The unchristian Cross

        Extracts from:

HISTORY OF THE CROSS:
THE PAGAN ORIGIN
AND
IDOLATROUS ADOPTION AND WORSHIP,

OF THE IMAGE.

BY
HENRY DANA WARD, M.A.,
U.S.A.
1871.

CHAPTER I.

THE CROSS OF CHRIST 

STAUROS and ZULON, are the only words in the Greek Testament descriptive of the wooden cross of Christ. Neither of them admit of the radical idea of a cross in English, or in any other modern language. In all the languages of Christendom, a cross consists of one line drawn through another. Two sticks, one crossing the other, are essential to constitute, and to present the universal idea of, a material, visible cross.
No such idea is conveyed by the Scripture words stauros and zulon. Stauros means "an upright pale," a strong stake, such as farmers drive into the ground to make their fences or palisades- no more, no less. To the stauros the Roman soldiers nailed the hands and the feet of the King of glory, and lifted Him up to the mockery of the chief priests and elders of the people. Over Him, on the stauros, Pilate put His title: "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." And no mortal is at liberty to affirm any other form of stauros on which our Saviour was lifted up than is implied in the meaning of that word, which alone the four Evangelists in the four Gospels use to describe the wood on which Jesus was lifted up.
ZULON, which I write for the easier pronounciation zulon, means "wood cut ready for use, a stick, cudgel, or beam; any timber; a live tree." This is, as I have said, the only word besides stauros employed in the New Testament to signify the cross of Christ. The Evangelists use this word to signify the clubs or staves with which the company were armed when they arrested Jesus by night in Gethsemane. In the Acts, and rarely in the Epistles, it signifies the wood or timber on which Jesus was impaled alive.
Zulon, then, no more than stauros, conveys the English sense of a cross. Zulon and stauros are alike the single stick, the pale, or the stake, neither more nor less, on which Jesus was impaled, or crucified. Stauros, however, is the exclusive name given by all the Evangelists to the wood of Christ's cross. The stauros Jesus bore, on it He was hanged, from it He was taken down dead. The Evangelists use this word also in the figurative sense: "Come, take up thy stauros, and follow me" (Matt. xvi. 24, Mark viii. 34, Luke ix. 23). "He that taketh not his stauros and followeth after me, is not worthy of me" (Matt. x. 38). Neither stauros nor zulon ever means sticks joining each other at an angle, either in the New Testament or in any other book.

THE BRAZEN SERPENT.

When Israel in the wilderness murmured against God, the Lord sent fiery serpents among them, and much people of Israel died. The penitent people besought Moses to pray the Lord to take away the serpents. Moses's prayer was answered, not by removing the serpents, but by providing a remedy against their bite. By command of the Lord, "Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole. And it came to pass that if the serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass he lived"(Numb.xx. 9). The healing power was not in the "pole," neither was it in the brazen serpent, but in the word of the living God. The healing virtue resided not in these lifeless forms singly or jointly, but in the faith of the word which turned the eyes of the wounded to look that they might live. After the lapse of eight centuries, Judah came to believe there was miraculous power in that image, and they worshipped it. They did not make an image; they worshipped with incense, the same which Moses, by divine command, had made, and had elevated in the healing sight of the congregation. They worshipped it, not as the work of their hands, but as an instrument of salvation, set up by their great lawgiver. Notwithstanding, that good King Hezekiah, such as " after him was none like him , nor any that were before him," when he removed the high places and brake the images, and cut down the groves, brake in pieces also "the brazen serpent that Moses had made ; and he called it Nehushtan," i.e., brass(2 Kings xviii. 4). So, were the veritable wood of Christ's cross now before our eyes, it should sooner be cut -in pieces, and burned for wood, than be adored with incense, and reverence, and love. Is it any holier and better to reverence and love an image of that wood, to kiss it, to wreathe it with laurel, to bow down and worship before the image, which, whether of wood or stone, is man's device, wrought into shape by the hands of man ? 
Not an instance of exalting or honouring the visible form of the cross occurs in the New Testament. On the contrary, it is the emblem of our humiliation and sorrow, which being endured in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, through Jesus and the resurrection, "when our captivity will be turned again, as the streams in the south, our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing;" for we shall not only see Him as He is, but be like Him, having our vile body changed into the likeness of His glorious body, and our joint inheritance of all things  with Christ Jesus in eternal life.

THE PUNISHMENT OF THE CROSS.

This was Inflicted on hardened criminals, and on resolute enemies, and on vile murderers and slaves, among all the renowned nations of antiquity. The manner and circumstances of the execution do not concern us now, so much as the instrument, respecting which Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible " gives large information. "In Livy," says Smith, evencrux means a mere stake. More generally, the cross is called arbor infelix -Livy, Seneca ; or lignum infelix-Cicero. The very name of the cross was abhorrent not only to the flesh, but even to the eyes, ears, and thoughts of Roman citizens-Cicero proRab.5." Yet the learned Dr Smith himself follows the learned of every name in Christendom, whether scoffer or believer, in confounding the cross monogram in various forms and fashions, calling and considering them as one and the same thing. .......Crosses must have been commonly of the simplest form, "because they were used in such marvellous numbers. Of Jews alone, Alexander Jannaeus crucified 800, Varus, 2000, Hadrian, 500 a day; and the gentle Titus so many that there was no room for the crosses, nor crosses for the bodies."-Smith's Dict. of the Bible. Alexander the Great crucified 2000 Tyrians, and both the Sogdian king and people, for their brave defence of their several countries. And Augustus crucified 600 Sicilians. Under such circumstances, men could not be particular about the form of the stauros, or the manner of applying it. Some were nailed, others were  tied hand and foot and lifted up on the stauros; others on the tree. Others, also , were spiked to the earth with the stauros driven through their body, and others were spitted on it. Thus the crucifying or impaling was executed in the cruelest manner, and the sufferers were left to rot unburied, or to be devoured by the birds and beasts. In deference to the Mosaic law, the bodies were in Judea removed and buried, and the crosses were burned, to avoid legal defilement by the accursed thing, as it is written: "His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but in any wise thou shalt bury him that day (for he that is hanged is accursed of God); that the land be not defiled " (Dent. xxi. 23).

......page 20.

With these facts before us, showing the many and divers forms which the most learned and accurate are wont to call by one common name, " the cross," which name contradicts the form of the wood on which Christ suffered according to the Scriptures; and further, showing the corrupt use of this symbol in orgies of the ancient heathen, we are better prepared to take up the thread of the story from its beginning in the counterfeit Barnabas, and to follow it down through the labyrinth of error, until the initial of Tammuz has come to supplant the monogram of Christ on the standard of Rome, and to be exalted as the banner of Christendom. These are no dreams, but realities set forth not in opposition to the Church of our crucified Lord but in fidelity to the glorified Lord of the Church. For though Aaron and all Israel made of their ornaments the golden calf, and danced, feasted, and shouted before it, "Behold , these be thy gods, 0 Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt;" and though the chief Pontiff and all Christendom make an ornament of the image of the cross, and lift it in reverence and worship, on their person, on the church spire, and on the communion-table in the house of God and say, " Behold the cross of thy Lord and Saviour! behold, these be thy Saviour, O Israel, which redeemed thee from the bondage of corruption! " the images alike are idols-the image of the calf and the image of the cross, both are a pretence and an abomination, supplanting, with a dumb show, the presence of the living God, and closing the heart against Jesus Christ crucified Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God" (I Cor. i. 24).

A GRAND MISTAKE.

