Omega Code 12-12: The Reluctant Philosophy of a Psychic Slave

He avoided heavy editing and montage, and insisted on the afective force of the story and its visual completeness, as a nineteenth-century family portrait, although his gentle use of dissolves indi- cates a distinct dialogue with D. Griith and Jean Renoir. Most of his ilms explored the potential of immobility, by having the actors standing still in front of the camera. Dialogue and acting gave a loose frame to a story that could never ind ultimate resolution without the deus ex machina, the voice of the omniscient narrator. His works are visual commentaries on nineteenth-century narrative and pictorial practices, yet his iconography marked the transition from photographic realism to the realism of the subject matter.

Gregg Tallas, he Barefoot Battalion Maria Plyta, Eve Finally, the dramatic cinema of the irst woman director, Maria Plyta, deserves much consideration as the background for many directors and ilms of the period. Plyta started with certain provocative and somehow subversive ilms about the feminine presence in history, in which reality is seen from the point of view of women, as the constant experiencing of violence, coercion and submission. However, mainstream producers did not trust her because of her gender. She then produced some of the most successful conventional melodramas in the s, until she completely lost her ability to think cinematically.

However, she soon discovered that very few producers trusted a woman to direct a ilm, despite the success of her irst work.

Omega Code 12-12

Cacoyannis and Koundouros built on the traditions created by these cinema- tographers. However, they also had to deal with immense and relentless change on an unprecedented scale, and they struggled to articulate it in visual terms and to construct a complete cinematic story, in terms of Aristotelian poetics.

Cacoyannis started with sculptural realism in his four ilms of the s and consummated his work with the hyper-realism, indeed high formal- ism, of the ritualistic Electra , but deconstructed his achievement with the monochromatic sculptural extravaganza of Zorba When he later tried to move from realism to naturalism, the crisp transparency of his forms simply dis- solved in the polychromy of the surrounding space; his later ilms are made up of visual fragments that cannot be fused together in a coherent and communi- cable way.

In he Trojan Women and Iphigenia , human forms look like hyperactive and verbose ghosts moving around a landscape that overpowers them. His further attempts at naturalism fail to deal even with the simplest form of verisimilitude: In full circle, with his last ilm, he Cherry Orchard , Cacoyannis made cin- ema a sub-genre of the theatre, immobilising the moving image and annihilating the ability of human form to express ambiguities and aporias.

In the s experimental non-linear narrative prevailed, but this ended with the stark and nostalgic realism of Films such as Magic City , he Ogre of Athens and Young Aphrodites indicated his desire to confront society with what was being chosen to be ignored, to remain unseen and overlooked. Koundouros was the irst director who dared to deal with the traumas of his- tory and to present them on the screen. As mentioned already, his ilm did more to objectify the trauma of the Catastrophe than any oicial ritual of the state.

He did so indirectly because of the strict censorship and the omnipresent social panic in remembering the Catastrophe. Indeed, oppression is a constitutive element of his visual language. His cinema embodied the continuous narrative of trauma expressed in all levels of human existence: His gradual adoption of an increasingly symbolic, almost allegorical, style, through the visual language of ideotypes, was the inevitable outcome of mainstream perse- cution and rejection.

Such varieties of realism, which can be easily divided into perceptual realism or conceptual realism,71 have to be seen within the context of Greek cin- ema; since the irst feature ilm in , cinematic representations had focused on conlict, struggle and breakdown. Probably for this reason, Greek ilmmakers have been unable to construct a character or form a grand narrative about history, imagination and identity.

Indeed, the persistent concern of the ilm- makers included in this study has been about form: On some occa- sions, the audience was asked to enter a universe of visual correspondences that at most times were oblique and too complex. As a consequence, very few Greek ilms showed us a world without dark shad- ows. Even the conformist anti-realist comedies of the s and s recorded an implicit network of threatening political institutions and precarious social order.

Yet, all comedies lambasted the rise of the petit bourgeoisie and the uncomfortable trade-ofs they had had to make in order to become accepted by the hegemonic political order. Yet com- edies do need special discussion: Nevertheless, the carnivalisation of a traumatised self-perception through anarchic humour and transgressive language makes these ilms unique. At the same time it shows their destructive elements, which made them suspect to the authorities and resulted in their strict censorship.

As Gerald Mast observed: Ironically, these iconoclastic comedies are products of a commercial system that depended on the support of mass audiences composed of anything but iconoclasts. They were political statements against an exploita- tive system that while promising modernity imposed class barriers and social exclusion. Yannis Dalianidis, as we shall see, was the commercial director who, underneath his innocuous comic characters, played the system off against its own proclamations: As the most significant comedian of Greek cinema, Thanassis Vengos, stated: Let me say it.

An ama- teur passionate about his work. Robert Bresson74 his book is dedicated to the study of speciic ilmmakers and their individual contributions to the Greek visual idiom. Ater them, a num- ber of ilmmakers, such as Antoinetta Angelidi, Constantine Giannaris, Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Tsangari and Costas Zapas, articulated a multi-ocularity in representation by exploring the potential of cinema from diferent perspec- tives and for diferent audiences. Intermediality and hybridisation create new visual languages, gen- res and possibilities for the cultural imaginary in the early twenty-irst century.

Michael Cacoyannis was the irst director to consciously approach ilm as an autonomous constructivist formation.

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His narrative ilms frame conversations with other ilms: His works inaugurated a dialogue between Greek cinema and Hollywood. Indeed one could claim that his ilms became the sites of conluence between incongruous visual languages. In the end he became unable to control the tension of their conlict or the undesired consequences of their colliding signiiers.

In his early ilms the coexistence of such incongruous idioms was created through a realism based on linear narrative, pictorial photography and sharp contrast. However, that detachment became precarious as his ilms became more ambitious and more complex: Electra consummated and at the same time destroyed the achievement with its hyper-realism and stylised ritu- alism. As Cacoyannis was evolving, his dense synthesis of story, landscape and music became more self-referential and opaque: His last ilm, he Cherry Orchard , was a strange return to pre-Cacoyannis representa- tional codes.

In its theatricality, it abolished the dynamism and the luidity of the images he had achieved in his ilms of the s. Nikos Koundouros is another unique case in formal innovation. Nothing has been written on him in English, although Greek critics rank his magisterial he Ogre of Athens as the best ilm ever made in the country. His monumental is probably a turning point in his work, as it ended his experiments with the cinematic gaze and privi- leged the energy transmitted by the story itself.

Ater , Koundouros plunged without any reservations into the madhouse of history. With his last ilms he seems to have explored the visual language of post-history, as his stories became symbolic essays on the mental states involved in totally imaginary situations. In each one of his ilms, Koundouros has been a diferent director. He constantly renewed his visual grammar, the movement of camera, the framing of action, the performance style of his actors.

With each new ilm Koundouros negated the stylistic or the rhetorical achievement of his previous work. His ilms as a whole form a dialectical cinema of antinomic representations, and are probably the single most important cinematic oeuvre in terms of never relinquishing their oppositional rage. Shaped during the gloomy persecution of all dissent in the s, Koundouros addressed the relationship between power and the individual and the mechanisms of oppression that restrict freedom.

His is the cruel cinema of an enraged humanist, and it lashes out against the oppressive presence of state power without comic relief or irony. His ilms ater show the despair and ravages of war, in the manner of Francisco Goya and Edvard Munch, as they portray the fragmented body of contemporary societies and the brutal violence of the state against the powerless and the dispossessed. His worship of the underdog led him to explore history from below, from the point of view of those who sufer history and whose existence is expendable and inconse- quential within the grand schemes of ideology.

With time, his ilms became more inward-looking, self-referential and somehow claustrophobic, although they are all set in open spaces and populous border stations. His trajectory, however, was extremely strange: Any study of Greek cinema would be misleading and incomplete if it did not address the great paradox of Yannis Dalianidis, the most commercially successful director in the country.

Despite the undeniable fact that his ilms he made a total of 65 dramas, comedies and musicals shaped the emotional landscape of two, or even three, generations of ilmgoers in the country, they are treated with derision and contempt by ilm historians and reviewers to this day. Commentary on his work is mostly an assessment of the studio era in Greece and its production mechanisms at the peak of its commercial success. Dalianidis is an uneven director: Like pop art artefacts, however, they also contain slight and imperceptible modiications, variations and shadings, which make them interesting and signiicant, as they discreetly depict for the middle-class fam- ily audience certain annoying and disturbing truths about their life.

Indeed, it is important to see his ilms as a work in progress, as a constant struggle with the potentialities of the medium, as visual investigations of what could not be represented or should not be explicitly depicted on the screen. He was a director who worked with actors and for actors: His camera was a cunning delector of attention: Dalianidis was and remains the most Freudian and Marxist director in Greek cinema: Dalianidis always worked with stereotypes; he never looked at the marginal, the irregular or the anomaly, although in his later successful ilms these types take a more prominent position.

His audience was the emerging middle class of the s, who wanted to forget the ravages of the Civil War, the German Occupation and, most importantly, their rustic or proletarian origins. His camera focused on those moments when negative emotions were beyond control and rational think- ing: In the inal analysis, Dalianidis himself was one of them, and felt immense empathy for the inner turmoil of all those young people, men in particular, who could not express their sexuality. Indeed, his whole work could be seen today as the irst complete gay mythologisation of the social experience in Greece.

