Tag Archives: bible

Bach, Religion, and a Story of Betrayal

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BachSt.MatthewI got a chance to listen to J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Kimmel Center right here in Philadelphia this weekend. It sets the biblical story of the betrayal, suffering, and death of Jesus to music. The whole performance is over three hours, and was my first experience of its kind.

As a secular person, having just enjoyed a Seder dinner with my mom, dad, and brother an hour before, I was going to this performance with some skepticism, of the kind I feel when a Jehovah’s witness comes to my door with promises of salvation and spiritual liberation. Plus, coming from a classical piano background, I always thought of Bach as a cold calculating composer devoid of passionate melody, for no good reason I should add. I was more into Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, etc.

This was probably the first time at a classical performance that I was moved on an emotional level. To me, this story had nothing to with religion. It was a story of love, hate, and most of all (for me) betrayal. Bach brought the intensity of it out, and made me forget my original skepticism.

The thing that particularly stuck with me for days after was the “God why have you forsaken me” that Jesus exclaims. The feeling of being abandoned by everyone, including your father, touched something with me. I know this story (and the resurrection after) has been at the core of millions of people’s faith in the supernatural, but to me it was a story of simple human suffering of the kind that many of us have or will have to experience in life. Bach may not write a big choral composition for my version of it but it will go on anyway in silence or with a far less beautiful soundtrack.

I am thankful for this experience as it showed to me another way that music can bring out the simple drama of life.

Side note: One very important lesson I learned, is that I will enjoy and understand a performance like this a lot more than I otherwise would if I do research on the story behind it ahead of time. With understanding comes appreciation. I spent a few hours reading about its composition, about the biblical story, and actually reading the relevant chapters from the Gospel of Matthew several times. I’m glad I did.

The “Predictive Power” of Biblical Numerics

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Harold Camping predicted Judgement Day will be on May 21, 2011. That day has come and gone. The prediction proved to be incorrect.

Being an engineer myself, I was embarrassed and saddened to learn that Harold Camping received a B.S. from Berkeley in Civil Engineering.

What was the evidence based on which he formed this prediction? The core “proof” rests on a numerological argument which derives the exact number of days since Christ’s crucifixion. Among the fascinating parts of his argument are ideas such as that “5 symbolizes atonement, 10 represents completeness, and 17 is for heaven”. This kind of blurring of the line between metaphysical concepts and the world of numbers is common among religious scholars. A good example of this is biblical numerics which is the “study” of numerical patterns in the Bible.

This kind of abuse of numbers is not an exclusive practice of the religious folk unfortunately. It is common amongst engineers and scientists too. In fact, with the advent of computers, modeling and simulation has become a major source of it in science. We form a model of the phenomena under consideration, and based on that model make predictions. The assumptions underlying the model model can be tweaked to achieve almost any desirable conclusion. It’s the job of the scientific community to question the validity of the assumptions.

That’s probably the biggest difference between scientists and followers of Mr. Camping: the willingness to question. The similarity, on the other hands, is that both communities have an admiration of numbers. Somehow, quantifying concepts makes an argument appear more grounded in reason and logic. But of course, this is an illusion, as the argument must also be grounded in real-world observed data (that’s reproducible).

The proof of the argument I make in this post is the brilliant insight by Douglas Adams that  the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42.