A posting from John Klotz’ blog, Living Free:
As some of you may know, I am working on a manuscript the working title of which is “The Coming of the Quantum Christ: The Shroud of Turin and the future of Science and Humanity.” I have just completed the draft of Chapter Seven (:Game Change”) which ends with the Shroud of Turin Research Group (STURP) in 1978 flying from New York to Turin to begin what is undoubtedly the most concentrated scientific study of the Shroud in its arguably two millennia history. (Some of what follows may wind-up in the “quantum” part of my manuscript., the Aquinas and Teilhard part.)
But in the past few days, the news has been of renewed efforts of the right wing extremists elected in the 2010 elections at the state level to gut Planned Parenthood again on the mistaken claim that Planed Parenthood is dedicated to abortion and that it spend most of its money providing abortions. That is simply not true. Ninety-Seven per cent of Planned Parenthood activities are devoted to women’s health issues, a part of the 97% does include contraception services, BUT, the number one way to prevent abortions is contraception.
But was does this have to do with Eva Cassidy and Nancy LaMott, two female vocalists. They have one thing in common: they both died in the prime of their singing careers from cancers that if discovered in time might have saved their lives.
First, a word about their music. Eva was a relatively unknown quantity when she died of melanoma at age 33. It was three years after her death that she came to the attention of a British disk jockey singing “Some Where Over the Rainbow. The rest is, as they say, history. There is a You Tube of an ABC Nightline story on Eva at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXU219b3Zdw (It’s 15 minutes long so you might want to finish this article before going to it.)
Eva first came to my attention when I stumbled across a recording of her singing “At Last” on Napster some years ago. You may recall that in the Inaugural Balls of 2008, Michelle and Barak Obama danced to “At Last.” Beyonce was the singer but I recall hearing the song many years before. Like a lot of songs some of it may seem over done, but I have always cherished the last verse:
You smile,
And then the spell was cast.
And here we are in heaven,
Because you are mine at last.
I was had a moment like that, New Year’s Eve, 1961.
Eva’s version is on You Tube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2odll7s8q0c
I stumbled across Nancy LaMott when I was once looking for tracks of “You’re Clear Out of This World.” I thought it was a Kurt Weil song because it seemed to draw from “Speak Low” one of Weil’s most beautiful songs. It wasn’t though. But Nancy LaMott did a set of “You’re Clear Out of This World” and Cole Porter’s “So in Love” that was out of this world. You find a recorded live performance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS4nnxA-IDE
The first time I heard Eva Cassidy sing, I knew she had passed away. I remember hearing of Nancy LaMott on NYC disk jockey Jonathan Schwartz’s Saturday morning jazz centered program. It was not until I discovered her recording of “Clear Out of This world” that I discovered that she too had died. Hers was uterine cancer. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19960324&slug=2320684
The implication in Seattle Times story was that she was on the brink of stardom at the time of her death
I will not claim that either of these two precious women could have been saved by Planned Parenthood because I am not familiar enough with their economic circumstances to know if they either qualified for, or needed, Planned Parenthood services. But millions of American women have qualified for these services and in many instances owe their lives to Planned Parenthood. You can see some examples at:
http://plannedparenthoodsavedme.tumblr.com/page/5
See also: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-topics/womens-health/pelvic-exam-4306.htm
Now the commercial: What has any of this have to do with Thomas Aquinas and Teilhard?
The issue is the human soul and when does that immortal soul come into existence. We now have claims that a fertilized egg cell, even before implantation in the womb, is a human being entitled to all the due process rights of a human being which would mean that even “morning after” pills would be murder because they prevent implementation. Thomas Aquinas would have disagreed.
He lived 800 years ago, long before Darwin. Aquinas along with St. Augustine was one of the pillars of Christian theology. Aquinas wrote concerning the issue of when the soul was infused into the fetus that it occurred at the time of “quickening” and that before quickening there was not a human soul but a vegative one. He seems to foreshadow both Teilhard and Darnwin
Teilhard wrote in the “Phenomenon of Man” that it was at the point in the evolution of a species of primates that it developed the quality of reflection or self awareness, that the human species was born. To credit the metaphor of Genesis, that would be the point when humanity became the “image and likeness” of God.
