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these photos don't fit into any category that i have for myself - except they make me happy. i've purposed i need to follow my own muse - create images that are just for me - from time to time. no expectations, no customers, no rules... just be loose and let the creative juices flow. peterbphoto is what i hoped it would be - an opportunity to get better at portrait photography whilst getting paid for it, working with wonderful people, and getting put in new situations (unfocusey-eyed babys and a high-contrast puppy) - and i will continue to love that and pour into that and be so thankful for the opportunities that brings, as well as the opportunities at meltingearth. but i also need to wander and listen for my own voice and find what ring true for me. building upon what i've learned so far - i'm ready to take my first steps...

:: theology ::

View On Black

:: the digitization of the sacred ::
View On Black

:: stained glass into everlasting ::
View On Black

location

click through to get to the photo on flickr. click 'view on black' to see them bigger. i'll appreciate comments on the flickr site as much or more as comments here. and i would love new contacts!

Rome

Taken at Arlington National Cemetary

invariance

"Code is Poetry"

it's a cool little quip.  but the point, whether we are einstein or not, is that we each develop an intuitive feel of how to approach a problem *before* we work out a logical replication of that as a rational thought.  they way we work out something intuitive, is art.

it struck me then - that if code is poetry - then the code of reality - revealed in say mathematics - would display God's intuitive sense, and be his poetry, his art.

Psalm 19:1-9 (The Message) A David Psalm
God's glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon. Madame Day holds classes every morning, Professor Night lectures each evening. Their words aren't heard, their voices aren't recorded, But their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere. The revelation of God is whole and pulls our lives together. The signposts of God are clear and point out the right road. The life-maps of God are right, showing the way to joy. The directions of God are plain and easy on the eyes. God's reputation is twenty-four-carat gold, with a lifetime guarantee. The decisions of God are accurate down to the nth degree.

there are a number of lines of God's code that have revealed themselves - accurate and also elegant to the nth degree. at the top of the pack are Einsteins Mass-Energy Equivalence and Maxwell's Electromagnetism Relationships.  But I would argue other lines of code have revealed themselves and are evident to all... love, redemption, beauty, grace, mercy, his infinite power, and goodness. these lines of code run rampant throughout all human experience - and they remain changeless regardless of your frame of reference.  this idea is called invariance. and it's a bombshell.

what i want to rail against, is that we pretend like we live in a newtonian (or flat euclidean) universe - but we don't.  we really live in an einsteinien (or curved minkowskian) universe.  but that doesn't mean that there aren't things that are changeless.  we've just been looking in the wrong categories for things to anchor ourselves to.  

for instance, we've been looking at facts-as-parsed-by-language to be True-from-all-perspectives-and-sides, and failed to recognize / respect the dimensionality of reality.  we need to recognize the ramifications of what Einstein learned about God and reality a hundred years ago - and start to graple with its meaning for us.

This is God's code.  This is God's poetry.  This is his art.  It's breathtaking in it's beauty, magnitude, elegance, and invariance.

p.s.  and of course, an einsteinien universe is not the last most correct understanding / revision of reality - there is a problem ;-)

bwaha hahaa haaaa

facts

This image represents changing views of spacetime along the world line of a rapidly accelerating observer.

In this animation, the vertical direction indicates time and the horizontal direction indicates distance, the dashed line is the spacetime trajectory ("world line") of the observer. The lower quarter of the diagram shows the events that are visible to the observer, and the upper quarter shows the light cone - those that will be able to see the observer. The small dots are arbitrary events in spacetime.

The slope of the world line (deviation from being vertical) gives the relative velocity to the observer. Note how the view of spacetime changes when the observer accelerates.

(taken from this page on wiki)

i would like to equate events (represented here as dots) with facts (i don't believe this to be an egregious error).  from our point of view - our experience of reality is holistic, consistent and intuitive.  from our perspective - reality doesn't feel like this image (even near the speed of light).  But God's-view-of-our-perspective looks precisely like this image.  The same would be true for every event given every person who has ever lived.

So the full truth (or Truth is you prefer)... the full reality - from e.g. God's perspective, would require every world line to be mapped in a similar manner - simultaneously.  This mapping would require many more dimensions to accomplish ... and still may not exhaust the full dimensionality of truth / reality that is God's.

this image isn't anti-truth. this is truth.

these ideas aren't anti-christian. this is christianity.

and this isn't anti-God. this is God's nature.

next episode - invariance!

truth

a lot of smart people have contemplated and written about what constitutes truth, and done so well before my time. i'm not trying to add to that conversation - primarily because I haven't mastered what has gone before me. but for the little slice of reality that i call home (the conversation recently emerging from evangelicalism) - i would like to talk about the nature of truth.... not to hear myself talk, but because i think a conversation about this important.

for most of us in or recently coming from evangelicalism, we say "truth" and mean "facts" (like saying "worship" and meaning "music"). in practice - we never say the later and mean the former... probably because we indeed think or even know that truth is more than facts (and likewise, that worship is more than music...) it's just that we have so few instances of this occurring in practice. the church just doesn't worship without music and doesn't talk about truth without facts.

if we were to talk about truth without facts, we would discover a world that is larger and bigger and more beautiful than we could possibly understand/know/comprehend with facts alone. this is because any given fact is a subset of a given truth (like using words to represent a music performance). furthermore, the subset itself is an artificial construct / parameter which arbitrarily selects a portion of truth from the truth God created - (like language is to music).

for a while we viewed reality as concrete and unique in places. holy ground was understood to be very real - real in a cosmic sense. But to be holy ground, a given location would need to be understood as different from other locations around it, and also fixed.

It would be difficult to conceive of holy ground in the same way today - knowing as we do that our planet hurls through space at 67,000 mph while rotating at 1000 mph. once you've seen the earth rise over the moon, you just can't go back.

for a while we viewed reality as both concrete and amorphous. existing in an either. hung with a T-square. we wanted desperately to believe this. and for Newton, is was a breakthrough thought... that the gravity that holds us on earth extends to the heavens and holds the moon in place. That truth is the same everywhere.

It would be difficult to conceive of space in the same way today, knowing as we do that there is no "absolute" either... and about the holy marriage of space and time and resultant curvatures. this special relationship means that every thread of consciousness that traverses space-time experiences a unique path. indeed we understand that twins could experience radically different trajectories though time and that observers traveling in different directions but from the same location could perceive different causalities while observing a given event.

truth is the same everywhere (as far as we know). but facts do differ, based on your point of view... it's hard coded into the universe.

this isn't anti-truth. this is truth.
this isn't anti-christian. this is christianity.
this isn't anti-God. this is God's nature.
and these are things nobody is trying to deconstruct(!) ... things like;

Love God. Love Others. God is Eternal. and, Seek Him.