Many Romans and some others think that by exalting an image of the cross, they honour the Lord Jesus Christ, in the spirit of the Apostle, who exclaims : " God forbid that I should glory, save in the stauros of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world" (Gal. vi. 14). They little consider that the stauros is death to this world with shame and reproach on the sufferer. They little consider whether it is indeed honouring an upright man, our Friend, to set up in His name an image invented to commemorate Him through the ignominious weapon with which His relentless enemies put Him to death. Such honour more befits His enemies than His friends. Yet the very murderers themselves would be understood to glory in their deed, should they make such image their personal badge,-the recognised banner of their polity and the test of their brotherhood, and a charm of their person. It is time to shout aloud with Imbert: "Worship Christ, not the wood!" And, though rejected of men, we may hope with Him to be accepted of the Lord.

CHAPTER III

A SUMMARY.

The Scripture sense of the word stauros, for the cross of Christ, is in the concrete a pale, a strong stake, a wooden post; and in the abstract, it is a voluntary and patient suffering of shame, reproach, and torment unto death, in whatever form it may please God to lay it on us, whether by the rack, the wild beasts, the fire, or the hatred and persecution of godless men, for the sake of truth and righteousness, and in the hope of everlasting life. The Scriptures never speak of the stauros as an image or a sign, but always as a reality, cognisable to the senses, in every case known, by the sorrows and anguish of the sufferer. "Pilate wrote a title and put it on the stauros," i.e., the wood. "Jesus said, He that taketh not his stauros, and followeth me, is not worthy of me ;" i.e., the stauros of personal shame and suffering for the truth and righteousness of God. "The preaching of the stauros is to them that perish, foolishness;" i.e., they see no sense in suffering wrong and injury patiently-"Lest they should suffer persecution for the stauros of Christ ;" ie., contumely and reproach for believing in the suffering and crucified Saviour. "Far be it that I should glory save in the stauros of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world; " i.e., not the stauros of wood, but the self-sacrifice and offering of the body of our Lord Jesus Christ on the wood. In every sense, the Scripture stauros, first, is a pale or wooden and, secondly, the shame, the reproach, and the patient suffering of innocence before the world for righteousness' sake. Joseph bore this form of the stauros while imprisoned by the captain of Pharaoh's guard, till the Lord delivered him; and so Ignatius, being condemned in Antioch to be torn and devoured by the wild beasts for the faith of Christ, bore his stauros from } Antioch to Rome, where, in the amphitheatre, he suffered it, despising the agony and the shame. In every Scripture sense, the stauros of Christ is a living reality, and never that lying vanity, a senseless image and sign of the wood.
Inquiring about this image, three things surprise us: 
I. The fact that a great variety of wholly unlike forms are, by the common and universal consent of the learned, called by the same name, "the cross," and are understood to mean the cross or stauros of our Lord Jesus Christ.
II.That the figure of the cross, used among the primitive Christians, was X(hi), the Greek initial of Christ, for a sign of Christ, as authors to this day make in their manuscripts X for Christ, and Xmas for Christmas, and Xian for Christian.
III. The third thing that exceedingly surprises us is, to find that this sign and image commonly called the cross, was a profane symbol in heathen mysteries, exalted and honoured from Babylon to Jerusalem ' from the Nile to the Ganges, and from Syria to Britain many centuries before our era. These are facts fully established, but not generally known.
Following up our inquiry, we learn how, when, and by whom this pagan symbol found entrance among Christians, and we shall soon learn how it came at length to supplant the sign of Christ in the churches and on the banners of Christendom. For no writer of the age and the school of the apostles ever mentions, or alludes to any sign, image, or form of the stauros, other than its name implies, one pale or stake; except a certain man under the assumed name of " Barnabas, the companion in labour of Paul, the apostle." The counterfeit Nicodemus follows in the same path, setting forth the power of the sign of the wood in Hades. Minutius Felix and Tertullian, in the beginning of the third century, follow, coyly teaching that it is no worse for Christians to worship the wooden cross, than for the pagans to worship their wooden gods and trophies and eagles Cyprian,A.D.-950-8, acknowledges the sign in the form of the initial of Christ-not the pagan image, but "Christi signum, signum Dei-the symbol of Christ and of God." And, finally, we learn that Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, A.D. 350, comes boldly forth for the sign of the wood, and for the wood of the stauros,} without saying ever a word about the form of the image of the stauros, or about worshipping it. He neither made nor vended images; but he pretended to have the original wood, with portions of which he parted, as a special favour to them that were worthy; and the wood grew in his keeping, so as, in his own words, " to fill the whole world," which many believed, if he did not.
It is time to awake to the fact that the Tammuz or old heathen cross, led the whole column of images, such as of the virgin, of the apostles, of the saints and martyrs, and of our blessed Lord himself, with their several altars, into the Catholic Church, by degrees, from the latter half of the fourth to the latter half of the eighth century; when image-worship was firmly and for ever established in the Roman Catholic Church by the seventh Ecumenical Council, which was the second Council of Nice, held A.D. 787. It is time to awake, for the same strong tide of formalism, which then overflowed Christendom, is now coming under the form and fashion of the same image of the Tammuz cross, to overwhelm the Protestant world. The self-styled Infallible in the flesh, whose mark is the cross, is no less confident of possessing the kingdom o the whole earth now, than the Jews were in the expectancy of that kingdom, when they crucified the Lord of glory.
The Greek initial of Christ is a sign bringing to the memory of Christians, in the midst of the torments of heathen persecution, both the name and the sufferings of Christ, with His victory over death, and His soon coming again to judge the quick and the dead, and to give His faithful followers inheritance in His everlasting kingdom. Hence they learned to recognise their fraternal fellowship in Christ by the sign of His monogram. Gibbon says, "In all occasions of danger and distress, it was the practice of primitive Christians to fortify their minds and bodies by the sign of the cross, which they used in all their ecclesiastical rites, in all the daily occurrences of life, as an infallible preservative against every species of spiritual and temporal evil."-Gibbon, chap.xx
That the persecuted and suffering believers should " fortify their minds and bodies by the sign of the stauros "of wood is inconceivable; but it is natural that, in their circumstances, they should fortify their faith by the sign of the initial of our Lord's name, X for Christ. That this custom came at last to be superstitious is evident. After the boasted vision of Constantine, and the invention and the multiplication of the wood, in the name of the cross, had supplied the whole world, many superstitious practices of the heathen were adopted, perverting the faith, and changing the significant sign of Christ's name into the present sign of the murderous tree.

.......page 74

IS THIS GLORYING IN THE IMAGE OF THE WOOD PLEASING TO GOD?

Could our blessed Lord himself be pleased with the evil tree? Could He make an idol of the wood on which He was nailed, then lifted up, and left to drink the vinegar and the gall in death? Can it be pleasing in His sight for His citizens to make an ornament of the image of that wood on which He was lifted up, amid the scoffs and jeers of the chief priests and rulers of His chosen people ? Can it be pleasing to the blessed Jesus to behold His disciples glorying in the image of that instrument of capital punishment on which He patiently and innocently suffered, despising the shame? It was a shame, else how did the innocent Sufferer despise the shame ? It was an infamous shame. Why should a rational man make an image of the instrument of it? Reverence and love the image! Lift it up and make an ornament of it! Bow down before it, and kiss the thing with his lips! It is monstrous. Were the crown of thorns taken from the Saviour's wounded head, or the rod with which they smote the Judge of Israel on the cheek, or the nails which fastened His bands and His feet to the tree, really brought to our view, they would, with the spear which pierced His side, be objects of abhorrence to every loving heart. We hear of " Israel's judicial blindness." What else is this which leads Christendom to boast of the instrument on which "Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many ?" (Heb.3 ix. 28). That it is most unnatural will plainly appear when we bring the case home to our own heart. Suppose we take up reverently in honour, and glory in, and even kiss a weapon which, in cruel hands had, without the slightest provocation, slain our best friend and benefactor-our elder brother-and brought him to an untimely, shameful, and agonising death ! No mortal in his senses is capable of such perverseness, while yet many, under the delusion of the cross, are daily guilty of it. Neither can it be conceived that such honour to the evil instrument would be agreeable to our departed brother, could his immortal spirit look on it. Would he not rather, in a burst of indignation, exclaim, ill the language of Christ, " Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, " If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets " (Matt. xxiii. 29).