As I have written in the Introduction to my manuscript, science today has advanced to the point where it is grappling with the issue of human consciousness. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have written that the human mind and(and necessarily awareness) arise from trillions of micro-tubules in the brain acting as a quantum computer with among other attributes, the ability to participate in “quantum entanglements.” That is the development among quantum phenomena to react identically and thus communicate instantaneously across time and space beyond the normal constraints of time and space. Einstein called the concept “spooky” but to paraphrase Cole Porter, it is strange, dear, but true.
I discuss this on my blog at
http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2012/08/michael-redux-quantum-mechanics.html
Where does it leave us. Ironically, it leaves us at the door step of Roe v. Wade which divided the pregnancy into three stages of legal concern. The first stage would correspond to Aquinas vegative state at the very least.
To the best of my knowledge, the Catholic Church has not yet stated as a matter of faith and morals that God has infused the soul in the ovum at the time of fertilization. Because science is now grappling with the issues of self-awareness that so closely resemble the Aquinas dichotomy, it would be best perhaps to avoid such speculation.
Galileo was nearly burned at the stake for challenging the Ptolemaic view that the earth was the center of the Universe. It might be best for everybody to take a deep breath before demanding all of our laws bend to the fundamentalist view about soul creation.
And it would certainly be a very good idea to those who are demanding the defunding of Planned Parent to back-off a bit. Millions of women have depended on Planned Parenthood for life saving services. As for me, I can not get the voices of Eva Cassidy and Nancy LaMott to be still.
Okay STURP team, it’s time to land.
Source: Living Free
“That is simply not true. Ninety-Seven per cent of Planned Parenthood activities are devoted to women’s health issues, a part of the 97% does include contraception services, BUT, the number one way to prevent abortions is contraception.”
You need to do your research better, Dan. Your statement is simply false from PPs own records.
Andy,
The fact that John Kyle claimed that providing abortions was 90% of Planned Parenthood’s principal activity was pretty thoroughly rebutted last year. John Stewart and Steven Colbert made short shrift of Kyle in their usual sardonic way: The actual figure reported was 3%.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/04/12/135347030/jon-stewart-stephen-colbert-tweak-sen-kyl-on-planned-parenthood
The same information was reported by other news outlets. I believe that life and death medical decisions should be left to the woman and her doctor. In Ireland recently, a woman died because the hospital applied Catholic theology to a problem of he woman. She, as I recall was a Hindu. I don’t know of any man other than not a devout Catholic but a blinkered one who will tell a doctor, go ahead let my wife die under those circumstances. I believe it was a Arizona Archbishop who disciplined a nun who was a hospital administrator when she agreed with a medical teams decision to perform an abortion that saved the mother’s life. She should have followed Catholic doctrine and let the mother die. Finally in Brazil, a doctor and a nine year old girl who had been raped by her step father and was carrying twins were excommunicated on Vatican orders for performing an abortion when to carry the child would have resulted in the girl’s death because her body was not developed enough to complete the pregnancy.
It’s a very tough thing for those caught in that situation. Pray that you will never have to face it and I will pray that no woman’s life will ever depend on your judgment.
Sorry, John, that’s false. See below. The numbers are taken from PP’s own report. Get it and read it if you will. Relying on a sardonic article is doing you a disservice.
Not my research, Andy. But I suspect that John is right.
Dan Porter’s shroudstory.com site has become the Shroudie Readers Digest of the internet, re-publishing lengthy chunks of other people’s content, but with one important difference – he can’t be bother to seek the author’s permission. He republishes so much of other people’s postings so that the courtesy link in blue need rarely to be accessed, his having provided what his devotees trust to be the gist of the (selected) core content. As I say – Shroudie Readers Digest- with Dan deciding what to quote, what to leave out – control freakery by any other name, filtering, attenuating, dampening other people’s signals.