One by one his ilms created a continuous coded symbolisation of the sexual pathology of everyday life, articulating well-structured cryptonymies about the secret libidinal names that the young were struggling to invent for their sexuality while they were still controlled by the hostile world of fathers and the sweet tyranny of mothers. However, the repressed middle class abandoned him simultaneously with the collapse of the studio system.

Without doubt, Angelopoulos is one of the great transnational cinematographers of the twentieth century. His ilms stand out as unique in their attempt to create a distinct cinematic language of visual perception irreducible yet conscious of its constitutive elements. Although the black and white Reconstruction presents a rather com- plex structure in storytelling and camera movement, it is conigured with the sim- plicity and the plain geometry of a silent ilm.

Angelopoulos cunningly and surrep- titiously structured his irst ilm as a series of photographs of old and forgotten crimes, but with the immediacy and the directness of a personal story, indeed of a tragic story of a friend in the neighbourhood. It was also a peculiar kind of ilm noir, without the implicit sexual energy of the genre or the narrative dislocation of its storyline. With minimal music and amateur actors, Angelopoulos relocated the centre of psychological gravity from the individual to their actions.

Between and he released a series of polychromatic vis- ual essays on the conlict between institutional power and the individual, while exploring new cinematic possibilities. In ilms such as Days of 36 , he Travelling Players , he Hunters and inally Megalexandros , the collective adventure is the focus of the camera; no protagonist, character or individual psychology stands out.

During the s, however, the individual, overwhelmed by disenchantment, loneliness and helplessness, becomes the centre of his exploration. Most of all, Angelopoulos almost reinvented colour and lighting for Greek cinema: Ater that ilm, he toned down the vibrancy and energy of natural colours by experimenting with muted shades of grey, green and yellow over sombre and dusky surfaces. Clouded skies, dark expanses and ashen, wooden interi- ors frame the movements of characterless individuals in their attempt to come to terms with the ominous historical changes around them; a smooth and melancholic impressionism permeates all his ilms during the s, a dec- ade of lost illusions and ideological disappointments.

During the same period Angelopoulos also privileged another elemental force within the structure of his ilms. Ater , the real force energising his images was less visual and more acoustic: Although Angelopoulos worked with many screenwriters, the main themes and ideas were his and he had a special approach to dialogue. His ilms were never really successful commercially, and the critics remained divided about them.

Actors were almost redundant in them, especially in the ilms before , while in the later ones they dominate the screen: Moreover, powerful archetypal myths underpin his stories, which are fre- quently taken from newspaper reports. Individual cases are fragments of lost macro-narratives and vanished universal identiications which the director efec- tively conceals in the poetic language of his dialogue, whenever dialogue exists, or in the long shots of depthless grandiose landscapes.

Indeed, the whole of his work is deined by the conlict of two opposite and irreconcilable aesthetic para- digms: His ilms frame what is absent from the shot and invite the viewer to look outside the screen in order to understand the meaning of its images. His ilms ater stand out as relentless experiments with colours and sounds more than as ilms that frame political views or ideologies. At the beginning of his career he was a cratsman of stark contrasts and neoclassical symmetries; later he became the most sophisticated colourateur of contemporary cinema.

His achievement is even more signiicant in that it is not based on techni- cal innovations or digital efects. His work needs more discussion and analysis. He attempted something Promethean: Women ilmmakers were always at the forefront of radical approaches, but have been discussed only briely in the overall literature about Greek cinema.

With the exception of Tonia Marketaki and Frida Liapa, who won moderate international attention, very little is known about female ilmmakers and their achievements. Angelidi is the patricidal daughter who singlehandedly dismembered patriar- chal and androcentric codes of representation with a series of ilms that reshaped what constitutes cinematic language. Her camera does not subvert or appropriate the dominant male-centred visual regimes.

She discards that which is ideologically tainted, cinematically worn out and thus politically spuri- ous. Her thematic lines are not Aristotelian myths: It is the gaze that looks into origins and beginnings as well as ends and inalities: Angelidi avoids the illusionism of technological cinema and the easy sensationalism of contempo- rary digital efects: Finally, any account of the poetics of postwar Greek cinema would be incomplete if nothing were said about its current situation.

Consequently, not only did the Greek state stop funding films; all production shrank dramatically in this time of social and political deterioration. The few films that have been made ten to twelve per year have portrayed a reality completely different from the one set in front of the camera until then. The current cinema, as represented by P. Koutras, Costas Zapas, Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina Tsangari and recently Alexandros Avranas, amongst others, explores a pro- found and almost foundational asymmetry between the images that had sym- bolised Greek experience until now and the present-day demise of meaning.

The images have become idols, and obscure vision. These films attempt the impossible task of bringing back the light to a mind addicted to the unreality of specular absences. It also indicates a failure of the moral imagination to take on the pretensions and the delusions of the political order and to confront the apathy, amnesia and inertia of the petit bourgeoisie. Contemporary Greek cin- ema targets this self-centredness and exposes its language and symbols; it avoids grand narratives and yet seriously questions the right of the ilmmaker to be the moral conscience of society.

Giannaris unleashed a revolution that was to bring the hidden horrifying undercurrents of Greek society under the magnifying lens of cinematic representation. His early short ilms, exploring mostly the queer experience through the eyes of existential loners, were emblematic of his later works. His black and white ilm North of Vortex is a road movie through the United States. His later movies let more things unvisualised and hidden, as if the director was more cautious about provoking the sensitivities of his middle-class urban audience, which had reacted negatively to his early ilms.

Its second target was the main instrument of Greek nation-building, the Greek language itself, as employed by the political order to manipulate the understanding of reality. Finally, living in the era of mass media, the last target was the abuse of images by the spin doctors of politics in order to obscure the absence of future-oriented social projects.

Other subtexts were the anxious world of masculine power, the sweet tyranny of maternal love and the asphyxiating reality of universal surveillance. Films made in private spaces and about private lives depict no sense of privacy or individuality: Yorgos Lanthimos, Athina-Rachel Tsangari and Alexandros Avranas strug- gle to de-ideologise ilmic images by exposing the structural patterns of horror underneath the self-aggrandising fantasies of the urban bourgeoisie. Cinematically, the anti-realism of their ilms, with its post-logical lack of referentiality, transforms them into rare social documents embodying, probably better than any historical account, the atmosphere of false- ness, cynicism and demoralisation that permeated the public sphere during the years of reckless irresponsibility.

It is institutionalised on such an immense scale through the family, the school, the church and politics that the only way a subject can gain self-awareness is by becoming either the master or the slave. If a good ilm results, then that ilm has created its own grammar. Vasilis Rafailides sug- gests the fairest critical approach to evaluating ilms: It is time to de-exoticise Greek ilmmakers and see them as image-makers, as creators of cinematic visuality, and therefore as creators who reshape visual perception and visual hermeneutics.

Only if we see them as image-makers in continuous reinvention of their medium can we connect their work with general questions about cinematic representation, and understand their responses to the ethics of visual constructiveness. As Jean-Luc Godard so incisively stated: Finally, we must see them in their constant evolution and change, as most of them renegotiated the limits of visual representation over time.

Each one of these ilmmakers must be seen within speciic semantic ields, picto- rial practices and visual regimes. Between and , Cacoyannis explored the aesthetics and the ethics of open spaces. As long as his camera foregrounded the sculptural qualities of things, each shot and frame constructed a dynamic depiction of contingent forms, fully at home in their cor- poreality and temporality. By moving away from the objec- tive sculptural realism of his irst period, he deconstructed the complexity and the verisimilitude of his own images.

It was like looking at ancient Greek statues covered in glorious col- ours under bright light: His ilms ater explore other features in form and genre, without the immediacy and the directness of the black and white photography of his early works, the crispness of their visual speciicity or the illuminating presence of sub- plots. His works dwell in spaces between genres, representations and visions.

He was the irst director who understood that the camera constructs a dangerous way of reimagining reality. As Kracauer notes, at the moment he sets his camera for shooting he becomes: His explored the condition of victimhood through its drab colours and muled sounds. Formally, this makes Koundouros, as a ilmmaker, the hero of the cutting room, using heavy editing and deep fast montage, and at the same time the Don Quixote of cinematic imagination.

We cannot understand the hugely successful ilms made by Dalianidis in the s without taking a psycho- analytical approach to them. As the main representative of popular cinema and the ilmmaker who shaped the aesthetic tastes of two generations, Dalianidis is a peculiar case. He depicted the confused gender perceptions of his society as they related to his own self-perception by substituting identities and representations: Dalianidis seemed to have seduced the gaze of a whole country by delecting its attention from the true objects of his desire.

My approach to his work is to explore the disguises of his homosexuality, and of his militant Marxism, and try to explain why his viewers and reviewers could not perceive the subversive character of his imagery. It is too complex to be seen or appreciated though a singular prism or a speciic perspec- tive. Angelopoulos, Koundouros and Cacoyannis became cultural and national icons while they were still alive. Most recently, and using diferent styles of representation, Angelidi, Giannaris, Koutras, Zapas, Lanthimos and Tsangari stand on the boundary between the known territory of visual deconstruction and the unknown landscapes over the borders of Greek territory.

From such a privileged yet precarious position they challenge norma- tive perceptions about national cinema and its language as well as dominant percep- tions of form and identity. In a way, they are all characters in interstitial exile; they are let on the borders between countries, languages and traditions, constantly redeining the concept of national cinema.

