Poisoned Fruit

During autumn visits we see these fruit trees bending low as if they were asking us to treat ourselves to their big apples and pears. We don't dare eat them.

The Book of Revelations says that a great star named Chernobyl fell upon the third part of rivers, and upon the fountains of waters, and made them bitter...

so, we don't drink from this fountain either.

Being non religious, I am not very concerned about my sins because we pay the price for sins in the world thereafter, but I am really concerned about mistakes where we've got to pay now in this world...I am not an optimist who sees the glass half full, and I'm not a pessimist who sees the same glass half empty. I am a realist who always sees the glass exactly as it is, and here in Chernie I see through a glass, darkly, that authors of the Bible had somehow foreseen the Chernobyl disaster. In Greek, the language in which the New Testament was originally written, there is a Bible verse that reads "...and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp." The word "fell" means "to hover or to settle," and the word "star" translates to "as scattered across the sky." It in turn is derived from another Greek word which meant "to spread like a carpet," an appropriate description of the radiation cloud that spread across the area. Most interesting is the word for "lamp" which comes from a Greek verb meaning "to radiate." When you make that into a noun, you have "radiation." In verse 11 the name of the star is even capitalized, as a proper name of a place...as for the third part of the world, it was popular in first century Greek to use the term "one-third" to describe a large quantity. Chernobyl may be a group name for all Chernobyls to come, wherever a "great star" will fall again, the future of this land will be the same, radiation and wormwood...the grass of oblivion. Another interesting detail, the alternate meaning of "wormwood" for the word "Chernobyl" has now mysteriously disappeared from our dictionaries. Such is the policy of our government. In order to suppress apocalyptic moods and to build more reactors they have removed this word from our dictionaries. I doubt they will succeed in erasing this episode from our memory as the word is still in everyday usage, and we all know that not all governments of the world, not even their rich patrons from the almighty atomic industry, can remove verses from the Bible.