Can it be true that our universe is not the only one in existence? Could there be others? Is there a “God particle” that can explain what makes up each atom, and gives us the answer to why one group of particles gathers together and makes up a grain of gold, while another group of quite similar particles collect themselves and makes a drop of water. The answer appears to rest in the discovery of something called the God particle.
And along the way, is there an element which moves faster than the speed of light? Apparently we are on the brink of these discoveries, which will inevitably raise even more questions on the origins of life.
Quirks and quarks and quantums have slipped out of the physicists’ lexicon into the cocktail party domain. It is all very exciting. It is also very confusing for folks like me who are still struggling with the fundamentals of the communication revolution. I struggle as FacePlant replaces handcrafted postcards and letters. I discovered that YouTube is not a submarine torpedo and that Twitter isn’t the sound of a chatty bird. It is tantamount to the communication revolution caused by the development of the Gutenberg printing press and the resulting popularization of religious discussion. Today, the emerging preoccupation of talk show hosts threatens to move us from a world of single syllable sound bites of political punditry to multisyllabic dissertations on the meaning of life.
Which brings us to the extraordinarily complicated societal phenomenon we call Christmas. About 2,700 years ago, a Hebrew preacher named Isaiah prophesied the coming of a messiah, born of a virgin, from the house of King David, who would bring new life to the world through his death. Then about 50 years after the birth of Jesus, a man named Matthew Levi, who was a student of this itinerant prophet, wrote a record of Jesus’ life.
Jesus had been born in Bethlehem at the time of a Roman census of the descendants of David. Jesus’ mother was reported to have been a virgin, betrothed to a cousin who took her as his wife for family reasons. At the end he was crucified as an enemy of the state, promising life after death. Matthew wrote his gospel to try to convince the Jewish people that Jesus was the Messiah promised by Isaiah.
Well, as we all know, the message caught on — initially for Rome-based political purposes. The idea then spread to other cultures, which had been subjugated under the Roman Empire. And with it, the miracle of Christ’s birth became entwined with the celebration of the rebirth of the planet as our ancestors emerged from the darkness of the winter solstice.
In the new age of multicultural societies, I suppose it is expected that we sterilize that message, removing any reference to the birth of Jesus Christ, and returning to the roots of our ancient religions. It is the safe thing to do. It is politically correct and can hardly offend anyone.
Yet in doing so, we risk losing our humanity in sterilizing ourselves from celebrating the miraculous birth of a child. For it is our children who will inherit the earth — in whatever form we leave it.
So as we pause and think about children of many faiths and living conditions across our world’s countrysides, villages, towns and cities, we hope for a better world made up of God’s particles. Merry Christmas.
Alan Murdock is a local pediatrician.