With them, Greek cinema is distinctly Greek when it is not Greek at all. Antoinetta Angelidi, as part of the experimental and poetic approach to cin- ematic images, must be seen as the poet of spatial constructivism. New and distinct styles emerge: As they evolve, they try to deterritorialise themselves, as existential homelessness is their main personal story as well. In a strange way, the mystery of human presence is the ultimate focus of their camera. It frames a distinct anti-Aristotelian and anti-classical defa- miliarised representation of form and storytelling.

Greek ilmmakers dare to dismantle the best and most enduring achieve- ments of their culture, and this gives them a signiicance beyond the recognition of their immediate environment. Social instability and ideological confusion have become the main targets of their representations: If their images are confronting and unpalatable, without the exoticism of the habitual Hellenic euphoria for tourists, that is because the face of the beast is itself confronting and unpalatable. With them the trajectory inaugurated by Cacoyannis is completed, brought to its end and reoriented: It remains to be seen what happens next.

Michael Cacoyannis1 When Michael Cacoyannis — moved to Athens from England in , he immediately recognised the sot and luminous landscape of the city and its environs as his personal cinematic language. In Athens, the young cinematographer also discovered the Greek ilm indus- try in a state of fervent reconstruction following the near destruction it had suf- fered during the s.

His arrival coincided with the gradual proliferation of studios around the capital and the competition between them for new stars, catchy storylines and fresh ideas. He was not simply making mov- ies; he was recreating the history of cinema, strenuously attempting to construct a functional visual language for the local experience. It was an enviable achievement, as his subsequent cinematography con- irmed. Cacoyannis was an outsider who became an insider, but never ceased feeling an outsider.

With his irst feature ilm, Windfall in Athens , Cacoyannis attempted something innovative: Such a risky exodus from the safety of the studio to the uncontrolled ambiguities of the open reality established a particular form of ever-expansive realism that was his distinct contribution to the develop- ment of cinematic realism in the country.

By synthesis- ing all these elements he developed a functional form of representational realism which was to reach its full potential in his next ilms and would make him the founder of a new cinematic culture in the country. Until then, in the few instances in which the issue was addressed, ilms depicted the conlict in a naive and distinctly anti-modernist way: Cacoyannis insisted on depicting the impact that such a conlict had on individual psychology, social mobility and interpersonal relations, especially on the position of women in Greek society.

He was the irst director to present modernity not as a conspiracy or a sinister destruction of tra- ditional values but as a promise of social justice, gender equality and individual empowerment. From that starting point, he expressed a strong liberal human- ism, a humanism that was cautious about radical changes but that strongly fore- grounded the values of libertarian bourgeois culture.

At the same time it established a new form of narrative realism, without the emotional and rhetorical excesses of Stella, by foregrounding collective mentali- ties and depicting implied mental structures about gender, class and sexuality. When you have watched for long enough the surface of a river or a lake, you will detect certain patterns in the water which may have been produced by a breeze or an eddy.

Found stories are in the nature of such patterns. Being discovered rather than contrived they are inseparable from ilms animated by documentary intentions. It was a drama about the deep changes that the traditional bour- geoisie was going through as Greek society was entering its rapid industrialisation, and was the irst to depict the rise of the new ruling class of the petit bourgeoisie. He also reinvented the proxemic patterns of his camera, from the intense close-ups and frantic jump cuts of his second ilm to the medium or long shots of his later ilms, recalibrating territorial depth and spa- tial continuity in his attempt to create a detached and critical view of the reality depicted.

Later, in Electra , he would achieve a functional harmonisation of both. His sculptural realism synthesised all these visual styles and languages in a way that had never been done before in the local industry. However, realism was the original habitus of his camera, not its ultimate destination: His transition can be discerned in his exploration of the formal possibilities ofered to him by the cinematic medium itself; the creative fusion he achieved between the Hollywood tradition and the postwar European cinema of Vittorio de Sica, Ingmar Bergman and especially Roberto Rossellini allowed him to experiment with the camera and its possibilities to depict what could not be seen within its frame.

His understanding of the limitations of realistic represen- tation can be clearly seen in his struggle to transform the camera into an active participant in the exploration of human form based on neoclassical aesthetics while at the same time maintaining the grand scale of the tragic universe. Unfortunately, most of the ilms he directed ater seem like imitations of his own style, unable to construct a successful plot through a convincing script or to articulate a cinematic language with formal and stylistic cohesion.

His ambitious comedy he Day the Fish Came Out lacked narrative cohesion, and its sense of humour was rather dated: Michael Cacoyannis13 he context for the production of his ilms is crucial in order to understand how his remarkable achievement in the s lost its relevance in the next decade when Greek and European cinema went through a crisis of representation that was to dismantle the conventions and the styles that had formed their visual language ater World War II.

As mentioned before, when Cacoyannis moved to Greece in the urban landscape of Athens was still scarred by the traumas of the German Occupation and the Civil War —9 ; at the same time, strict and intrusive censorship did not allow the indiscreet eye of the camera to explore the Athenian landscape as lived experience and cultural memory. It was not allowed, however, to be conceptualised or even articulated on any level of public communication without fear of persecution and exile; it remained codiied and cryptic.

Consequently, every depiction of what was out there constituted dangerous conduct, entailing self-exclusion and mar- ginalisation, and therefore led to self-censorship and consequent psychological displacement. Most directors ater had to tread very carefully in order to make their ilms without incurring exile or banning. During this period of intense social turmoil, cinema became the central medium through which Greek society relected on its own structure, cul- tural memory and traumas; it was a period of high realism for the arts, which rep- licated the Greek world with the faithfulness of a photograph.

Cacoyannis was the irst cinematographer to deal with these lingering questions by compiling a visual language that articulated a complete narrative about individuals and their society in their organic interconnectedness. His cinematic realism, as a political statement, was dichotomised by competing values: Indeed the hyperrealism of his ilms in the s collided with a social real- ity that was becoming increasingly unstable, dangerous and incomprehensible.

For reasons that had to do with their disillusionment with certain collective projects of modernity liberalism in the case of Cacoyannis and socialism in that of Angelopoulos , they retreated from contemporary history and found refuge in the archetypal structure of ancient myths, in which the turmoil, luidity and the instability of reality were eliminated. Although Cacoyannis himself avoided all classical references Stella, for example, takes place on the slopes of the Acropolis hill but the Parthenon is only seen once, leetingly , his tragedies look more like exercises in symbolic dehistoricisation.

Yet both history and autobiography can be found irmly encoded within these ilm: Ultimately, it becomes a drama about personal identity as the children ind in their own psyche the presence of pernicious parents who dominate the external horizon of history and the internal landscapes of their being. In a sense, Electra is a very personal ilm: It is subsequently purchased by Alexis, an aspiring songwriter and musician, who lives a life of idleness punctu- ated by dreams of success. When Alexis wins millions, Mina launches a public campaign through the media and, inally, the court system to retrieve the money.

She is assisted by a famous lawyer who, partly moved by her innocence and partly enchanted by her nascent sexuality, stands by her, being subconsciously sexu- ally attracted, despite the negative reaction of his jealous wife. However, Alexis likes Mina and ofers her one-third of the money. He also wrote the script. One can even see this ilm as an experiment with timing in ilmic narration and as a precursor to his next ilm. Upon its release, the ilm was an immediate success, second in ticket sales only to another musical comedy.

Twenty-two ilms were produced that year, most of them at the Egyptian Studios in Cairo and Alexandria. Seen under the light of its structural morphology, the story in the ilm has a pattern: It is also interrupted by the trickery and the deception of the venerable lawyer, whose sexual advances delay the story, creating confusion in the main female character and testing her ability to choose correctly, as well as provoking moral expectations in the audience. Furthermore, around the adventures of the two protagonists Cacoyannis weaves the minor stories and adventures of many other characters, some of them without any relationship to the main story, except as catalysts for the narrative to unfold.

Cacoyannis is the irst director to intervene in the script in order to give struc- tural cohesion to such urban fairytales. His close associate and cameraman Walter Lassaly observed: On the other hand, it was a period when the need for good scripts was intensely discussed in Greece: In order to make a movie, we must irst write the script, by all means. Words pre-exist so that we can be certain that the necessary form can exist also, necessary not only for the dramatic construction of a scene but also so that certain rules can be respected relating to the economy of the script itself.

My scripts do not need psychological instructions; they were produced by the roles themselves and the situations. With his irst ilm Cacoyannis made possible the transition from a script based on a book to a script written specii- cally for cinema, with the translation of recognised stories into the visual language of images with compositional unity. In order to achieve this, he avoided distinct episodes and lashbacks, which could have disrupted the emotional climax of the story. Money won in the lottery ofers the opportunity to break through traditional structures and enables the individual to fulil their dreams and aspirations.

Michael Cacoyannis, Windfall in Athens Yet the body is at the same time released from its middle-class reserved respectability and gains an enchanting and graceful fast movement, something that Cacoyannis explored in his subsequent ilms with subtlety and sensitivity. Cacoyannis was one of the irst directors to use the ilmic persona of his actors as a comment on their actual personality, something which in Stella would indeed invent the persona and the personality of Melina Mercouri.

By adopting frames and scenes from Emmer and Clair, as well as from popular Hollywood ilms, Cacoyannis became the pioneer in Greek cinema of what might be called inter-ilmic transcriptions, extracting a speciic scene from its original ilmscape and placing it in a completely diferent context in an act of cinematic and visual acculturation.