THE BEARER OF THIS CROSS DOES NOT PRAY IT MAY
PASS FROM HIM.

No language is too strong to express the indignation of our loving Brother at conduct so shameful, so unnatural. Nor does it improve the matter to pay this homage to an image of the murderous weapon, to lift it up, to gild, and wear it for a charm of the person, for an ornament of the house, and of the house of God. It does not lessen the offence to make this idol minister to the pomp of public worship, to the pride of life, the vanity of fashion, or sale of an article stamped with the image. No; this pagan image is a false cross, from which the holy apostles would shrink in horror, however the multitude of their successors honour it. This is a make-believe cross of pearl, gold, and precious stones, which the wearer cannot pray that it may be taken away from him, and which the multitude naturally covet, should it please God to give it them! How impious and blind to call this image the cross of Him who said, "Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee. Take away this cup from me. Nevertheless, not what I will, but what thou wilt " (Mark xiv. 36). All the images of the heathen are an abomination in His sight. How much more those of Christendom, and, most of all, "the glory cross," borne in solemn procession, adorned and set up in the house of the living God, to honour the most cruel death of His be loved Son at the hand of envious murderers! How much better such manners are in this age than those of the thirteenth century, when the visible head of the churches ordained festivals sacred to the memory of the various instruments of torture which afflicted our Lord unto death, the reader will judge."

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Of interest are these comments from Jesus: God, Man, or Myth (The Truth Seeker, 1950), which states:

"A stauros was a mere stake, and horrible to contemplate, it was used in the cruelest fashion to execute criminals and other persons..... It was sometimes pointed and thrust through the victim's body to pin him to earth; or he was placed on top of the stake with it's point upwards so that it gradually pierced his body; or he was tied upon it and left exposed till death intervened; and there were other methods too. There is not a scrape of evidence that a stauros was ever in the form of a cross or even of a "T" shape............

"If Jesus had been executed, mythically or historically, it would not have been with outstretched arms on a cruciform structure.Cutner reports that scholars have been aware of the error but have been unable to resist the TRADITIONAL MISTRANSLATION. In the 18th century some Anglican bishops recommended eliminating the cross symbol altogether, but they were ignored.There is no cross in early Christian art before the middle of the 5th century, where it (probably) appears on a coin in a painting. The first clear crucifix appears in the late 7th century. Before then Jesus was almost always depicted as a fish or a shepherd, never on a cross. Constantine's supposed 4th century vision of a cross in the sky was not of the instrument of execution: it was the Greek letter "X" (chi) with a "P" (rho) through it, the well-known monogram of Christ, from the first two letters of XPISTOS. Any Bible that contains the word "cross" or "crucify" is dishonest. Christians who flaunt the cross are unwittingly advertising a pagan religion."

The unchristian cross II

Did Jesus die on a cross?

Good Morning America reported this week on a thesis by Swedish theologian Gunnar Samuelsson http://www.exegetics.org/ in which he claims there is no historical support for the notion that Jesus died on a cross. If this is true, what effect should it have on Christians?

"There is no distinct punishment called 'crucifixion,' no distinct punishment device called a 'crucifix' anywhere mentioned in any of the ancient texts including the Gospels," he told ABCNews.com.

For his thesis, Crucifixion in Antiquity: An Inquiry into the Background of the New Testament Terminology of Crucifixion, Samuelson analyzed thousands of ancient texts to compare their wording with the wording of the gospel accounts and what he found is that there is simply no proof that Jesus was nailed to a cross.

There are two Greek words in question: stauros (stow-rose or stav-rose) and xylon (ksee-lon). Peter seems to favor xylon. For example, in his speech recorded at Acts 5:30 Peter says, "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you slew and hanged on a [xylon]." Some bibles translate that as "cross" and some as "tree." Which is correct?

Genesis 40:19 talks about the execution of an Egyptian, his body being 'hung on a tree.' When the passage was translated into the Greek Septuagint version, the translators used a form of the word xylon. Jerome's Latin Vulgate says the baker was to be hanged on a cruce, a form of the word crux. In English, some bibles say the baker was hanged on a cross, but the primary definition of crux is tree, not cross. Further, there is no historical evidence that the Egyptians crucified people, There is, however, historical evidence that they displayed the dead bodies of people with whom they were displeased by hanging them on trees or impaling them on poles.

Joshua 10:24 relates an account of Joshua winning a victory over 5 kings, and says he put their dead bodies on display. Again, the translators of the Greek Septuagint used the word xylon. Jerome translated it stipites - posts or poles - in his latin Vulgate. Are we to believe Joshua hung the bodies of the 5 kings on crosses, 1500 years before Jesus was executed? Or is it more likely he followed an Egyptian practice with which he was familiar?

Esther 5:14 refers to Haman preparing a stake 75 feet high on which to hang Mordecai. The Greek translates it xylon, the Latin trabem (beam). What purpose would have been served by a crossbeam 75 feet in the air?

What about stauros?

The gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, use stauros about 10 times with reference to Jesus' executional implement. The remainder of the Bible uses it another dozen times. Several reputable Greek dictionaries advise that the definition of stauros is 'a stake or pole.' For example, Vine's Expository Dictionary of Greek Words says of stauros: "Primarily, an upright pale or stake. On such malefactors were nailed for execution." Paul Schmidt's The History of Jesus says stauros "means every upright standing pale or tree trunk.” The Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott gives the first definition of stauros as "an upright stake or pole."

In spite of this, you would be hard pressed to find an English bible that doesn't translate stauros as "cross" when referring to Jesus' execution. (I looked at over a dozen online, and the only one that didn't translate stauros as "cross" was the Jehovah's Witnesses New World Translation.) http://www.watchtower.org/e/bible/index.htm

One of the most telling points in Samuelsson's research is this: he points out that in the ancient literature, the word stauros is used with reference to hanging fruit or animal carcasses up to dry. It's rather silly to think of fruit being crucified.

The fact of Jesus' execution is far more important than the implement on which he died. The fact that translators allowed their preconceptions to sway them to translate stauros as cross instead of stake or pole has to make one wonder about the accuracy of the rest of their translations.

