holding the up the roof of their mine. 

They shaved away the pillars supporting the ceiling, from 50 feet in diameter to just 25. In 2012 the price of cesium was $70.60 a gram. Then, in 2013, Cabot admitted that over the past three years at least a ton of rock had fallen into their mine because “The crown pillar...is unstable and requires immediate action”.  Corporate greed was destroying the goose that laid the golden egg, and digging at the Tanco mine had to stop.

The accuracy of cesium clocks is now the limiting factor in available cell phone channels, the accuracy of Global Positioning systems, higher precision and versatility in the electrical grid and better science in every field.  And it would require several college degrees just to understand the details as to why that is true. But it is.

So in the new generation of clocks, the NIST-F2, introduced on 3 April 2014, the chamber containing the cesium ball is chilled to minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit (-193 ºC). This does not change the frequency of the cesium, but it eliminates much of the “noise” of all the other atoms in the chamber, so the faint electromagnetic vibrations produced by that single valance election can be more clearly heard and more closely measured.

Instead of losing a second every 20 million years, the NIST-F2 loses a second every 300 million years. With this more precise measurement of frequencies, the internet will get faster, cell phones will get more versatile and dependable, going beyond 5G, and there will be more profit and better lives for every living human on earth.  Until the cesium runs out.

By 2015 it was figured that Bernic Lake (above) would drown Cabot's golden goose and the world's primary source of cesium within three years,  unless something was done. Cabot's solution was to bulldoze a new road through the virgin forest, build dikes across the lake, and “de-water” the now isolated section over their mine. 

In Cabot's opinion, this, as well as staples drilled into the ceiling (above)  provided “an optimal solution, in that it eliminates the immediate risk of flooding, minimizes the long-term footprint of the project, and upholds Cabot’s corporate commitment to being responsive, responsible and respected citizens...”.  It will also keep oil pouring into pipelines around the world, and profits pouring into the pockets of Cabot stockholders. It will also continue to pour $28 million a year into the Lac du Bonnet economy, and save 150 jobs in Manitoba.  And a few million other jobs world wide in related industries.

In 2018 Cabot "...resumed mining operations...", making certain they will provide cesium for new NIST-F2 clocks world wide. But to do so it may have to  kill the three mile long Bernic Lake, and poison the Winnipeg River and Lake Winnipeg which the Bird River pours into.

About six thousand years ago a Sumerian Michelangelo crafted an 8 foot long, 3 foot wide copper tribute to his God, the powerful lion headed eagle Imdugud (above). Copper was a new medium six thousand years ago. The metal has two electrons in its first orbit, eight in the second, eighteen in the third, and like cesium, a single electron in the valance level. But unlike cesium, when exposed to oxygen and moisture, copper slowly forms a layer of green verdigris, or copper carbonate, which then shields the underlying metal from further corrosion. 

The Imdugud frieze, found in the ancient city of al' Urbaid, has been dated using carbon 14 techniques, which uses the science developed by Newton and extended by Professor Isidor Rabi. The science of chemistry and metallurgy tells us the ore for the frieze came from mines in present day Iran, mines whose tailings and waste rocks were scavenged by a third and fourth generation of miners for copper not long after Bishop Ussher's birth date for the universe. 

Perhaps the ore was carried to Ubaid in a ship powered by a sail, an invention which also made its first appearance about 6,000 years ago, as dated from the images painted on pottery, an unbroken line of which can be followed style change by style change, over the last eight thousand years - 2,000 years older than Bishop Usher ever imagined existed.

In the past the Catholic Church has denied that atoms decayed, that sunlight could be split into a spectrum, that the sun was at the center of the solar system, that anything existed before sunset Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C.  None of those contentions proved or disproved the existence of God. And eventually each, and a thousand other beliefs  were discarded, without destroying the faith of the faithful. 

And consider, that insisting ignorance is truth or that hypocrisy is devotion, is truly taking the Lord God's name in vain, by mistaking your ignorance for God's will. The rare earth metals clawed from rocks by humans does not threaten faith. But ignorance does threaten your ability to receive a cell phone call from your kids to say they love you.  Which, according to Jesus Christ,  is really the point of human existence: Love.

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