Interilmic transcriptions give his work, especially of this period, a deep aesthetic and narrative complexity: Despite the simplicity of the story, cinematic narrative unfolds with ease, diversity, rhythm and very sophisticated taste. Within this site one can also detect subtexts on gender, especially masculinity, and the rise of new perceptions of feminine social roles. With his early ilms the narrative was mostly focused around family melodramas and domestic spaces, establishing the template for all the later ilms that explored the hidden life of families.

However, in order to understand this strange, and somehow distracting, evasion we must revisit his irst ilms and look more closely at how he pieced together their visual grammar. Windfall in Athens imported a considerable part of European cinematic his- tory into Greek ilm production; with his next ilm, Cacoyannis would take on the great fear of Hollywood. References to ilms such as Stella Dallas and From Here to Eternity , and to American musicals and westerns, abound in the ilm.

His interilmic transcriptions need to be studied carefully, because they have contributed signiicantly to a distinctly cinematic grammar of visual perception, something that had, until then, been used only infrequently and spasmodically, by directors such as Yorgos Tzavellas. It makes its audience feel at home at the movies by seamlessly extending the domesticity of a communitarian life to an urban reality and way of living. Windfall in Athens transforms the landscape of Athens into a friendly, positive and life-airming presence, by insisting on the speciicity of its mundane components and on the idealistic notion that pre-capitalist modes of being can coexist with capitalist forms of social organisation.

What dominates its temporality is the sense of the present moment, of a vivifying simultaneity that transforms the mundane existence of the modern middle class into an exciting and promising wonder. Windfall in Athens is also a parable about the illusion of innocence, the discov- ery of the complexities of the world and the disruptive function of modern institu- tions. He had directed a farce, an intelligent satire of the rising petit bourgeoisie, during its ascent to power in a period of reconstruction. Despite its comic sense, character- ised by witty dialogue, fast editing and funny situational misunderstandings, the ilm overall is a rather serious depiction of a society in a state of intense social mobility.

Many social references, such as the role of the press and the judiciary, indicate the tensions that give this ilm its latent political edge. What is absent from its story is also important. Cacoyannis was cognizant of the fact that certain themes needed to be depicted without actually being articulated. Comedies, especially during the postwar period, typically ridiculed authority and its servants.

In Stella, desire took another expression: Ultimately it is a visual exploration of the irreconcilability of order and disorder, and the ability of the cinematic camera to frame an image that could demonstrate the force, or from another perspective the narcissism, of human desires. Constructing visual narratives here is no better mask than the close-up.

Michael Cacoyannis33 Unfortunately, Stella is an over-exposed ilm: Stella is of historic importance as the irst Greek ilm to success- fully bring Greek music, Greek images and Greek issues to the attention of international audiences. Lindsay Anderson, in his report from the Cannes Festival, seems to have noticed the formal and ideological dis- continuities of the ilm when he wrote: In the inal scene of dancing with two diferent styles, in two diferent rhythms and out of two diferent worlds, Cacoyannis brings everything together with an ingenious use of montage which gave him the opportunity to juxtapose the symbiotic yet competitive exist- ence of opposing temporalities in Greek society.

Because of the competing social and aesthetic agendas in its structure, Stella can be inscribed within diverse interpretive paradigms: In the end, Stella accedes to her own death, as she has already surrendered her free will to the patriarchal system. She is the voluntary sacriice to the omnipotent masculine authority, which simply conirms, through her death, the inability of women to live unmarried and uncommitted.

Beyond this, the realism of the ilm is not to be found in the characters but in its exploration of urban space. Also, the inal scenes, when the camera uses a documentary mode to show the student parade for the national celebration, are equally telling: But as she surrenders to her own death, the drama has been decided, primarily within her; and Cacoyannis shows us the psychic impossibility of a woman existing without a male partner within a masculine order that ruthlessly punishes those who question the central- ity of the phallus.

Despite its popularity amongst feminist theorists, Stella is a ilm about what is lacking in masculinity, especially about the fear of mutilation and castration. It shows maleness experiencing a deep anxiety about its power and therefore being full of rage against those who question its domination. As Judith Butler observed: It gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalisation of bodies in which the phallus, though clearly not identical to the penis, deploys the penis as its naturalised instrument and sign. It is when a young man of Hydra, sun-baked island in the Sea of Crete sic , sets upon his own widowed mother in the open streets of the town and beats her for being a loose woman while the jeering townsfolk gather round.

And drawn to the street by the commotion, his poor, frightened sister pitches in and tries to pull him away from their weeping mother. It is a shocking, humiliating scene. Elli Lambetti performs her role with austerity, motion- less, and almost emotionless. It is the landscape that occludes all memory, which in turn impedes the individuation of the characters: Before the emergence of mass tourism, the island of Hydra was the irst place ater the Acropolis to be transformed into an imaginary topos, through the work of the cubist painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika — Indeed they punctuate the massive spatial continuity, emerging as black vertical lines out of the colourless and historyless background.

With his next ilm A Matter of Dignity , Cacoyannis enhanced his sculp- tural, neoclassical realism, achieving a continuous development of time and space, linking open form and efective characterisation. What also keeps the narrative together is the nuanced performance of Elli Lambetti, as the young girl Chloe, sufering under her reckless mother and becoming the symbolic sac- riice to the new capitalist order.

Gestures, language, behaviour all lose their signiicance and are transformed into stratagems of marginalisation and expulsion from the new arrangement of power. Despite its ruptures, reality is meaningful and there is a place for everything within the frame. What was standing in front of him as a pain- ful vestige of the past was silently recorded by the camera, almost like a dance of ghosts that could not be ignored any more. Eroica is about the last spring before the Asia Minor Catastrophe and shows that, inally, history had caught up with Cacoyannis.

It takes place in a dreamlike past, the world of childhood, full of awe and wonder, before the gradual awakening of sexuality and the painful awareness of the imminent collective tragedy. Despite the great cam- era work by Lassally and the ethereal music by Argyris Kounadis, it fell short of capturing the atmosphere of enchantment that was so brutally lost in Smyrna.

Most critics rejected the ilm. Walter Lassally wrote about it: It also indicates a very interesting latent dialogue with Hollywood again, especially with D. Michael Cacoyannis, Eroica Unfortunately, the ilm is miscast and the young actors were too young to understand the tragic generation they incarnated.

Stylistically, the ilm problematised the transparent realism of his previous works. Tragedy, then, is mimesis of an action that is elevated, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not nar- rative; through pity and fear, accomplishing its catharsis of such emotions. In its wildest reaches, it presents a boisterousness in tune with the edgier examples of innovative narrative.

At that moment, he discovered Euripides and the world beyond the realm of history, whose representation was a matter of abstraction and ellipsis more than a variety of actual details, richness of texture and compositional gravity. Greek myths ofered him a universe that spoke his language and at the same time addressed questions that he thought pertinent to his generation without politicising them. His classical real- ism, indeed his classicism, was an attempt to ind a new balance between idealism and reality through the adaptation of archetypal myths. His discovery of tragedy ofered a way out of his creative entanglements and, to a certain degree, a political, philosophical and aesthetic alternative.

Electra is probably the inest and most intricate ilm ever produced in Greece, because of its formal geometry, tragic atmosphere and cinematic timing, a superb example of total cinema, combining acting, music and performance in an almost operatic completeness. In the very few notes that he wrote about the ilm Cacoyannis stated: My purpose was to transform tragedy into cinema, and not to direct a performance of tragedy in front of the camera; to achieve, through purely cinematic means, the same emotional force which tragedy achieves, the same pity, the same fear, the same catharsis.

Actors are not the only characters in the ilm. Ancient twisted olive trees, rocks and dry land act together with them; they existed then as now and will exist forever as components of our land. Anastasia Bakogianni, ater a thorough analysis of the ilm, concluded: Cacoyannis was trying to convey a political message in his ilms.

Bad rulers should be punished. In responding to the turbulent poli- tics of Greece in the twentieth century, Cacoyannis used his recep- tion of Euripidean tragedy to condemn war and bad government. Without reverting to crass biographism, it was a metaphor for his family life, as well as his closeted sexuality. In this case, her mother, Clytemnestra, does not sufer penis envy, as a facile Freudian reading would have suggested.

In an era of unstable identiications the phallus does not belong to a speciic gender; it is the attribute of those in power, ascribed to them by internalised inferiority and submissiveness. Michael Cacoyannis, Electra She is aggressive, unrepentant and uncompromising. Her costume, which references the Minoan snake goddess, frames another demonic irregularity: It is a malevolent mother who determines the destiny of her castrated and neutralised children. Eliot, in their beginning was already their end; their tragedy was complete and had no redemption.

When, later, Cacoyannis made he Trojan Women and Iphigenia , he abandoned the hyper-realism of that intensiied rhythmic temporal- ity and opted instead for a polychromatic naturalism, almost for ultra-verism. Despite the better technical equipment, the colours themselves betrayed the sub- ject matter: It became a genuine televisual spectacle, full of obvious ideological allusions and having a strong political elements: From Euripides has remained only the skeleton of the myth.

Its lesh was devoured, obviously by the directors of the Greek Film Centre, whilst the poetry and philosophy of the tragedy was com- pletely gobbled up by Cacoyannis himself. And this happened because he wanted to modernise the tragedy and make it totally unrecognisable. Rafailides was also referring to the newly estab- lished Greek Film Centre and the politics of ilm production in the country ater As the screen fuses with the politics around it, the ilm becomes the archive of its own production and of the ideological structures that made it possible; it consciously discards its own open-endedness and singularises its ambiguities.