And a serious Christian should also wonder where the "cross" idea came from. If, as Alexander Hislop suggested, it originated as the symbol for the god Tammuz, it is certainly inappropriate for Christians. Even if it didn't, isn't wearing a little gold copy of someone's murder weapon on a chain around your neck a little gruesome? -Phoenix Signs of the Times Examiner

The unchristian cross III

The Two Babylons, Alexander Hislop, Chapter V, Section VI, The Sign of the Cross


There is yet one more symbol of the Romish worship to be noticed, and that is the sign of the cross. In the Papal system as is well known, the sign of the cross and the image of the cross are all in all. No prayer can be said, no worship engaged in, no step almost can be taken, without the frequent use of the sign of the cross. The cross is looked upon as the grand charm, as the great refuge in every season of danger, in every hour of temptation as the infallible preservative from all the powers of darkness. The cross is adored with all the homage due only to the Most High; and for any one to call it, in the hearing of a genuine Romanist, by the Scriptural term, "the accursed tree," is a mortal offence. To say that such superstitious feeling for the sign of the cross, such worship as Rome pays to a wooden or a metal cross, ever grew out of the saying of Paul, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ"--that is, in the doctrine of Christ crucified--is a mere absurdity, a shallow subterfuge and pretence. The magic virtues attributed to the so-called sign of the cross, the worship bestowed on it, never came from such a source. The same sign of the cross that Rome now worships was used in the Babylonian Mysteries, was applied by Paganism to the same magic purposes, was honoured with the same honours. That which is now called the Christian cross was originally no Christian emblem at all, but was the mystic Tau of the Chaldeans and Egyptians--the true original form of the letter T--the initial of the name of Tammuz--which, in Hebrew, radically the same as ancient Chaldee, was found on coins. That mystic Tau was marked in baptism on the foreheads of those initiated in the Mysteries, * and was used in every variety of way as a most sacred symbol.

* TERTULLIAN, De Proescript. Hoeret. The language of Tertullian implies that those who were initiated by baptism in the Mysteries were marked on the forehead in the same way, as his Christian countrymen in Africa, who had begun by this time to be marked in baptism with the sign of the cross.

To identify Tammuz with the sun it was joined sometimes to the circle of the sun; sometimes it was inserted in the circle. Whether the Maltese cross, which the Romish bishops append to their names as a symbol of their episcopal dignity, is the letter T, may be doubtful; but there seems no reason to doubt that that Maltese cross is an express symbol of the sun; for Layard found it as a sacred symbol in Nineveh in such a connection as led him to identify it with the sun. The mystic Tau, as the symbol of the great divinity, was called "the sign of life"; it was used as an amulet over the heart; it was marked on the official garments of the priests, as on the official garments of the priests of Rome; it was borne by kings in their hand, as a token of their dignity or divinely-conferred authority. The Vestal virgins of Pagan Rome wore it suspended from their necklaces, as the nuns do now. The Egyptians did the same, and many of the barbarous nations with whom they had intercourse, as the Egyptian monuments bear witness. In reference to the adorning of some of these tribes, Wilkinson thus writes: "The girdle was sometimes highly ornamented; men as well as women wore earrings; and they frequently had a small cross suspended to a necklace, or to the collar of their dress. The adoption of this last was not peculiar to them; it was also appended to, or figured upon, the robes of the Rot-n-no; and traces of it may be seen in the fancy ornaments of the Rebo, showing that it was already in use as early as the fifteenth century before the Christian era." There is hardly a Pagan tribe where the cross has not been found. The cross was worshipped by the Pagan Celts long before the incarnation and death of Christ. "It is a fact," says Maurice, "not less remarkable than well-attested, that the Druids in their groves were accustomed to select the most stately and beautiful tree as an emblem of the Deity they adored, and having cut the side branches, they affixed two of the largest of them to the highest part of the trunk, in such a manner that those branches extended on each side like the arms of a man, and, together with the body, presented the appearance of a HUGE CROSS, and on the bark, in several places, was also inscribed the letter Thau." It was worshipped in Mexico for ages before the Roman Catholic missionaries set foot there, large stone crosses being erected, probably to the "god of rain." The cross thus widely worshipped, or regarded as a sacred emblem, was the unequivocal symbol of Bacchus, the Babylonian Messiah, for he was represented with a head-band covered with crosses. This symbol of the Babylonian god is reverenced at this day in all the wide wastes of Tartary, where Buddhism prevails, and the way in which it is represented among them forms a striking commentary on the language applied by Rome to the Cross. "The cross," says Colonel Wilford, in the Asiatic Researches, "though not an object of worship among the Baud'has or Buddhists, is a favourite emblem and device among them. It is exactly the cross of the Manicheans, with leaves and flowers springing from it. This cross, putting forth leaves and flowers (and fruit also, as I am told), is called the divine tree, the tree of the gods, the tree of life and knowledge, and productive of whatever is good and desirable, and is placed in the terrestrial paradise." Compare this with the language of Rome applied to the cross, and it will be seen how exact is the coincidence. In the Office of the Cross, it is called the "Tree of life," and the worshippers are taught thus to address it: "Hail, O Cross, triumphal wood, true salvation of the world, among trees there is none like thee in leaf, flower, and bud...O Cross, our only hope, increase righteousness to the godly and pardon the offences of the guilty." *

* The above was actually versified by the Romanisers in the Church of England, and published along with much besides from the same source, some years ago, in a volume entitled Devotions on the Passion. The London Record, of April, 1842, gave the following as a specimen of the "Devotions" provided by these "wolves in sheep's clothing" for members of the Church of England:--

"O faithful cross, thou peerless tree,
No forest yields the like of thee,
Leaf, flower, and bud;
Sweet is the wood, and sweet the weight,
And sweet the nails that penetrate
Thee, thou sweet wood."

Can any one, reading the gospel narrative of the crucifixion, possibly believe that that narrative of itself could ever germinate into such extravagance of "leaf, flower, and bud," as thus appears in this Roman Office? But when it is considered that the Buddhist, like the Babylonian cross, was the recognised emblem of Tammuz, who was known as the mistletoe branch, or "All-heal," then it is easy to see how the sacred Initial should be represented as covered with leaves, and how Rome, in adopting it, should call it the "Medicine which preserves the healthful, heals the sick, and does what mere human power alone could never do."

Now, this Pagan symbol seems first to have crept into the Christian Church in Egypt, and generally into Africa. A statement of Tertullian, about the middle of the third century, shows how much, by that time, the Church of Carthage was infected with the old leaven. Egypt especially, which was never thoroughly evangelised, appears to have taken the lead in bringing in this Pagan symbol. The first form of that which is called the Christian Cross, found on Christian monuments there, is the unequivocal Pagan Tau, or Egyptian "Sign of life." Let the reader peruse the following statement of Sir G. Wilkinson: "A still more curious fact may be mentioned respecting this hieroglyphical character [the Tau], that the early Christians of Egypt adopted it in lieu of the cross, which was afterwards substituted for it, prefixing it to inscriptions in the same manner as the cross in later times. For, though Dr. Young had some scruples in believing the statement of Sir A. Edmonstone, that it holds that position in the sepulchres of the great Oasis, I can attest that such is the case, and that numerous inscriptions, headed by the Tau, are preserved to the present day on early Christian monuments." The drift of this statement is evidently this, that in Egypt the earliest form of that which has since been called the cross, was no other than the "Crux Ansata," or "Sign of life," borne by Osiris and all the Egyptian gods; that the ansa or "handle" was afterwards dispensed with, and that it became the simple Tau, or ordinary cross, as it appears at this day, and that the design of its first employment on the sepulchres, therefore, could have no reference to the crucifixion of the Nazarene, but was simply the result of the attachment to old and long-cherished Pagan symbols, which is always strong in those who, with the adoption of the Christian name and profession, are still, to a large extent, Pagan in heart and feeling. This, and this only, is the origin of the worship of the "cross."

