1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: We return to the Apocalypse, with an article by essayist nonpareil Adam Gopnick, on Elaine Pagels’ new book about Revelations. Bottom line? It was a coded screed about current events, not a prediction about the future. As opposed to BP’s report on their oil spill which was complete fantasy. But the truth is seeping out, faster than an uncapped oil-well.

* Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation Adam Gopnik The New Yorker

Perhaps what most strikes the naïve reader of the Book of Revelation is what a close-run thing the battle is. When God finally gets tired of waiting it out and decides to end things, the back-and-forth between dragons and serpents and sea monsters and Jesus is less like a scouring of the stables than like a Giants-Patriots Super Bowl. It seems that Manichaeanism—bad god vs. good god—is the natural religion of mankind and that all faiths bend toward the Devil, to make sense of God’s furious impotence. A god omniscient and omnipotent and also powerless to stop evil remains a theological perplexity, even as it becomes a prop of faith. It gives you the advantage of clarity—only one guy worth worshipping—at the loss of lucidity: if he’s so great, why is he so weak?

You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

* BP Misrepresented Gulf Oil Spill NationofChange

Gulf Rescue Alliance (GRA) has just sent a briefing package to the Attorney Generals of Alabama and Louisiana which presents evidence that:

• The unmentioned existence of a 3rd Macondo well (the real source of the explosion, DWH sinking and ensuing oil spill).

• The current condition of this well being such that it can never be properly capped.

• The compromised condition of the seabed floor being such that there are multiple unnatural sources of gushers continuing to pour into the Gulf, with Corexit dispersant still suppressing its visibility.
• That the highly publicized capped well (Well A) never occurred as reported, and in fact was an abandoned well, hence it was never the source of the millions of gallons released into the Gulf.