While the ilm tries to use a portable camera, in the end it becomes only the eye of an irrelevant yet cunning journalist whose open vision of the past has shrunk into an introverted and closed neighbourhood. In short, Cacoyannis was afraid to clearly state his intentions, which have nothing to do with the ilm itself but with his own dis- empowerment in the new conditions dominating the cultural imaginary of the country.

However, behind the artiicial plainness of the plot and the presumed naivety of the story, Cacoyannis does make a discreet statement, at last, about his own sexuality. Mina, Stella, Marina, Chloe and Electra all represent the same child, in search of an absent father igure. In the end the child decides to identify with the aggressor: Yet there remains the sufering of gender dysphoria and confusion.

Symbolically, the child castrates itself and experiences its presence in terms of masochistic sufering and corporeal loss: Yet the animalistic sexuality of Miltos, Christos and Aegisthos creates the most memorable characters in terms of male chauvinism and its predatory sexual- ity. We must see them more as projections of tendencies considered feminine and less as authentic markers, or symbols, of femininity. In her essence, Stella was a man in disguise, a man who could not reveal the truth about his feelings.

Cacoyannis started out with the liberal project of realistic presentation, moved towards the hyper-realistic mythopoeics of dehistoricisation and consummated his work through his endorsement of a totally artiicial naturalism that dissolved the ability of the cinema to explore potentialities in the social realm and on the psychic level. In a sense, Cacoyannis was very close to the trajectory followed by Roberto Rossellini, from his early neorealism to the introspective cinema of his last ilms. Rossellini, however, saw realism as a spiritual project, with strong religious underpinnings and very obvious educational function.

In Rome, Open City , realism becomes the platform on which the competing systems of the Italian cultural experience found their most signiicant formal coexistence: He sees the rituals around religious experience, the phenomenology of the cultus, but not the transiguring presence of the mystery. Hence, in order for an infinitely improbable state to occur would require violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Consequently, if the known laws of physics are true statements of how the world works, then the Omega Point cosmology is logically unavoidable.

In the above-quoted paragraph, "measure zero" is a technical term in measure the- ory an area of mathematics which deals with the sizes of sets that means "null set" also called "measure set". The initial data space is all the possible outcomes which could come about given particular physical conditions — the reason for it being called "initial" is because as time progresses, events occur which preclude other events from taking place. In the context of the above, what it means is that the Omega Point cosmological singularity is infinitely improbable acting only on blind and dead forces, i.

The reason for this is because in order for the universe to evolve into the Omega Point, event horizons must be eliminated, other- wise one doesn't get a solitary-point final singularity which is one of the definitions of the Omega Point , but instead a singularity with many different points due to different locations of the universe being out of causal contact with each other which is what the term "event horizon" means , which would be completely lethal to life as even- tually even a single computer with the complexity and intelligence of a human mind would be out of causal contact with the rest of itself, thereby making human-level intelligence impossible and progressing further in time, eventually even the simplest form of life would become out causal contact with the rest of itself.

Yet in order to eliminate event horizons requires intelligence to direct the collapse trajectories of the universe, necessitating an infinite number of distinct manipulations as the universe col- lapses toward the Omega Point. Because the complexity of the universe grows without bound, and because the universe must be understood so that its collapse trajectories 24 Ref.

It means infinitesimally close, or infinitely close 29 The reason for this term being used here is because while the known laws of physics say that the cosmological singularity must exist, no possible laws of physics can apply to the sin- gularity itself, because physical values are at infinity there, and hence it's not possible to perform the arithmetical operations of addition or subtraction nor multiplication or division on those physical values in order to apply a physics equation to them.

The gravita- 28 To elaborate on this matter, in order to eliminate event horizons life will have to understand the universe to some degree. Life can't understand the universe in which it lives perfectly, since that would involve a proper subset perfectly modeling its proper superset. Here the degree of life's understanding doesn't matter to this argument, as the issue is that the complexity of the universe is increasing, and this will necessarily increase the complexity of far-future life's imperfect models of how the universe is to evolve and thus how they are to respond to it so as to manipulate the universe's collapse trajectories — the point being here is that whatever their degree of understanding, said knowledge will still have to diverge to inf inity.

Taub collapses have also been termed Kasner crushings, after mathematician Edward Kasner. This process which avoids Heat Death is depicted in Figure[3] x Ref. That is, by making the negative gravitational energy go to minus infin- ity, the positive energy available to life goes to plus infinity, as the total energy of the universe at all times sums to exactly zero, as physicist Stephen Hawking has pointed out: The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity.

Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.

Now twice zero is also zero. Thus the universe can double the amount of positive matter energy and also double the negative gravitational energy without violation of the conservation of energy. As [physicist Alan] Guth has remarked, "It is said that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

But the universe is the ultimate free lunch. A light ray thereby traverses an infinite number of times across the entire universe before the final singularity, allowing an infinite number of computer clock cycles before the end of proper time. Hence, experiential time lasts forever, i. At the same time, the universe's entropy i. In other words, the universe's memory space diverges to infinity at the same time that the universe's processor speed is diverging to infinity, with both becoming infinite at the final singularity i.

Some have suggested that the current acceleration of the universe's expansion due to the positive cosmological constant would appear to obviate the Omega Point. The actual spatial topology of the universe is that of a 3-sphere The technical term for this squashed sphere shape is oblate spheroid, which is a type of ellipsoid, and which has a 3-sphere analogue in addition to the 2-sphere form depicted above. In order to overcome event horizons so that light will circumnavigate the universe just once in the collapsing direction — hence allowing communication across the universe — the size of the universe in that direction must decrease by a factor of approximately 70 Q p.

Collapse in that direction is then halted and the universe undergoes collapse in a different direction, with an infinite number of these different Taublike collapses i. These anisotropic collapse cycles additionally provide gravitational shear energy for life by creating a temperature differential across the universe, because greater heating occurs in the direction of collapse. Krauss and Michael S. Turner have pointed out [] that The recognition that the cosmological constant may be non-zero forces us to re- evaluate standard notions about the connection between geometry and the fate of our Universe.

An open Universe can recollapse, and a closed Universe can expand forever. As a corollary we point out that there is no set of cosmological obser- vations we can perform that will unambiguously allow us to determine what the ultimate destiny of the Universe will be. The reason why cosmological observations cannot tell us whether the universe will expand forever or eventually collapse is because that is dependent on the actions of intelligent life. The known laws of physics provide the mechanism for the universe's collapse. As required by the Standard Model of particle physics, the net baryon number was created in the early universe by baryogenesis via electroweak quantum tunneling.

This necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum, which is the cause of the observed cosmological constant. But by sapient life annihilating baryons in the universe — again via electroweak quantum tunneling which is allowed in the Standard Model, as baryon number minus lepton number, B — L, is conservecQ — the Higgs field is forced toward its absolute vacuum state, canceling the observed cosmological constant and thereby allowing the universe to collapse. Moreover, this process will provide the ideal form of energy resource and rocket propulsion during the colonization phase of the universe.

Baryons are the heavy particles made up of quarks. Examples are neutrons and protons. In my book, I pointed out that this mechanism would be ideal for propelling inter- stellar spacecraft, but I did not discuss its implications for the Higgs vacuum, a serious oversight on my part. An oversight which invalidates the second part of my Fifth Prediction on page of []. In his book, Tipler recognized that the Higgs field could stop the collapse of the universe but did not at the time investigate the full implications of this ][ p.

If the baryons were so created, then this process necessarily forces the Higgs field to be in a vacuum state that is not its absolute vacuum. But if the baryons in the universe were to be annihilated by this process, say by the action of intelligent life, then this would force the Higgs field toward its absolute vacuum, canceling the positive cosmological constant, stopping the acceleration, and allowing the universe to collapse into the Omega Point. Conversely, if enough baryons are not annihilated by this process, the positive cosmological constant will never be can- celled, the universe will expand forever, unitarity will be violated, and the Omega Point will never come into existence.

Only if life makes use of this process to annihilate baryons will the Omega Point come into existence. But because these physicists were looking for equations with a finite number of terms i. Tipler writes thai 41 38 That is, correct according to the known laws of physics 39 Ref. Worldline of the Earth Time Worldline of a point in the universe antipodal to the Earth. A photon traverses the entire length of the universe an infinite number of times before the final singularity is reached.

Furthermore, the distance between an- tipodal points in the universe becomes closer and closer as the universe collapses into the final singularity, meaning that the time it takes a photon to travel between opposite points of the universe becomes shorter and shorter, i. In other words, an infinite number of computer processor cycles occur before the final singularity i.

Total available energy as the radius of the universe goes to zero: That is, for every halving of the universe's radius R, the total available energy E increases by 8 times. Entropy growth allowed by the Bekenstein Bound as the radius of the universe goes to zero: That is, for every halving of the universe's radius R, the entropy S allowed by the Bekenstein Bound can increase by 4 times. In the graph, the horizontal axis is the radius, and the vertical axis is the entropy. From the aforesaid Reports on Progress in Physics paper, Tipler elaborates on the mathematics and physics of this issue, in part explained below: Physicists do not like it because 1 it has an infinite number of renormalizable constants c 1 -, all of which must be determined by experiment and 2 it will it not yield second order differential equations which all physicists know and love.