This, no doubt, will appear all very strange and very incredible to those who have read Church history, as most have done to a large extent, even amongst Protestants, through Romish spectacles; and especially to those who call to mind the famous story told of the miraculous appearance of the cross to Constantine on the day before the decisive victory at the Milvian bridge, that decided the fortunes of avowed Paganism and nominal Christianity. That story, as commonly told, if true, would certainly give a Divine sanction to the reverence for the cross. But that story, when sifted to the bottom, according to the common version of it, will be found to be based on a delusion--a delusion, however, into which so good a man as Milner has allowed himself to fall. Milner's account is as follows: "Constantine, marching from France into Italy against Maxentius, in an expedition which was likely either to exalt or to ruin him, was oppressed with anxiety. Some god he thought needful to protect him; the God of the Christians he was most inclined to respect, but he wanted some satisfactory proof of His real existence and power, and he neither understood the means of acquiring this, nor could he be content with the atheistic indifference in which so many generals and heroes since his time have acquiesced. He prayed, he implored with such vehemence and importunity, and God left him not unanswered. While he was marching with his forces in the afternoon, the trophy of the cross appeared very luminous in the heavens, brighter than the sun, with this inscription, 'Conquer by this.' He and his soldiers were astonished at the sight; but he continued pondering on the event till night. And Christ appeared to him when asleep with the same sign of the cross, and directed him to make use of the symbol as his military ensign." Such is the statement of Milner. Now, in regard to the "trophy of the cross," a few words will suffice to show that it is utterly unfounded. I do not think it necessary to dispute the fact of some miraculous sign having been given. There may, or there may not, have been on this occasion a "dignus vindice nodus," a crisis worthy of a Divine interposition. Whether, however, there was anything out of the ordinary course, I do not inquire. But this I say, on the supposition that Constantine in this matter acted in good faith, and that there actually was a miraculous appearance in the heavens, that it as not the sign of the cross that was seen, but quite a different thing, the name of Christ. That this was the case, we have at once the testimony of Lactantius, who was the tutor of Constantine's son Crispus--the earliest author who gives any account of the matter, and the indisputable evidence of the standards of Constantine themselves, as handed down to us on medals struck at the time. The testimony of Lactantius is most decisive: "Constantine was warned in a dream to make the celestial sign of God upon his solders' shields, and so to join battle. He did as he was bid, and with the transverse letter X circumflecting the head of it, he marks Christ on their shields. Equipped with this sign, his army takes the sword." Now, the letter X was just the initial of the name of Christ, being equivalent in Greek to CH. If, therefore, Constantine did as he was bid, when he made "the celestial sign of God" in the form of "the letter X," it was that "letter X," as the symbol of "Christ" and not the sign of the cross, which he saw in the heavens. When the Labarum, or far-famed standard of Constantine itself, properly so called, was made, we have the evidence of Ambrose, the well-known Bishop of Milan, that that standard was formed on the very principle contained in the statement of Lactantius--viz., simply to display the Redeemer's name. He calls it "Labarum, hoc est Christi sacratum nomine signum."--"The Labarum, that is, the ensign consecrated by the NAME of Christ." *

* Epistle of Ambrose to the Emperor Theodosius about the proposal to restore the Pagan altar of Victory in the Roman Senate. The subject of the Labarum has been much confused through ignorance of the meaning of the word. Bryant assumes (and I was myself formerly led away by the assumption) that it was applied to the standard bearing the crescent and the cross, but he produces no evidence for the assumption; and I am now satisfied that none can be produced. The name Labarum, which is generally believed to have come from the East, treated as an Oriental word, gives forth its meaning at once. It evidently comes from Lab, "to vibrate," or "move to and fro," and ar "to be active." Interpreted thus, Labarum signifies simply a banner or flag, "waving to and fro" in the wind, and this entirely agrees with the language of Ambrose "an ensign consecrated by the name of Christ," which implies a banner.

There is not the slightest allusion to any cross--to anything but the simple name of Christ. While we have these testimonies of Lactantius and Ambrose, when we come to examine the standard of Constantine, we find the accounts of both authors fully borne out; we find that that standard, bearing on it these very words, "Hoc signo victor eris," "In this sign thou shalt be a conqueror," said to have been addressed from heaven to the emperor, has nothing at all in the shape of a cross, but "the letter X." In the Roman Catacombs, on a Christian monument to "Sinphonia and her sons," there is a distinct allusion to the story of the vision; but that allusion also shows that the X, and not the cross, was regarded as the "heavenly sign." The words at the head of the inscription are these: "In Hoc Vinces [In this thou shalt overcome] X." Nothing whatever but the X is here given as the "Victorious Sign." There are some examples, no doubt, of Constantine's standard, in which there is a cross-bar, from which the flag is suspended, that contains that "letter X"; and Eusebius, who wrote when superstition and apostacy were working, tries hard to make it appear that that cross-bar was the essential element in the ensign of Constantine. But this is obviously a mistake; that cross-bar was nothing new, nothing peculiar to Constantine's standard. Tertullian shows that that cross-bar was found long before on the vexillum, the Roman Pagan standard, that carried a flag; and it was used simply for the purpose of displaying that flag. If, therefore, that cross-bar was the "celestial sign," it needed no voice from heaven to direct Constantine to make it; nor would the making or displaying of it have excited any particular attention on the part of those who saw it. We find no evidence at all that the famous legend, "In this overcome," has any reference to this cross-bar; but we find evidence the most decisive that that legend does refer to the X. Now, that that X was not intended as the sign of the cross, but as the initial of Christ's name, is manifest from this, that the Greek P, equivalent to our R, is inserted in the middle of it, making by their union CHR. The standard of Constantine, then, was just the name of Christ. Whether the device came from earth or from heaven--whether it was suggested by human wisdom or Divine, supposing that Constantine was sincere in his Christian profession, nothing more was implied in it than a literal embodiment of the sentiment of the Psalmist, "In the name of the Lord will we display our banners." To display that name on the standards of Imperial Rome was a thing absolutely new; and the sight of that name, there can be little doubt, nerved the Christian soldiers in Constantine's army with more than usual fire to fight and conquer at the Milvian bridge.

In the above remarks I have gone on the supposition that Constantine acted in good faith as a Christian. His good faith, however, has been questioned; and I am not without my suspicions that the X may have been intended to have one meaning to the Christians and another to the Pagans. It is certain that the X was the symbol of the god Ham in Egypt, and as such was exhibited on the breast of his image. Whichever view be taken, however, of Constantine's sincerity, the supposed Divine warrant for reverencing the sign of the cross entirely falls to the ground. In regard to the X, there is no doubt that, by the Christians who knew nothing of secret plots or devices, it was generally taken, as Lactantius declares, as equivalent to the name of "Christ." In this view, therefore, it had no very great attractions for the Pagans, who, even in worshipping Horus, had always been accustomed to make use of the mystic tau or cross, as the "sign of life," or the magical charm that secured all that was good, and warded off everything that was evil. When, therefore, multitudes of the Pagans, on the conversion of Constantine, flocked into the Church, like the semi-Pagans of Egypt, they brought along with them their predilection for the old symbol. The consequence was, that in no great length of time, as apostacy proceeded, the X which in itself was not an unnatural symbol of Christ, the true Messiah, and which had once been regarded as such, was allowed to go entirely into disuse, and the Tau, the sign of the cross, the indisputable sign of Tammuz, the false Messiah, was everywhere substituted in its stead. Thus, by the "sign of the cross," Christ has been crucified anew by those who profess to be His disciples. Now, if these things be matter of historic fact, who can wonder that, in the Romish Church, "the sign of the cross" has always and everywhere been seen to be such an instrument of rank superstition and delusion?