Yes, it’s piracy (and more besides) by any other name – a Shroudie news aggregating, news filtering site – guaranteed user-friendly to those who seek generally pro-authenticity copy, carefully iinterspersed with comfort-inducing RC/quasi- RC (Episcopalean) stuff (Akiane’s Jesus etc, probably most of it fake) and fliers from Russ Breault etc on their Shroud-mystery marketing roadshows.
A tiny proportion of his readership contributes comments, and a major proportion of those who do so are in the grip of one or other agenda-driven or pro-authenticity obsession.
You need to clean up your act, Dan Porter. Editorial blandness may have protected you so far, but where this outpost of Shroudie scepticism is concerned, that ends today. The gloves are off.
Sorry Dan. I misread it. The facts don’t lie, John. Read these numbers and then dispute their numbers if you wish.
Planned Parenthood recently released its 2011-2012 annual report indicating this non-profit government funded (over $500 million) performed a record-high 333,964 abortions during 2011.
– 92 percent of Planned Parenthood’s pregnant clients received abortions
– Prenatal care patients accounted for 7 seven percent
– Adoption referrals were less than one percent
Colin,
Dan had my explicit decision to re post my article rather than simply link to it. I expect your attack on Dan which factually in error reflects your research standards.
John: leaving aside the fact that Dan did not bother to state he was publishing with your permission, you overlook one fact. I did not mention you by name. In fact, my comment was prompted by that of Andy Weiss before yours, no stranger to this site, and a seasoned website manager himself as I recall, posting a comment that had clearly assumed your words to be those of the blog site owner’s. His mistake was understandable in my view, given Dan’s nominal 8 word preamble making no clear demarcation between his and yours (e.g. no quotation marks, or use of the WordPress facility for indenting quotes from others).
As for my research – I endeavour wherever possible to give sufficient experimental detail such that genuine sceptics can check out – and hopefully confirm – my findings for themselves. I stand or fall by reproducibility – not by your vicious agenda-driven put-downs. If you have specific complaints – then make them. Address the issue – not the man. I have no time for ad hominem sniping on websites.
Yeah, right, Colin. You can dish it out but you can’t take it. Talk about cudgels, ha! You don’t see it, do you?
Concerning ‘colinsberry’ comment:: “re-publishing lengthy chunks of other people’s content, but with one important difference – he can’t be bother(ed) to seek the author’s permission”..
I can confirm that I have a copy of an email sent by John Klotz to Dan Porter dated 11 Jan 2013, adivising the content of the John Klotz “lengthy” posting above which includes the comment “Dan Porter: Feel free to link or post. Probably posting is better.”
So Colin – Eat that!
I’ll take your word for it, not being privy to what’s in other people’s email inboxes. I can only respond to what I see. And what I see here is a complete cut-and-paste of someone else’s posting, one that appeared just yesterday, reproduced here with no explanation for why it has been duplicated on another site, while still awaiting a first comment on its own, There is scarcely any ‘top’ and no ‘tail’ so is it any wonder that at least one person has read it as Dan Porter’s own posting? Is it any wonder that this site appears near the top of search engine listings when it systematically hoovers up other people’s blog postings within hours of their appearing, with scarcely any input from the blog site owner?
But it’s not the piracy to which I object to most. See my previous comment re drawing any perceived sting etc … This site needs to be more open and honest about its true raison d’etre. Calling itself simply “Shroud of Turin” blog, given the essentially RC agenda, while hoovering up everyone else’s content is not what I would call a legitimate use of the internet. It is essentially parasitic.
John Klotz’s efforts are worthy of appreciation. The problem is that only part of the story has been told so far and the finished manuscript will have to include what is missing.