But the countable number of constants are in effect axioms of the theory, and I pointed out in an earlier section that the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem suggests there is no real difference between a theory with a countable number of axioms and a theory with a finite number of axioms. The finite case is just easier for humans to deal with, provided the 'finite' number is a small number. Donoghue [ ] and Donoghue and Torma [ ] have shown that Lagrangian [3] will not contradict experiment provided the renormalized values of the infi- nite number of new coupling constants are sufficiently small.

One consequence of the above Lagrangian being the true description of quantum gravity is that so long as one is within spacetime, then one can never obtain a complete 42 Ref. Citation formatting in the quoted passage has been modified for the sake of clarity. Typographical errors in this quoted passage have been corrected, again for clarity. Physics will become ever-more refined, knowledgeable and precise, but never complete i.

Only at the final singularity of the Omega Point which is not in spacetimepj will the full description of physics be obtained. Out of 50 articles, Tipler's said paper was selected [] as one of 12 for the "Highlights of " accolade as the very best articles published in Reports on Progress in Physics in [Vol. Articles were selected by the Editorial Board for their outstanding reviews of the field. They all received the highest praise from our international referees and a high number of downloads from the journal Website. Reports on Progress in Physics is the leading peer-reviewed journal of the Institute of Physics, Britain's main professional body for physicists.

Tipler has been published in more than once. A journal's im- pact factor is a measure of the importance the science community places in that jour- nal in the sense of actually citing its papers in their own papers, with a higher number meaning more citations. Impact factors published by Journal Citation Reports are the standard measure used to compare a journal's influence.

The Continuity of Consciousness: Logically speaking, an exact emulation is the thing being emulated. If it were not, then this would violate the Law of Identity in the field of logic, and thus it would be a logical contradiction. An exact emulation of, e. To say that a perfect emulation is not the thing being emulated would be the same as saying that , i. Again, to suppose otherwise involves a logical contradiction. Brian Greene, it is unknown if singularities of gravi- tational collapse are possible or excluded in String Theory as applied to the actual ge- ometry of the universe, although he states that string theorists suspect that no object 46 Ref.

As well, the Omega Point cosmology requires the existence of a cosmological singularity at the end of proper time, and the Omega Point cosmology is required by the known laws of physics. Besides proposing new phys- ical laws that have no experimental confirmation in an effort to solve the black hole information problem, Hawking's proposal also violates the known laws of physics see Appendix A. Whereas the known laws of physics have been confirmed by every experiment con- ducted to date, String Theory has never been confirmed by even a single experiment. As yet, String Theory has been nothing more than pure mathematics with the aspira- tion held by its proponents of someday becoming physics — a goal that has so far been a wild-goose chase.

Tipler himself argues against the validity of String Theory in its current state []. The same lack of experimental confirmation presently applies to all other forms of proposed new physics, and such proposed new physics also violate the known laws of physics. George Ellis and Dr. David Coule in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation []. Writing in the "Book Reviews" section of the journal Nature, Ellis [[] described Tipler's book The Physics of Immortality as "a masterpiece of pseu- doscience.

If one ignores what the critiqued individual wrote then one can construct any irrelevant objection. For example, Ellis asserts that Tipler "ignores the fact" that life cannot exist at arbitrarily high temperatures, but it is Ellis who ignores the fact that Tipler already addressed this matter in the very book under review. Physics allows life to exist as the temperature diverges to infinity if enough energy is available in which to record pro- cessed information i. Tipler points out in his said book that such energy will be available and that within the Omega Point cosmology the energy levels for the medium in which to store information at the given temperatures automatically scale with the collapse of the universe Jilt's as if Ellis skimmed parts of the book without reading all of it, and hence is unaware that his objections were already addressed 53 In the magazine New Scientist, physicist Prof.

Krauss [] referred to Tipler's book The Physics of Christianity as "a collection of half-truths and exaggera- tions, I am tempted to describe Tipler's new book as nonsense — but that would be un- fair to the concept of nonsense. It is far more dangerous than mere nonsense. Else- where, Krauss has made it a point to emphasize what he considers to be the utter pur- poselessness of the universe and the futility of human life within in.

Apparently Krauss be- lieves that Tipler's "dangerous" ideas pose the risk of screwing up mankind's pointless fate! In his review, Krauss repeatedly commits the logical fallacy of bare assertion. Krauss gives no indication that he followed up on the endnotes in the book The Physics of Christianity and actually read Tipler's physics journal papers.

All that Krauss is going off of in said review is Tipler's mostly nontechnical popular-audience book The Physics 52 Ref. Krauss's review offers no actual lines of reasoning for Krauss's pronouncements. His readership is simply expected to imbibe what Krauss proclaims, even though it's clear that Krauss is merely critiquing a popular-audience book which does not attempt to present the rigorous technical details. For instance, Krauss asserts that "He [Tipler] claims that we have a clear and con- sistent theory of quantum gravity.

Krauss displays no awareness of this peer-reviewed paper or of Tipler's other refereed papers on the Omega Point cosmology published in many physics journals. Although in this same review, Krauss does admit that the mechanism that Tipler proposes for Jesus Christ's miracles is physically sound if said miracles were necessary in order to lead to the formation of the Omega Point and if the Omega Point is required in order for existence to exist. Ironically, Krauss has actually published a paper that greatly helped to strengthen Tipler's Omega Point cosmology.

Turner point out in Reference that "there is no set of cosmological observations we can perform that will unambiguously allow us to determine what the ultimate destiny of the Universe will be. So when Tipler's critics actually do real physics instead of issuing bare assertions and nihil ad rem cavils, they end up making Tipler's case stronger. Ironic though it is, nevertheless that's the expected result, since the Omega Point cosmology is required by the known laws of physics. Unfortunately, most modern physicists have been all too willing to abandon the laws of physics if it produces results that they're uncomfortable with, i.

It's the antagonism for religion on the part of the scientific community which greatly held up the acceptance of the Big Bang for some 40 years , due to said scientific community's displeasure with it confirming the traditional theological position of creatio ex nihilo, and also because no laws of physics can apply to the singularity itself: Georges Lemaitre in Indeed, Lemaitre relates that when he spoke with Albert Einstein regarding his Primaeval Atom Hypothesis, Einstein's response to it was "Non, pas cela, cela suggere trop la creation" "No, not this — this too much suggests the creation" p] 55 Ref.

Alexander Friedmann was the first to derive solutions to Einstein's field equations that require the curvature of space to vary with time [ ], but did not suggest that the universe was actually expanding. Lemaitre independently derived the solutions, and proposed that the universe was in fact expanding as also the title to his first paper [] on the subject indicates , while providing observational evidence that this was so.

For histories on this, see Refs. McVittie wrote [ [ p. Friedmann had, in and , published papers in which the general differential equation for [Ein- stein's field equations' radial scale-factor] R was considered. But Lemaitre went beyond the determination of a specific form for R: With this step, cosmology, as we know it today, was launched. And as physicist Alain Blanchard wrote [57 p.

In this sense, [according] to [cosmologist] Jim Peebles, Physical Cosmology during the century was essentially a continuation of Lemaitre's program Peebles, Wherein " Peebles, " is Ref. Lemaitre's Primaeval Atom Hypothesis would later be mathematically proved per General Relativity with the Penrose-Hawking-Geroch Singularity Theorems, discussed in this section farther below. As regards physicists abandoning physical law due to their theological discomfort with the Big Bang cosmology, in an article by Prof.

Tipler he gives the following exam- ple involving no less than physicist Prof. He told his class that of the theories of cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because "it least resembled the account in Genesis" my emphasis. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimen- tal effort. He and I are both convinced that the equations of physics are the best guide to reality, especially when the predictions of these equations are contrary to common sense.

But as he himself points out in his book, the Big Bang Theory was an automatic conse- quence of standard thermodynamics, standard gravity theory, and standard nu- s8 Cf. However, in past-to-future causality, all causal chains begin at the Big Bang initial singularity, and so it is uncaused in the sense of how humans commonly think of causality. Another sense in which the cosmological singularity is uncaused is that it is outside of spacetime [ pp. All of the basic physics one needs for the Big Bang Theory was well established in the s, some two decades before the theory was worked out.

Weinberg rejected this standard physics not because he didn't take the equations of physics seriously but because he did not like the religious implications of the laws of physics Prof. Stephen Hawking reinforces what Einstein, Weinberg and Tipler spoke about concerning the antagonism of the 20th century scientific community for religion, re- sulting in the scientific community abandoning good physics. In his famous book A Brief History of Time, Hawking wrote thai 65 Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.

There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang. The proposal that gained widest support was called the steady state theory. In the same chapter, Hawking wrote about how attempts to avoid the Big Bang were dashed in the form of the Penrose-Hawking-Geroch Singularity Theorems [ ] The final result [of the Singularity Theorems] was a joint paper by Penrose and myself in , which at last proved that there must have been a big bang sin- gularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe.

There was a lot of opposition to our work, partly from the Russians because of their Marxist belief in scientific determinism, and partly from people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was repugnant and spoiled the beauty of Einstein's theory. However, one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem. So in the end our work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang singularity.

In this book Hawking is himself dissatisfied with the implications of the Penrose- Hawking-Geroch Singularity Theorems, and on p. Hartle as an attempt to avoid the initial singularity, which Hawking writes about further on pp. However, given the Singularity Theorems, the only way this proposal could be correct is if General Relativity is incorrect, i. Regarding the possibility that the energy condition on the universe's matter won't hold at Planck scales, the initial and final cosmological singularities are actually more inevitable when Quantum Mechanics is taken into account: Their reactions provide an interesting demonstration of the response of the scientific mind — supposedly a very objective mind — when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to a conflict with the ar- ticles of faith in our profession.

