Ukraine | Playing in the World Game

In a Church in Ukraine¹, Vladimir Putin has been burning in Hell since 2017.

Note: Christian stuff here. If you’re a humanist, feel free to move along except for perhaps the cultural interest.

The painting, by graduates of an Academy of Fine Arts, was unveiled on Easter even in 2017. Backstory was provided by two Polish websites, fakt.pl and kresy24.pl.

According to the reports, the work shows Putin burning in hell with the Soviet coat of arms and other symbols of evil, according to the Ukrinform news agency.

“The idea was to leave the historical memory of something that happened in our history for future generations. And this fresco of the Last Judgment is probably so unique, because of the depicted figure who did a lot of evil to Ukraine,” said a pastor of the church. ²

Another website reported:

“The painting is right at the entrance to the temple. It represents doomsday. The flames of hell consume, among other things, the symbols of criminal regimes – the hammer and sickle and the swastika. The most striking, however, is the screaming man in a suit. The faithful have no doubts – this is Vladimir Putin on fire. However, a priest at the church has a different opinion: the character symbolizes an official who robbed the country.”²

I’m intrigued by some of the details of the painting.

The devil poking the symbols of Nazism and the Soviet Union with a pitchfork
the concept that not all clergy are evil, since one is being led to the light
the (purportedly) Russian soldier being bitten on the neck by a demon
an innocent child being protected by an angel and carried to Heaven
soldiers and churchmen and royalty along with regular people consigned to the flames.

I’d be curious to know if any of the other figures represent real persons in the minds of the artists, and what the writing above the mural and on the scroll says.

Spiritual leaders whom I respect have counseled us not to consign anyone to Hell even in our imaginations as all judgment belongs to God, but it is easy to understand these kinds of sentiments being expressed by people who have been oppressed by brutal regimes.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ The exact location and the identification of the Church are known, as well as certain other names and details, but I’m not including them in case the Russian army happens to read this and decides to reduce the church to rubble and ashes out of spite. If Ukraine is successful in resisting the unholy invasion by Vladimir Putin, I will return and update the post (if I’m still alive).

² Automatically translated from the Polish.

This lovely video, intimately crafted, was a delightful and wistful view into a time so far removed from us that it’s difficult to even get one’s head around. More years in the future than there are atoms in the observable universe, 8 * 10¹²⁰ years according to this imagining… but still fascinating.

Most of it is pure speculation, but it’s speculation based on mathematics that have been developed at this point in time, and real observations of the universe and what happens inside places like the Large Hadron Collider and other particle-generating devices.

If you’re not sure, the joke here is that some fear the energies generated within the Large Hadron Collider will be great enough to rip a hole in the fabric of space time, or to create a local black hole that will consume the earth. But thus far, this has shown no signs of happening.

I’ve seen other such productions, equally thought-provoking, and all of them put me in mind of Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question.” It’s a similar imagination, although somewhat simplified because the concept of black holes would only be posited two years after the story was written, of what happens when entropy reaches its ultimate terminal state, and there is no energy left anywhere in the universe at all. It revolves around humanity’s quest to stop the heat death of the universe, by asking ever-more powerful computers, “How can entropy be reversed?”

It’s a beautiful story, and I won’t spoil it, because it has an unexpected ending – one that always brings a few tears to my eyes – and it gives me hope for the continuation of life; I just love Asimov’s writings. I recall with fondness a dramatization of this story that I saw long ago at the Hansen Planetarium, when it was still at its original home in the renovated Salt Lake Public Library at 15 South State Street in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Fortunately or unfortunately, right now all we have to worry about is destroying our world by allowing climate change to proceed unchecked, and insane despots like Vladimir Putain knocking on the door of World War III with his rapacious attacks on innocent neighbors.¹ But from a scientific standpoint, it is captivating to imagine what will happen to our universe when all of these concerns have become moot.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

Playing in the World Game

As One

Tag Archives: Ukraine

The Heat Death of the Universe