Louis,
Thank you for your comment. The reason I post issues I am dealing with is to get feedback. It is quite helpful and I, believe it or not, really appreciate criticism. I intend to complete this manuscript and probably initially E-Book it. I was hoping to finish before Easter, but unfortunately, Easter comes early this year – just as it did in 1978, the year of the STURP examination of the Shroud,
You’re welcome John. It looked necessary to make the comment in view of the importance of the topics you are dwelling on, particularly the bit on Chardin.
John, my advice is not to publish this. From a layman’s perspective it just looks loony and quite frankly smacks of hysteria and extreme narcissism IMHO. It sounds like something Colin would write.
Chris,
When I said I like to receive criticism, I was thinking of something more substantive :-)
Your viewpoint would be a minority of one from what I’ve heard. For example, I believe I posted a bit on Father Rinaldi including a link to a Sign Magazine article that he wrote in 1934 when still a seminarian in Italy.
That article was the beginning of the serious Shroud study in the US for it attracted the attention of many thousands of Catholics including Father Wuenschel who went on to found the Holy Shroud Guild. Fr. Rinaldi who immigrated to he US became, along with Fr. Otterbein, a star in the Shroud world. Rinaldi was probably the single most important person 44 years later in STURP being formed and in gaining access to the Shroud (I don’t mean to gainsay the contributions and organizational talents of Dr. Robert Jackson in writing that).
When my book is complete, you will be able to read about it. That chapter is already drafted and has received favorable reviews from those I shared it with privately and who commented. It’s not for publication yet.
My digging Rinaldi’s article out of an archive in Pennsylvania got some attention from some very interesting quarters including one across the Pond in GB.
I really don’t want to be so defensive about this but I do resent the “loony” part. Has someone profiled me and figured out how to get under my skin? Not that I am paranoid or anything.
The working title of my manuscripts is: “The Coming of the Quantum Christ: The Shroud of Turin and the Future of Science and Humanity.” I owe a portion of that title to Dame Isabel Pizek who once said: “The future of science is the Shroud of Turin.”
The reason she could say that is ultimately I think she believes as I do, that the issue of the Shroud image will be resolved at the level of quantum mechanics. Now if you want loony, try quantum mechanics. Richard Dawkins, the atheist pope (my description cc) is quoted in the introduction to my manuscript drafted a year ago:
“Perhaps there are some genuinely profound and meaningful questions that are forever beyond the reach of science. Maybe quantum theory is already knocking on the door of the unfathomable. But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?”
Now that’s loony, or is it?
“The future of science is the Shroud of Turin”. John, honestly, aren’t you going too far?
I take seriously any comments addressed to the issues Paulette, but ignore those that are merely crank-it-out ad hominem put-down- and/or-snuff -out comments, which sadly have become this site’s speciality. Thank you though for your appreciative comment re my critique of Ray Rogers’ FAQs.
As for “dishing it out”, note that my initial comment was addressed, yet again, to a sore point with me – an issue note – namely the cutting-and-pasting of lengthy but incomplete selections other blog postings, often within hours of their being posted, leaving this site’s readers little or no incentive to visit those other sites for the entire story, warts an’ all.
Readers Digest? Target Readership Easy To Digest” more like it. It was someone else, not me, who first suggested there was a certain smoothie mellifluous PR man’s modus operandi at work here – drawing the sting, pre-empting, any off-site internet comment deemed threatening to this one’s (unarticulated) agenda, presenting a Kremlinesque (or should that be Vaticanesque?) air-brushed version instead. Ever read Orwell’s 1984?
Gabriel,
That is a direct quote from Isabel Pizek. She may have been quoting a European physicist when she said it. I don’t know what your position is on the Shroud or the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The are some who take the attitude I guess of the old song: “How do I know, the Bible tells me so.” Biblical interpretation (exegesis) is not easy and to read the Bible as something dictated by God with human authors playing stenographers doesn’t do justice to the Bible, the putative stenographers or, for that matter, God.
If the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ, and I believe it is, then the simplest solution to the mystery of its image is the Resurrection. At that point it becomes the most important object on the face of the Earth.