It turns out that the scientist behaves the way the rest of us do when our beliefs are in conflict with the evidence. We become irri- tated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phrases. Later in this book, Jastrow states thai ' 69 There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe.

Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause. Einstein wrote, "The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.

He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. Both the university system and the field of natural science as a systematic discipline are the inventions of Christianity. The Christian Weltanschauung was a unique development in the history of thought, since it held that God is rational and that unlike in, e.

It was this change in worldview which made systematic study into the physical world possible. Jesus Christ founded the only civilization in history to pull itself out of the muck, and along with it the rest of the world.

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A great irony is that even antitheists benefit enormously from the civilization that Christ founded: According to the known laws of physics, Wordsworth's worthy words here are in this case literally true. Woods [ 1, and Dr. Hannam [ ]. Note that by antitheist I mean one having a positive belief in the nonexistence of God, which popularly goes by the etymologically incorrect name atheist.

Atheist etymologically means one lacking a positive belief in God. It was the Christian religious orders which preserved and advanced European civilization through the tumultuous centuries of the Barbarian Invasions ca. With- 33 totelianism, which maintained the verity of geocentrism predicated on philosophical premises. This lead to the persecution of Galileo Galilei, which was demanded by the Aristotelian academics of the time in order to protect their bailiwick; the pope and sev- eral of the churchmen were quite enthusiastic about Galileo's observations confirming heliocentrism, but caved-in to the demands of the Aristotelian academics.

For these men, their scientific investigations were driven by their desire to better know the intellect of God. It might be objected that while Christianity has birthed science and provided con- siderable inspiration for its advancement, the seeking after God cannot serve as a methodological basis for science, because such an enterprise presupposes that God ex- ists, whereas science must be prepared to accept any answer that's correct.

Kealey shows in Ref. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view. Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against scepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against super- stition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: Science will win because it works. If God does not exist, then ultimately there is no such thing as winning — we are all existential losers in that case.

According to the known laws of physics, science has won. The prize it has won, instead of inexorable eternal extinction, is divergence to infinite knowledge. The Omega Point final singularity is a different aspect of the Big Bang initial sin- gularity, i. The crucial concept of God is as a state of infinite mind. As such, God is inherently personal, since the mental resources of God are infinitely greater than that of a sapient human being.

Given a state of infinite mind, anything that can exist can be rendered. Further- more, any universal Turing machine is mathematically equivalent to any other univer- Refs. In Hawking's book coauthored with physicist Dr. Leonard Mlodinow and published in [ 1, Hawking uses the String Theory extension M-Theory to argue that God's existence isn't necessary, although M-Theory has no observational evidence confirming it. Yet despite the complete lack of any confirmational observations for M-Theory, people are apparently supposed to be impressed that the authority-figure Hawking has come to this conclusion.

As well, it begs the question as to what the prize is that science will win if sapient life is ultimately meaningless — which is a point that Hawking emphasized in his interview by Sawyer — and doomed to extinction. With String Theory and other nonempirical physics, the physics community is reverting back to the epistemological methodology of Aristotelianism, which held to physical theories based upon a priori philosophical ideals.

One of the a priori ideals held by many present-day physicists is that God cannot exist, and so if rejecting the existence of God requires rejecting empirical science, then so be it. Omnipotence means containing all power and energy that exists, wherein this power and energy is infinite in amount, i. Omnipres- ence means existing everywhere in existence. Although there is a sense in which not all Turing machines would be equivalent, and that is the time taken to compute a result.

Only given infinite computational time can they all compute the same result. However, one of the traditional haecceities of God is that God knows everything that can logically be known all at once. In other words, God has a singular mind, i. In the Omega Point cosmology, all spacetime points impinge upon the Omega Point singularity all at once. The Omega Point is the collection of all spacetime points in a solitary-point final singularity. Moreover, computational resources in terms of both processor speed and memory space become literally infinite at the Omega Point, and so anything which at any time can exist will simply be a subset of what is rendered at the Omega Point.

The Omega Point knows all that can logically be known, and it knows it all at once. Moreover, since everything that will ever exist is simply a subset of what is rendered at the Omega Point, the totality of all existence is God That is to say, for instance: God doesn't merely contain love. God is truth itself. Because the cosmological singularity is outside of spacetime, it is not subject to time. While time is necessary for finite minds to exist, this is because our minds occupy spatial extent, 77 As David Deutsch wrote [, p.

There is only 'computable' and 'non-computable', and rendering real physical environments definitely comes into the 'computable' category. However, the injustices and pains of the current mortal world have a finite existence compared to the infinity of blissful experiences that will be generated by the future immortal societies. Even if it is true that a state of endless anguish is rendered as punishment for unrepentant malignity by the society which performs the general resurrection of the dead, and that consequently such a state would be infinite, it would nevertheless have asymptotic density compared to the infinitely more probable set of ecstatic experiences that are generated with asymptotic density 1, as elaborated upon further in footnote on p.

However, all logical connections impinge upon the Omega Point solitary-point singularity all at once. Thus, the Omega Point's perception of reality is as a timeless, unchanging, infinite whole. Since computational resources diverge to infinity going into the Omega Point final singularity, the far-future societies going into the Omega Point will have ever-greater computational resources coming online in which to render realities that they find to be more pleasurable — i. Hence, the Omega Point itself is a state of infinite pleasure and perfection.

The Omega Point is a state of infinite love and liberty: It is a state of perfect, infinite bliss. Due to the Omega Point cosmology having infinite computational resources, the universal resurrection of the dead will eventually be trivial to perform, whereupon the resurrected people can be granted immortality in an infinite-duration afterlife.

Resur- rection of the dead and the granting of immortality is another property traditionally claimed for God in the Abrahamic religions. In the Abrahamic religions, God also has the ability to perform miracles! In the Omega Point cosmology, the Omega Point can perform miracles via the Principle of Least Action, including by using electroweak quantum tunneling. Yet another traditional definition of God is the creator of all reality, which means that all causal chains begin with God. According to the Big Bang cosmology, all causal chains start at the initial singularity, which is the first cause.

In the abstract sense, the first cause might not necessarily entail identification with God, since one might abstractly imagine that the first cause doesn't have the other properties of God. But in the concrete sense of the known laws of physics, the first cause logically requires a state of infinite mind, i. As well, the initial singularity is a different aspect of the final singularity. But like the solution to many of the deepest of mankind's enigmata, the answer is actually quite simple and obvious once 37 explicated 81 Indeed, it's an answer that's so obviously correct that when it's mentioned in a slightly different context, everyone accepts it as true without protest 82 The answer as to why anything exists as opposed to nothingness is that existence is mathematics, i.

Only this and nothing more 83 But therein is everything. Ex- istence is a mathematical theorem. That does not mean that everything mathematical exists, as those things that are mathematical yet do not exist would not be an element of this ultimate theoremo But then why does mathematics — i. If logic itself required a justi- fication for its existence, then no justification could be given, since logic would have to be used in the justification, hence presupposing logic's existence.

For this reason, mathematics is inherently its own cause, i. Because mathematics is its own cause, there exists nothing more basic to turn to in order to explain why mathematics exists. Indeed, that's what "explanation" means: If something has no cause other than itself, then it also can have no explanation which utilizes something beyond itself in the explanation. Although it can be veridically said that reason is the reason why logic is self- existent, i.

That is, in order for there to be a reason for anything — an explanation for anything — logic must first exist. All explanation is predicated upon logic's prior existence. So what then is mathematics? What mathematics really is is cause-and-effect — among many other things that are all really the same thing. The simplicity and ex post obviousness of such solutions does not mean that answering them wasn't difficult, as it took mankind thousands of years to arrive at the solutions.

William Lane Craig's discussions on the aseity of God, wherein he uncontroversially gives mathematics as an example of something which has the property of aseity. But in the context it's clear that Tipler is contrasting this with mathematics as performed by humans, as opposed to mathe- matics itself. Tipler gives the example of the physics of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics being based upon the mathematics of the continuum i. So also, in order for any mind to exist, logic must exist, otherwise it makes no sense to say that any sort of mind could exist, since the process of mentation involves the interplay of logical relationships.

If no logical relationships exist, then no mind can exist. It might then appear that God doesn't have the property of aseity because logic must exist for any mind to exist, and therefore there is something more fundamental and basic than the Mind of God: But in actuality this is not the case. The reason this isn't the case is because God is the Logos Xoyoc;: And mathematics is mentation 86 infinite. God is mathematician Georg Cantor's Absolute Infinite. And the set cardinality of God is that of the continuum: Some- thing that is never experienced by some form of consciousness however primitive the consciousness cannot coherently be said to exist, because what is meant when it is said that something exists is that it can in some sense be experienced, either directly or indirectly, i.

So in order for existence to exist, mind must exist. And, again, there is no duality between mind and existence, because existence is mind, i. The Omega Point apodictically must exist now according to the known laws of physics, otherwise existence couldn't exist. Ergo, only God can know the full explanation as to why existence exists.

Logos has usually been translated into English as "word" in this passage, which barely even begins to convey the full meaning of the word Logos. Etymologically the closest English word is log ic [ On the meaning of Logos, see also Ref. Although within a single universe only K the cardinality of the countable set of natural numbers N bits can be recorded between now until the final singularity [ p. A finitary logical result such as with Presburger arithmetic ; a finite mind; or a finite part of existence is simply a finite subset of the infinite totality of existence, i.