There is more, much more, in the rites and ceremonies of Rome that might be brought to elucidate our subject. But the above may suffice. *

* If the above remarks be well founded, surely it cannot be right that this sign of the cross, or emblem of Tammuz, should be used in Christian baptism. At the period of the Revolution, a Royal Commission, appointed to inquire into the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England, numbering among its members eight or ten bishops, strongly recommended that the use of the cross, as tending to superstition, should be laid aside. If such a recommendation was given then, and that by such authority as members of the Church of England must respect, how much ought that recommendation to be enforced by the new light which Providence has cast on the subject!

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As many have suspected, there is much more to the true, authentic history of the Christian religion than what we had originally been told. Some claims regarding the Church's history are accurate, some are not. The most extreme claims against the religion come from the atheist camp and often remain unproved. But this book is completely different. It comes from a devout Christian, Henry Dana Ward, a believer in Christ who backs himself up with scholarly research and facts. Why, then, was this book written if it goes against traditional beliefs and acceptance? It is because the traditional beliefs surrounding the cross and its worship are wrong! It took time for us to eventually accept the cross in its current form and to worship it and, according to Ward, this was a pagan symbol that should never have been adopted. Idols were not to be worshipped by the earliest of Christians, and the cross was no exception to this rule. Not worshipping the cross is consistent with early Christianity and is not heretical. Its lack of worship is part of Christianity's foundational beliefs and its exclusion should be part of the religion's current structure, according to Ward. Revering the cross is based on lies, deception, and ignorance. Ward shows how the lies began, who spread them, and how and why they did it.
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You may be surprised to learn that many traditions of Roman Catholicism in fact dont come from Christs teachings but from an ancient Babylonian Mystery religion that was centered on Nimrod, his wife Semiramis, and a child Tammuz. This book shows how this ancient religion transformed itself as it incorporated Christ into its teachings. You may be surprised that certain practices like confessions, and crossing ones self, and even the position of the Pope come from traditions of this mystery cult. Originally a pamphlet published in 1853, The Two Babylons is Hislop's most famous work. In this book he argues that the Roman Catholic Church is nothing more than pagan cult, with roots in Babylonian mystery cults, which have a bank of secret knowledge only available to those who have been formally accepted into the cult. Roman Catholics, Hislop argues, are descendants from early Christians who adopted the Roman religion descended from the worship of Semiramis, the wife of the founder of Babylon. By discrediting the true Christianity of Catholics, Hislop hoped to bolster the legitimacy of the Protestant and Scottish Reformations. Students of theology and those interested in the complex history of Christianity will find Hislop's arguments provocative enough that they may be moved to further research of their own. Scottish minister ALEXANDER HISLOP (1807-1865) became an ordained clergymen in the Free Church of Scotland in 1844. As a Presbyterian minister, Hislop was famously critical of the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote a number of books including Christ's Crown and Covenant (1860) and The Moral Identity of Babylon and Rome (1855). http://philologos.org/__eb-ttb/
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The history of the symbol of the cross has had an attraction for the author ever since, as an enquiring youth, he found himself unable to obtain satisfactory answers to four questions concerning the same which presented themselves to his mind. The first of those questions was why John the Baptist, who was beheaded before Jesus was executed, and so far as we are told never had anything to do with a cross, is represented in our religious pictures as holding a cross. The second question was whether this curious but perhaps in itself easily explained practice had in its inception any connection with the non-Mosaic initiatory rite of baptism; which Jesus accepted as a matter of course at the hands of his cousin John, and in which the sign of the cross has for ages been the all-important feature. And it was the wonder whether there was or was not some association between the facts that the New Testament writers give no explanation whatever of the origin of baptism as an initiatory rite, that this non-Mosaic initiatory rite was in use among Sun-God worshippers long before our era, and that the Fathers admitted that the followers of the Persian conception of the Sun-God marked their initiates upon the forehead like the followers of the Christ, which finally induced the author to start a systematic enquiry into the history of the cross as a symbol.

The third question was why, despite the fact that the instrument of execution to which Jesus was affixed can have had but one shape, almost any kind of cross is accepted as a symbol of our faith. The last of the four questions was why many varieties of the cross of four equal arms, which certainly was not a representation of an instrument of execution, were accepted by Christians as symbols of the Christ before any cross which could possibly have been a representation of an instrument of execution was given a place among the symbols of Christianity; while even nowadays one variety of the cross of four equal arms is the favourite symbol of the Greek Church, and both it and the other varieties enter into the ornamentation of our sacred properties and dispute the supremacy with the cross which has one of its arms longer than the other three. Pursuing these matters for himself, the author eventually found that even before our era the cross was venerated by many as the symbol of Life; though our works of reference seldom mention this fact, and never do it justice. He moreover discovered that no one has ever written a complete history of the symbol, showing the possibility that the stauros or post to which Jesus was affixed was not cross-shaped, and the certainty that, in any case, what eventually became the symbol of our faith owed some of its prestige as a Christian symbol of Victory and Life to the position it occupied in pre-Christian days. The author has therefore, in the hope of drawing attention to the subject, incorporated the results of his researches in the present essay.
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This study investigates the philological aspects of how ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew/Aramaic texts, including the New Testament, depict the practice of punishment by crucifixion. A survey of the ancient text material shows that there has been a too narrow view of the “crucifixion” terminology. The various terms are not simply used in the sense of “crucify” and “cross,” if by “crucifixion” one means the punishment that Jesus was subjected to according to the main Christian traditions. The terminology is used much more diversely. Almost none of it can be elucidated beyond verbs referring vaguely to some form(s) of suspension, and nouns referring to tools used in such suspension. As a result, most of the crucifixion accounts that scholars cite in the ancient literature have to be rejected, leaving only a few. The New Testament is not spared from this terminological ambiguity. The accounts of the death of Jesus are strikingly sparse. Their chief contribution is usage of the unclear terminology in question. Over-interpretation, and probably even pure imagination, have afflicted nearly every wordbook and dictionary that deals with the terms related to crucifixion as well as scholarly depictions of what happened on Calvary. The immense knowledge of the punishment of crucifixion in general, and the execution of Jesus in particular, cannot be supported by the studied texts. http://www.exegetics.org/

The unchristian cross IV

Did Jesus Die on a Cross?

The Bible’s answer

Many view the cross as the most common symbol of Christianity. However, the Bible does not describe the instrument of Jesus’ death, so no one can know its shape with absolute certainty. Still, the Bible provides evidence that Jesus died, not on a cross, but on an upright stake.

The Bible generally uses the Greek word stau·ros′ when referring to the instrument of Jesus’ execution. (Matthew 27:40; John 19:17) Although translations often render this word “cross,” many scholars agree that its basic meaning is actually “upright stake.” * According to A Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek New Testament, stau·ros′ “never means two pieces of wood joining each other at any angle.”

The Bible also uses the Greek word xy′lon as a synonym for stau·ros′. (Acts 5:30; 1 Peter 2:24) This word means “wood,” “timber,” “stake,” or “tree.” * The Companion Bible thus concludes: “There is nothing in the Greek of the N[ew] T[estament] even to imply two pieces of timber.”

Is using the cross in worship acceptable to God?

Regardless of the shape of the instrument on which Jesus died, the following facts and Bible verses indicate that we should not use the cross in worship.

God rejects worship that uses images or symbols, including the cross. God commanded the Israelites not to use “the form of any symbol” in their worship, and Christians are likewise told to “flee from idolatry.”—Deuteronomy 4:15-19; 1 Corinthians 10:14.
First-century Christians did not use the cross in worship.
 *  The teachings and example of the apostles set a pattern that all Christians should adhere to.—2 Thessalonians 2:15.
Use of the cross in worship has a pagan origin. * Hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, when the churches had deviated from his teachings, new church members “were permitted largely to retain their pagan signs and symbols,” including the cross. (The Expanded Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words) However, the Bible does not condone adopting pagan symbols to help make new converts.—2 Corinthians 6:17.

