IV Editor Charles Michael Byrd (Racial Privacy Initiative and Religion’s Failure), in a wonderful call to churches and religionists to "get off the dime" (contra old car-talk, "stop on a dime") where America's "race" torment is concerned, and help with supporting Ward Connerly's, California Racial Privacy Initiative (aka: Prop. 54) that would "color blind" state government to the "races" of private persons, invoked Quantum Physics.

Mr. Byrd also reminded us of religion's long, criminal entanglement with "race." Is not the last bastion of Jim Crow apartheid America's church "sanctuaries," where the most segregated hour ends at the tolling of twelve each Sunday morning? Was not chattel slavery's pre-"biological" excuse religious incorrectness -- as "just" deserts for having been reared non- Christian / Jewish / Islamic ... [choose one]? Is not what passes for religious faith today up to its eyeballs in this sin -- in this primordial racism -- the "races"?

So it was, that Mr. Byrd acknowledged the secular sciences that, by contrast, seem, alive, vibrant, and filled with wonder at their closeness to the Creator.

Quantum Physics now contemplates mysteries that might reconcile our wayward churches. One such mystery is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, by which ultimate truth slips definitively from its own revelation. And this is a universal philosophical realization, not merely an esoteric detail of vibrating electrons. The great Uncertainty seems to define us, in fact, at the juncture of our race and being. Here the Church could join -- had it only eyes to see us with -- in color.

Who are we? When did our human race begin? From its Latin origins, "Race" has always meant "root" in an ancestral sense. Race differs from "species," a way of saying "type," by pointing to origins. Thus our human species (Homo sapiens) began in Africa about six million years ago, evidently. But that clearly was not the birth of our human race, which always had ancestors -- and traces common ancestry with every living thing on Earth. Moreover, by evolutionary DNA law we could never have been more human "races" than one. Our species (currently) shared common ancestry with apes. But antecedents necessarily thrived whose inter-mating necessarily defined our human race as an exclusive, inter-breeding species of some sort at all times. Therefore, our mutually exclusive breeding fecundity makes of us today in our present human species form ("colors" and all), the same human race as we genetically were always -- together -- since the human race began. (Since Life on Earth first was created?!)

What this means to Quantum science, and our fallen churches, is that Thomas Jefferson evidently stumbled on a Heisenberg Uncertainty truth when he found that "all Men are created equal." Through our unbroken, eternal human race, we are each and every one equal in our human species. (Therefore, constitutionally equal before the Law.) But this common racial origin simultaneously honors us each one genetically unique. Unique means "different," which cannot be exactly "equal." (We each are so unique, in fact, that we all recognize one another as named, different individuals!) Therefore, our paradox of simultaneous human individuality and equality cannot be reconciled except as a Heisenberg atomic uncertainty. Clearly this mystery is a meeting place where Science and Church could come together and mend our racial tears.

As Mr. Byrd asked, the question is will Faith purge its guilty eyes to see these, our Humanity's glorious colors, flying at half-mast and upside down?

George Winkel

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