I believe that ultimately it will be science that will unlock the mystery of the image and I believe it will be unlocked at the quantum level of existence. (The late Ray Rogers has already been there in one sense, a tiny fingerprint of the quantum is in his calculations.)
The quantum, IMVHO is the interface between the primordial consciousness (God) from which our existence sprung at the Big Bang and that existence. The Shroud is a link between science and God . Revealing that primordial existence will be a scientific accomplishment beyond measure. It’s the future of science and religion, the synthesis of which was predicted by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Thank you for challenging me. You just made me clarify my thoughts.
I second Gabriel. With all respect to Isabel Piczek (notice the “c” in her name): people say that she is a physicist, but is that really the case? What are the papers she ever published in physics? And what exactly is the meaning of “quantum” in the context of your book? It does not seem that it is the concept of quantum in physics. If not, why use this word?
Mario,
I cover these issues on my blog at http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2012/08/michael-redux-quantum-mechanics.html
There is a video linked on that page which discusses the human brain as quantum computer and speculates about near death experiences bein essentially an upload to the quantum information of all existence and the snap back to life being a download.
You may disagree with me but I believe that science is beginning to deal with human intelligence as a quantum phenomenon (QP), perhaps a singularity (whatever that is) If our intelligence is a QP, what is God, in whose image and likeness we are made?
John, please let me know when your manuscript is ready.
I promise not to keep it a secret :-) Thanks for the interest.
My E-Mail address is klotlaw@gmail.com
Thanks a lot, John. I’ll get in touch with you the soonest possible. There is no way of keeping it a secret as many will be waiting to read it!
Reply to Andy Weiss
Andy, in your summary of the report you state:
– 92 percent of Planned Parenthood’s PREGNANT clients received abortions (emphasis added)
You don’t state how many non-pregnant clients PP actually had except that 7% received prenatal care. How many does that represent compared to the number of abortions. The whole point is contraception and health services. Is it not a fact that the number far exceeds the number of pregnant women who receive abortions.?
I am not a proponent of abortion as birth control or being used as an excuse to ignore reasonable precautions. Every abortion is a failure. Sometimes the reasons for the abortion arise from natural circumstances beyond the control of the woman, her doctor, her husband or companion. The cases I cited: two in which the Catholic Church penalized individuals who acceded to an abortion where the life of the mother was in stake and one in Ireland where Catholic doctors enforced anti-abortion laws and the mother died – as the doctors knew she would.
Since you seem conversant with the figures, how many women received health related services from PP WHO WERE NOT PREGNANT. That would certainly include health screenings and contraception. I believe the number would be far, far in excess of those who were pregnant. And if PP were a single minded abortion organization, how did those who were pregnant escape its clutches with their pregnancy intact? Could be that PP helped the women carry to term? Do you know? Your statement indicates that many women received pre-natal care. Where those women go if PP were defunded?
By the way, do you believe contraception other than the rhythm method is immoral? Do you believe all the women who sought contraception aid from PP were immoral? Do you believe that all the women who received cancer screenings and or health assistance were immoral?
Do you believe that a doctor who refuses to perform an abortion knowing that the woman would die acted morally?
Do you believe that your morality should be enforced on women and doctors by the criminal code?
Are you married Andy? Do you have a wife? Have you ever comforted a wife through a difficult pregnancy? Have you ever told a wife, you are going to have to die because of my/our religious beliefs?
Since you seek to enforce your religious beliefs through the civil and criminal law on others, these are relevant questions.
I see that in response to the furor over the female ordination controversy a single male who was a member of Opus Dei who had taken a vow of celibacy. Don’t you find that a little weird? I do. If a single male can handle celibacy, his place would probably be with the celibate clergy – either brother or priest.
By the way, I have never advised a woman to have an abortion. And my advice has been asked. The circumstances are private.
I expect that a large number of individuals who accept the authenticity of the Shroud or at least find it reasonable are “Right to Life” adherents who oppose abortions under all circumstances. That is their choice. When it comes to appropriate civil and criminal law in a pluralistic society, my choice is different.