For us, being finite subsets of existence, time has its beginning at the Big Bang singularity and its proper-time end at the Omega Point although in experiential time this is never reached. But for existence as a whole, the entire timeline of the multiverse exists as a static structure. So in the ultimate sense, sub specie aeternitatis, the totality of existence has always existed. What then of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo if in the ultimate sense existence has always existed?

To be precise, creatio ex nihilo is the doctrine that the universe had a beginning, and that it wasn't made from preexisting material, but instead that the material which makes up the universe came into being with the universe. That fun- damental difference being God's intrinsic infiniteness and His divine substance being beyond creation. Hence also, the doctrine does not hold that all of existence had a be- ginning, but rather that the universe did, i. Again, as stated above, from our perspective, being that we're finite subsets of exis- tence, the universe has its beginning at the Big Bang singularity.

But from the ultimate perspective, with the God's-eye view of sub specie aeternitatis, the entire duration of the multiverse has existed eternally. One may then wonder why it is that we find ourselves in the early part of the universe if existence has always existed. One reason is because the multiverse can be perfectly rendered from the start of the Big Bang singularity when the computational capacity of a universe reaches a stage that doing so only requires a trivial amount of total computational resources. The complexity of the multiverse grows as it advances in time, but this presents no problem for the society running the emulation since ad- 89 Such as is pictured in the diagrams of the multiversal Omega Point cosmology of Figures [l] on p.

Spacetime begins at the Big Bang initial singularity and ends at the Omega Point final singularity in the sense of an open interval, as the singularity itself is not a part of spacetime. The reason for such a society running such an emulation is so that they can resurrect their ancestors and hence, family members , as well so they can learn all the details of the past. Even once this emulation of the multiverse reaches the stage when all the beings in it have them- selves become immortal by being able to upload the programs of their minds onto more robust hardware, there will be reasons for continuing this emulation, because accidents will still rarely occur, such as the occasional ship being lost during the col- onization phase which, even though mental backups will exist, the experiences after backup would be lost ; to keep everyone honest and ethical, since everyone will know that all their actions will eventually be recreated by the future society in their own timeline; and for additional reasons.

Hence, at the Omega Point itself which, again, is reached in proper time; in ex- periential time it is never reached there exists an infinite number of levels of imple- mentation of the complete multiverse from Alpha Point to Omega Point, i. Existence is the Ultimate Fractal. Furthermore, one must find the origins of one's own personal consciousness in the early timeline of the multiverse.

The reason for this is because all possible combi- nations of finite consciousnesses eventually become exhausted per the Quantum Re- currence Theorem The less complex a consciousness is, the sooner all possible com- binations of it become exhausted. Therefore any nascent consciousnesses must find their origin in the early part of the multiverse.

Moreover, a finite mind can only expe- rience so much complexity, and if the complexity of an environment exceeds what a particular finite mind is capable of experiencing, then the extra complexity will be lost upon that mind. That is to say, a mind of mortal human-level complexity is not even capable of experiencing a sufficiently-advanced superhuman society, except in outline or small-scale aspects of it. Although proper time is finite, an infinity of experiences happen in the last fraction of a second of proper time, whereas only a finite number of experiences occur in the one quintillion to ten quintillion years that precede the last fraction of a second.

An example of a fractal. It approximately forms Fermat's Spiral in the manner of a sunflower Helianthus annum floret as described by Helmut Vogel [ ]. It is centered at But while the particular consciousness that we call ourself ex- periences state t as being in our past, the past still exists in the multiverse as David Deutsch wrote, "Other times are just special cases of other universes' 9S , and so state t is still being experienced by the previous version of ourself i. One can think of it as a sort of existential conveyor belt: Thus, even without any emulated levels of implementa- tion, the early part of the multiverse will forever be experienced by the relatively new consciousnesses that inhabit it.

Due to this existential conveyor belt, the far-future society won't have any wor- ries about allowing the emulation of the multiverse to continue beyond the universal resurrection — and hence allowing eventually an infinite number of levels of imple- mentation to develop, which also means an infinite number of copies of the early multiverse — because they will know that the early stages of the multiverse are already continuously being experienced, apart from whatever they choose to render. That is, the cosmological singularity has infinite nearness to every point in spacetime.

So the cosmological singularity is transcendent to, yet immanent in, space and time. Of cour se, God in toto, being the totality of existence, is the ultimate base-level reality.

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The First Quantum Concept", p. But in quantum relativistic cos- mology the Initial and the Final Singularities are connected by a third singularity: Occasionally it's suggested that Hinduism also holds to a concept of a divine Trin- ity, involving "the 'triple form' trimurti in which the cosmic functions of creation, maintenance, and destruction are personified by the forms of Brahma, Visnu, and Siva respectively' 99 In actuality, this notion appears to be mostly a case of Western- ers' eagerness to find corollaries with Christianity in other religions.

As historian and Indologist Prof. Arthur Llewellyn Basham writes: In fact the parallel is not very close, and the Hindu trinity, unlike the Holy Trinity of Christianity, never really "caught on". All Hindu trinitarianism tended to favor one god of the three; thus, from the context it is clear that Kalidasa's hymn to the Trimurti is really addressed to Brahma, here looked on as the high god.

The Trimurti was in fact an artificial growth, and had little real influence. In addition to the New Testament, the concept of the Holy Trinity is also found in the Old Testament, but the Jews didn't incorporate it as doctrine. Besides mentioning the Holy Spirit in the Tanakh a number of times. This process is depicted in Figures [T] p. The word translated as "God" in the above is in the original Hebrew el bit,. El is sometimes translated as "mighty", etc.

As well, "Everlasting Father" can only be a title for God. The above Tanakh passage also affirms the Trinitarian doctrine that the Father and the Son are One 7. The reason God cannot do this is because this would create a logically paradoxical strange loop whereby the knowledge of good and evil doesn't exist in existence, thereby setting the stage for the destruction of existence due to evil being generated by a highly advanced society: The only reason God knows of evil is because evil actually exists in the early part of the multiverse — that is to say, God knows of evil because God knows the beginning to the end.

Existence has no choice but to go through a stage of pain and suffering Cf. In mankind's life on Earth, humanity can be at each other's throats in large-scale internecine feuding, yet so long as a genetically-viable breeding population continues on then mankind can survive. Whereas during the Taublike collapses, if a significant portion of the population goes rogue then it would termi- nally disrupt the collapse cycles, destroying existence itself.

The closer the Omega Point is approached, the greater the free-market cooperation will have to be.

For this reason, the social ethics selected by existence is that of the Golden Rule, which in the form of legal ethics is the Nonaggression Principle. Although ultimately existence is itself a divine miracle according to the known laws of physics 7. This is because of mankind's coming out of an animalistic mental state into states of higher degrees of reason.

While nonhuman animals don't appear to hold much fallacious mental content, this is due to them apparently not being able to form very much in the way of abstract mental concepts. When the faculty of sapient reasoning and language skills comes into being, this allows forming ideas on a wide range of subjects, but in mankind's history many of those ideas were quite destructively erroneous, with no small amount of that error still with us today. Such applies to religious knowledge, as well.

For instance, the Torah is itself quite evil in many places, such as requiring any Israelite picking up sticks on a Sabbath to be stoned to death No one alive today actually believes in much of the Torah laws, and there is quite rightly no place on Earth where it would be legal to practice many of them. These days no Jew is lethally stoning another Jew for gathering wood on a Saturday.

Again, this has to do with mankind's evolution from fallacious ignorance into knowledge: The pagan religion of the original Hebrews evolved in time to the monotheism of what we now regard as modern Judaism, though the Torah reflects the strong polythe- See Romans 8: That is, according to the Big Bang cosmology, which is a subset of the Omega Point cosmology.

For the details on this, see Sec. The Torah laws were never intended for non-Jews living outside of Israel to follow. Within modern mainline i. For examples of this Prophetic rejection just regarding the Torah laws on animal sacrifice, see Psalm See also the second paragraph in footnote on p. The teachings of Yeshua Ha'Mashiach's ministry themselves necessitate the involvement of a superintelligence, since they are so spectacularly advanced beyond that age, and indeed this age: Albert Einstein said that "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot: Yet Trinitarianism holds that there is one God i. Ritual human sacrifice appears to be a universal cultural practice among mankind if one goes back far enough in time. A written interjection has been omitted from the quoted passage. No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus.

His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life " And here is what Einstein wrote regarding Christianity in his book The World as I See It w If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests, one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social ills of humanity. It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.

So authentic Christianity i. In the previous displayed quote of Einstein, he is careful to separate the message preached by Jesus Christ and the Prophets i. But then Jesus Christ and the Prophets spoke out against the irrational aspects of the Torah. Such was not lost on Einstein, which is why he is careful in the above to specify which aspects of the Bible he finds to be in conformance with the truth.

Unfortunately, the inversion of that organization popularly calling itself the Chris- tian church occurred with the pagan Roman government's takeover of said group un- der Constantine I, himself a lifelong pagan, bloodthirsty tyrant, and unrepentant mur- derer of his eldest son Crispus and his wife Fausta, to say nothing of all the plebeians he murdered. Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler can all be made to seem like wonderful people if one simply declines to men- tion their immoral actions.

Yet even Eusebius relates the story that Constantine told to him about his Constantine's supposed "In hoc signo vinces" vision with some skepticism. Eusebius wrote in his panegyrical Life of Constantine [, Book 1, Ch.