The title is a reference to the book by Bishop Spong ‘Honest to God.’ The Bishop is unpopular among many of the pious because he thinks that congregations should know about the facts and doubts concerning the Christian faith. Check his newsletter for thinking Christians. Geraint’s choice of a title about Sophia was a similar nod about the feminine aspect of the deity. This is what Caitlin Matthews said about Geraint’s book: “Honest to Goddess is a call to spiritual maturity. In the pattern of Sergius Bulgakov and the many faithful followers of Sophia, the author’s orthodoxy is strongly committed to the knightly championship of her. The Spirit and the Bride sing ‘Come’ and Geraint has answered their invitation.” Sophia has entered the healing arts as well, as a feminine form of Reiki called Dar’ Shem, the ‘House of the Name.’ I will be writing more about this and other Reikis in future articles. Now a word about the insane American system of not noticing half of its people. In the 1950’s and 1960’s America had a stunning lesson on how another country had used the resources we ignore or marginalize. And that country was officially atheistic. Every October 4th I think of Sputnik and every June 16th I think about the cosmonaut Valentina Tereskova. On that day in 1963 she orbited the Earth 48 times and steered her spacecraft to within about a mile of the cosmonaut who had been put into orbit the day before. At that time I was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, a group of mathematicians and scientists who were considered weird by the rest of the scientific community because they believed long before Sputnik, that the ultimate destiny of mankind was in Space. The Society invited Valentina to a banquet in her honour in London. She came. It was one of the most impressive moments of my life up to that time. The hall where she was to be presented was filled with scientists and mathematicians, all of them men as far as I could see. When she came in, emanating radiant energy and perfect health and confidence, every man in the place stood up as one, in total silence, in honour of the first woman in space. There was also a cosmic first in that she married the cosmonaut with whom she had made the first space rendezvous, and Nikita Khrushchev himself gave the toast at the wedding and mentioned for the first time, by name, the man who had designed the enormously powerful rockets that gave Russia their many firsts into space. This had been a state secret since Sputnik in case he was assassinated by the CIA to interfere with the Russian space program. While we are here let’s quickly review what happened when Sputnik, the first ever earth satellite began to orbit the Earth on October 4th 1957. It was emitting beeps on two frequencies that ham radios could pick up, a smart piece of propaganda ensuring publicity from all around the world. At the right time of day you could see it with binoculars as it went through the sky at 18,000 miles an hour. All my students saw it. The Russians gave its trajectory and times of visibility, not forgetting to mention that it could be seen from Little Rock, Arkansas where America at that time was being treated to the sight on TV of a little black girl being escorted into a high school with a guard of soldiers to protect her from the segregationists in the land of the free. America had agreed to the proposal to create an artificial satellite during the International Geophysical Year, and was working on the Vanguard, which weighed a few pounds. Eisenhower wanted to keep the military out of the picture so the military missile rockets were not to be used to put Vanguard into space. Every stage of the work was made public except some of the problems. The Russians said nothing whatever about what they were doing. The educated Russian scientists could read everything the West had available about rockets, but none of the Western scientists bothered to read anything in Russian. Few of them indeed knew any Russian. Even wanting to learn it could cause suspicions of being a communist with career-ending results.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 14:36:19 +0000
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