An academic pans logic.Explains a lot.

Why Human Reason Didn’t “Evolve”

 David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

 The indispensable neuroscientist Michael Egnor, writing at Mind Matters, applies some needed intellectual rigor in disciplining atheist philosopher Justin E.H. Smith. In a new book, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, Professor Smith “argues that reason is inferior to the non-rational behavior of animals.” Egnor: “Think of the irony: a professor of philosophy, who is paid only to reason, uses reason to argue against reason. Welcome to the bowels of atheist metaphysics.”

According to Smith, writing at Aeon, “Philosophers and cognitive scientists today generally comprehend the domain of reason as a certain power of making inferences, confined to the thoughts and actions of human beings alone.” Well, not exactly. Reason, as Dr. Egnor reminds him, is nothing  more or less than the ability to think abstractly, as opposed to thinking about physical objects. 

A Clever Dog

An example of the latter would be thinking about how to get out of your doggie play pen. Our family is currently testing out a puppy (long story) who has surprised me repeatedly when I wasn’t looking by somehow escaping from a closed play pen. It took me a while to figure out how he was doing it, since the pen is about twice his height. Even then I had to catch him in the act. Clever dog! But he wasn’t engaging in the activity of reasoning by, let’s say, contemplating the idea of freedom. Egnor:

Only man thinks abstractly; that is the ability to reason. No animal, no matter how clever, can think abstractly or reason. Animals can be very clever but their cleverness is always about concrete things — about the bone they are playing with, or about the stranger they are barking at. They don’t think about “play” or “threat” as abstract concepts.

Tough to Explain

Smith says, “Like echolocation in bats or photosynthesis in plants, reason is an evolved power.” But if reason is unique to humans, and exists nowhere else in life, did it indeed “evolve” from lower animals? That’s a tough question. In fact, Egnor explains why it didn’t, at least not by any purely material mechanism like the Darwinian one:

Reason is a power characteristic of man, to be sure, but it is not “an evolved power.” It didn’t “evolve.” The ability to reason didn’t evolve because it’s not a material power of the mind. Reason is an immaterial power of the mind — it is abstracted from particular things, and cannot logically be produced by a material thing.

A purely material process can’t “evolve” a spiritual power. Egnor is, as I said, indispensable. Read the read as Mind Matters.

Why some can't help but disagree with determinists.

Physicist tells people to stop saying they have free will
January 13, 2016 Posted by vjtorley under Intelligent Design

Over at her BackReAction blog, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist based at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Frankfurt, Germany, has written an article titled, Free will is dead, let’s bury it. However, her arguments against free will are both scientifically unsound and philosophically dated. She writes:

There are only two types of fundamental laws that appear in contemporary theories. One type is deterministic, which means that the past entirely predicts the future. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no freedom. The other type of law we know appears in quantum mechanics and has an indeterministic component which is random. This randomness cannot be influenced by anything, and in particular it cannot be influenced by you, whatever you think “you” are. There is no free will in such a fundamental law because there is no “will” – there is just some randomness sprinkled over the determinism.

In neither case do you have free will in any meaningful way.

These are the only two options, and all other elaborations on the matter are just verbose distractions. It doesn’t matter if you start talking about chaos (which is deterministic), top-down causation (which doesn’t exist), or insist that we don’t know how consciousness really works (true but irrelevant). It doesn’t change a thing about this very basic observation: there isn’t any known law of nature that lets you meaningfully speak of “free will”.

If you don’t want to believe that, I challenge you to write down any equation for any system that allows for something one could reasonably call free will…

The only known example for a law that is neither deterministic nor random comes from myself. But it’s a baroque construct meant as proof in principle, not a realistic model that I would know how to combine with the four fundamental interactions.

First of all, let’s get the bad science out of the way. Dr. Hossenfelder insists that top-down causation “doesn’t exist.” She should try telling that to George Ellis, an eminent cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, whose scientific work is described by Adam Frank in an article titled, How Does The World Work: Top-Down or Bottom-Up?, over at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos And Culture blog:

In an essay for the physics website FQXi, Ellis argues for top-down causation. If he’s right, then much of our thinking about what matters would have to be revised.

To get an handle on how top-down causation works, Ellis focuses on what’s in front of all us so much of the time: the computer. Computers are structured systems. They are built as a hierarchy of layers, extending from the wires in the transistors all the way up to the fully assembled machine, gleaming metal case and all.

Because of this layering, what happens at the uppermost levels — like you hitting the escape key — flows downward. This action determines the behavior of the lowest levels — like the flow of electrons through the wires — in ways that simply could not be predicted by just knowing the laws of electrons…

But the hardware, of course, is just one piece of the puzzle. This is where things get interesting. As Ellis explains:

Hardware is only causally effective because of the software which animates it: by itself hardware can do nothing. Both hardware and software are hierarchically structured with the higher level logic driving the lower level events.
In other words, it’s software at the top level of structure that determines how the electrons at the bottom level flow. Hitting escape while running Word moves the electrons in the wires in different ways than hitting escape does when running Photoshop. This is causation flowing from top to bottom…

Ellis is arguing for a kind of emergentism whereby new entities and new rules emerge with new levels of structure in the universe (an argument also made by Stuart Kaufmann here at 13.7). But Ellis is going further. He is arguing that the top is always exerting an influence on the bottom.

Ellis concludes his FQXI esssay, Recognising Top-Down Causation, with a bold hypothesis, and he puts forward some concrete research proposals which he believes will fundamentally transform the nature of science (bold emphases mine – VJT):

Hypothesis: bottom up emergence by itself is strictly limited in terms of the complexity it can give rise to. Emergence of genuine complexity is characterised by a reversal of information flow from bottom up to top down [27].

The degree of complexity that can arise by bottom-up causation alone is strictly limited. Sand piles, the game of life, bird flocks, or any dynamics governed by a local rule [28] do not compare in complexity with a single cell or an animal body. The same is true in physics: spontaneously broken symmetry is powerful [16], but not as powerful as symmetry breaking that is guided top-down to create ordered structures (such as brains and computers). Some kind of coordination of effects is needed for such complexity to emerge.

The assumption that causation is bottom up only is wrong in biology, in computers, and even in many cases in physics, for example state vector preparation, where top-down constraints allow non-unitary behaviour at the lower levels. It may well play a key role in the quantum measurement problem (the dual of state vector preparation) [5]. One can bear in mind here that wherever equivalence classes of entities play a key role, such as in Crutchfield’s computational mechanics [29], this is an indication that top-down causation is at play.

There are some great discussions of the nature of emergent phenomena in physics [17,1,12,30], but
none of them specifically mention the issue of top down causation. This paper proposes that
recognising this feature will make it easier to comprehend the physical effects underlying emergence of genuine complexity, and may lead to useful new developments, particularly to do with the foundational nature of quantum theory. It is a key missing element in current physics.

Having disposed of Dr. Hossenfelder’s claim that top-down causation doesn’t exist, I’d now like to examine her philosophical argument. Briefly, the argument she puts forward is a variant of what Bob Doyle describes as The Standard Argument against Free Will, at his Information Philosopher Website:

First, if determinism is the case, the will is not free. We call this the Determinism Objection.

Second, if indeterminism and real chance exist, our will would not be in our control, we could not be responsible for random actions. We call this the Randomness Objection.

