God's Answer to the Atheists

Codes 557, 558 and 559 were repeated as 3557, 3558 and 3559 as the Code Cracker Crossword puzzle numbers in Wellington’s Dominion Post newspaper between 23rd and 26th December 2008. Was this intended not only as a code repeat, but also as a reminder of those clues in those Daily Telegraph D-Day crosswords predicting the forthcoming invasion in May/June 1944? Had the clue moved, rather as I had, from the capital at the heart of the Empire to the capital of the furthest flung of the Dominions. Code-cracker Crossword number 3558 appeared on Christmas Eve. There was no paper on Christmas Day, of course, but the Israelis filled the gap. Showing even more contempt for God’s message of ‘Peace on earth and goodwill to all men’, than had their forbears two thousand years before, the Israeli Cabinet rubber-stamped the planned attack on Gaza. It was to be the most vicious onslaught in the history of modern Israel. The Gaza invasion codes turned out to be a re-echo of the Gulf war invasion codes of January 1991. Yes, it really is all in the Alpha and Omega Codes, the final proof that God is real, if not with Israel.

It was on Monday, 6th January 2009, three days after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, that Ariana Sherine’s campaign rolled out on buses all across Britain, It just happened to be the Feast of the Epiphany, when the Christian world remembers the Three Wise Men coming to Bethlehem, via King Herod,  800 atheist buses carried their sign of atheist conviction : ‘THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE’ But was it all a sign that we are actors on a stage to a far greater extent than we imagine? Was Ariana, the comedy writer, inspired to write her ‘There is no God’ so let’s broadcast it ‘on the buses’ piece for the Guardian in October 2008? Was she meant to raise awareness of the issue so that her campaign would fit in so precisely with God’s reply which was also written ‘On the Buses’….

Now for a moment think back to Erebus. Is the word Erebus another clue, in Old English, one heavily redolent of destiny. It should appeal to lovers of cryptic crosswords: ‘Ere bus – before the bus….Could that be the first bus, the Airbus reply, before the atheist bus campaign even got on the road?

And there is another ironic parallel in the timing of it all. After the visit of the Three Wise Men, Herod ordered the slaughter of the Holy Innocents – “Kill all the children!” Of course, in Gaza 2000 years on, at that very time, they were just collateral damage – 300 plus of them – dying to make Israelis feel safer…..just as the Holy Innocents were killed, so legend has it, to make Herod feel safer.

But it seems likely that Israel’s attack on Gaza now, very much a ‘Coventrieren’, with the slaughter and devastation of 2009, will be no more effective than the one of legend, two millennia before. That is the one which we remember each Christmas in so many Nine Lessons and Carols Services, when choirs sing the Coventry Carol to a tune dating from 1591, with words a century older than that.

There is far more detail in the intricate web of meaningful coincidences which came before and after the Perpignan plane crash. These are described in our book Balanced Observations, volume 6 of our series  Fragments of an Outer Mind. Volume 1 of that series is The Diagrams of Truth