So more on the definition of modernity---Weber's polar night. I prefer juxtapositioning experiences to theoretical definitions in this case. Do the donkey and the jet coexist in the same world?
About four years after getting back from Mexico, I was on a `church' sponsored back pack trip in the Sierras, August 1957. I was fourteen. I had an army surplus `summer' mummy bag which was nothing more than a course wool blanket sewn inside a heavy canvas cover, so I froze to death every night. We were camped at about 9-10k feet at Woods Lakes. I got up very early one morning as soon as the sky lightened a little and started to build the morning fire to keep warm. Suddenly it was broad daylight. I looked south east and there was a brilliant very yellow light that turn orange and then faded. I realized it was a hydrogen bomb set off in the Nevada test site, just a couple of hundred miles away. About five minutes later a low, loud rumble rocketed through the camp and woke up the rest of the kids.
Modernity is nuclear weapons. You are in the modern age if you can toast your neighbors to a cinder of free electrons and nucleonic residues.
A childish thought just occurred to me---something in the spirit of that fourteen year old. If you're vaporized at the speed of light, can you still go to heaven?
There is something intuitively wrong about the idea that first of all you can be vaporized, and then second that a `soul' could survive this material devastation and mosey on up to heaven to get a place in line, do the interview, make excuses and wait for a decision. It's one thing if there is a body, even a badly damaged body. But what if there is no body at all? Of course theology excuses these circumstances with words like `not of the body'. Nevertheless, I am thrown back on the monophysic controversy. If not of the body, then of what? Well, something else. Something not of the body. Something decided in the third century at one of the councils at Nicea. Oh, that works for me.
I was discussing this question with a buddy at work. It turns out that he had seen a nuclear blast too. He was an Army brat and the family was being shipped back to the states from Japan by merchant marine under contract. They were about two hundred and fifty miles north of Bikini. The captain made an announcement on the ship at 2 am in the morning that anyone interested could come up to the deck and watch a hydrogen bomb go off. My buddy described seeing just about the same thing I described above, except he could see the dome of light because the ocean and curve of the earth was the only horizon. The captain had pointed out that a Russian trawler would appear on the horizon just in front of them. Sure enough, there was another ship. A tiny profile seen against the bright yellow dome.
He told me he had visited the Nagasaki museum and there was a helmet there that was thought to be of a Japanese guard stationed near the cathedral (Nagasaki had a large Catholic community). The helmet had the top skull bones fused to the interior of the metal helmet.
CG