Together, these objections can be combined in the Responsibility Objection, namely that no Free Will model has yet provided us an intelligible account of the agent control needed for moral responsibility.

Both parts are logically and practically flawed, partly from abuse of language that led some 20th-century philosophers to call free will a “pseudo-problem,” and partly from claims to knowledge that are based on faulty evidence.

So why does Doyle think the Standard Argument Against Free Will is flawed? First, Doyle argues that determinism is empirically false: quantum physics introduces a significant degree of indeterminism into the world, even at the macro level. Second, Doyle maintains that chance would undercut freedom only if it were a cause of our actions, but in his preferred two-stage Cogito model, it’s not: chance serves to dish up a random array of possibilities, and then something called “MacroMind” takes over, and makes a decision, based on the individual’s past history of preferences. However, I don’t propose to discuss Doyle’s Cogito model further here, because Doyle himself rejects the strong libertarian view (which I support), that “a decision is directly free only if, until it is made, the agent is able to do other than make that decision, where this is taken to require that, until the action occurs, there is a chance that it will not occur.” Indeed, Doyle explicitly acknowledges that in his Cogito model, during the split-second before a choice is made, “the decision could be reliably (though not perfectly) predicted by a super-psychiatrist who knew everything about the agent and was aware of all the alternative possibilities.” To my mind, that’s a Pickwickian account of freedom.

For her part, Dr. Hossenfelder vehemently disagrees with Doyle’s contention that quantum physics entails indeterminism: she points out that superdeterminism (the hypothesis that the quantum measurements that experimenters choose to make are themselves predetermined by the laws of physics) is an equally consistent possibility – and, I might add, one that was acknowledged by John Bell himself: see The Ghost in the Atom: A Discussion of the Mysteries of Quantum Physics, by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, 1986/1993, pp. 45-47). For my part, I think physicist Anton Zeilinger identified the flaw in superdeterminism when he perceptively commented:

[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist… This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature. (Dance of the Photons, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010, p. 266.)

Additionally, I should point out that even on a classical, Newtonian worldview, determinism does not follow. Newtonian mechanics is popularly believed to imply determinism, but this belief was exploded over two decades ago by John Earman (A Primer on Determinism, 1986, Dordrecht: Reidel, chapter III). In 2006, Dr. John Norton put forward a simple illustration which is designed to show that violations of determinism can arise very easily in a system governed by Newtonian physics (The Dome: An Unexpectedly Simple Failure of Determinism. 2006 Philosophy of Science Association 20th Biennial Meeting (Vancouver), PSA 2006 Symposia.) In Norton’s example, a mass sits on a dome in a gravitational field. After remaining unchanged for an arbitrary time, it spontaneously moves in an arbitrary direction. The mass’s indeterministic motion is clearly compatible with Newtonian mechanics. Norton describes his example as an exceptional case of indeterminism arising in a Newtonian system with a finite number of degrees of freedom. (On the other hand, indeterminism is generic for Newtonian systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom.)

Sometimes the Principle of Least Action is said to imply determinism. But since the wording of the principle shows that it only applies to systems in which total mechanical energy (kinetic energy plus potential energy) is conserved, and as it deals with the trajectory of particles in motion, I fail to see how it would apply to collisions between particles, in which mechanical energy is not necessarily conserved. At best, it seems that the universe is fully deterministic only if particles behave like perfectly elastic billiard balls – which is only true in an artificially simplified version of the cosmos.

Finally, I should like to add that in my own top-down model of free will (as with Doyle’s), chance does not figure as a cause of our choices. In my model, it serves as the matrix upon which non-random, but undetermined, free choices are imposed, via a form of top-down causation. Here’s how I described it in a 2012 post titled, Is free will dead?:

…[I]t is easy to show that a non-deterministic system may be subject to specific constraints, while still remaining random. These constraints may be imposed externally, or alternatively, they may be imposed from above, as in top-down causation. To see how this might work, suppose that my brain performs the high-level act of making a choice, and that this act imposes a constraint on the quantum micro-states of tiny particles in my brain. This doesn’t violate quantum randomness, because a selection can be non-random at the macro level, but random at the micro level. The following two rows of digits will serve to illustrate my point.

1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1
0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1

The above two rows of digits were created by a random number generator. The digits in some of these columns add up to 0; some add up to 1; and some add up to 2.

Now suppose that I impose the non-random macro requirement: keep the columns whose sum equals 1, and discard the rest. I now have:

1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0

Each row is still random (at the micro level), but I have now imposed a non-random macro-level constraint on the system as a whole (at the macro level). That, I would suggest, what happens when I make a choice.

Top-down causation and free will

What I am proposing, in brief, is that top-down (macro–>micro) causation is real and fundamental (i.e. irreducible to lower-level acts). For if causation is always bottom-up (micro–>macro) and never top-down, or alternatively, if top-down causation is real, but only happens because it has already been determined by some preceding occurrence of bottom-up causation, then our actions are simply the product of our body chemistry – in which case they are not free, since they are determined by external circumstances which lie beyond our control. But if top-down causation is real and fundamental, then a person’s free choices, which are macroscopic events that occur in the brain at the highest level, can constrain events in the brain occurring at a lower, sub-microscopic level, and these constraints then can give rise to neuro-muscular movements, which occur in accordance with that person’s will. (For instance, in the case I discussed above, relating to rows of ones and zeroes, the requirement that the columns must add up to 1 might result in to the neuro-muscular act of raising my left arm, while the requirement that they add up to 2 might result in the act of raising my right arm.)

As far as I’m aware, there’s no law of physics which rules out the idea that patterns of random events (such as radioactive decay events) might turn out to be non-random at the macro level, while remaining random at the micro- or individual level. Of course, as far ass we know, radioactive decay events are random at the macro level, but the same might not be true of random neuronal firings in the brain: perhaps here, scientists might find non-random large-scale patterns co-existing with randomness at the micro- level.

Putting it another way: even if laboratory experiments repeatedly failed to detect patterns in a random sequence of events over the course of time, this would not establish that these events are randomly distrubuted across space as well. Hence large-scale spatial patterns are perfectly compatible with temporal randomness, at the local level.

In her blog post, Dr. Hossenfelder challenges her readers to “write down any equation for any system that allows for something one could reasonably call free will.” It’s a challenge she has already met, with her free will function in part 3 of her ARXIV essay, in which “each decision comes down to choosing one from ten alternatives described by the digits 0 to 9”:

Here is an example: Consider an algorithm that computes some transcendental
number, τ, unknown to you. Denote with τn the n-th digit of the number after the
decimal point. This creates an infinitely long string of digits. Let tN be a time very
far to the future, and let F be the function that returns τN−i for the choice the agent
makes at time ti.

This has the following consequence: The time evolution of the agent’s state is
now no longer random. It is determined by F, but not (forward) deterministic: No
matter how long you record the agent’s choices, you will never be able to predict,
not even in principle, what the next choice will be…

Dr. Hossenfelder’s example is mathematically elegant, but it’s really not necessary, in order to salvage the idea of free will. All that is needed is to show that the the idea of top-down causation which is irreducible to preceding instances of bottom-up causation remains a valid one in physics, and that this, coupled with the suggestion that the mind can make non-random global selections from random sequences of events without destroying their local randomness, is enough to render the ideas of agent-causation and strong libertarian free will scientifically tenable. How the mind makes these selections and influences processes within the brain is a question for another day (for a discussion, see here and here). All that I have been concerned to show here is that no laws of physics are broken, even if one adopts a very robust version of libertarian free-will.